Arnaud de Borchgrave gives us choice morsels from a ringing declaration in support of America, from Axel Springer's CEO. It is Churchillian and bracing, unsparing in its indictment of Western European laxity and fervent in its support for America's rising to the challenge of militant Islam. Rare though such expressions may be, they are welcome in the dark hours of the war. Definitely read this one.
Former Blair government Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, now in private practice as a doctor, has asked Muslim patients to lift their veils when visiting his office. Straw wrote that the veil constitutes "a visible statement of separation and difference" and added that he "felt uncomfortable about talking with someone face-to-face who I could not see." Straw's statement is especially significant because he retains his seat in the House of Commons as an MP from Blackburn, and is Leader of the governing party in Commons. Perhaps more important is that Straw represents a constituency that includes lots of Muslim voters.
Straw touched a raw cultural nerve, and needless to say the usual gaggle of community "activists" ( a word that is becoming a synonym for "agitators") pounced on him for insensitivity, etc. But the veil does promote separation, which is why Cherie Blair's litigation on behalf of a Muslim family who wanted their child to wear traditional costume was so damaging 9discussed in a 3/16/06 LFTC posting. Blair's wife, it seems, can learn from his former Foreign Secretary about how to defend Western values.
I regret to admit that in 10 minutes rutting around the East Lancashire Telegraph website I couldn't pull up Straw's original column, posted this week. Oh, BTW, Jack, it is "whom" when using the objective case. As Rex Harrison lamented to Julie Andrews in My Fair Lady, "Why Can't the English? (teach their children how to speak).
Mark Steyn, who has an unmatched talent for writing amusing pieces about unfunny crises, pounces on George Clooney over Darfur, where Gorgeous George demands decisisve UN action. Steyn explains in his inimitable way why the UN will never intervene in time to save anyone: because powers like Russia and China have a veto in the Security Council (as does France, too). So, writes Steyn, unless Clooney supports a "coalition of the Anglosphere willing" nothing will happen. Clooney and Angelina Jolie do not grasp what every sane individual not ideologically in denial understands: Decisive action by the UN is the world's foremost oxymoron.
Newly-minted WSJ columnist Bret Stephens opens his tenure as WSJ's new "Global View" columnist with tales of Islamic marriage in Germany. Turks import brides--often pre-teen--into Germany, marry them without their consent and drag them into a life of domestic servitude. There are 2.6 million Turks living in Germany. This week Angela Merkel is introducing legislation that would require prospective immigrant brides to first learn German and to be at least 21 years of age. Says a prominent Turkish author whose efforts exposed the trade: "It's the women who have felt the relapse into Sharia the most. The boys might be slaves to their families, but on the streets they are free, and besides they can always look forward to a wife they can suppress. It's the women who explode." In the past 6 years there have been 55 "honor killings" in Germany--girls killed by male family members for disobeying Islamic law. Europe is losing the culture war, bending over backwards to be tolerant of the intolerant, while 43 prattles on about the "Religion of Peace."
In 1899 Rudyard Kipling penned his classic poem warning about the burdens taken up by American intervention in the Philippines ("The White Man's Burden"). Now there is a 21st century version, which author Shelby Steele calls white guilt and the American past. Steele says that America is paralyzed by the prime cultural event of the postwar period: the destruction of white skin as a source of moral authority. In its place is limitless white guilt that ties the hands of our military and political leaders, and emboldens our adversaries. We fail not because we lack the power to win, but because we lack the will. This is a superb column.
Lee Smith, a visiting scholar at the Hudson Institute, predicts that Islamists will continue to use terror as a tool to try to topple the faltering regime of Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt since Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Egyptian Islamic Jihad in October 1981. Al-Qa'ida is the prime suspect here. Mubarak is expected to ally himself with the Muslum Brotherhood in an effort to defuse the situation, but prospects are iffy at best.
Counter-terror consultant & lawyer David Gartenstein-Ross warns of a potentially ominous trend: foreign government representatives intervening in war cases before the Supreme Court, claiming that US foreign treaty obligations require changing US war policy. In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld 422 foreign "friends" filed an amicus curiae ("friend of the court" in law Latin) brief seeking to change US detention policy; one such "friend" is none other than George Galloway, Saddam's chief UK apologist. Two foreign "obligations" they cite are treaties that were ratified by the Senate, but with the proviso that they would not take effect until enabling legislation was passed, which did not happen in either case; the third "obligation" was never even ratified.
Amici, eh? The clear intention is for foreigners unhappy with 43's war policy to try to tie America's hands in its war effort, limiting interrogation, surveillance and whatever else creative minds can conjure up. Islamo-fascists need not worry: they will be untouched by this. And they will still get to make threats over cartoons they dislike.
Michelle Malkin nails Comedy Central for censoring its popular South Park cartoon show by blocking depiction of Muhammad, having on other occasions declined to censor cartoons manifestly offensive to Christians.
William F. Buckley deplores the overkill of the ghastly, blundering proceedings in the 20th hijacker trial of ZM (I will no longer spell out his annoying name). We've wasted nearly five years in court to raise from life in prison to death the sentence of one person not actually involved in the 9/11 attacks, albeit aware of the plan--and yes, of course he richly deserves death. Worse, beyond what WFB argues, is the unjustified platform ZM gets to parade on stage--scorning the families, proudly proclaiming his terrorist allegiance, with his loutish countenace thrust into our field of vision countless times. We make a global martyr out of a thug who should have been held as an unlawful combatant, consigned to oblivion for eternity. We gave his life meaning, rather than render his life irrelevant on the world stage. We have been tossed by a classic application of political & media judo. And many Americans still don't know it.
WSJ columnist Dan Henninger argues that we need 21st century rules for 21st century war but are applying 20th century rules such as the Geneva Convention model instead. He notes a recent speech given by UK Defense Minister John Reid, which triggered strong opposition from the Left. Here is the text of Reid's April 5 speech DH referenced; on April 3 Reid gave a more detailed view re international law issues in this text.
Henry Kissinger argues that Westphalian pre-emption rules have been rendered obsolete by technology enabling small groups to attack with WMD, but that some set of rules that make American pre-emption a rarity must be adopted by the international community; at minimum, a great power concord is achievable given the common danger from certain rogue regimes. HK writes: "The Westphalian system sought security based upon the sanctity of international borders. In our time, the power, range and speed of modern weapons have made this definition too narrow." Yet there is an inescapable dilemma confronting advocates of pre-emption: "Preemptive strategy is based on assumptions that cannot be proved when they are made. When the scope for action is greatest, knowledge is at a minimum. When knowledge has been acquired, the scope for preemption has often disappeared."
A fine book-length treatment of the issues is Harvard law prof and showboat controversialist Alan Dershowitz's Preemption (2006). Dershowitz, a thinker of quality despite his flamboyance and outsize ego, offers a wide-ranging history of pre-emption, not only in international contexts but also in the domestic criminal context. You learn that the justice of the peace we all associate with marriages by the roadside originated as an official with power to detain those suspected of plotting mayhem. AD examines Israel's 1967, 1973 and 1982 wars in detail, and assesses Iraq II & Iran. He distinguishes between "pre-emption" in the face of an apparent imminent attack, and "preventive" war to end a threat before it might become imminent. Israel's 1967 war exemplifies the former; Iraq II exemplifies the latter. Where Dershowitz goes astray is in proposing a jurisprudence of pre-emption: AD assumes that lawyers will be realistic and that biases will cancel out; the sad reality is that the international legal bar is overwhelmingly anti-US, anti-Israel and would hardly produce a reasonable code. Still, his book merits study.
Iraq II's aftermath has severely damaged American prestige, with consequent loss of success as a lever to press for pre-emptive action against Iran. Forgotten are: (1) the six months the US spent at the UN before Iraq II: (2) unanimous Security Council passage of Resolution 1441 in November 2002, calling upon Saddam to disarm forthwith or prove absence of WMD, without any chicanery; (3) Saddam's jerking around Hans Blix's inspectors in January 2003; (4) Colin Powell's compelling presentation to the Security Council in February 2003, featuring transcripts of intercepted conversations between Iraqi officials showing clear intent to evade; (5) France's announcement, on the cusp of a Security Council vote on an 18th UN resolution re Iraq and days before Iraq II began, that it would use its permanent member veto to block approval if necessary; and (6) France & Germany leaning on Turkey--threatening permanent exclusion from the EU--if Turkey allowed American military units in or use of its bases for the war. The failure of the US in Iraq to stabilize security and midwife a moderate regime makes such amnesia easier, but it remains convenient historical revisionism.
Which leaves Iran on the tee. The US is pursuing diplomacy not because any senior official in this Administration believes such will stop Iran's murderous mad mullahs, but to reduce the political cost of an eventual military action upon its evident final failure. There appears little prospect of a mass uprising before Iran "goes critical" and becomes a nuclear power with attendant immunity from attack, and consequent license to wreak havoc in the Mideast and elsewhere. (Would the US strike nuclear Iranian's soil after a Hezbollah suicide bomber walks into a suburban shopping Mall?) Our best hope for a non-messy outcome: a massive series of earthquakes that destroy key Iranian nuclear facilities, which have been deployed at sites not ideally geologically stable. Alas, we may have exhausted our divine allotment of miracles for the Boomer generation.
Arnaud de Borchgrave predicts that a US strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, even if successful, would backfire as Iraq II has done; he counsels that we learn to live with a nuclear Iran instead. AdeB is a serious critic; his piece merits a read. Iran's former President, Hashemi Rafsanjani, has announced that Iran has enriched uranium for the first time, having begun in February; this begins what will be a long process of enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels. The Wall Street Journal notes that Iran's actions put it in formal breach of a UN resolution; WSJ editors also think that the flurry over a possible US strike sends a healthy warning signal to the mullahs. Chief IAEA Inspector Muhammad ElBaradei reports April 28 to the Security Council, whose March 29 unanimous resolution called for "full and sustained suspension of all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities"; US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton calls for a "sense of urgency" in dealing with the 3.5 percent enrichment (commercial grade--full weapons-grade is around 90 percent) at Iran's Natanz facility. Iran has used its 164 centrifuges to produce 110 tons of uranium hexaflouride (UF-6)--50 tons more than it previously admitted to producing--and plans to have 3,000 centrifuges going by year-end. At its current pace a 2009 crossing of the nuclear threshold--and thus being secure from attack--seems achievable.
Harvard anti-proliferation expert Graham Allison calls the Iran situation "a Cuban Missile Crisis in slow motion" but Carter NSA Zbigniew Brzezinski argues that a US strike would set us back 30 years and that the mullahs are Iran's past, not its future. Mark Steyn has an essay on the Iran challenge in Manhattan Institute's online edition of MI's stellar City Journal in which he recommends (as has LFTC) a decapitation strike to destroy Iran's leaders.
Steyn traces the West's retreat in the face if Iranian intimidation: no holding to account for the 1979-1981 hostage crisis when 52 American diplomats were held 444 days; no penalty for being the leading sponsor of terror over a 25-year period; no penalty for issuing a fatwa (religious edict) calling for the assassination of British author Salman Rushdie for satirizing Islam in a novel (The Satanic Verses); no penalty for Iran's role in the Danish cartoon outrage; and no penalty for threatening to obliterate a UN member state, Israel.
Steyn thinks the Iranians see us as the "weak horse" Osama saw us as, which led to 9/11. He asks re an Iranian nuclear threat--keep in mind as you read the two paragraphs below Bob Dole's famous quip during the 1986-1987 Iran-contra Affair that an Iranian moderate is a radical who has run out of ammunition:
"By way of illustration, consider the country’s last presidential election. The final round offered a choice between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an alumnus of the U.S. Embassy siege a quarter-century ago, and Hashemi Rafsanjani, head of the Expediency Council, which sounds like an EU foreign policy agency but is, in fact, the body that arbitrates between Iran’s political and religious leaderships. Ahmadinejad is a notorious shoot-from-the-lip apocalyptic hothead who believes in the return of the Twelfth (hidden) Imam and quite possibly that he personally is his designated deputy, and he’s also claimed that when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly last year a mystical halo appeared and bathed him in its aura. Ayatollah Rafsanjani, on the other hand, is one of those famous 'moderates.'
"What’s the difference between a hothead and a moderate? Well, the extremist Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be 'wiped off the map,' while the moderate Rafsanjani has declared that Israel is “the most hideous occurrence in history,” which the Muslim world 'will vomit out from its midst” in one blast, because “a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counter-strike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world.' Evidently wiping Israel off the map seems to be one of those rare points of bipartisan consensus in Tehran, the Iranian equivalent of a prescription drug plan for seniors: we’re just arguing over the details."
Stolen US military computer drives with classified data are on sale at Afghan bazaars. Seems our Afghan friends are guilty of what medieval English common law called trespass de bonis asportatis--illegally carrying off goods. Anyone know how to say "swag" in Pashtun?
Fences, fences everywhere--or, at least, ideas of same. It seems that Saudi Arabia is contemplating a 560-mile fence along the Saudi-Iraq border and for an intriguing reason: to prevent Saudi jihadists from returning to SA from Iraq. Yo, al-Saud princelings, need advice on fence design & construction? Perhaps the Israelis can help....
Michael Barone warns that failure to curb welfare state excess could make the US very like France soon; partisan politics makes it harder to talk about the issue than it was for Clinton and Bush in his first term. Barone notes that Clinton sank health care reform to thank liberals for preventing his impeachment. MB lets 42 off too easily. 42 should have, to paraphrase the 19th Austrian diplomat quote I have used several times on LFTC, "astounded liberals with the magnitude of his ingratitude" and supported reform for the good of the country. But Mr. Bill preferred politics to statesmanship, let pass his "Nixon to China" moment and the best chance in a generation to reform health care was lost.
In contrast to Gerhard Schroeder's anti-US tack, NRO editor Jim Geraghty reports, Angela Merkel continues to move closer to and generally give support to Washington. Read the pleasing details. And also read about how NATO is significantly stepping up its activities in Afghanistan.
Columnist Max Boot chronicles mindless unilateralism as 43's Administration unravels, including denying technology transfer on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter to such dangerous partners as...Great Britain and Australia. The J-35 is supposed to be co-produced in partner countries, as our 21st century replacement for the super-successful F-16. Questioning Arab suzerainty over ports the Administration opposes, so instead it gives the two countries who have been with us all the way in Iraq are hard time. Boot's other examples are less egregious, but worth a look. Items like this make one look for a convenient balcony to jump off.
So nutcake Georgia Democrat Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who thinks 43 knew in advance of the 9/11 attacks and kept silent, thinks the faces of 535 members of Congress should be recognized by every member of the Capitol Police? Blogger Michelle Malkin skewers McKinney and also the cowardice of her party in keeping mostly mum, noting her own experiences being groped by airport security. A test case has been set up, then: Will the cheapest race demagoguery trump security post-9/11? Terence Gainer, Chief of the Capitol Police, puts security first. The betting here is that the race card probably will limit political--and even perhaps legal--damage to Crazy Cynthia.
In a BBC interview this past weekend, Bill Clinton said that if Hamas offered him the same assurances Arafat did in 1993 he would shake hands and negotiate. So Mr. Bill would once again play Charlie Brown to the Palestinians' Lucy, rushing to kick the football through the goal posts. Makes one grateful for the 22nd Amendment.
Michael Ledeen writes wittily and pointedly about the recent Harvard Kennedy School paper on the "Israel lobby" running US foreign policy. The authors have already been exposed for the intellectual frauds they are, with numerous factual errors. But it is worse, for this document, called by one wit "The Protocols of the Elders of Harvard," has at its core the Jewish world conspiracy fantasy of the infamous original Protocols of the Elders of Zion. As the persecution of Oriana Fallaci for speaking out against radical Islam shows, religious bigotry is on the march again, with certain suspect religions under fire while other, politically correct ones--notably Islam--are apologized for in the West. AEI scholar Gerard Alexander reviews widening speech bans in Europe and sees a predictable leftward bias. The Left escapes because it blames discrimination or poverty for the underclass status of lagging groups; the Right gets hit with legal action because its critique is rooted in individual responsibility of members of those groups. P.C. multiculturalism is midwifing illiberal democracy before our very eyes.
Clinton State Department official Jamie Rubin predicts the next wave of pressure on Israel, if it withdraws from the West Bank: a humanitarian crisis of starving Palestinian kids that will generate international pressure for relief. And on whom? Hamas? PLO? Nope. Israel. Rubin proposes some international aid, presumably better audited than oil-for-food. This is a Clintonista pipe dream. But even he knows that the "peace process" is dead. And he is chillingly right about what Israel will face. Sitting behind the fence and letting the Palestinians take responsibility sounds neat, but "world opinion"--ever poisonous towards Israel--will not stand for it. Sadly, one suspects even 43 will go along with such pressure. His new-found European "allies" will demand no less.
Waldenbooks and Borders in Buffalo, NY are refusing to carry a magazine with a cartoon of Muhammad for fear of sparking Islamist violence. Score one for Islamist intimidation.
La France is convulsed by riots due to student opposition to a law designed to encourage employers to hire inexperienced youths, which allows employers to fire new hires after a two-year trial, instead of rolling the dice by hiring someone that they are then stuck for life with--for better or worse, in sickness and in health, etc. Economist Larry Kudlow offers metrics on French economics and regulation that show the non-Kosher pickle France finds itself in.
There are a pair of bright spots: France's unrivaled nuclear energy position and a strong, growing broadband sector. As two excellent Wall Street Journal articles today note, in these vital areas France easily outstrips, among others, America. Whereas France gets 78 percent of its electric power via nuclear energy, Germany is a distant second at 28 percent and the US a far back fifth at 19 percent. Yet France's nuclear program provides only 20 percent versus 49 percent for oil, of total energy consumption, and they spent $120 billion to build it--in US per capita terms, $600 billion. Regarding broadband, OECD figures as of June 2005 show France, at 12.5 percent household broadband penetration, trailing the US's 14.5 percent and world leader Korea's 25.5 percent. (There are more than 10 countries between the US and Korean figures, but that lies outside the scope of this posting.) Where French broadband shines is in its quality; 24 megabit speed, 16 times the US norm of 1.5 megabits, for $36 per month. France's faster broadband enables services like remote health monitoring, not doable at US speeds.
Returning to the riots, put simply, France is toying with the novel idea that giving someone a job does not constitute a shotgun marriage for life. John Tierney, in a gentle ribbing, suggests that America help its floundering "ally" by exporting to France the American self-help industry, as the French, with low self-esteem, need it more than a relatively more confident US. The once culturally confident country for which my generation had nothing but admiration--who with a spark of joie de vivre objected to brie & Brigitte?--is now a whimpering, self-absorbed welfare haven, ripe for taking by an exploding (in more ways than one) Muslim population. (France still does produce jolie femmes; as for its cheeses, US import rules make it hard to get decent ones here.)
Tierney gets it half-right: we should export of self-help promoters. But his choice of importer is wrong. Leave us export our self-help folks not to France, but to Muslim lands, which badly need a dose of "can-do" self-0help promoters. As for France, leave us stick with our real allies (UK, Australia, etc.) while we tell the French, per The Donald: "You're fired!"
Mike Ledeen's latest NRO piece gives his latest tally of perfidy by Russia, France & Germany. Russia, as reports from captured and now public Iraqi "Harmony" documents show, tipped off Saddam re US force plans, from a leak within Central Command. Meanwhile, France & Germany leaned on pro-US Turkish pols, warning them that Turkey would never get in the EU if American forces were allowed to move into northern Iraq from Turkey. We thus lost a close vote and our most powerful infantry division was blocked from moving southward. These actions prolonged the first phase of Iraq II, caused more US casualties and gave Saddam's Fedayeen insurgents valuable time to organize the insurgency. Ledeen predicts--probably rightly--that Russia will use its spies to keep Iran informed about US plans. Our position in Iraq would have been much stronger had continental European forces sent special ops to help, plus really pitched in afterward, especially in training police.
None of this makes Europe our enemy, but it does mean that we ought to calibrate our posture on a country-specific basis, and calculate in the fashion of the great 19th century European statesmen how we deal with Europe: We have neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies there, but merely permanent interests. As for helping Europe, if you think Iraqis are not sufficiently grateful recall the famous line of Austria's Prince Felix Schwartzenberg after his country got outside help in suppressing the 1848 Hungarian revolution: "Austria will astound the world with the magnitude of her ingratitude." This doesn'o mean we never help Europe; just do not except to be thanked for doing so, and pick our spots with care.
The intellectual and moral wreckage at Ivy League colleges is revealed anew in a Wall Street Journal editorial that notes how Yale treats Afghan applicants. Eli Yale, so happy to help a Taliban Tokyo Rose applicant escape what the school calls "the wreckage of Afghanistan" did not extend such help to Afghan women who applied to escape the wreck the Taliban made--with the help of the very apologist Yale accepted as a student. Under a program started by an Afghan female refugee, 20 students have been placed, with 10 colleges participating--NONE Ivy League. All the women were fully qualified, unlike Yale's Taliban-flack "diversity" hire; all maintain at least a 3.5 GPA. The full article is worth a read. Equally worth a look is today's follow-up article by ace WSJ reporter John Fund, detailing more on Yale's contemptible contortions and on which students deserve dispensation.
The Transportation Security Administration outdid itself this past week. First, we learn that a lawyer for TSA violated the trial judge's instructions not to coach witnesses, and thus 7 important witnesses are barred from the "20th hijacker" punishment trial (death penalty or life sentence) of Zaccharias Moussaoui. And yesterday NBC reported that in tests conducted at 21 airports last fall, TSA screeners failed to detect bomb material smuggled on planes at any of the 21 test airports. TSA even failed to detect bomb materials in bags taken aside for special screening. Think of this the next time you see TSA morons invasively pat down a Scandinavian grandmother.
As stalwart as Tough Tony has been on terrorism, Cherie Blair has been the opposite. In many ways she is Hillary without the post-9/11 makeover. She is a prominent barrister, and has taken on a case defending the right of Muslim schoolgirls to wear the veil. As peerless social commentator Theodore Dalrymple explains, the schoolgirls are not competent to make this choice which in reality was made by their Islamist parents in pursuit of cultural separation. Such parents often take their Muslim female offspring out of school around age 12 and send them back to Pakistan to be forcibly married. True, the Amish, too, seek cultural separation, but adherents of their faith neither commit terrorist acts nor intimidate cartoonists. Laws that treat Islam differently rightly recognize this reality--one Cherie Blair implicitly denies.
Dalrymple, who works in a lot of underclass settings including hospitals (he is a physician), sees bright, ambitious Muslim girls, well-mannered, who try to kill themselves to avoid the fate of consignment to the darker corners of their faith. The Muslim girls come from intact families, unlike many of Britain's whites. Dalrymple concludes:
"Yet the Muslim families clearly were doing something right, or at least much better than the white, non-Muslim families around them (if you could call the loose patterns of association found among the whites “families”).
"Here, then, is proper material for reflection, of the kind that the opportunistic Blair couple will never give it. Discipline without freedom leads to misery, but freedom without discipline leads to chaos, shallowness, and misery of another kind."
An NY Sun editorial sums up the sheer stupidity of wasting taxpayer money putting "Fifth Pilot" Zacharias Mousaoui on trial in search of the death penalty--ZM has pled guilty to enough offenses to get life already, so the trial is on punishment. As the Sun notes, a Clinton appointee wants to toss the death penalty off the table on a technicality, and that instead we should just hold ZM indefinitely at Gitmo as an unlawful combatant and be done with it. NRO's Andrew McCarthy offers a legal analysis of the government's trial goof; McCarthy, who prosecuted the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, gives his usual top-notch take. Executing ZM, in any event, would give him a martyrdom to which he is not entitled. Lock him up in well-deserved obscurity, with a white-supremacist Nazi cell-mate 100 pounds heavier who wants a girlfriend.
The NY Sun reports that al-Jazeera is having trouble attracting sponsors to launch an English-language station in America. This is a test of how foolish and self-destructive America can be. Are we willing to allow a terrorist network masquerading as a news outlet to broadcast to Muslims in America? They need alienate only a small percentage US Muslims (think Chapel Hill last week) to create a pool of potential suicide bombers. This is not the Oxford Union debates. We did not give Axis Sally access to US airwaves in World War II. Nor does former CBS anchor Dave Marash, who would be al-Jazeera's man in America, inspire confidence. Even if, against all odds, the American subsidiary does provide honest news, as al-Jazeera continues to spread lies in the Mideast it must be required to stop lying elsewhere as the price of a ticket to broadcast here. Or will "our values" hand another victory to Islamist terror?
How's this for a presumably irresistible offer from Hollywood siren Sharon Stone: Sharon, visiting Israel, kissing a nonplussed Shimon Peres, offered to kiss-yes, smooch--"just about anybody" who could bring peace to the Mideast. Fred Barnes noted on Beltway Boys that Sharon probably never met Yasir Arafat, but Sharon, no dummy she, said "just about anybody." Here's another "indecent proposal" for Sharon to make: kiss whoever turns in Osama, a-Zawahiri or al-Zarqawi. Then again, whoever does faces for sure a thousand fatwas, and may wish compensation that exceeds the value of connubial bliss in the after-life with 72 black-eyed virgins. Even for Sharon, that may require a proposal more "indecent" than a kiss. Oh, and North Korea's "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-Il is known to have a preference for movie-star blondes. Now, if Sharon can get together with Kim and reprise her famous ice-pick scene in Basic Instinct....
Retired General Wesley Clark, Supreme Allied Commander during the 1999 Kosovo War, rates Milosevic a petty Hitler and sees more trouble ahead for Serbia. His article is a compelling portrait of the vain, deceitful and murderous thug Clark came to know very well in the 1990s.
Today's NY Times has a front-pager on the Defense Department's Military Liaison Elements (MLE) program, under which special ops personnel are based in US embassies to gather intelligence on and, if need be, take action against terrorists. Naturally the CIA objects on turf grounds, receiving some support from Lee Hamilton (ex-Democratic Congressman from Indiana), co-chair of the 9/11 panel. Rumsfeld is right: Our military is an organization of doers, in stark contrast to the desk-bound bureaucrats at Langley. How anyone, given the CIA's appalling track record--and the military's sparkling one--could back the CIA in this is beyond me. Root, root, root for Rummy.
"De Nile is a river in Egypt" is an old staple--probably as old as Egypt. Columnist Tony Blankley spots denial in the aftermath of the recent attempted vehicular mass homicide by a disgruntled Iranian Muslim student at the University of North Carolina. The student told police he was trying to "avenge the deaths of Muslims around the world." Blankley recites events around the globe that confirm denial is not homegrown. In Britain there has been an upsurge in violence by Muslim youth, rarely reported as such. In Antwerp Moroccan Muslims beat up reporters, yet their assaults were kept out of the press and police were instructed to refrain from arresting them. Last fall France denied that radical Islam was a factor in the massive outbreak of rioting that exploded the myth of assimilated Muslim populations in France.
Pains have been taken to point out that the Chapel Hill assailant is not a member of al-Qa'ida or other radical group. This, Blankley rightly notes, is more worrisome for precisely this reason. It is not only radical Muslims and Islamist terrorists--but normal folks radicalized in one calamitous moment--that pose a threat to Western societies. Warns Blankley: "[A] a witch's brew of psychological denial and political correctness is suppressing the institutional voices of government, police, schools, universities and the media when it comes to radical Islam."
He is right. "De Nile" is a river in Chapel Hill, too.
A Wall Street Journal op-ed warns that the Gulf Arab economic boom--fueled by $1.3 trillion worth of petrodollar earnings since 1998 and by massive liquidity, could give us the next market meltdown. Ruling Arabs seeking to placate restive populations with economic growth may over-reach. Today's Gulf stock market day traders may become tomorrow's Islamist terrorists. The author enumerates "seven pillars of folly" that foretell impending bust following boom. Sounds like Dubai's Burj Tower, to be at 800 meters (2,624 feet) the world's tallest building (more than 1,000 feet higher than Chicago's Sears Tower, and 954 feet taller than the 1,670-foot TFC 101 building in Taipei, now the world's tallest) may never be finished. But the Burj Tower does boast a sexy website video collection. Enjoy it before things fly apart.
Barbra Streisand posted a website attack on 43 with no fewer than 11 spelling errors, as reported by Drudge. This should be no surprise. Babs cannot even spell her first name right, there being in every other female with her name a third "a." (Babs, the third "a" goes between the second "b" and the second "r".) Babs blew four words in one sentence, a Hollywood all-comers' record--well, at least, among those denizens of Tinseltown that can complete a sentence: "In the 1970’s, during the Nixon Adminstration, serious political curruption arose and the Republican leadership stepped up and took responsibilty by holding hearings and subpoening administration officials."
Um, Babs: "curruption" does not arise--eruptions do. There is an "a" in subpoena, so you need two "a" letters, counting the one for your first name. And your sentence is short two "i: letters, a curious omission, since "I" surely is your favorite word.
The Way Words Were
(adapted from A. Bergman, M. Bergman, M. Hamlisch "The Way we Were"--1973)
Spell Bee
In English is hard to do
"I" before "e" save after "c"
My profs passed me through
Me, fair
Star go-fers must smooth my way
Let my dreams make skywriters beam
Bush, don't me gainsay
English seemed so simple then
Pig Latin worked best for me
Singing telegrams when
I played high-school hookey
Web site
Is my fav'rite form of art
Posting all my venom and spite
My "Bev Hills lib" heart
It's my brain on "max"
Not my syntax
Erase my "oops" tracks
The way they were
The way they were
Copyright John C. Wohlstetter 2006
NY Sun columnist Hillel Halkin recounts how Israeli Arab leaders ignored pleas for restraint from the government after a mentally deranged Jewish man and his Christian wife tossed firecrackers into the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, a town with a large Arab population. Israeli Arab leaders have little influence in the country's politics, Halkin writes, because their leaders prefer posturing and siding with Arab enemies of Israel to the hard work of making alliances with Jewish leaders to improve the lot of their communities. Did any Israeli Arabs protest the May 2002 seizure by Palestinian militants of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and its subsequent defilement by the thugs? For the record on that and other church outrages by Palestinians, see this site. How does one say "Al Sharpton" in Arabic?
Scholar Amir Taheri assesses the dismal state of governance in Iraq, and proposes that Iraq PM al-Jaafari step down. Newsweek's Fareed Zakharia, a serious 43 critic, says the Administration must re-assess its policies. His best point: 43 looks at Iraq and sees an educated, unified democratic polity, when in fact Kurds (91%) and Shi'a (98%) strongly support changes, while Sunnis (13%) see them as bad. (Taheri, for his part, is more optimistic re the Sunnis.) Zakharia doesn't advocate partition, but his piece lends support to my stance for partition as Plan B. AEI scholar Michael Rubin told the WSJ editors on Wall Street Journal Editorial Report that the US must move forcefully against Iranian subversion inside Iraq.
Perhaps the most famous quotation of the 18th century French philosopher Voltaire is: "I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it." The descendants of the great man recently confronted a request from French Muslims that a December 2005 staging of Voltaire's 1741 play, Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet, be canceled, because parts of it offend Muslims. The play skewers all forms of religious intolerance. Hubert Bertrand, mayor of the Alpine village where the play was staged, courageously refused, instead getting added police protection to protect the theater. In 1741 rioting by Catholics forced cancellation of performance in Paris after three shows. So Islam has reached 1741, it seems, still 1,000 years ahead of Islamism's 7th-0century atavism. Mayor Bertrand, calling free speech society's "foundation stone," wrapped it up: "For a long time we have not confirmed our convictions, so lots of people think they can contest them." American constitutional law has an analogue: the "heckler veto" doctrine: not allowing angry audiences to disrupt, and thus silence, speakers they find offensive.
LFTC last week carried ace WSJ reporter John Fund's story about a Taliban student attending Yale, who had been a flack for the Taliban pre-Afghan war. Fund followed up by trying to get Yale to talk. His report on Yale's evasions concludes Yale will simply stonewall, knowing that conservative alumni are already disgusted, and that Yale gains nothing by being forthcoming. One source says that a probable factor in State giving a visa to this applicant--who, with a fourth-grade education would not intuitively seem fit for a position at any college, let alone one rated a top school--was that the visa applicant was going to attend Yale. Yo, Condi, we need education visa reform: Anyone attending an Ivy League school should get a minus on their visa scorecard.
An Italian parliamentary commission has concluded in a draft report that "beyond any reasonable doubt" the Soviet Union was indeed behind the attempted May 13, 1981 assassination of Pope John Paul the Great. Computer-enhancement technology enabled the commission to prove that a Bulgarian official was also present in St. Peter's Square that day. Agca had spent nearly two months in the Bulgarian Embassy prior to the shooting. At the time, most media outlets accepted the faux narrative that Agca acted at the behest of the Turkish rightist group Grey Wolves. A few papers--most notably, the Wall Street Journal--pressed for damning the Soviets. The Reagan Administration surely thought the USSR guilty, but decided the political cost of joining in publicly accusing the USSR too costly. (Reagan did however, following the Kennedy family maxim of "Don't get mad, get even," work with the Pope to undermine the Evil Empire.) A couple of excellent books (Time of the Assassins, by Claire Sterling, and The Plot to Kill the Pope, by Paul Henze) made the case, as did Judge Martella in Italy. The Bulgarian link made no other conclusion plausible--Agca did not spend two months at the Bulgarian Embassy researching the medieval Bulgarian Empire. Yet another example of how the impulse of psychological denial exerts a strong influence in world geopolitics. Oh, by the way, Agca was released from prison a few years ago, and promptly murdered a Turkish journalist.
A wave of democratization in the 1980s, fostered by the Reagan Administration, gave South America (a better term than Latin, as Brazil, a huge part, is not Latin) its chance to climb into the sunlight of economic growth and prosperity. In the 1990s newly elected governments, for the most part, blew it. Turning now to the Left, led by Castro-Plus-Oil tyrant Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, South America is sliding off the radar screen. Scholar Carlos Albert Montaner argues that South America (he uses the term Latin, but I presume he includes Brazil) will join Africa on the margin of world politics except when catastrophe strikes. Hugo disses Condi, but 43 has too many bigger fish to fry--Iraq, Iran, North Korea, etc.--to care. For once "Tio Sam" is playing it smart. To borrow Pat Moynihan's famous 1970 advice to Nixon re domestic race relations (sadly, not taken), we seem to be adopting a posture of "benign neglect" towards the region. Small low-profile initiatives here and there, but no sturm und drang, which would play into Chavez's hands. So South Americans want Tio Sam to stop spoiling their lives, eh? Per the ancient Chinese admonition to beware what you wish for lest you get it, Tio Sam is saying, if not adios (permanent farewell--"God be with you"), hasta la vista (temporary parting--"see you again"). Good idea.
Anecdotes are, in one view, deceptive, as they are often not representative of the whole picture. But sometimes they are--AEI's resident optimist--to be fair, usually right on target, demographer Ben Wattenberg, has said that "the plural of anecdote is data." In which spirit I pass along a report from David Frum, AEI-based now and an ex-Bush speechwriter in 43's first term. It recounts a debate on Hamas held at a quarterly forum sponsored in Qatar. The resolution before the house was whether Hamas should be accepted as a peace partner. The debate took place in the immediate aftermath of the temple bombing in Iraq. Frum told the audience, which included many students, male and female, in traditional garb, that Hamas terror would not end with Israel, but would be turned on them. Israel, warned Frum, would survive; Qatar might not. How did this go down? The audience voted in favor of Hamas, 89 to 11 percent. The more I view what is going on in the streets of Muslim lands, the more I think of the oldie about the Lone Ranger telling Tonto: "Indians! We're surrounded by Indians!" To which Tonto replies: "What do you mean 'we,' kemosabe?"
Richard Pipes, supreme Russia scholar, explains why Russia is destined to remain a dangerous adversary of the West: (1) it has deep historical insecurity about being an outsider in world affairs; (2) it retains deep authoritarian tendencies; (3) it is a low-trust society, which will impede political, legal and economic development. Pipes does not discuss a fourth issue: Russia's imploding demographics, of which he surely is well aware. That will not help either.
Yesterday in an LFTC post I noted that a good foreign policy discriminates--intelligently: favor first your friends, aid allies of convenience, set neutrals at arms length, tilt against rivals and stiff real enemies. So who does 43 stiff? Reports Hudson scholar and Blair adviser, Irwin Stelzer, 43 is shafting Tony Blair. While Karen Hughes sucks up to anti-US Muslims worldwide, 43 stiffs Tough Tony. Read the gory details here and weep.
Francis Fukuyama warns that Europe cannot respond to Islamist sentiment within their Muslim populations by a sectarian exclusion. Rather it must replace its current mix of "see no evil" tolerance and moral relativism with an idea-based assimilationist ethos of the kind that the US has been successful with since its founding. Fukuyama also warns Europeans that they need to junk the 1968-style reflexive anti-Americanism once and for all. Well said. And RCP columnist David Warren calls the Cartoon Riots the most significant war event since 9/11. He fears that the West is retreating into a 1930s-style appeasement, with comparably poor results ultimately to follow. Alas, this seems true, too.
Bush says one day that he would veto any effort by Congress to kill the Dubai Ports World deal to serve major US ports, and then the next day the WH says that the deal was signed & sealed before 43 knew of it? What were they thinking? To be fair, Jonah Golderg informs us that the Dubai firm bought CSX's US container business last year, to silence.
It is easy to laugh at Democrats who have been horrified at the thought of treating Arabs differently, lest P.C. be violated, and now scream at this deal. The 2/22 NY Sun has a delicious editorial detailing the union ties of Democrats--port unionism also motivates them. NRO's Andrew McCarthy, in the same vein, offers us the Clinton China/UAE suck-up chronicles, but chides the White House as well for political correctness. As blogger Michelle Malkin says with justified schadenfreude, "We are all profilers now." Wesley Pruden weighs in with his customary wit, and sees 43 throwing away his party's strongest asset: national security credibility. Naturally, Arabs are being quoted accusing the US of "Islamophobia."
But as the NY Post's pointed 2/22 comment, appropriately entitled Dubya Jeopardy, neatly sums up the problems with the deal. True, the UAE firm will not be responsible for security--that will still be provided by US Customs, Border Security & the Coast Guard, but it will have to work with the security apparatus and will therefore gain knowledge. In a 2/26 editorial, however, the NY Post welcomed a "lull" so that both sides could cool off and consider the deal upon closer scrutiny. Ex-Scoop Jackson aide Frank Gaffney, head of the Center for Security Policy, explains more about the shadowy government committee that put this clinker together. The 2/22 Washington Times reports that the $6.8 billion acquisition of Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation, the UK firm, by Dubai Ports World would create the world's third largest port operator. The firm provides stevedoring, terminal operating, loading and unloading and ferry service in 18 countries.
A 2/22 Wall Street Journal editorial defends the deal, and says that some 9/11 hijackers were UAE citizens does not argue against the deal, because some Muslims who did the 7/7 bombings last year in London were UK citizens, and British firm, P&O provided port security before. Yes, but the Brits are our dear friends. The UAE is nothing like that; it is a fair-weather partner at best, having helped fund the spread of Islamist fanaticism with petrodollars. Mansoor Ijaz, a solid national security guy, explains why he sees Dubai having made a strongly pro-US turn since 9/11, despite pre-9/11 actions. On 2/21 NRO collected contrasting brief posts. A 2/23 editorial in the WSJ tells us that Dubai is now a trade entrepot and on the way to becoming an Arab Switzerland. A 2/23 Weekly Standard piece provides intriguing details from a captured al-Qa'ida document (declassified), with cause for pro and con. Top blogger Glenn Reynolds, initially opposed, now supports the deal, but suggests that the White House should use blogs as an early warning system. NR Editor Rich Lowry argues strongly that the UAE is reformed and that its security role will be minimal; the real port security problem he sees is at foreign ports of embarkation, not US ports of disembarkation; AEI's Veronique de Rugy agrees. Ex-Green Beret Jack Kelly also endorses the deal.
How clueless 43 is can best be shown by reference is to his remark about it being wrong to "discriminate." Any intelligent foreign policy does precisely that: intelligently discriminate. Favor true friends, lean towards allies of convenience, deal arms-length with neutrals, beware of rivals and above all, stiff your enemies. So: favor true-blue pals like Britain, Australia & Japan; lean towards fair-weather states like UAE; treat straddlers like Switzerland & Sweden at arms length; beware of rivals like China; and stiff mortal enemies like Iran.
Neither the UAE nor Arabs in general are our true friends at this juncture. In the event, with the deal on ice for a few months, Charles Krauthammer suggests a Dubai Finesse that allows for more safeguards. It appears likely that something along these lines may be worked out. The Sunday Washington Post carried an informative visual diagram showing how the port trade moves; well worth checking out.
Proliferation expert Kenneth Timmerman reports in great detail about how Russia spirited out Saddam's WMD before the 2003 war. The US, fearful that Russia would help Iran's nuke program, does not want this information to get out. Russia will help Iran anyway, so out with it. A "must read."
The NY Times has a front-pager revealing that German intelligence gave us Saddam's Baghdad defense plan a month before the war, and that certain Arab regimes, notably Egypt & Saudi Arabia, gave us more help than advertised. Nice to hear, but is it ever possible for the Pentagon to keep anything classified? Apparently not.
The NY Times Sunday Magazine carries a heartwarming story of how the ex-publicist for the Taliban now attends Yale. It is long, and I made it only part way through before throwing up. Tokyo Rose, Axis Sally, Lord Haw-Haw, meet your spiritual legatee. Just try to imagine the following dispatch in the February 26, 1949 NY Times: "Mildred Gillars, the former Axis Sally, now attends Yale." Taliban are still killing Americans in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and their former flack comes to America and sucks at the teat of one of its most prestigious (probably not justified any more) colleges. The Taliban's ex-flack is attending the alma mater of none other that G. W. Bush, of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington DC 20002. Where the Hell were State & the INS on this one? As usual, out to lunch. To learn more about who we let in, read John Fund's short portrait in today's Opinion Journal; Fund met the punk in spring 2001. His is a very revealing article.
Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte opposes rapid release of 3,000 hours of Saddam tapes, citing the usual stuff about sensitive information. A Washington Times editorial tells us that from 12 hours made public we learn that Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov was in Iraq in December 2002 helping Saddam dispose of his WMD, using Russian commandos. That leaves 2,988 hours to go. A Weekly Standard editorial tells of the runaround that Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairmanf Peter Hoekstra has been getting. 43 reportedly favors release. Stay tuned.
I resisted the temptation to take an immediate blast at Al Gore for his appalling defamation of President Bush and the USA at a speech in, of all places, Saudi Arabia, cradle for 15 of 19 hijackers on 9/11. But Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Jack Kelly has rewarded my patience. His 2/17 column gives the numbers for detention of Arab-Americans in 9/11's aftermath. A-G John Ashcroft rounded up about 1,200: 725 were held on immigration violations, 360 on suspicion of terrorism links and 100 on unrelated criminal charges. According to a June 2003 Justice Department inspector general report, 59 percent were charged within three days and only 24 detainees--two percent--were held at least one month. This out of an estimated 3 million Arab-American population. Oh, by the way, the numbers on detainees arrested came from the Arab-American anti-Discrimination Committee, not exactly a hotbed of anti-Arab or anti-Muslim feeling, one would think. This is the performance of which Al said in Saudiland that Arabs were "indiscriminately rounded up, often on minor charges of overstaying a visa and not having a green card in proper order, and held in conditions that were just unforgivable." Really. Kelly notes that the 9/11 report said that Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, 9/11 attack chief planner, selected Saudis because they were able to so easily get visas. You'd think that speaking in Saudi Arabia would be the perfect place for Al to give one of his Global Warming sermons.
Today's New York Sun has a chilling article on a demonic embryonic political pact engineered by French neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen: an alliance, along with France's far left, with France's Muslims. Le Pen's National Front is splitting 50-50, as half the old party was Christian rightists. Here is the arithmetic: France's population is now 62 million, of which 6 to 8 million (10 to 13%) are Muslim. Of France's under-20 cohort, Muslims are 25%, with 40% to 50% in major cities. France's far-left comprises 20% of French votes, with Le-Pen now under 10%; a Farrakhan-like figure, a music-hall performer who goes by the name Dieudonne (God's gift), son of a white mother and black father from Cameroon, has emerged. Their common focus: hate Jews, hate Israel, hate America. An energized Muslim community could supply tons of new voters for this satanic coalition. When I was growing up France was Brigitte Bardot, Maurice Chevalier, Edith Piaf, Fernandel, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Charles DeGaulle. Time machine, anyone?
There must be something in the air around Langley. A WSJ op-ed today by ex-CIA officer Guillermo Christensen reports that yet another ex-CIA officer has fired a salvo at President Bush over Iraq. This time the culprit is none other than Paul Pillar, pivotal in CIA intelligence analyses of Iraq all the way back to before the Gulf War, when the CIA thought Saddam was nowhere near getting a nuke (in fact after the GW we learned he was within a year of success), to Iraqi Freedom and beyond. So Pillar, having gone along with deeply flawed intel assessments, never having made any serious effort we know of to change conclusions, now fires at 43. Christensen notes that CIA betrayals like this undermine trust between the CIA and its Executive Branch clients. Now, get this: Pillar authored a book in 1999 opining that terrorism was a problem to be managed, not confronted militarily. A Weekly Standard 2/10 piece has that and more about Pillar's treachery.
Three-time US male figure-skating champ Johnny Weir is enamored of Russian culture--his coach is a Russian with the lilting name of Tatiana Tarasova. (Her name brings to mind Tatiana Romanova, the Ian Fleming bait for 007 in From Russia With Love, doesn't it?) So how does Weir "honor" Russian culture? By wearing a warm-up jacket with CCCP on it (news photo). Except CCCP is the acronym (in transliteration from Cyrillic characters) not for Russia but for the former Soviet Union. (Chalk up another triumph for neo-Marxist US educrats.) Does Weir think that the former USSR honored Russian culture? Stalin blew up the largest Orthodox church in Moscow in 1929, to make way for a gigantic public bathing pool. Soviet architecture is grotesque in its ugliness--square cement blocks that starkly contrast with the decorative facades and graceful cupolas of classic Russian architecture. Prokofiev and Shostakovitch had to compose in a manner acceptable to Stalin's notorious cultural commissar, Andrei Zhdanov. Solzhenitsyn had to distribute his manuscripts via literary underground (samizdat). Novelist Boris Pasternak was humiliated and forced to recant works he had written. And so on. As the song title goes, I could go on singing--of one Olympian's epic imbecility. Citius, altius, fortius, imbecilicus.
Fareed Zakharia's Newsweek column says that the latest OECD survey of global economies, Going for Growth, shows Europe dropping off the radar screen, in irreversible decline. EU per capita GDP is 25 percent lower than that for the US, and falling further behind. In 20 years the average French and German citizen will each have half the US average per capita wealth. One study shows 40 percent of Swedes living at the US equivalent for low-income households. Europe faces daunting problems with aging populations and changing demographics. Zakharia believes that Europe's decline will perpetuate America's superpower status. Reflexive schadenfreude at Jacques & Gerhard aside, Europe's decline--regardless of its impact on America's rank--is bad news for us, too.
Classics scholar Victor Davis Hanson, eloquent and erudite as always, speculates that the Cartoon Riots will prompt Europe to: (a) work closely behind the scenes to help the US in the Mideast--including in Iraq; (b) sharply reduce Muslim emigration to Europe; (3) kill Turkey's chances of joining the EU; (4) temper Europe's anti-American rhetoric. He thinks 2006 will determine whether Europe takes a page from Winston Churchill's book, or Neville Chamberlain's.
Right-wing provocateur Ann Coulter may go over the top not infrequently, and even offend her fellow conservatives at times, but at least she is refreshingly un-P.C. in a society where P.C. can chill critical speech. In the wake of massive efforts by jihadists to silence inconvenient Western talk about Islam, and tepid response at best from our leaders, it is time to re-affirm the foundation principle that freedom of speech includes freedom to say offensive things. The first Amendment's Speech Clause is of course not absolute (we cannot shout fire in a crowded theater,wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes), and offending speech invites strong rebuttal. But N.B., there is no adjective in front of "speech," no narrowing qualifier banning speech which offends, or is false, or is not helpful.
James Madison, architect of the Bill of Rights, knew what he was creating. True, the Supreme Court, whose members are less apt constitutionalists than was Mr. Madison, has via "judicial gloss" qualified speech freedom, but not so far--yet, at least--as to concern us in this context. When freedom of speech comes under violent attack speakers must err not on the side of moderation--a form of self-censorship that amounts to surrender to threats of violence; rather, speakers must err on the side of risking offense. In that spirit we should all, for a time at least, (mis)behave more like Ann. Not because she is dead right--she isn't, but because they are dead wrong.
Last week Ann posted a piece on the "Religion of Peace" with the lovely title of Calvin and Hobbes -- and Muhammad. She argues that Islam is not her idea of a peaceful religion, citing 9/11 and the usual litany of jihadist violence since, and the still far too rare instances when Muslim moderates have spoken out against the appalling brutality of their co-religionists. Quoth Ann:
(1) "In order to express their displeasure with the idea that Muslims are violent, thousands of Muslims around the world engaged in rioting, arson, mob savagery, flag-burning, murder and mayhem, among other peaceful acts of nonviolence." (2) "Muslims are the only people who make feminists seem laid-back." (3) "The little darlings brandish placards with typical Religion of Peace slogans, such as: 'Behead Those Who Insult Islam,' 'Europe, you will pay, extermination is on the way' and 'Butcher those who mock Islam.' They warn Europe of their own impending 9/11 with signs that say: 'Europe: Your 9/11 will come' -- which is ironic, because they almost had me convinced the Jews were behind the 9/11 attack." (4) "The rioting Muslims claim they are upset because Islam prohibits any depictions of Muhammad -- though the text is ambiguous on beheadings, suicide bombings and flying planes into skyscrapers." (5) "Making the rash assumption for purposes of discussion that Islam is a religion and not a car-burning cult, even a real religion can't go bossing around other people like this." (6) "But Muslims think they can issue decrees about what images can appear in newspaper cartoons. Who do they think they are, liberals?"
Yet the above is arguably tame compared to what Ann wrote in a 9/13/01 column, which prompted so much protest that NRO, a place where P.C. is generally vigorously resisted, felt compelled to banish Ann from their pages. In a column entitled This is War that was mostly an elegy to her friend and fellow pundit, the graceful, gracious and brilliant Barbara Olson (who perished on AA Flight #77 when it crashed into the Pentagon) Ann unloaded:
"The nation has been invaded by a fanatical, murderous cult. And we welcome them. We are so good and so pure we would never engage in discriminatory racial or 'religious' profiling." After reaming out the "Kabuki theater" of airport insecurity of "[applying]the same laughably ineffective airport harassment to Suzy Chapstick as to Muslim hijackers," Ann ended her post-attack diatribe with the tart closer that got her bounced: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."
That NRO felt pressure to distance itself from Ann for a column written just two days after her friend and colleague was murdered--one much admired (justly so) at NRO, a piece obviously written in grief, shows the power of P.C. Not even 9/11 could dent Western P.C. strictures against offending those most easily offended. Oriana Fallaci, the legendary Italian journalist, is being prosecuted for assailing Islam in her post-9/11 philippic, The Rage and the Pride. No less than Brigitte Bardot, also a legend (albeit not for journalism), was convicted for writing a book (give her credit: do you think today's film-babes could write one?), A Cry of Silence (a 2003 work as yet not available in English), supposedly insulting Islam. La Bardot condemned Islamic practices immigrants brought to France, and called the 9/11 hijackers "monstrous, satanic men." (She also slammed today's Third World hookers parading the sidewalks of nocturnal Paris as unlike "our lovely kind street-walkers" of yore, and dismissed modern art as "shit--literally and figuratively").
Alas, the problem is more than jihadists. In his 2/10 column Charles Krauthammer nails Muslim "moderates" for their own disingenuous role in this debate: "The worldwide riots and burnings are instruments of intimidation, reminders of van Gogh's fate. The Islamic 'moderates' are the mob's agents and interpreters, warning us not to do this again. And the Western 'moderates' are their terrified collaborators who say: 'Don't worry, we won't. It's those Danes. We're clean. Spare us. Please.'" This is partial exaggeration, as protests in the West have been peaceful. In Germany there was no reaction from the Muslim community--German Muslims are mostly Turkish-- when Die Welt (the World) published the cartoons last week as an act of political solidarity with Denmark. But CK's general point about our trans-cultural surrender is valid.
Mark Steyn weighs in with his usual panache, telling us that Albert Brooks wanted to do a film about comedy in the Muslim world but was rebuffed by Muslim nations; he wound up filming in India. Arnaud de Borchgrave's 2/11 column sees a global intifada (a term used earlier last week by French philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy); he sees a coalition of jihadist branches of Islam now arrayed against us: Wahhabi, Salafi, Deobandi (Pakistan's Islamist sect) and Shi'a. Foreign policy expert Olivier Gutta warns in a riveting narrative that the Muslim Brotherhood has a long-range plan to isolate Muslim communities from Western democratic parties by making itself the political interlocutor of those communities.
England faces a severe challenge from Islamic militancy, centered in "Londonistan." The Sunday Times has a crack report on how Muslims took advantage of Britain's liberal laws and traditions to spread subversion. A radical Egyptian cleric, Abu Hamza, who lost his hands trying to make a bomb, took over the Finsbury Park Mosque in 1997, sidelining moderates whose internal divisions paralyzed any potential resistance. The authorities dismissed the cleric as a nut-case; it was simply beyond them that radical sermons could appeal to thousands of young Muslims. Last week Hamza was convicted (under an 1861 law) of inciting Muslims to kill kaffirs (unbelievers). UK authorities monitor 100 radicals, of whom 10 are in detention and 9 under control laws, with 80 still freely floating. A recent poll sampling attitudes among the UK's 1.6 million Muslims found chilling numbers: 7% (112,,000) favoring suicide bombing inside the UK, 16% (256,000) favoring suicide bombing inside Israel and 30% (480,000) favoring Israel's extinction. A poll last summer showed 24% (384,000) having some sympathy with the 7/7 London bombings and 32% (512,000) believing Western society "decadent and immoral." Moderates are speaking out now, but on the evidence their task is a steep uphill climb. another way that Muslims can silence leaders is that some, like UK Foreign Minister Jack Straw, hail from constituencies that his party (Labor) would lose were Muslims sufficiently offended.
Just how steep the UK's task is was illustrated by John Leo, who reports that British police arrested pro-Denmark demonstrators carrying signs with pictures of Muhammad, while ignoring Muslim protesters carrying signs saying "Exterminate those who mock Islam" and "Be prepared for the real holocaust." Muslims in Denmark's Muslim areas have told police "This is our area. We rule the place." Police are staying out. The Dutch Language Union has endorsed lower-case spelling for the "C" in Christ, effective as of August. Muslims in Italy want Dante's Divine Comedy bowdlerized to remove images of Muhammad. Muslim fathers in Linz, Austria, want all female schoolteachers to wear scarves, whether Muslim or not. Leo explains that "conveyor belt" Muslim groups in the West refrain from practicing terror themselves but train young Muslim males who then join terror groups. In 2002 Italians arrested four in a suspected al-Qa'ida plot to blow up a Bologna church where a scene from Dante re Muhammad is displayed. Jed Babbin reports that the EU is championing self-censorship to avoid offending Muslims. Last week the EU's Justice & Security Minister, Italy's Franco Frattini, proposed a "voluntary" code of media conduct, and said this: "The press will give the Muslim world the message: 'We are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression....We can and we are ready to self-regulate that right.'"
And we are on the defensive in Arab lands, too. Eli Lake's 2/13 NY Sun column informs us that middle-class Cairenes are being fed Islamist disinformation spread via cellphone text messages, a prime means of communication among prosperous Cairenes. And they are being told lies--that the Danish government is organizing Qur'an-burning parties, that Danish publishers plan their own edited version of the Qur'an--and the Cairenes believe them.
On the plus side there are some eloquent moderates speaking out, such as a magazine editor in England, a Houston attorney, a Chandler, Arizona family physician and a Harvard student fellow. All express outrage at the cartoons, but recognize violence is unacceptable as a response; their views are all well worth sampling. Also worth a look is a Sunday Telegraph op-ed by a Muslim raised in the Mideast, who says Muslims were taught to hate Christians and Jews from childhood. A 2/13 op-ed in the NY Sun offers more from a writer who grew up under Arab rule. Bus drivers on strike in Tehran offer an example of allies stifled by Islamist tyranny.
Reuel Marc Gerecht, ex-CIA, noted that Christian calumnies of Islam in the Middle Ages were taken in stride, and that catering to jihadist sensitivity is not only a futile exercise, but amounts to selling out moderate Muslim populaces:
"And the controversy over the Danish cartoons could conceivably betray
the most important, though least remembered, player in this
controversy: the average Muslim in the Middle East. Far more than most
Middle Eastern Muslims and politically correct Western scholars of the
region and Islam would like to admit, Western standards for individual
liberty, curiosity, personal integrity, scholarship, and the political
relations among men have become the defining benchmarks for Muslims
everywhere, however resented or admired. If our standards collapse and
give way to fear, theirs in the long-term have no chance whatsoever.
The psychology of victimization--surely one of the worst gifts the
Western anti-imperialist left has given the Muslim world--can only be
made worse by Westerners who treat Muslims like children unable to
compete and to defend their religion."
Gerecht believes that Western support for women's rights is fueling young male jihadist rage. This is no doubt true, but having women vote heavily and freely is the best insurance policy against long-term fundamentalist democratic rule. And in the end Gerecht continues to support democracy, for dictatorships will always back the jihadists. He rightly notes also that the "peace process" obsession re Israeli-Palestinian issues is an irrelevant sideshow.
Ann's bile, plus Oriana's and Brigitte's, too, are antidotes to the calculatedly cuddly rhetoric of Western leaders dancing around the edges of criticism of Islam, lest they offend moderates and turn them into jihadists. Bill Kristol notes that Robert Frost said liberals were incapable of taking their own side in a fight. Striking his own blow for liberty, he has published the cartoons as they appeared originally in Denmark. For higher-quality art depicting The Prophet, check out this online archive of myriad historical examples from all around the world, many quite lovely.
Has any Western leader publicly taken note that the Wahhabi clerics in Saudi Arabia desecrate everything related to Muhammad, including his birthplace and tomb? This is no time to tiptoe through rhetorical tulips lest the all too easily offended be offended, for free speech is indeed endangered. Strong speech must be published, re-published and re-published, until it is made clear that we will not let a gaggle of homicidal loons acting in the name of their own perverted, mythological version of their religion to dictate what we can speak, write or think.
We must be especially vigilant not to allow veto by violence or threat of same. In 1977 there was an infamous confrontation orchestrated by American Nazis, rallying in Skokie, Illinois, in a cynically calculated giving of offense to 35,000 elderly Jewish concentration camp survivors--the Nazis mendaciously claimed that they merely sought to promote political debate. The ACLU vigorously defended the Nazi march as protected speech per the First Amendment; a counter-demonstration was organized. But one reason the Nazis could march in Skokie, while Ku Klux Klansmen could not have marched in Harlem (nor Black Panthers in Boston's Southie) without scads of police protection, was that elderly Jews, unlike the young, could not credibly threaten marchers with violence.
To prevent such asymmetries of de facto hate-speech power, hate-speech laws must be abolished. Not becuse some speech is not hateful and wrong; of course it is. Because at a time when Islamism threatens free speech values by violence, we must err on the side of free speech, and accept as sole remedy for offensive speech the use of speech--as strong as the occasion demands--in rebuttal. (This does not preclude enacting laws prohibiting child pornography, which involves exploitation of minors; it may mean we tolerate adult pornography, a price worth paying to escape selective self-censorship by P.C. hate-speech laws.)
In this enterprise of protecting vigorous free speech Western publics need the unequivocal support of their governments. Such backing must go beyond rhetoric. Free world governments must put Mideast and Muslim countries on notice that if they condone, let alone sponsor, any violence directed against Western citizens or their property: (1) they will be held financially accountable for full compensation; and (2) as punishment they will forfeit foreign aid. Western governments should fund moderates worldwide--clandestinely, if they can keep a secret (the French can, let them do this)--to help rectify the balance, and hold foreign governments accountable should they fail to protect moderate voices. In the domestic context, Muslim groups must not be permitted to use speech codes to prohibit debate and comment they find offensive. The human temptation to take advantage of such rules will empower those most easily offended, that they can stifle thoughts from which they desire insulation. The rules here must return, once and for all, to "When in Rome...."
Theodore Dalrymple, unmatched as chronicler of underclass pathology, informs us in a 2/11 op-ed that France has returned to its pre-riot posture since last fall's disturbances. Nothing will be done, as the privileged majority will not surrender their economic perks; underclass Muslim males will simmer with resentment until the next eruption. Dalrymple sees hope in the bright, highly-motivated young women seeking employment outside the ghetto, where they might escape subjugation by their thuggish male brethren. Meanwhile, Muslims are torching 100 cars a night, roughly the rate before the November explosion.
France has upgraded its nuclear arsenal, (a) increasing missile range and accuracy by reducing warheads per missile, and (b) configuring some missiles for high-altitude detonation to create electromagnetic pulse, which disables electronics over a country-wide large area. Which reminds me of a delicious cartoon by Oliphant from 1981, published on the cusp of Reagan's inauguration. It showed an Iranian cleric with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Cleric: "Hey, Imam, I got one for you." AK: "OK, I'll bite." Cleric: "What's flat and glows?" AK: "I give up." Cleric: "Iran after Inauguration Day." AK: "I don't get it." Cleric: "There are those of us, Imam, who wish you would ponder it."
Author David Pryce-Jones, ever acute in his analysis of West-Islam issues, offers a 6-pager in the New Criterion (Hilton Kramer's superb arts journal) on Europe's historical entanglement with Muslim populations, and how their relations have changed. It makes for somber, thoughtful reading.
A second piece merits attention, too, on how puzzled Danes are at the Muslim reaction. It contains a revealing quote from a Danish philosophy student:
"A lot of Danes have problems understanding what is going on and why people in those countries reacted this way. We're used to seeing American flags and pictures of George Bush being burned, but we've always seen ourselves as a more tolerant nation. We're in shock to now be in the center of this."
In other words, when Islamist rage is aimed at less tolerant America it's OK and understandable. But when jihadists pick on tolerant Denmark, Danes do not get it. They had better figure it out before they lose their country and their civilization. Playing Hamlet to Islamism's apocalyptic jihadist sword will not cut it.
Jones: Muslims: Integration or Separation?
LA Times: Rage Over Cartoons Perplexes Denmark
A decorated former military officer found four sealed bunkers in the town of Nasiriyah after the war, and reported the exact location to the Iraq Survey Group (ISG). He says that the ISG told him: (a) the site was not safe to visit; (b) the ISG lacked manpower & equipment; and (c) the ISG was focusing on northern Iraq. The article gives intriguing, highly plausible details. A congressional committee is investigating the allegation. Worst of all: After all this time, if WMD is found in Iraq, expect that the US will be accused of planting it, and most of the world's media--including MSM in America--will take the allegations seriously.
NY Sun (paid): Ex-officer Spurned on WMD Claim
Amir Taheri gives numerous examples of Muslim art with Muhammad's image. He adds that intolerance of humor is a modern Muslim phenomenon. Worth a look.
Taheri: Bonfire of the Pieties
The NY Times reports today that with some 20 million Muslims in Europe--they are 3% of the UK, 4% of the Danish and 5% of the EU population--Europeans increasingly realize that the have invited into their midst a resentful minority that does not share their values. For their part, Muslim immigrants feel excluded and mistreated. The article is a good one, with apt quotes and context. It makes one wonder if Europeans have discovered time travel and journeyed back to 1683, when the Ottomans were at the gates of Vienna. That time the Islamic visitors left Turkish coffee and went home. This time they are inside the gates of their adopted home, and are not offering anything so felicitous as coffee.
NY Times: West Beginning to See Wide Islamic Protests as Sign of Deep Gulf
Things are heating up: (1) Iran's program has been referred to the Security Council: (2) Iran's Islamofascist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced resumption of uranium enrichment and an end to snap inspections; (3) a news report says Iran tested a new surface-to-surface rocket on January 17; and (4) Germany's Angela Merkel now says things remind her of the Nazi era. The 35-nation IAEA Board vote taken in Vienna (for the 3-page text of the draft resolution--see link below) went 27 for referral, 3 against (Cuba, Syria, Venezuela) and 5 abstaining (Algeria, Belarus, Indonesia, Libya, South Africa). NY Sun columnist David Twersky notes that the IAEA language was intended to apply as well to Israel's nuclear arsenal, and thus is not as strong as its language indicates, as the IAEA can take the position that Iran's abandonment of nuclear ambitions be tied to Israel's surrender of its existing arsenal, a certain non-starter for Israel and 43.
Iran's Prez was blunt in rejecting the IAEA move: “You can do nothing. The period of threat and pressure is over...issue as many declarations like this one as you want, and be happy. You will not stop the progress of the Iranian nation.”
Warned Merkel, addressing the annual Munich security conference of NATO defense chiefs: "Looking back to German history in the early 1930s when National Socialism (Nazism) was on the rise, there were many outside Germany who said 'It's only rhetoric -- don't get excited.' There were times when people could have reacted differently and, in my view, Germany is obliged to do something at the early stages ... We want to, we must prevent Iran from developing its nuclear program."
Check out the text of the IAEA draft resolution. It is loaded with diplo-speak, but worth wading through to see the extent and seriousness of Iran's transgressions to date--setting a known baseline for future action not tied to any country's intelligence findings or estimates. Add to his what Arnaud de Borchgrave's 2/6 piece says about Iran's nutcake Prez: he has fired top Iranian diplomats and officials who do not share his messianic religious vision (an apocalyptic Judgment Day upon the "return" of the 12th Imam revered by Twelver Shi'a); Iran's leaders believe that they can retaliate sufficiently strongly to deter a strike, even by the US. De Borchgrave argues that we should seek a deterrence pact with Iran akin to our Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) posture vis-a-vis the former Soviet Union. He expects that Israel will strike if Iran is not headed off at the pass. The MAD analogy fails for two reasons: (1) MAD presumes rational leaders, but Iran's messianic Prez is a poor candidate for a balance of terror; (2) the US never fully adopted MAD during the Cold War, as every President reserved options short of all-out nuclear suicide.
Newsweek's 2/13 issue has an article re a possible Israeli strike against Iranian facilities. One the plus side, Israel need only target a small number of key Iranian facilities--the weakest links in the nuclear production chain; its 100 or so bunker-busters could do the job. The minus side is greater. First, Israel would have to execute multiple strikes to destroy Iran's deeply-buried sites. Second, Iran's MiG-29 fighters are a match for Israel's F-15s & F-16s under normal combat circumstances; with Israel's planes operating at the extreme of their range, the MiGs might have an edge, albeit Israeli pilots are better. Third, a series of strikes executed by the world's only Jewish state would inflame Muslims worldwide--far more than a bunch of cartoons; unlike Israel's 1981 strike at Saddam's reactor, this one and its aftermath would be carried over satellite TV to Muslim audiences worldwide--much of it over stations like al-Jazeera. Lastly, the US will be blamed for any Israeli strike, as it must pass through airspace controlled by the US, and as Israel, however unfairly, is viewed as a client of the US, not an independent power. Thus, if the strike must be launched and the US inevitably held responsible, the US may as well do it; the US can do a far more thorough job--including regime decapitation, than can the Israelis.
Newsweek's 2/13 issue has a second, even more chilling article. Iran's Prez is part of--and speaks for--a "war generation": Iranians who lived through--with many serving in--the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War. They have, it seems, a romanticized view of that time: Far from regarding it with the horror that a war that cost one million lives ought to engender, they see it as a time of revolutionary zeal and purity and of having fought a just war. Just what we need.
IAEA Board of Governors 2/4 Draft Resolution on Iran & NPT
Newsweek: Will Israel Strike Iran?
De Borchgrave: Later Than We Think
Twersky (NY Sun - paid): IAEA Includes Israel's N-Program
Newsweek: How Dangerous Is Ahmadinejad?
Caroline Glick states in her 2/3 column that Condi is Colin Powell II. State has embraced the "Hamas might change" myth. Call it Song of Road Map--as with Son of Kong, the sequel will be worse. Denial seems to be the order of the day. Glick's column is crisply written. She challenges the Sharon idea of unilateral withdrawal, noting that when Israel pulled back from 2000 to 2002 in Judea & Samaria, terror increased greatly. A solid column worth a look.
Glick: Hamas Myths Trump Reality
Proliferation experts Valery Lincy and Gary Milhollin (he directs the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, she assists him) co-authored a 2/1 piece warning that Russia's offer to enrich Iran's commercial fuel has a backdoor: Iran can continue "research" activities inside Iran. Let's see, by research surely the Iranians mean medical research right? (Think Dr. Frankenstein with isotopes.) Hope Tsar Vladimir's plan dies aborning. We should do our best to kill it; naturally, State praises it.
Lincy & Millhollin: Russia's Sweetheart Deal
No, not Alain Charnier, the dapper drug dealer memorably portrayed by Alexandro Rey in the 1971 classic film, The French Connection. Try Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, adviser to Chirac, who has been meeting regularly with 43 NSA Stephen Hadley on key issues, notably the Mideast. The diplomatic game re Syria & Iran has become "good cop (France), bad cop (US)." Most intriguing of all is that France has, if Ignatius is right, agreed that Iran will be given a brief respite to clear things up. Pray this is true. (How about one cycle of the NBA's 24-second shot clock?)
Ignatius: Bush's New Ally: France?
The President's State of the Union address was, like most of those I have seen over the past 35 years (I've seen most of them), uneven. Touching lots of bases and giving a coherent, powerful speech is hard to do. Bush's 2002 & 2003 SOTU's were better by far--his post-9/11 Axis of Evil rhetoric laying the groundwork for the next steps in the terror war, and his last-chance warning to Saddam carried inherent drama that 43 could not possibly have matched last night. His energy package seems like the latest edition of Presidential wishful thinking--20-year efforts are gone in a puff of smoke before the morning papers arrive. A crisper health care proposal would have been nice--simply asking Congress to give all Americans the lovely menu of choices they have so self-thoughtfully given themselves. Punting Social Security to a bi-partisan commission is all that 43 can do after last year's train wreck.
About the speech, 'nuff said. Now onto the twin crimes last night. First, anti-war media-mom Cindy Sheehan was arrested an hour before the speech for--surprise, right?--causing a "disturbance." She had been invited by Democratic Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey of (you guessed it) California. Now do you think Rep. Woolsey really expected that Ms. Cindy would sit still--quietly--when 43 brought up Iraq? Sure. And Iran's leaders are ready to convert to Judaism next week. That attempted sabotage was but a warm-up.
We all saw what happened next, when 43 noted that his Social Security proposals did not get anywhere last year and the Democrats stood and applauded, with many (yep, Hillary) wearing broad smiles. Such lack of class and breach of attendee protocol for a SOTU is surely without precedent. But it augurs ill for Democrats in 2006. Their vitriolic hatred of things all Republican has become more than an act; they really believe it. Let their over-the-top contempt be front and center in 2006. Americans dislike disrespect and hate sore losers. Even more, Democrats cheering the Social Security stuffing last year should know, Americans cannot stand sore winners. If the Democrats wish to play scorched-earth Palestinian politics in 2006, they will discover that Americans aren't Palestinians.
Watching the State Department re Iran reminds one of Jeane Kirkpatrick's classic quip that the State Department needs a Department of American interests. Here Congress tries to do the right thing--for the past year considering legislation to aid democratic forces inside Iran. So what does State do? Predictably, what comes naturally to the striped-pants set: block aid, fearing it impedes negotiations with Iran re its nuclear program. It is one thing, for reasons Machiavelli & Talleyrand (and others) would have fully understood, to go along with negotiations one knows will prove futile in the end, to buy time and build political support among those who need extra convincing. It is another to actually believe that diplomacy will stop an Iranian bomb. Earth to Condi....Meanwhile, ace Israel beat reporter Uri Dan interviews Rafael Eitan, a Mossad co-founder and architect of the 1981 Osirak raid on Saddam's reactor; Eitan thinks Iran already has a device or two, and plans a vicious crackdown on domestic dissent. Perhaps they are not yet there: An IAEA report about to be released confirms that Iran has obtained via black market sources documents and drawings that are useful solely for building nuclear weapons.
NY Sun (paid): Bush to Encounter Skepticism on Iran in Speech
Dan: Iran Already Has the Bomb
Guardian: Iran Reportedly Holds Illicit Papers
Washington Times columnist Wesley Pruden has an exceptionally witty and apt take on how the West is already caving in to Hamas, with empty threats and public bluster. Not pretty, but Pruden's take is his writing at its hilarious, sword-sharp best. Savor it and weep. Christopher Hitchens, an honest left-winger, says Israel helped implant Hamas, and that religious parties are even more corrupt than their secular counterparts. Worth a read, too.
Pruden: Trying to Look Tough With Terror
Hitchens: Suicide Voters
The University of Maryland's International Program polled global publics on the virtues (or lack thereof) of the free-enterprise system. Tops was--not the US, third at 71% pro--but..China, at 74%, with second the Philippines at 73%. Less than half of French approved (naturally). So Mao's Little Red Book is supplanted by Adam Smith's 18th century tome, The Wealth of Nations. Wonder if it had something to do with the great Leap Forward of the late 1950s-early 1960s, when agricultural policies devised by the Great Helmsman cost China some 30 million lives? To the horrific revelation of which, one suspects, Mao, if challenged (unlikely) would have responded, quoting Joe E. Brown to Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot: "Nobody's perfect."
Wall Street Journal: Comrade Capitalists
One factor in the Hamas win, write Michael Kass & Peter Pham in 1/30 NRO, was that the US State Department--under Condi, no less-tolerates Hezbollah participation in the post-Cedar Revolution Lebanese government. A bad augury for Israel re Palestine and the US posture. Barbara Lerner gives a valuable Mideast democracy primer in 1/30 NRO: She sees Egypt, Jordan & Palestine as a "fool's dream" where the populations are seized en masse of Islamofascism. Iraq, Lebanon & Iran are possible democracies, because their polities are divided--not united in a tyrannical ideology; the divide in Lebanon & Iraq is ethnic, in Iran generational. Lerner, who predicted a Hamas win, dismisses 43's view of democracy as that of Rousseau's--satirized memorably by Voltaire in Candide. Instead, she argues, we should support not democracy but democrats--and only in places whee they speak for large numbers of people, not as lone voices in the wilderness. William Buckley's 1/30 column says that democracy brings self-satisfaction to voters, and responsibility; the latter imposes over time, he believes, restraints. Perhaps the case. For now Hamas has called for Israel to remove the two blue stars from its flag, which signify to Jews a prayer shawl, but which to Hamas signify the intent of Jews to rule from the Nile to the Euphrates. And what meanwhile does the EU do: announce it intends to continue funding the Palestine Authority so long as it "supports peace." Right.
Kass& Pham: We Helped Hamas
Lerner: Mideast Democracy Primer
Buckley (NY Sun - paid): Democracy as Spinach
So monster Internet planet Google caves in to the Chinese. Tom Lipscomb, founder of New York Times Books, notes that Google's market cap exceeds that of the entire newspaper industry ($80B v. $65B). Yet while Google resists efforts of the US government to turn over customer search data on privacy grounds, the company caves to the Chinese and accepts censorship. Try to find out about Falun Gong through Google's portal. Tom attributes much of this what he terms (not without reason) the keiretsu oligopoly structure in communications industries, plus a dose of greed worthy of 1980s Wall Street movie heavy Gordon "Greed is good!" Gekko.
Tom says that Google should have done what he did as Times Books President a generation ago: He pulled out of the Moscow Book Fair to protest Soviet censorship. Google has the market leverage to force the Chinese to choose between open access and economic growth, or closed access and economic stagnation. What a pity that Google's owners don't see this--or, maybe they do but simply don't care.
Lipscomb: The Real Cost of Google's Sellout to China
So, Hillary has decided 43 has not been tough enough on Iran! Don't laugh: Anytime a Democrat these days even talks tough it is a step forward. Here's what she said Wednesday last week (1/18): "I believe that we lost critical time in dealing with Iran because the White House chose to downplay the threats and to outsource the negotiations." Better still: "We cannot take any option off the table in sending a clear message to the current leadership of Iran that they will not be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons." Of Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Hitler's surname in Farsi?), he who wants Israel wiped off the map, the junior senator from the Empire State said: "[He] is moving to create his own nuclear reality in line with his despicable rewriting of history." All true. Yes: Hillary is right--but on the past, not the future.
Sanctioning Iran: Too Little, Too Late
OK, give Hillary credit for being more "realist" than her UN-besotted party base. But Senator 2008 does not grasp the limits of sanctions as substantive policy. The main value of sanctions against Iran would have been to prove their futility, and thus make carrying out a military option more politically feasible. But now it is too late: We simply do not have the time anymore, having squandered several years with European diplomat and UN bureaucrat games.
To see this more clearly, hark back to Iraq under Saddam. In the 1990s my late uncle, the strategist Albert Wohlstetter (a fixture in national security circles for five decades) said, opposing sanctions against Iraq: "Saddam's capacity to inflict pain on his people infinitely exceeds ours." It was the Iraqi hoi polloi who suffered under sanctions; Saddam still built palaces funded by oil revenues via his corruption of the UN oil-for-food program. Saddam willingly accepted a steep decline in Iraq's GDP--prosperity of his people was not his agenda. Nor is growing GDP at the top of Iran's Islamofascist agenda.
The model for successful use of sanctions was the Reagan Administration. Sanctions helped end apartheid in South Africa and Rhodesia (since 1980, Zimbabwe); they worked against a relatively weak, and thus vulnerable, states. Against a stronger state like the former Soviet Union more care had to be exercised. Reagan rightly lifted the Carter Administration's grain embargo against the Soviets, because all it did was replace American farm supplies with grain from Australia, Argentina and Canada. Thus that embargo hurt American farmers, not the Soviets.
However, Reagan successfully embargoed high-technology products in 1982. By denying the Soviets access to advanced information technology, plus specialized oil-drilling equipment, he hurt the Soviets in key economic sectors and above all in their military sector, on whose power the regime depended for its world position and internal cohesion. Reagan understood that just as precision-guided munitions (PGMs) are great for targeting military assets while minimizing collateral damage, sanctions should equally be precise--in effect, economic PGMs. By hurting the Soviet leaders and their power-assets, while minimizing collateral damage to the captive Russian people, Reagan accelerated the downfall of the Evil Empire.
So, it takes special conditions for sanctions to work--if they work, which often they don't. But sanctions have an Achilles heel: Even when successful they take time--lots of it, far more than we likely have with Iran. Most current estimates see Iran "going critical" (having enough weapons-grade material to make bombs within weeks) within three years. The former Rhodesia lasted 13 years (1967-1980) before a black regime won (and it was ghastly); South Africa lasted 27 years (1967-1994); Russia lasted a decade (1982-1992). Saddam lasted 12 years under sanctions that did not work, with great suffering endured by the Iraqi people--that Saddam caused and for which he blamed us. (The West was even blamed for medical supply shortages, despite that item not being on the embargo list--another triumph for global media.)
Iran (Alas) Has Options, Too
Iran is a medium-strength regional power, floating on oil, that has sponsored transnational terror worldwide; in 1983 Hezbollah's Marine barracks bombing killed 241 and drove Ronald Reagan's America out of Lebanon. Economic sanctions could hurt Iran--denial of Western investment, or refusing to sell key oil equipment. But they will likely hurt Iran less than Iran can hurt the world: playing with the oil supply or even by impeding transit through the choke-point Straits of Hormuz that lead into the Persian Gulf. Iran could also unleash the 25 al-Qai'da leaders they currently shelter, or set Hezbollah terror against US targets--they already did so recently against Israel. Sanctions against Iran likely will replay Jimmy Carter's failed grain embargo against the Soviets, by hurting the wrong people (the captive population and Western publics) while leaving intact the true target (Iran's leaders).
Indicative of the fear Iran inspires is what Italy's Foreign Minister said re Israel launching a pre-emptive strike against Iran's nuclear program: "With the same firmness with which I say that Iran represents a danger and therefore we need to be very firm and very decisive ... I tell Israel that you cannot and must not think of launching a pre-emptive attack because it would set the whole Middle East and the whole world on fire for who knows how many decades." This as Israel announces that it has definitive proof that last Thursday's (1/19) suicide bombing in Tel Aviv was carried out by Syria with Iranian funds. And now, with the charm that has become Iranian officialdom's hallmark, its defense minister said on 1/24: "Zionists should know that if they do anything evil against Iran, the response of Iran's armed forces will be so firm that it will send them into eternal coma, like Sharon."
The West Is Sharply Divided Over What (If Anything) To Do
Fareed Zakharia writes in the 1/30 US News & World Report that neither sanctions nor a military strike will work. He sees the Iranians as being years away from success. He advocates a broad, multilateral strategy of containment. David Brooks writes in his 1/22 NY Times column that there are four policy camps on Iran: (1) pre-emptionsts, who advocate a quick military strike; (2) sanctionists, who believe economic warfare can work; (3) reformists, who press for surgical (what Colin Powell, re Saddam, called "smart") sanctions; (4) silent fatalists, who see Iran's emergence as a nuclear power inevitable. Brooks thinks all four options "stink." He sees us arguing among these options endlessly, without result. Sadly, he may well be right.
Ruel Marc Gerecht, ex-CIA & now with AEI, writes in the 1/30 Weekly Standard that the Foggy Bottom types who persuaded 43 to let Europe take the lead re Iran in 2003 knew that the Europeans weren't serious about stopping the Iranian bomb. Gerecht recalls that prior efforts at "engagement" with Iran--Carter NSA chief Zbigniew Brzezinski's trip to Algeria in 1979, Reagan NSA chief Robert MacFarlane's disastrous 1986 visit that led to Iran-contra, Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's 2000 flop--all failed. He advocates tough sanctions: serious economic ones plus denying Iranian students Western technical education--plus sending notice that there are trip-wires that, if crossed, will cause a US military strike. Gerecht also argues that promoting democracy in Iran (and in Egypt) is essential for the credibility of 43's pro-democratic agenda, much more so than in pushing for reform in marginal places like Pakistan and Libya. He thinks the CIA comatose on Iran, lacking staff resources to do much useful.
This is a very small sample of serious observers, but should suffice. The West's policy towards Iran is incoherent: diffuse, tentative, belied by its obvious reluctance to back sanctions by the threat--let alone actual use--of military force if sanctions fail.
Time: The Clock is Running--Against Us, Not the Mullahs
Worse, time is on Iran's side. There are two clocks running: (1) Iran's progress towards going critical; (2) the time that must pass before a military option becomes widely politically acceptable. Both clocks run against the West. Worst of all is not if sanctions collapse now, but if they are adopted. If so they would delay any military option until sanctions are widely perceived as futile, which would take years. Monday 1/30 the five Security Council powers plus Germany will meet in London to try and reach a common position on Iran prior to a 2/2 IAEA meeting in Vienna. Pray that they fail, lest time-killing sanctions freeze military options indefinitely. If sanctions might plausibly work, prayer for their use would make sense; if surely futile, pray for failure.
Christopher Dickey writes in the current Newsweek that the key diplomatic date is 3/6, not 2/2. Mohammed el-Baradei, the UN-sponsored IAEA's chief nuclear inspector and Nobel Peace laureate (he got his prize for stalling US and Israeli military action against Iran), promises a definitive report on that date. In an interview (link below) with Dickey the inspector, asked about Iran's leaders not seeming to care what the IAEA does, answered: "Well, they might not seem to care. But if I say that I am not able to confirm the peaceful nature of that program after three years of intensive work, well, that's a conclusion that's going to reverberate, I think, around the world." To be fair, el-Baradei comes across as sincere, but his vision of graduated escalation against Iran is surrealistic.
Dickey, for his part, itemizes how Iran has played footsie, going back as far as 1987--nearly 20 years: (1) concealing information, as yet not detailed, from A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani enrichment expert, in 1987 & 1994; (2) bulldozing a site, Lavizan, after it was identified as a suspect site, and refusing to allow environmental soil samples to be taken; (3) keeping mum on a laptop stolen from Iran in 2004, sent by the CIA to the IAEA, that showed hundreds of pages of what appear to be nuclear weapons designs; (4) giving IAEA inspectors two cardboard boxes in 2004, to be examined in a government room, with inspectors finding 10 pages showing a design for casting uranium in a spherical form consistent with a weapon configuration--the Iranians refused them permission to copy the documents and have stonewalled since. Dickey advocates sanctions if the 3/6 deadline passes without Iran coming across with answers. He believes that the Iranians will reject a "let Ivan do it" enrichment deal, as not only has Persia feared Russia over the centuries, but Russia recently cut off natural gas supplies to Ukraine and Europe, and likely sabotaged energy pipelines in Georgia and Armenia. But an Iranian official yesterday called this option open.
If Sanctions Fail, What Might Work (No, Not International Law)?
Leave us first put "international law" to bed, once and for all. International law works great if there is a fishing dispute between Norway and Denmark. It takes a while, but no one gets hurt and everyone goes home safe and sound. In the area of WMD, a treaty can work--with nations you need not lose sleep over. Feel relieved that Australia signed the Chemical Weapons Treaty? Just in time--Canberra was on the brink of striking America's West coast! (OK, to be fair, the 1987 INF Treaty banning US & Soviet medium-range ballistic missiles from Europe worked. But it worked because Gorbachev abandoned his regime's historic goals; absent Gorbachev's change, the Treaty would have failed, as did earlier arms treaties due to massive violations by the Soviets.) Alas, international law does not work so well against certain folks. Hitler stomped on the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war as an instrument of state policy. Iran's Islamist leaders have sworn fealty to one law--their God, whose sacred words are found not at The Hague, but in the Qu'ran. Twelver Shi'a devotees await the return of the Child (Hidden) Imam and the ensuing apocalyptic Judgment Day. They do not consult Western law professors.
Which leaves force, and timing issues. Given the landmark 3/6 IAEA deadline, any strike before that date would have to be based upon airtight intelligence, a prospect that is essentially zero. One Iranian dissident group, notes Jed Babbin in 1/23's TAS, has predicted an Iranian nuclear bomb test before March 20--this year. So if the Iranians can "go critical" before 3/6 chalk up game, set and match for the mullahs. But on the assumption that Iran is not quite that close, what will work?
Force, or the credible threat of same. Above all, any military option threatened or executed against Iran must be comprehensive, aimed at destabilizing the regime at minimum, decapitating it at maximum. Iran's leaders must be made to know that pursuing nuclear weapons endangers them, that wrecking the oil market endangers them and that sponsoring transnational terror endangers them. (Yes, a big oil price hike justifies military action--why accept economic blackmail that costs us hundreds of billions--perhaps trillions--of dollars? That triumph of self-restraint led in 1974 to OPEC ascendancy and the consequent financing of war, terror and the spread of Islamist fanaticism.)
Max Boot's 1/25 column does counter one anti-strike argument, by noting that far from causing the population to rally around a hated regime a successful strike can undermine further its prestige. But Boot worries that Iran will retaliate against US efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is precisely why a military option should aim at destroying the regime. Tony Blankley's 1/25 column traces a number of regional permutations--rivalry with Saudi Wahhabism for jihadist primacy, rivalry with Turkey and Egypt, too; his piece covers a broad range and is worth a look. Writing in the Weekly Standard counter-terror expert David Gartenstein Ross says that the fissures within Iran can be exploited to the West's advantage. This is perhaps true, but how quickly? Probably not quickly enough, one suspects. (Democracy stalwart Mike Ledeen may dispute this, and he has proven prescient about much in Iran over the past 30 years.)
Iran's determination should not be underestimated, if Pakistan's history is any guide: Regarding nuclear programs, recall that in the early 1970s Pakistan's then-ruler, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, said of the country's nascent nuclear program that his people would "eat grass" in pursuit of an Islamic bomb. (That choice Bhutto made for his subjects; be consoled that his diet wasn't grass.) Money, to fanatics, is not what counts. John Bolton, truth-teller extraordinaire, says that 43 will not accept a nuclear Iran because he fears the mullahs might unleash a nuclear Holocaust.
Only if faced with the concrete prospect of their imminent demise might Iran's leaders be reigned in. Alas, despite Hillary's tough talk there is no convincing sign that many in the West are ready to use necessary force to stop Iran's march towards joining the global nuclear club. Historian Victor Davis Hanson is even more pessimistic: He believes that even if Iran destroys Israel with a nuclear first-strike (what Cold War strategists called a "bolt from the blue"--a move deemed by strategists possible only given a nut case--just who might that be today?), much of the world is too addicted to oil and the pleasures it makes possible to care about the fate of Israel and the Jews. In his view, were Israel nuked, in short order the world would simply move on. The indisposition of "world opinion" to end anti-Semitism at the UN, and its persistence in Europe makes Hanson's prophecy chillingly conceivable.
To preclude this, and many other plausible future horrors, it is best to issue a final ultimatum (as did Bush, Blair & Howard to Saddam) ASAP after Iran fails the 3/6 test (a certitude) and serious sanction efforts stall (a near-certitude). If Iran (as is likely) balks, then a massive military strike should be launched with regime change the strategic aim. A successor regime likely would be military at first, then might flower into democracy. Were it to stay a dictatorship at least it would not be theocratic, jihadist, terror-sponsoring, imperialist, WMD-bent and half-insane. If the West--and, especially, the US--must pay a steep political price for action, as seems certain, let it be paid in pursuit of all the marbles.
Sen. Clinton Calls for Sanctions Against Iran
Hanson: End-of-Days Worldview
Zakharia: Time to Face Reality on Iran
Brooks: Hating the Bomb
Gerecht: Coming Soon, Nuclear Theocrats?
Himmelfarb: Islamofascist Solidarity Day
Brookes: Iran: Our Military Options
Babbin: Iran Showdown
IntlJPost.com: Bolton: Bush Won't Tolerate Nuclear Iran
Boot: Iran's Threat, Bush's Dilemma
NY Times: Six Powers to Meet in London to Seek Common Iran Stance
Blankley: Why Fear Iranian Nukes?
Gartenstein-Ross: The Mullah Wars
Jerusalem Post: Iran Threatens 'Eternal Coma' Retaliation Against Israel
Dickey: Countdown to a Showdown
Newsweek Interview With Mohammed el-Baradei: Diplomacy and Force
Canada's right-of-center government may be--as is Angela Merkel's--limited in how much it can do for the US. But at least the new kids on the block will not lie to us or betray us. Call it a plus on that alone. Ex-43 speechwriter David Frum, Canadian by birth, gives us a lowdown. Fellow Canadian Mark Steyn sees Stephen Halper as neither a Reagan nor a Maggie, but instead like Australia's PM John Howard: secure within himself, and a great calculator of what is politically achievable. A Wall Street Journal editorial notes that between 1985 and 2004 Canadian per capita income relative to the US figure declined from 80.4% to 66.9%. Now, says the WSJ (rightly), it is time for 43 to step up to the plate and remove the anti-dumping tariff slapped on Canadian lumber, which no fewer than four panels have found in violation of GATT.
Frum: Putting an End to Ottawa's Brat Act
Steyn: A Howardesque Leader
Wall Street Journal Editors: Canadian Warm Front
Brian C. Anderson, editor of Manhattan Institute's stellar City Journal, explains at length how the McCain-Feingold "reformers" now have talk radio and the blogosphere in their gunsights. He starts with background: Congress was snookered into passing McCain-Feingold because it did not realize that left-wing groups used the Pew Trusts plus money from George Soros and like-minded lefties to finance the pressure campaign. Mass media went along, as its relative voice would be made more powerful if others were silenced. 43 committed the greatest domestic policy disservice of his tenure when he signed the bill to placate John McCain (who 43 feared might have run a third-party race in 2004). But the Supreme Court's McConnell v. FEC (2003) ruling upheld the law, contrary to what 43 and his too-clever-by-half advisers expected. (McConnell is Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who challenged the law; the FEC is the Federal Election Commission, a monstrosity created after Watergate.) And so the greatest-ever peacetime diminution of political speech by statute became law of the land.
Now the "reformers" aim to put Internet advertising and advocacy under the FEC regulatory banner. They further aim to resurrect the Federal Communications Commissione's defunct Fairness Doctrine, which required balance in broadcast programming. When there were a few stations it made superficial theoretical sense, although in reality big-gun liberal media were not forced to balance anything. The Reagan FCC killed the doctrine in 1987 and talk radio, a mostly right-wing phenomenon, flourished in the 1990s. Right-of-center blogs lead in the blogosphere, too: 157 of the top 250 blogs lean right--that tally from a liberal survey, no less. So the lefties want the government to silence them, rather than leave the debate to the free marketplace of ideas. One piece of good news: When Samuel Alito takes the Court in place of Sandra Day O'Connor, he replaces the Justice whose swing 5th vote sustained McCain-Feingold.
Anderson: Shut Up, They Explained
So the Swiss senator who investigated allegations that the US maintained secret CIA prisons in Poland & Romania unearthed no evidence of such. And the senator could not definitively establish that secret facilities existed. Yet all the same he convicted, and said that European governments probably knew about it, too. and he added that the investigation should continue. So, the verdict is guilty as charged, and we'll keep investigating until we can prove it. Add to this John McCain (no "weenie" is Hero John, but increasingly our Vietnam hero supports "weenie" policies that hamstring US war efforts): His anti-torture bill, now law, imposes on the US (as Andrew McCarthy wrote in the 1/30/06 print National Review) obligations it did not accept in ratifying the International Convention Against Torture: We did not accept the "cruel, inhuman or degrading" (CID) language in ratifying; now we do. The upshot: forget about aggressive interrogation as a tool for gathering intelligence.
UK Times Online: US 'Outsourced' Torture, Report Finds
Hillel Halkin writes in today's NY Sun that the rise of Hamas in the Palestinian electoral mess (elections are tomorrow) plus the strident "wipe Israel off the map" regime in Tehran may revive sympathy for Israel in Europe. He may be optimistic on this (I think so), but his op-ed merits a look.
Halkin: A Different Light Unto Nations
Yesterday French President Jacques Chirac warned terrorists that France reserved its nuclear option for use in retaliation for terror attacks. Said Jacques during a visit to a French nuclear sub base in Brittany, in what may be his (and France's) finest moment since 9/11:
"The leaders of states who would use terrorist means against us, as well as those who would envision using . . . weapons of mass destruction, must understand that they would lay themselves open to a firm and fitting response on our part. This response could be a conventional one. It could also be of a different kind."
Were 43 to have said this, the response, at home and abroad, would have been that the Toxic Texan should keep his cowboy craziness to himself. France would have led the international condemnation. Fine, let Jacques say it and get away with it. Would Cowboy 43 shrink from using nukes where the French would do so? Our enemies should have this on their minds. Oh, dig the photo of Chirac that accompanies the Washington Post story!
Chirac: Nuclear Response to Terrorism is Possible
In an eloquent NY Sun op-ed today, Katherine Curtis Stethem, sister-in-law of Navy Seabee Robert Dean Stethem, the Navy diver murdered by Iranian terrorists during the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847, addresses her dismay to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Mrs. Stethem asks that Angela not repeat her recent betrayal in releasing one of the terrorists who murdered her brother-in-law. It is a very well-written, poignant piece.
Stethem: Merkel At the White House
Yesterday, in a major speech at Georgetown University, Condi Rice declared the diplo-whirl party over for 6,400 Foreign Service officers. Instead of advancing via cushy posts in Europe, rising diplomats will be expected to serve in dangerous posts and also in far-flung spots crucial to US policy, such as India. They will also be expected to master two languages, with extra credit given for languages key re the changing world geopolitical map--e.g., Arabic, Urdu, Chinese. Condi noted that there are 200 cities of at least one million population where the US has no current diplomatic presence; she wants more single-officer postings that now are in only a few places such as Alexandria, Egypt. She said that State cannot continue to have as many diplomats in Germany as in India, given that Germany has 82 million people and India more than one billion. Looks like the days of wine and roses--April in Paris, sipping Lafite Rothschild over brie with La Comtesse at Taillevent--are drawing to a close. (Look at the oh, at least partly bright side, diplomats of tomorrow: Chinese cuisine is great, as is India's Mughal cuisine and also Pakistani fare; in the Mideast you are on your own.) Yo, Condi, to stay on the safe side you might be well advised to hire a food taster for meals served at Foggy Bottom.
Washington Post: Diplomats Will Be Shifted to Hot Spots
Jim Hoagland writes today on how Angela Merkel is re-balancing German foreign relations between Washington and Moscow. Perhaps most symbolic is that she speaks fluent Russian to Vladimir Putin, whereas her predecessor, Herr Gerhard of Gazprom, listened raptly as Putin displayed his KGB-fluent German. Angela is now on a first-name basis with 43--they are "friends"; but with Putin she is a "colleague," not the "friend" Herr Gerhard of Gazprom was. This, Hoagland writes, will not make Angela a puppy for the US, but her experience growing up in the former East Germany under Soviet domination will ensure she is not Moscow's mascot either. Angela amidships is not Adenauer alongside us, but it sure beats Gerhard gone over. Schroeder lied to 43 when he promised not to use Iraq as an issue in his 2002 electoral race; he won mostly on anti-US positioning. Angela will not do this. And her word, one feels confident, will be good as gold.
Hoagland: Merkel's Middle Way
A front-pager in today's Washington Post details how Europe remains seriously vulnerable to terror from the air. Sweden forbids shooting down a civilian airliner for any reason. Germany passed a law allowing its Defense Minister to order a shoot-down; it is being challenged in court, on the basis that the German Constitution expressly forbids the state from taking the life of any German citizen. Four Eastern European members of the EU lack air forces. Smaller EU countries can be transited in minutes by a jet. NATO lacks authority to act on its own. Ironically, AWACS coverage enables NATO to quickly flag airborne threats, and Europe's air forces can rapidly scramble interceptors--neither of which was true in the US on 9/11. In 2003 US and British officials detected an al-Qai'da plot to crash planes taking off from Eastern Europe and aimed at London Heathrow. One simple metric could make it easier to decide on shooting down a civilian plane: Establish speed & altitude benchmarks that no civilian plane is ever permitted to exceed; any plane traveling faster, as a hijacked suicide plane is likely to be, gets splashed. No genuine civilian flight would be allowed to travel at, say, 300 miles per hour below 3,000 feet. Anything that does....
EU's Patchwork of Policies Leaves It Vulnerable To a 9/11-Style Attack
In his op-ed today Charles Krauthammer explains three things: (1) why Europe will never agree to serious sanctions against Iran--it fears expensive oil more than Iranian nukes; (2) why China will veto any serious UN measures--it made an oil deal with Iran; and (3) why sanctions will never work against the mullahs--if North Korea starved 2 million while pursuing nukes, Iran will do without flat-screen TVs. The scary thing is, he is right. A more upbeat take on this comes from Washington Times op-ed columnist Helle Dale, but her take seems far too optimistic; Dale cites Angela Merkel, but check out her quote at the top of CK's column. Ever prescient, Mike Ledeen's NRO column today recaps his listing of our past and present failures re Iran, and eloquently argues that we should press for democratic revolution there even (especially) if Iran goes nuclear, and that Iran's neighbors are mortally threatened by her destabilizing efforts. So, what would work best for fastest results? One thing, and one only: a regime decapitation strike. Ends not only a rogue nuke program, but a rogue terror state and a fount of Islamic Shi'a jihadism. Whichever leadership succeeded the mullahs--whether dictators or democrats--would neither be a terror-exporting nor jihad-exporting state. Call it LFTC's Iran policy trifecta.
Krauthammer: The Iran Charade, Part II
Dale: Brokering Power
Ledeen: Do the Right Thing
John O'Sullivan, former top adviser to Margaret Thatcher and a surpassingly acute and witty observer of events, published recently a superb book review (6 printed pages) on a book that tells the true, and ghastly, tale of Belgium's creation and its founding royals, down to the present day. He sees Belgium as the laboratory for the genesis of multiculturalist Europe and today's EU. O'Sullivan's review is well worth a read and you may, as I plan to do, decide to buy the book as well. The book is called A Throne in Brussels: Britain, the Saxe-Coburgs and the Belgianization of Europe, by Paul Belien (Imprint Academic, 384 pages, $49).
O'Sullivan: Patriots for Themselves
German Chancellor Angela Merkel's visit to Washington signals a period of low-key, if hestitant, cooperation. She is not Konrad Adenauer, to be sure, or even Helmut Kohl, but compared to Gerhard Schroeder she is a bargain. Expect the usual public Euro-whining on many issues, but with less brio and, one trusts, without the duplicity of her predecessor. For a German perspective, check the link to left-of-center Der Spiegel. One amusing item: Angela is enjoying a little boomlet at home, not quite a star but at least, in political terms, says the mag, a starlet. WSJ editor Bret Stephens writes on 1/14 that poisonous public attitudes in Germany re America--1/3 of young Germans think the US perpetrated the 9/11 attacks--ensure that Merkel's flexibility and friendliness will be limited.
Germany's Rising Star: Angela Merkel
Stephens: Terms of Endearment
Writing in Foreign Policy, Michael Mandelbaum affirms in the foreign policy context the unhappy truth uttered in a personal context by basketball great Wilt Chamberlain. Asked early in his career why he was so unpopular with fans, the 7'2" Stilt answered: "Nobody loves Goliath." Europeans in particular will continue to publicly vent anti-American ideas, some quite outlandish, while happily accepting our help. American power, manifestly beneficial in promoting freedom, prosperity and security around the world, is destined to be ever resented, Mandelbaum observes.
But continued vigorous extension of American power is hardly inevitable, and should 2008 bring an electoral result that brings America home and turns its attention inward, our fair-weather friends around the world may come to regret their promiscuous abuse of free speech privilege at our expense. Their calls for help may go unanswered, placing them at the mercy of power exercised by forces far worse than imperfect, yet civilized, America. Robert Kagan, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes in the 1/15 Washington Post that America remains "the indispensable nation" (a phrase he attributes to Bill Clinton, but methinks 'twas Madeleine Albright), and that all over the world Washington will be sought to help solve knotty problems; he also thinks anti-Americanism will wane after 43 leaves office. I doubt it.
Mandelbaum: David's Friend Goliath
Kagan: Still the Colossus
A 1/15 New York Times front-pager informs us that Saudis represent more than half the insurgents in Iraq, and have failed to fight terror as the US wishes they would. A 1/16 piece by Rachel Ehrenfeld shows that Saudi investment in America is hardly benign either.
NY Times: US Faults Saudi Efforts
Ehrenfeld: Saudi Interest in America
Ace foreign correspondent Arnaud de Borchgrave details the state of Iran's leaders re nuclear ambitions. His cited quotes from leaders considered in the fever swamps of our State Department to be moderates show anew the truth of Bob Dole's quip during the 1987 Iran-contra uproar: "An Iranian moderate is a radical who has run out of ammunition." A WSJ editorial today chronicles the fandango between Iran and European diplomats, Iran leading. Mike Ledeen writes in today's NRO that Iran is training Iraqi Shi'a "insurgents"--we are at war with Iran now, as the diplomatic dithering over Iran's nuke program continues.
Writing on 1/10, NRO's James Robbins, sharp on security issues, notes that Foggy Bottom is getting squishy on Iran's nuclear quest, believing that deterrence should suffice even if Iran goes nuclear. Why Islamo-fascist nuts are deemed deterrable is an issue Robbins briefly notes, but his focus is on options short of nuclear conflagration that Iran's leaders would have.
Robbins offers three scenarios where US response might be limited by fear of possible Iranian nuclear use: (1) Iran blockades the Straits of Hormuz, the choke-point for Persian Gulf transit; (2) Iran does Saddam one better, invading Kuwait and then continuing into Saudi Arabia, seizing all their oilfields; (3) Iran crushes a major domestic uprising, as China did in 1989. How aggressively the US might responds in these cases--especially the third--would clearly be tempered by recognition of the risk of nuclear escalation by leaders not known for rationality and restraint. Does State really want to put us in this harness?
de Borchgrave: Target Iran
Robbins: Iran's Nuclear Options
WSJ Editors: Unserious Consequences
Ledeen: We Are At War With Iran Already
Katherine Stethem, sister-in-law of the late Robert Dean Stethem, the Navy diver murdered during the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985, asks that the US continue to press for extradition from Lebanon of Muhammad Ali Hamadi, the #847 hijacker released last month by Germany after serving 19 years of a "life" sentence. Her request should be honored. Read her moving petition.
Stethem: "The Feeling of Betrayal"
The Weekly Standard has published an editorial by publisher Bill Kristol and an article by writer Stephen Hayes detailing Iraq's terrorist training activities--thousands of terrorists trained inside Iraq--discovered in documents seized in Iraq by US forces. Of 2 million Arabic-language documents in custody, a mere 50,000 (2.5 percent) have been translated into English. Both authors suggest releasing them en masse to accelerate translation, redacting only those deemed too sensitive. There is risk of unintended compromise, but sunlight here may work best.
Kristol: Just the Facts
Hayes: Saddam's Terror Training Camps
A black bodyguard for Camilla (wife of Prince Charles) has negotiated a $70,ooo settlement for having been over-promoted to a job for which he was unqualified; he later was fired. To follow the "Peter Principle"--workers are promoted until they reach the first job that they cannot perform well--now will cost English companies money. Of course, to under-promote someone....Rock, meet hard place.
Herald Sun: Camilla Bodyguard Sues
An Australian politician (AU Liberal party is like our Republicans--PM John Howard is an LP member) gives his views on ruthlessness in war, and cites Churchill (Sir Winston, not Ward).
Neil Brown: Ruthlessness in Pursuit of Terror No Crime
Australian Liberal Party
Columnist Thomas Bray informs us that many US allies tap their citizens far more intrusively than does the US government, a fact little noted in the media. Confirming Bray's case is a report that Italy is monitoring scads of conversations during the run-up to the Turin Winter Olympics.
Bray: If You Think America is Repressive
Breitbart.com: Italy Conducts Monitoring Ahead of Games
Foggy Bottom has scrapped a magazine that was part of its outreach effort to Muslims worldwide. It's name--no, NOT making this up--was "Hi International!" At a cost of $4.5 million, some 55.000 copies were distributed monthly over the past two years, in 18 Arab countries; the magazine focused on American life and yielded 100 website hits daily. Mona Charen reports that one issue sported an article entitled Sharp Dressed Men that began with a sentence for all of us: "Real men moisturize." The article continues:
"In fact, some of them, like Michael Gustman, a 25-year-old public relations account executive from Boca Raton, Fla., even have separate moisturizers for the face and body. Facial pores can clog with too heavy a salve, it seems. Not long ago, these and other habits would have been considered odd for a male. Gustman exfoliates. He gets manicures. He gets pedicures. He gets facials. He gets his hair done every two weeks. He accessorizes. He puts effort into getting ready for a date. He loves cooking complex dishes. He's a refined, evolved, sensitive guy. In a word, he's a metrosexual."
In the Islamic Republic of Iran, article 116 of the penal code gives Muslim metros power denied metros in the US: "Stones used in stoning should be neither so big as to kill the adulterous at the first or second blow, nor as small as a pebble."
Muslim metrosexuals, eh? What next, (equally alliterative) Taliban transsexuals? To her credit, 43 confidante Karen Hughes suspended publication over doubts about the magazine's effectiveness. Yo, Hamid, did anyone ever tell you that being Jewish was cool? Not convinced? Never seen Borscht Belt comics? Do click on the link below to the magazine and enjoy.
LFTC reports; you decide.
"Hi!" Magazine
Pipes: Winning the Propaganda War
Fores: State Dept. Suspends Arab Magazine
Charen: Real Men Moisturize!
Over the past twenty years, reports The American Enterprise in its Jan./Feb. 2006 print issue, the Wahhabi clerics that rule over Mecca and Medina have systematically destroyed what they regard as idols--over 90 percent of the ruins located there. Its next archaeological gift to the world: plans to destroy the birthplace of Muhammad --yes, that Muhammad. As Bob Dole's unacknowledged Saudi twin brother (DC's best-kept secret), Ahmad, said after losing the 1996 Saudi national election to Clinton twin-brother Ibrahim, "Where's the Muslim (or, for that matter, UN) outrage?"
The folly of Foggy Bottom twisting Israel's arm in the wake of the Gaza pullout was demonstrated by year-end events. A suicide bomb attack forced Israel, yet again, to close off access. Then, angry over a fellow PA policeman's killing, armed Palestinian police drove off unarmed European observers from the Gaza/Egypt checkpoint. One would think that there is a learning curve at State, but evidence of such is, sadly, lacking. Writing in the 1/3 NY Sun, Hillel Halkin says that as Palestinian society implodes--elections, due later this month, will be a farce--Israel's course has become clear: no grand Oslo deal, but simply unilateral disengagement. The 1/4 Washington Post reports that Palestinian "militants" (MSM-speak for Palestinian terrorists) stole two bulldozers and knocked down a wall at the Rafah crossing between Gaza & Egypt, in protest over the jailing of one of their comrades. As for State's Road Map, the less said, the better.
Attack Forces Israel to Close Gaza Access
NY Sun: Gaza Chaos Worsens
Halkin: Future is Clear--Not Peace, But Disengagement
WPost: Palestinian Militants Smash Border Wall
Wall Street Journal editor (ex-Jerusalem Post as well) Bret Stephens neatly dissects Steven Spielberg's maudlin "Munich."
Stephens: "Munich": What's Wrong With It
The 12/27 Washington Post reported that Ahmad Chalabi, Darth Vader to our State Department despite lack of evidence justifying State's animosity, failed to win a seat in Iraq's new Parliament; key to his loss was that he got less than one percent of expatriate votes--0.89%. This poor overseas showing is easily explained by State's unsubstantiated, but ruthless, propaganda campaign against Chalabi. A high-value figure is denied a place in the emerging Iraqi government. Instead we have more power going to religious parties. What a legacy for State's monumental botch of Iraq policy.
WPost: Chalabi Fails to Win Parliament Place
Vladimir Putin is a pal of 43's, eh? His latest move, arranging for Gazprom, Russia's state energy giant, to cut off supplies to Ukraine in the dead of winter, because Ukraine balks at paying $230 per 1,000 cubic feet for natural gas, up from the current $50, backfired badly. The new Russian price was to include subsidies to Russia above true market rates, and also be higher than more favorable rates charged friendly thugocracies like Belarus. As 80 percent of the natural gas Western Europe imports from Russia flows through the Ukraine pipeline, Germany (whose ex-leader Gerhard Schroeder recently signed up with Gazprom--this will make him real popular back home), Austria, Italy and France pressured Russia to ensure their continued energy supply. Moscow first pulled back, restoring 75 percent of the reduced pipeline flow, and on 1/5 the matter was settled: Ukraine will pay $95 net, via a complex tripartite entity agreement.
Writing in the 1/4 NY Post, Ralph Peters says that "Vlad the Bad" cut a pipeline deal with Germany so that after the undersea link is built Russia will be able to supply Western Europe without passing through former "captive nations" like Ukraine. This will enable Russia, next time, to cut off Ukraine without hurting Western Europe. That Putin would make such a deal is understandable; that ex-German chief Gerhard Schroeder, now on Gazprom's payroll, would do it shows what a rotten piece of work he is.
More fun: Russia chairs the G8 for 2006. The Hoover Institution's David Satter writes in the 1/3 Wall Street Journal that Russia, under ex-KGBer Vladimir Putin, is unworthy of G8 membership (let alone the chair), as the G8's other members are all democracies. Anne Applebaum writes in the 1/4 Washington Post that it is time the US & Europe lean harder on Russia for its various misdeeds, of which the gas ploy is but the latest. Add this to helping Iran's nuclear program, and 43 needs a new friend in the Kremlin. And yo, 43, remember Napoleon's famous dictum: "Scratch a Russian, wound a Tatar."
WTimes: Russia Cuts Off Kiev's Pipeline
Russia Restores Most of Gas Flow
Satter: Russia Not a Democracy
Peters: Putin's Gas Game (free subscription)
Applebaum: Playing Politics With Pipelines
NYTimes: Russia & Ukraine Reach Compromise on Natural Gas
Tuesday Dec. 20 saw Judge James Robertson resign from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court (FISA Court), in protest against 43 bypassing the FISA Court. In my July 18 posting, Gitmo and Geneva: A Judicial "No" I presented one ruling by the good judge, a Clinton appointee, that was overturned on appeal. Here is one passage from my 7/18/05 posting:
"Judge James Robertson granted a petition for habeas corpus filed by Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a detainee captured in Afghanistan in late 2001, who had been for five years (1996-2001) a driver and personal bodyguard for Usama bin Ladin --facts disclosed in the appellate court opinion but not even mentioned by Robertson. The Court held that the military tribunal before which Hamdan was to be tried was not lawfully constituted and thus Hamdan is entitled to prisoner-of-war status under the Third Geneva Convention of 1949. Afghanistan is a signatory to that treaty (as is the US). Judge Robertson based his ruling on Article 102, which requires that the detaining power apply the same trial procedures for POWs as for its own soldiers."
Which gives Chief Justice Roberts a chance to make a better appointment than did the late C.J. William Rehnquist did in appointing Robertson.
Washington Post: Spy Judge Quits in Protest
California's Governator has been taking lots of flak lately which, although LFTC has passed on covering, on balance seems justified (e.g., apponting a Gray Davis honcho to top staff). But this week the Terminator is back! The Wall Street Journal has a neat editorial on how, after his hometown of Graz decided to vote on whether to take his name off the town stadium for allowing the execution of Crips co-founder "Tookie" Williams to be carried out, Arnold answered. Shot back the Terminator: Not only must Graz take his name off the stadium by the end of the year, it must also cease using his name for all promotional proposes. Graz's other leading expatriate citizen is Alfred E. Neumann.
WSJ: Arnold's Auf Weidersehen
Three developments since Israel withdrew from Gaza (a move LFTC supported as a wise strategic re-positioning) give cause for concern that Israel's position is worsening. First, the US State Department continues to press Israel to make concrete concessions to the Palestinians despite there being no sign of change in their hostility towards Israel, Second, Sharon's mini-stroke puts his third-party in jeopardy, and paralyzes Israel at a crucial time. Third, Iran's Islamo-fascist Hitler-clone nutcake Prez is getting close to the point of no return re Iran "going critical" with nuclear material, which may force Israel to strike in March, when their election will take place, as a strike after Iran crosses the nuclear threshold is politically untenable. Of these three, only the first bears relation to Gaza.
Writing in US News & World Report, publisher Mort Zuckerman offers details of Palestinian treachery--and ditto from Foggy Bottom. After arm-twisting by Condi, Israel opened the Rafah crossing between Egypt & Gaza, with a promise that security could check persons crossing into Gaza; instead, information is given eight minutes late, by which time persons have exited the terminal. Exiled senior Hamas operatives have slipped into Gaza. Sweet talk from Palestinian Prez Abbas has contrasted with ongoing terror operations. Rocket, mortar and small-arms fire continue.
Foggy Bottom's recipe? Force Israel to allow Hamas a role in politics. Hate sermons and political tirades against Israel abound still. The cult of the suicide bomber is promoted on TV and in public oratory. Zuckerman notes that Abbas was Arafat's deputy for 40 years, and that no longtime deputy of Saddam would be tolerated by the US in Iraq. So Bush, says Zuckerman, has been Clintonized re Israel. On his evidence, sadly, he is right.
Re Sharon, stay tuned. Re Iran's Prez, Condi said that the international community cannot allow--and will not allow--Iran to possess nuclear weapons. Yo, Condi, the "international community" (protestations to the contrary notwithstanding) could care less. It's up to Israel, or us, to stop this. It had better be done.
Oh, and one more thing. There is a super piece in today's TAS that details the 1972 massacre at the Munich Olympics--the treachery of Germany during and after the Games is stupefying--at one point colluding with Palestinian terrorists to allow the hijacking of a Lufthansa plane and quick release. Author Yale Kramer also explains why Steven Spielberg's Rodney King version ("Can't we just all get along?") of the event and its aftermath is so jejune: Steven still has, and thus still understands the world through, the mind of a child. This, alas, should not surprise: Entertainers spend their time pretending to be other people, or dreaming up imaginary plots with usually imaginary people. Yes, they do often try to model these after reality as they see it, but people who play "Let's pretend" all their lives are bound to have a lot of child in them. It is Tinsletown's--and Broadway's--deformation professionelle.
Zuckerman: A Fulcrum Moment
Kramer: Indiana Spielberg and his Jewish Problem
Scholar of Islam Daniel Pipes lists the many ways in which we are reverting to a 9/10 mentality, including some steps that 43 and his minions are taking. We are, says Pipes, going back to sweet sleep. Not quite yet, but time to worry. It's a sobering read.
Pipes: Back to September 10
Today's print NY Daily News reports that Saddam, shortly before he was captured two Decembers ago, pondered escaping by motorcycle, but couldn't find one. The News doubts that Steve McQueen's The Great Escape style would have worked for Saddam. Let's see: Saddam riding a Harley with Ali McGraw hanging on, carrying the one WMD mini-shell he forgot to send to Syria, jumping a border concertina fence and being picked up by a French plane, living it up with Ali on the Riviera, assaying a remake of the Cary Grant - Grace Kelly thriller, To Catch a Thief, directed by Michael Moore, and casting himself as an Islamic Cary....
A Wall Street Journal editorial notes a warning from the German newspaper Das Bild that Iran is buying from North Korea technology to extend its Shahab missile's range from 1,500 to 3,500 kilometers--in round figures, from 1,000 to 2,200 miles. Shahab would become an Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM). This would put German territory within range of Iran's arsenal. True also as to more Russian land area. LFTC says: Great idea! If the Europeans faced Iranian nuclear missiles--and Europe lacks Israel's world-best Arrow ABM system, maybe our European and Russian friends would think twice about helping Iran get nukes. Perhaps 43 should supply Iran with the technology and see what our European friends say....
WSJ: Iranian 'Option'
James Thayer writes in The Weekly Standard that Boeing's 787 "Dreamliner" is kicking the financial lardbutt of what LFTC veterans know as Europe's "Flying Fat Albert"--the Airbus A380. Latest on the 787 parade is Qantas, national airline of best-pal Australia, with $8 billion invested in 45 immediate 787 orders; the 787 is part of a planned Qantas order of 100 Boeing airliners totaling $13 billion. The 787 is 20 to 30 percent more fuel-efficient than other planes.
Europe's FFA is the ultimate realization of the hub-and-spoke airport concept, by which folks in mid-size cities have to change planes, in this case, for a plane seating up to 853 passengers and weighing 177 tons more than a fully-loaded 747-400. The FFA is forcing major airports to spend tons of dough modifying facilities to handle the monster--$821 million at London's Heathrow alone. Airbus thinks it will sell 1,500 FFAs, but Boeing sees 320 as a more likely total. Imagine 1,180 unsold FFAs. Hey, they'd be great bunker-busters if Europe ever gets into a shooting war, right?
Airbus hedged its bet by planning a competitor for the 787, the A350; but it lags Boeing by two years, and to date Boeing has 185 firm orders for the 787, versus 49 for the A350. In 2005 Boeing expects to top its all-time best sales year of 878 planes in 1998 (not a typo--those 7s & 8s again--numerologists take note). Airbus, Thayer reports, once called the 787 "dreaming in Seattle." Seems instead that the 787 is becoming Airbus Industrie's worst nightmare.
Thayer: Flying High
George Friedman reports on Stratfor (subscription only) that two events have given new German Bundeskanzler Angela Merkel leverage to shift German foreign policy towards a more pro-US stance: (1) ex-PM Gerhard Schroeder, who inked a Russia - to - Germany oil pipeline deal with Russia just before leaving office, has now, just after departing signed on with the project; (2) Iran's president recently suggesting that Israel relocate to Europe. The stench of the former discredited ex-Chancellor Schroeder in the eyes of many leaders; the latter led even prominent members of Schroeder's SPD to condemn Iran and call for vigorous action. It united all five major political parties, going over, writes Friedman, "like a lead Zeppelin."
Anne Applebaum informs us in her column today that the Russians are using petrodollar wealth increasingly as the Saudis have done, initially for fun, but then to buy respectability and influence in the West. The smelly pipeline deal with Gerhard Schroeder is but one example. Very worth a look.
Applebaum: Waht Are the Russians Buying?
NY Times columnist David Brooks previews Steven Spielberg's new film, Munich, set in the 1972 Olympics murder of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists. Brooks shows that Spielberg is a decent sort--no Michael Moore, he. (Apropos of Ronald Radosh's super book, Red Star Over Hollywood, which I reviewed last spring, Spielberg is, in historical terms, today's Melvyn Douglas to Moore's reincarnation of Lillian Hellman.) But Spielberg also is yet another moderate liberal who cannot fathom the evil Islamic jihadism represents, and thus the sheer futility of entering into a dialogue for peace with them. An excellent read.
Brooks; What "Munich" Left Out
Today's NY Sun reports that minimal, sloppy tradecraft by the CIA made disclosure of "rendition" transfers between prisons in foreign countries almost certain to be disclosed publicly by an aggressive press and human rights groups. For example, instead of hiding plane flights within a legitimate charter firm that also booked genuine flights, the CIA isolated them in a company that did nothing but CIA transfers. Read Josh Gersten's article on Air Imbecile and weep.
NY Sun: How the CIA Blew Its Prisons Cover
Helle Dale (no weenie she) writes in today's Washington Times on the Pentagon's planting of stories in the Iraqi media. Justification, she argues, requires that: (a) the stories be true, (b) they are clearly marked as advertising and (c) it is the Pentagon or a private group placing the stories. That Dale, a sensible moderate, wishes to impose these restrictions suggests that once again the US will have its hands tied by pressure from fastidious folks who wish that we fight this war according to Marquis of Queensbury. Fighting this way, the CIA could not in 1947 have saved Italy from Communism. Allied powers would not have succeeded in rebuilding Germany and Japan, without postwar censorship. The concept that when fighting for our lives, and the survival of our civilization, we must do so with our hands tied behind our back in the name of "fair play" or the "moral high ground" seems quite popular. It betrays a reckless indifference to the risk of so doing. In the entire history of the world, no power has ever fought a war by the rules we are now being asked to fight under. Is this war a good choice for a first test case?
Dale: Rules for Pentagon-Backed Media
Tony Blankley reminds us in today's Washington Times that our brilliant CIA predicted not long ago that Iran was ten years away from a nuclear bomb; the IAEA, as reported this week in LFTC, now tells us that upon resuming uranium enrichment Iran is but months away from joining the nuclear club. (Did this 10-year estimate come from CIA non-proliferation star analyst Valerie Plame Wilson?) A Wall Street Journal editorial today clarifies the timeline: once Natanz (the enrichment site) is restarted it will become fully operational in two years. From then, a full nuclear weapon capability will be but months away.
In his January 2005 State of the Union President Bush declared: The Iranian regime must give up its uranium enrichment and any plutonium reprocessing." His 2005 SOTU also included: "And to the Iranian people I say tonight: As you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you." Blankley wonders if 43 will prove to be, faced with potential nuclear disaster, Hamlet, Henry V or Neville Chamberlain (a real-life character not even Will Shakespeare's endless ingenuity could invent). Besides gut-check time for 43, what else can we learn? Two things.
First, Vladimir Putin, whom 43 thought a new best friend ("Pooty-Poot"), is more like what Muhammad Ali (when he was still Cassius Clay) called Sonny Liston: "the big ugly bear." Whatever help Russia gave us in Afghanistan pales beside the harm it is doing us by aiding Iran's enrichment program. 43 (you too, Condi) must bear in mind Napoleon's famous quip about Russia: "Scratch a Russian, wound a Tatar."
Second, what of the folks at Langley? An August 2, 2005 Washington Post article cited a classified, new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that Iran was a decade away from a nuclear bomb; this doubled the previous NIE of five years (an estimate originally made in 1995). A CIA that proved successful in politically damaging the Administration in the Joe Wilson fandango could not come even close to guessing when an Islamic state run for 26 years by fanatical Islamo-fascists, and which was for much of that period the world's leading sponsor of transnational terrorism, will cross the nuclear threshold. When your main intelligence agency is better at sabotaging its putative bosses domestically than it is at assessing the probability and immediacy of an emerging grave national security threat, "Houston (Langley), you've got a problem."
43's options? First, given the very real prospect that a dovish Administration will take office come 2009 (Democrat, or even certain Republicans), 43 must resolve the matter before leaving office. The diplomatic options will fail--every indication from Tehran is that it is contemptuous of efforts to stop its program. Basing a strike on intelligence findings will not sell, even domestically, let alone globally. The CIA's credibility is--sad to say, rightly--zero. The mullahs do not look like they will be dislodged during 43's term.
Suggested strategy: Ideally we somehow bring about the internal collapse of the mullahs' theocracy, and see a democratic Iran emerge; if nuclear, we can live with it. But if, as likely, this does not come to pass, then what? This: Delay until 2009 completion of Natanz; diplomatic pressure might accomplish this--if not against Iran by the UN, then by the US against Russia, whose support of Iran's enrichment effort is essential. This requires setting the timetable back by one year. Then, prepare a massive military strike, to be executed during the transition period between the 2008 election and the 2009 inauguration. The incoming President must not be saddled with this problem.
Justification: Iran, floating on oil, has no need of commercial nuclear power, plus Iran's President's recent statements about wiping Israel off the map. Price: fury at unilateralist America, even among allies, but especially in the Islamic world. A high price to be sure, but not as high as a nuclear-armed Islamo-fascist power deeply hostile to us and our hope for a democratic Mideast, and capable of arming Islamic terrorists with WMD.
43, who cares little about polls, and who will not be a popular globetrotter ever, retires to Crawford TX with the thanks of Americans (and some folks abroad) with the good sense to see that a nuclear Iran is a mortal threat to US and Israeli security. Should Iranian democracy come to pass later, Iran could resume the nuclear program, and we could stand down. Yes, Iranians would be mad at the US, if only due to wounded national pride. But remember what Natan Sharansky said: a hostile democracy beats even a friendly dictatorship (let alone a hostile one). Stay tuned.
Blankley: Nuclear Iran
WSJ Editors: Ticking Tehran Bomb
Washington Post: Iran Is Judged 10 Years Away From Nuclear Bomb
No, not Trump: Rumsfeld. At last someone high in 43's circle slams MSM on war coverage. Yesterday Donald Rumsfeld cited pervasive focus on IEDs, US forces killed, unfounded allegations of torture instantly taken as presumptively true by MSM, a Newsweek Koran-flushing story that was "false and terribly damaging," failing to explain why US forces are making sacrifices; Rumsfeld noted that troops in Iraq ask him why the American public is being given a misleading picture of the war.
"We've arrived at a strange time in this country, where the worst about America and our military seems to so quickly be taken as truth by the press and reported and spread around the world....often with little context and little scrutiny, let alone correction or accountability after the fact."
Rumsfeld press aide Larry Di Rita added: "There seems to be a lot less interest in the systematic anti-coalition disinformation campaign that has been going on for three years than in the modest attempt by U.S. forces to transmit actual information to counter it."
Wesley Pruden praised 43 for emerging from what he called "his velvet bunker" to challenge critics. Ralph Peters went the next logical step a few days ago, accusing the press of "moral collapse." He attributes this to Woodward and Bernstein, who turned journalists into President-hunters rather than honest reporters of fact, and whose "cult" led to "the rise of the self-adoring conviction that journalists were above patriotism the law and common decency." Journalists, Peters writes, see themselves as "citizens of the world," and media stars think, as Leona Helmsley did of taxes, that obeying laws is "for the little people," not them. Peters cites as especially harmful to the war effort the recent story on secret CIA prisons run by Dana Priest of the Washington Post. He now thinks that Watergate was not worth it, as uncovering Presidential crimes did less good than the harm done by transforming journalism.
Meanwhile, Codi took the fight over interrogation to Europe. The full text (see link below) is bracing. Rice noted that "torture" is a term defined under law--the Convention against Torture. This is a start, but not enough. The Convention bans international infliction of severe physical or mental pain only--i.e., less than severe pain infliction is permissible. Further, in applying a legal standard it is not the detainees who decide what is "severe"--protests have been lodged re denial of Internet or DVD access--but a "reasonable person" standard. Rice--or 43--should tell the world that we are not running a Ritz Hotel for Detainees. "Humane" treatment is not a synonym for pleasant treatment. Here is the full text of Article I of the Convention Against Torture, adopted 1984, put into effect 1987:
Article I
1. For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.
2. This article is without prejudice to any international instrument or national legislation which does or may contain provisions of wider application.
US law adopts this definition of torture:
(1) “torture” means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control; (2) “severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from—
(D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality.
What is "disrupt profoundly the senses or personality?" Waterboarding, as was done with 9/11 planner Khalid Shaikh Muhammad? Critics do not even ask, lest the public answer more narrowly than would they. So 43 and his minions at long last go on the offensive. The next step: adopt the quarterly presidential report LFTC floated recently, addressing a joint session of Congress, bypassing MSM's pernicious, dishonest filter.
Washington Times: Rumsfeld Scores Press 'Negativity'
Wesley Pruden: Prez Emerges
Peters: Journalism's Moral Collapse
Rice: Test of Remarks re Europe & Interrogation
Convention Against Torture (1984)
US Code, Title 18, sec. 2340: Torture Defined
Drudge reports this AM that IAEA head honcho Mohammed El-Baradei said today that Iran can make a nuke within "a few months" upon resuming fuel enrichment activities, confirming an Israeli assessment. To which El-Baradei suggests we try...more diplomacy. 43, will we nap while the IAEA (supported by our putative allies) does?
El-Baradei: Iran Months Away From Nuke
An Opinion Journal editorial Sunday encapsulates the hypocrisy and fecklessness of a Europe (they intend Old Europe--call it OE) which is only interested in human rights abuses when allegedly committed by the US--North Korea, Iran, Sudan, etc. Those all get a pass, but not the US of A; OE seems more concerned with treatment of terror detainees than what terrorists might succeed in doing if information about future attacks is not disclosed due to inadequate (or non-existent) interrogation. Not mentioned by the WSJ editors this time, but consistent with their point, is that OE fetishizes over the condition of the Palestinians, and cares not one whit whether Iran's new Prez means it when he says that Israel should be wiped off the map (ritualistic public cluck-clucking notwithstanding).
Which proves that OE is the most amoral collection of nations on the planet. Not immoral, as that honor belongs to places like North Korea and Iran. Islamo-fascist leaders see their actions as profoundly moral, and the West as profoundly evil. We rightly reject their morality as an immoral morality, one dedicated to destruction and atavistic tyranny. Their leaders serve a morality, but one rooted in seventh-century times.
OE is not evil, merely terminally cynical. And thus OE is not immoral, merely amoral. The Marquis Charles de Talleyrand was famous, two centuries ago, for legendary cynicism and equally cynical wit. "Worse than a crime, it was a blunder" has become part of the diplomatic lexicon. In amoral OE there is no more amoral nation than France. OE citizens lack any moral confidence even in their own societies, now crumbling from within.
All that remains is resentment of Uncle Sam. And it is expressed in a sourness and perversity that is stomach-turning to behold. Faux amis, indeed.
WSJ: Europe's Hypocrisy
Bad news for me and my fellow pajamahadeen; Mainstream Media--MSM (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Time, Newsweek, Washington Post, New York Times)--still kicks the most ass. Evidence of MSM's residual power comes from Ann Coulter's compilation of praise Republicans heap on Democrats, and the absence of same when Democrats attack Republicans. Thus, AC notes, Pennsylvania Marine-turned-dove Congressman John Murtha is lavishly praised for his war records, but does anyone recall Ollie North getting similar praise from Democrats? AC does not, nor do I.
The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes details the bad news: MSM still sets the issue agenda, still tilts shamelessly to Democrats and still creates national figures out of whole cloth, such as, Barnes cites, Cindy Sheehan. MSM created her in August, than abandoned her by Thanksgiving. (Could Cindy's calling for withdrawal of federal troops from "occupied New Orleans" have done the trick? Or did MSM polling show her helping Republicans?) MSM made Joe Wilson a media hero, cratered support for the Iraq War by showing the IED of the night in prime time, and presses Republicans to support their views with evidence, but rarely does so for Democrats.
Want more? Check out Brian Wesbury's column in Opinion Journal today, on how MSM reports a crashing economy no matter how much good economic news there is. In 2004, 36 percent of Americans thought the US was in recession; with the economy growing even faster this year the figure is 43 percent. To be fair, WSJ columnist Dan Henninger points out in today's Opinion Journal that the Bush Administration has been following what he calls the "Alfred E. Neumann school of public relations" ("What, me worry?"). He is right. 43 has spoken all too rarely on the Iraq war. John Snow, at Treasury, has been more comatose than the former Soviet Union's short-lived General Secretary, Konstantin Chernenko (1983-85, just before the ascendancy of the much-alive Mikhail Gorbachev). When Snow does speak up, it's in Europe, on growth there, not on the 4.3 percent 3Q05 US growth report--the tenth straight US growth quarter, averaging nearly 4 percent--and this latest despite Katrina. DH also observes that the 24/7 media hothouse amplifies the emotional at the expense of mere facts.
What to do? 43 must go over the heads of MSM quarterly, as advocated here yesterday, by addressing a joint session of Congress (end-Jan. SOTU, end-Apr., end-July & end-Oct.). More: maybe an Agnew-style attack on MSM--which worked well with the public until Nixon's V-P was indicted and then resigned, and then Watergate discredited Nixon himself. Start by reminding voters that recently al-Qai'da No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote a missive to Abdul Musab al-Zarqawi, head of the Iraqi insurgency, stating the the media was their best asset. Continue by citing North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap, who said years after the Vietnam War ended that the war was won not on the battlefield, but on American television screens. How about a grassroots effort by military returned from Iraq to make ads saying that MSM is distorting the picture? One thing is clear: hunkering down only encourages MSM to strike. Even famously courtly 41 showed the value of fighting back, when he bested Dan Rather in a prime-time tiff during his run for President in 1988. If Agnew and 41 could strike back at MSM in a far less favorable environment--with MSM power at its zenith--43 can do better now.
Coulter: Praising the Opposition
Barnes: MSM Still Strong
Wesbury: The Bad News Is Wrong
Henninger: Alfred E. Neumann Public Relations
Fliers expecting a "Merry XMAS" from TSA be warned: new rules take effect Dec. 20. Small sharp items, found on 1/4 of bags, will no longer be confiscated. But new random searches will be added--broader pat-downs, two-minute invasions of physical privacy. All this despite not a single hijacking since 9/11. Cabin doors are now locked. Worried about bombs in planes? Fair enough. But behavioral profiling is the way to go, instead of assailing the personal dignity of everyone by randomly searching Grandma. That way, as noted in LFTC several times before, would require screeners with IQs above plant level plus with real street experience--such as retired cops.
NY Times: New TSA Rules Soon
Stratfor (subscription only) reports that over the night of Nov. 16-17 another 98 cars were torched in France, a level police described as a return to "normal."; the peak night during the rioting was Nov. 6, when 1,400 cars were set aflame.
"FRANCE NOT IN TIME"
(to the Styne-Comden-Green tune "Just in Time")
Not in time
France woke up not in time
To Muslim violent crime
Both night and day
Youths are mad
No jobs French can be had
A crummy "banlieue" pad
It's no fair way
Running 'round
Chirac made little sound
While parties fought for higher ground
It's the French way
This time it's cars they scorch
Soon Notre Dame they'll torch
When they own Paris porch
And mosques hold sway!
Copyright John C. Wohlstetter 2005
Today a Wall Street Journal editorial chronicles the prior actions and statements of ex-Prez (and putative unofficial World-Prez) Bill, re Iraq, Saddam, WMD and terror pre-emption. Makes for a great read after Slick reversed field when speaking to students this week in Dubai.
WSJ: A Clinton Reprise
In her Friday column on Latin American affairs, the Wall Street Journal's Mary Anastasia O'Grady informs us that leaders in key Latin American countries are getting fed up with Venezuela's Castro + oil commie, Hugo Chavez, and his cross-border meddling in other countries. Mexico's Vicente Fox,useless weenie to 43 re immigration, seems to have stepped up to the plate in recalling his ambassador and kicking out Chavez's envoy this week, in response to Chavez's over-the-top verbal assault against Mexico. Venezuelans are getting fed up too, with Chavez's domestic repression and commie economics. It's high time. Stay tuned.
O'Grady: Why Fox's Outrage
David Brooks writes in today's NY Times that Israeli society has undergone a profound transformation in psychology, from that of making peace with the Palestinians to that of separation and disengagement from a society Israelis perceive as terminally dysfunctional. Brooks says that while this change is understandable it is not sustainable, for two reasons: (1) Palestinians remain dependent upon Israel; and (2) neither America nor Israeli Arabs will accept disengagement.
The first argument is false, because Arab petrodollars can substitute for access to Israel in creating jobs for Palestinians. The second, as evidenced by Condi Rice's twisting Israeli arms to force through a Gaza/Israel access deal, is probably correct. Foggy Bottom seems unable to comprehend two things: (1) pushing for Palestinian "need" for access to Israel ignores the cause for lack of access, i.e., the stupefyingly barbarous Palestinian suicide bombing campaign; (2) ignoring the cause effectively absolves Palestinians for responsibility in starting a terror campaign, and thus sends the wrong signal to the wrong people. Instead we should have told the Palestinians that they created their own access problem, and that until they defeat terror factions and end terror once and for all access would not be granted.
Behind all this is the unseemly spectacle of Arab governments raking in petrodollars at triple the true market price, unwilling to spend even a small fraction of that wealth in rebuilding Palestinian society; with $400+ trillion annual oil revenues, a one percent contribution would inject $4 billion investment in the areas. So much for Arab solicitude for the plight of Palestinians. The truth, which Foggy Bottom still does not comprehend, is that the Arabs still hope that the Palestinians somehow succeed in destabilizing Israel.
Brooks: What Palestinians?
Lebanese sage Fouad Ajami gives a history lesson: how a fly-whisk in the face of a 19th century envoy changed French-Africa relations, led to France annexing Algeria, and now to the quasi-intifada outside Paris.
Ajami: France Faces History
Former Lady Thatcher aide John O'Sullivan writes in today's NY Post on the France Muslim riots. He identifies many factors and suggests that France, with its own long civilizational tradition, can still pull this one out. For reasons posted in the past few days on LFTC I am not sanguine, and O'Sullivan realizes the difficulties. His idea is that instead of pitching a broad European identity alternative to Euro-Muslim identity, a French nationalist model can successfully appeal if the larger society opens up and offers opportunity to France's Muslim citizens. Read his as always well-put take.
O'Sullivan: France's Task
The Washington Times reports that French president Jacques Chirac has diagnosed France as suffering from a "malaise"--and that discrimination must be fought and hiring diversity promoted. One wonders if Chirac knows that malaise was the word applied to Jimmy Carter's July 15, 1979 national address, upon announcing a shake-up of energy policy. Carter never actually said the "m" word, but rather used "crisis of confidence" to describe a moral and spiritual crisis he saw in America; anticipating Clinton, Carter also said that he would "feel your pain." The cure for that pain turned out to be Ronald Reagan.
As for his proposed remedies, Chirac is as clueless as was Jimmy. Half-baked concession coupled with "understand their frustrations" is a recipe for serial episodes of mass rioting. Chirac would do well to study the difference between David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani in their respective approaches to dealing with urban crime. Doing so will not resolve the deeper issues of what France will do with the ten percent of its population that is now Muslim (70 percent of whom hail from North Africa). But it can create a framework of basic civil order from within which other problems might possibly be addressed. Is there a French Rudy? Or Reagan?
Gerard Alexander, an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia, informs us in the current Weekly Standard that crime rates have skyrocketed in Europe over the past quarter-century. While murder rates are still well below US levels, many Western European countries have higher rates of assault, robbery and burglary. Famously pacific Norway has a higher auto theft rate, and several Scandinavian countries have higher general theft rates. As for France, one reason that the Muslim discontent was ignored for so long by authorities is that 80 cars per night were being torched in France--even before the riots.
Enter Charles Krauthammer with his column in Time. Noting that the Euro-Muslim birthrate is triple that of Christians, and that the most common first name in Belgian maternity wards is...Muhammad, Krauthammer says:
"On the one side are the protester-arsonists, many if not most of them Muslim, whom the Interior Minister called racaille (rabble)--young, restless, violent, vibrant, angry, jobless, envious and fecund. And on the other side is an aged and exhausted civilization, the hollowed-out core of European Christendom, static, aging, contented, coddled, passive and literally without faith. Who would you think will win in the end?"
And:
"The only possible way out for France is to undertake the kind of self-reformation that America did in the 1960s, when it finally began welcoming African Americans into mainstream society and spent two generations pursuing that goal. But the prospects for success in France are far fewer, because even if France changed, woke up and welcomed those it had once invited, it is very late. The grandparents who first came would have eagerly accepted the invitation. But their young have grown up in an alienated monoculture that has contempt for the godless decadence of French secularism with its empty churches, sexual license and existential ennui. France doesn't want them. They don't want the France they are throwing rocks at. But they are not leaving. And they are growing."
Culture maven Mark Steyn goes further, noting the angry reaction in Jordan last week to the bombings, compared with the passive "in sorrow" reaction of the Spanish after 3/11/04's pre-election bombing, which turned them not against the Moroccan terrorist perps but against Jose Maria Aznar and Bush. Worse than passivity is, in Steyn's view, a structural weakness: a bi-cultural society is far less likely to be stable than one with more than two ethnic groups, because polarization is more likely to occur with twin warring camps:
"Whether or not one believes in 'celebrating diversity', that's a lot of diversity to celebrate. But the Continent isn't multicultural so much as bicultural. There are ageing native populations, and young Muslim populations, and that's it: 'two solitudes', as they say in my beloved Quebec. If there's three, four or more cultures, you can all hold hands and sing We are the World. But if there's just two - you and the other - that's generally more fractious. Bicultural societies are among the least stable in the world, especially once it's no longer quite clear who is the majority and who is the minority - a situation that much of Europe is fast approaching, as you can see by visiting any French, Austrian, Belgian or Dutch maternity ward."
Steyn continues: "In a democratic age, you cannot buck demography." He adds:
"I love the way those naysayers predicting doom and gloom in Baghdad scoff that Iraq's a totally artificial entity and that, without some Saddamite strongman, Kurds, Sunnis and Shias can't co-exist in the same state. Oh, really? If Iraq's an entirely artificial entity, what do you call a state split between gay drugged-up red-light whatever's-your-bag Dutchmen and anti-gay anti-whoring anti-everything-you-dig Muslims? If Kurdistan doesn't belong in Iraq, does Pornostan belong in the Islamic Republic of Holland?"
Steyn breezily concludes that France is not worried about Iran becoming the second Muslim nuclear state, because the third will be...France. And a generation or two after that the national symbol, you can be sure, will no longer be Marianne.
Washington Times: Chirac Sees "Malaise"
Carter 7/15/1979 Speech
Alexander: Europe's Crime Rates Climb Past US
Krauthammer: France Will Lose
Steyn: Islamic Reform Better Bet Than European Reform
President Bush gave a speech on Veterans Day recapitulating the War on Terror, much in accord with his recent fine address at National Defense University. It merits a read, free of the media filter. As well, in today's Opinion Journal, Norman Podhoretz presents a lucid recap of Iraq intel; he establishes beyond reasonable cavil that intel failures were honest mistakes. I was away last week, so I did not monitor how MSM covered 43's speech. I would be surprised if they did so in a competent fashion. My own experience upon attending Presidential addresses is that rarely do they receive accurate coverage in MSM. MSM either takes passages out of context or harps on quips, thus giving the public the impression that the speech lacked substance. When I wish to know what a President has said, I now go to the White House website and download the speech. This is the only way to reliably learn what was said. Sad but true.
Which raises a question: What, if anything, should be done about it? First, the President should--holidays excepted--speak in prime time when desiring to reach the public directly. Second, he should appoint a third Republican to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the agency should adopt a new rule for broadcasters: As part of their obligation to serve "the public interest, convenience and necessity," broadcasters must do two things: (1) upon Presidential request, they must give air-time; (2) upon request of the opposition party, they must give the opposition equal air-time.
Currently, broadcasters have discretion as to whether to carry a Presidential address, and they can decline to do so if they judge the president's speech "political." Well, all Presidential speeches are political; the President is a practicing politician. Allowing a few network executives to decide for themselves whether to carry presidential remarks is giving vast power to people who themselves are highly politicized. Now consider certain objections that will be raised.
First, what is to stop a president from abusing the privilege--getting in the public's face nightly? Answer: the public reaction is likely to be highly adverse, and in the event a message given incessantly falls on deaf ears. Second, is this a revival of the FCC's "Fairness Doctrine," junked during the Reagan years? Answer: No, because that doctrine involved refereeing private media commentary for lack of balance; the diversity of media today enables all points of view to receive air-time. Third, what about the First Amendment rights of the broadcasters? Answer: Broadcasters are licensees of public spectrum, and have a "public interest" statutory obligation encompassed within their charter. Now, the Supreme Court might disagree, and strike down a rule such as the one I propose. But then the President is no worse off than now. It is worth a try. The Court did, after all, uphold the constitutionality of the Fairness Doctrine.
Oh, one last idea: White House press conferences should be junked. The White House reporters rarely even try to inform viewers with their questions. They try instead to embarrass Presidents they dislike with smart-aleck, loaded questions. No one learns from this MSM grandstanding. Adopting an English custom of answering questions before the legislature would be better, in that critics could be called on distortions--as could the President and his own party. Reporters are rarely called on theirs. Presidents should be made to confront critics, but in a serious forum, not via the frivolous inanity of press conferences with self-absorbed media wiseacres.
President Bush's Veteran's Day Speech
Norman Podhoretz Reviews Iraq Intel
David Brooks writes in the 11/10 NY Times that the styles of American counter-culture trump American culture in terms of global hegemonic influence. Rioters in France are emulating gangsta rap's poisonous underclass macho. With little upward mobility, Europe cannot do much about it. Ugh.
Brooks: Gangsta Beats McDonald's
NRO's Mike Ledeen explained in the 11/7 NRO why the French were the ultimate source for the Italian forgery re the infamous Niger/Iraq uranium deal. Amusing, as Mike often is, and informative, as he always is.
Ledeen: Chirac's Stink Bomb
VACATION POST 2 of 5. John O'Sullivan writes in a Chicago Sun-Times op-ed about a recent judicial confab entitled Conversazione between Boston University, Oxford University and Melbourne University; just as then-Chief Justice Earl Warren (1953 - 1969) inaugurated vastly creased judicial activism in the US, so 30 years ago the highest Australian court followed suit, as did Britain's highest court a decade ago. He quotes a Justice now on the Australian high court:
"When judges detect particular community values, whether in the Australian community or the 'international community,' as supporting their reasoning, they may sometimes become confused between the values which they think the community actually holds and the values which they think the community should hold."
Defenders of activism, O'Sullivan reports, at the confab either (a) denied it existed or (b) asserted that judicial activism was needed to prevent recurrence of the kind of human rights violations seen in Europe during the 1930s. O'Sullivan points out that bureaucrats and the judiciary were far more supportive of Hitler than other elements of society.
Stars of the event were debaters Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer, acknowledged as the leading intellectuals on the Supreme Court (a status they now share with Chief Justice John Roberts). Breyer is a leading advocate of referring to foreign law as a source of interpretation, having done so in last term's case striking down capital punishment for minors who commit capital crimes. Once, Breyer even looked to klepto-thugocratic Zimbabwe for judicial guidance.
At the Oct. 27 American Spectator dinner, Scalia addressed the foreign law issue. Scalia looks to foreign law re: (a) interpreting a treaty; (2) interpreting a statute that incorporates a reference to foreign law; (3) interpreting a Constitution provision for which there is English law antecedent. Where he draws the line is as to trends: the globalist set that looks to trends to ban capital punishment ignores, Scalia notes, c a counter-trend against allowing abortion. Scalia recognizes in our Constitution what internationalist US judges increasingly do not: American exceptionalism.
Activist judges tend to pick and choose which provisions to expand. Here is Alex Kosinski, Ninth Circuit judicial star (who would be great on the Supremes but has pricked too many balloons with his wit to stand a chance) in a 2003 case (link below):
Judges know very well how to read the Constitution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted. We have held, without much ado, that “speech, or . . . the press” also means the Internet, and that “persons, houses, papers, and effects” also means public telephone booths. When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases--or even the white spaces between lines of constitutional text. But, as the panel amply demonstrates, when we’re none too keen on a particular constitutional guarantee, we can be equally ingenious in burying language that is incontrovertibly there.
It is wrong to use some constitutional provisions as spring-boards for major social change while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home until they quit annoying us. As guardians of the Constitution, we must be consistent in interpreting its provisions. If we adopt a jurisprudence sympathetic to individual rights, we must give broad compass to all constitutional provisions that protect individuals from tyranny. If we take a more statist approach, we must give all such provisions narrow scope. Expanding some to gargantuan proportions while discarding others like a crumpled gum wrapper is not faithfully applying the Constitution; it’s using our power as federal judges to constitutionalize our personal preferences. . . .
All too many of the other great tragedies of history— Stalin’s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few—were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. See Kleinfeld Dissent at 5997-99. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars. My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history.
If activist judges have their way, the late Tip O/Neill's famous aphorism "All politics is local" will be complemented by a new one: "All judging is global." Be afraid. Be very afraid.
O'Sullivan: Judges Go Global
Kosinski Dissent: Silvera v. Locker
"Pogo" comic-strip creator Walt Kelly famously said: "We have met the enemy and he is us." He should see the performance of tour media in aiding al-Jazeera, treating its pro-terror propaganda as legitimate news reporting. This is like treating Pravda as an independent news organization would have been during the Cold War. Durrance Smith, ex-aide to Paul Bremer in Iraq, has a fine piece in today's Opinion Journal on this today. With 77 percent of Iraqis relying on TV for news, versus 15 percent on newspapers, and with only 18 percent having cellphones and 8 percent Internet access, Iraq's government wisely banned al-Jazeera. Yet Qatar's $100 million subsidy keeps the network alive. Worse, read how our MSM gives al-Jazeera undeserved credible currency. If we lose the War on Terror, much credit will go to MSM.
Smith: US Media Aids Terror
The 11/1 American Spectator online carries a disturbing piece that credibly details how the British government, by hamstringing its soldiers, is now losing ground in Basra, while Iran gains. If accurate this is deeply troubling. If Tough Tony is wimping out....
The Battle for Basra
The October 28 indictment handed down by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald contains five counts: Count 1 for obstruction of justice, in misleading the grand jury; Counts 2 & 3 for making false statements to the FBI; and Counts 4 & 5 for committing perjury before the grand jury. Mini-tutorial for non-lawyers: the false statement statute punishes lying when not under oath; the perjury provision punishes lying under oath. Both require "material" falsehoods, i.e., lies about facts deemed by the prosecutor important to the case. Thus, lies about things deemed not important are not violations. Under the perjury statute if a witness gives two inconsistent versions the prosecutor need not determine which is false. Further, to prove perjury a prosecutor need not have any particular number of witnesses or documents.
The indictment charges that Libby lied about having a conversations with one reporter (NBC's Tim Russert, who denied having had such a conversation with Libby) and about the content of actual conversations with two others (NY Times reporter Judith Miller and Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper). Fitzgerald said that seven sources testified that Libby, contrary to his testimony, told reporters about Spy Gal Val's CIA status, rather than, as Libby testified, the reporters telling him. Paragraph 32 of the indictment lists the false or misleading statements Libby allegedly made regarding his conversation with the three reporters. According to paragraph 33(a)(ii), on nine instances prior to speaking in July to reporters, Libby had spoken to various officials about Plame's CIA identity, officials at CIA, State and the White House, including one conversation with Vice-President Cheney, who allegedly told Libby that Plame worked for the CIA's Counterproliferation Division. In reply, Libby's lawyer said that Libby had cooperated fully--including waiving Fifth Amendment privilege and allowing reporters to speak about their conversations--and that there was no indictment for the allegedly underlying crime.
Yes, lying to federal officials and grand juries is a serious matter. But prosecutors have discretion: not every violation of law leads to indictment. What makes these indictments so awful? Consider: (a) an identity the CIA made no serious effort to conceal--having not told the White House she was "covert" and one which the CIA's own legal counsel surely knew was not a "covert agent" within the meaning of applicable federal law; (b) an accuser who apparently perjured himself before the Senate Intelligence Committee--for which he faces no indictment; (c) an intelligence agency that, in a war against the President it is supposed to serve, has massively leaked inside information (whether classified or not) with REAL national security content, such as deliberations within the Administration, disputes among principals, and potential war strategies, all far worse--and more harmful--sins than the "outing" of a Langley desk agent.
So: (d) A special counsel files an indictment that destroys the top aide to the Vice-President. Worst of all, as a 10/29 piece in the Washington Post by Lee Casey and David Rivkin points out, Fitzgerald likely concluded, as early as January 2004, that Spy Gal Val was not a "covert operative." This was but a month after his December 2003 appointment. Yet he did not close up shop. Special counsels have no incentive to do so. To be fair to Fitzgerald, he apparently decided not to indict Karl Rove upon being persuaded by Rove's counsel that inaccuracies in Rove's testimony were memory errors, not evasion. Further, Fitzgerald didn't stretch the 1917 Espionage Act to get an indictment.
Now, the proverbial dog that did not bark. Did Fitzgerald ask expansion of his authority to investigate perjury by the Administration's chief accuser? An accuser who appeared before the grand jury? Did Fitzgerald compare what Wilson told him with what he told the Senate? If Fitzgerald wants to make a tutelary point that lying to deflect an investigation is serious, why not make the same point about lying to get an investigation going in the first place? Is it material that Libby is a high official while Wilson is a private citizen? Wilson had vast power, thanks to media allies: access to the op-ed section of the NY Times to launch a vicious, mendacious vendetta against an Administration. Oh, and by the way, Spy Gal Val, if she knew that Wilson was lying--say, about whether she recommended him for the Niger mission, would be guilty of a misprision, a felony punishable by up to three years imprisonment. (For non-lawyers, a "misprision" means failure to report to the authorities a felony one knows to have been committed.)
So far, we are left with it being OK to lie to start an investigation, but not to obstruct one. Indeed, there would have been no obstruction to allege had there been no lies to start the ball rolling.
Lawyer Clinton Taylor writes in today's TAS that Joe Wilson's claim that Valerie Plame Wilson had no connection with his selection for the Niger mission is contradicted by none other than Fitzgerald himself. Consider page 4 of the indictment:
"[Libby] was advised by the CIA officer that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and was believed to be responsible for sending Wilson on the trip." (Emphasis added.)
Then try this from page 12:
"[Libby] was informed by
a senior CIA officer that Wilson's wife was employed by the CIA and
that the idea of sending him to Niger originated with her."
(Emphases added.)
Back to Libby: Why would an official lie? Either because (a) the truth would generate criminal liability or (b) a hyper-loyalist might risk criminal liability to prevent political damage. Libby faced no criminal liability, so (a) makes zero sense. Fitzgerald neither charged that Spy Gal Val's "outing" was by Libby, nor that her identity was protected as a "covert agent" under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. Further, although Fitzgerald found that Spy Gal Val's identity was classified, he did not charge Libby with violating the Espionage Act of 1917. Fitzgerald told reporters that Spy Gal Val's status as a CIA agent had to be concealed "for her protection." Protection? Spy Gal Val on magazine covers, going to cocktail parties? And if her life was endangered by exposure, why did her husband launch a highly-visible, highly-public anti-White House attack via the NY Times op-ed page, exposing himself--and surely his family as well--to intense public scrutiny?
It gets worse. The indictment says that Spy Gal Val's identity was classified, and that her CIA affiliation wasn't "common knowledge outside the intelligence community." But in a 7/15/05 story, the Washington Times reports that a former CIA agent--like Spy Gal Val, one with "non-official cover"--told the paper that neighbors knew she was an agent, something she and her hubby made no attempt to conceal. Said the agent: "Her neighbors knew this, her friends knew this, his friends knew this. A lot of blame could be put on to central cover staff and the agency because they weren't minding the store here. ... The agency never changed her cover status."
Wilson, for his part, was asked if he knew Spy Gal Val had been compromised before the leak. In his only candid statement he answered: "I have no idea." To be fair, this AM I saw Wilson attorney Christopher Wolf interviewed on CNN. Chris, a fine lawyer an a solid citizen whom I know well and greatly respect, is a neighbor of the Wilsons. He said that he didn't know of her CIA affiliation. Chris also said that Spy Gal Val was indeed a top CIA anti-proliferation expert and that her life was endangered by her cover having been blown. If that judgment is acorrect, all the more reason for her hubby to shut up--and for her to have avoided any entanglement in hubby's quest to get the Niger mission assignment, one that clearly had the potential in the context of a possible WMD-driven war with Iraq to become a major public issue.
Looks like Plame-Out will now Flame Out.
Title 18 United States Code Section 1503: Obstruction of Justice
Title 18 United States Code Section 1001: False Statements
Title 18 United States Code Section 1623: Perjury
Title 18 United States Code Section 793: Gathering, Transmitting or Losing Information
Title 50 United States Code Section 421: Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982
Indictment of Scooter Libby
Statement of Counsel for Scooter Libby and Statement of Scooter Libby
Website of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald
Transcript of Fitzgerald 10/28 Press Conference
Washington Times: Neighbors Knew Plame CIA; CIA Never Changed Cover
Title 18 United States Code Section 4: Misprision
Rivkin & Casey: No More Special Counsels
Taylor: Joe Wilson In a Bind
In an appropriate counter-strike on the day that US deaths in Iraq reached 2,000-still more than 700 less than were killed on 9/11--Robert Kagan writes in his 10/25 Washington Post op-ed that both liberal East Cost papers of record--the Washington Post and New York Times--pushed as hard for disarming Saddam of WMD as any folks anywhere. Everything they wrote, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld could love. The excerpts quoted by Kagan defy easy summary, so surf the link and enjoy a riveting read. Kagan's piece is also, on another level, sobering, as it teaches us yet again about the literally Orwellian capacity of media organs to re-write history as their editorial views change.
Kagan: It's Wasn't Just Miller's Story
A Wall Street Journal article today by LA Daily News columnist and screenwriter Bridget Johnson recounts the mega-hypocrisy of Hollywood, where female and minority writers are paid far less, shoehorned into stereotypical writing parts and grossly under-represented compared to their actual share of the population. Yet this does not stop Hollywood from being overwhelmingly liberal and thus pro-affirmative action--save when it might inconvenience themselves. Reminds me of the famous crack of legendary wit Wilson Mizner (the model for the Clark Gable character in San Francisco, the 1936 blockbuster), who described Hollywood life as "a trip through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat."
Johnson: Hollywood Writer Income Gaps
Reach back into your medium-term memory and dredge up the name of Elian Gonzalez, whose mother perished delivering him close to the shores of Florida around Thanksgiving 1999, to apparent freedom per her dying wish. But 'twasn't to be. Suddenly, as a Caribbean shark digested mom's remains, there emerged her estranged husband, hitherto absentee dad Juan Gonzalez. Egged on by Fidel himself, Juan demanded that Elian's Miami relatives surrender the boy, then 5 years old. Things dragged on into the spring, until, on Easter Sunday 2000 no less, thugs from the INS staged a pre-dawn raid after the feds got a friendly hack magistrate to issue a Friday evening warrant, bypassing a skeptical, better-informed judge who'd left earlier. Hauling the terrified boy from a closet, the thug-raiders gratuitously smashed a religious icon and punched an NBC newsman in the tummy on the way out. Nice work--for a day in the life of the KGB.
Newsweek's Oct. 10 print edition informs us cheerfully that Elian, now 11, had this to day about Fidel: "Not only [do I think of Fidel Castro] as a friend, but also as a father." Father Fidel indeed. The Russian scholar Richard Pipes has described Russia as a "patronymic state": to the Russian Tsar, every subject was his child and all private property part of his estate. Fits Fidel's Paradise. You think if Juan wanted Fidel to back off he'd say it? Once. Juan knows better. Alas, Elian does not. Juan may not have had a choice, then or now. That cannot be said for William Jefferson Clinton and his imbecile A-G, Janet Reno. 42 escaped paying any price for his act--MSM gave him a pass. But Florida paid Gore back for this kidnap caper in 2000.
So, was Gore the biggest political loser of the Elian Affair? He probably thinks so, but Saddam has a stronger case. As for Elian, perhaps the adulthood in a someday-free Cuba will teach him the nobility of his mother's sacrifice. Meanwhile, for a reminder of just how happy Elian was to be snatched by the INS, check out this series of photos by the one photographer the thugs missed.
The Photos the INS Failed to Snatch While Snatching Elian
Arnaud de Borchgrave writes in the 10/22 Washington Times that "the lamentable spectacle of internecine warfare" has led Israel to conclude that a negotiated withdrawal from the West Bank is not feasible; instead, Israel will act unilaterally. As was predictable, Abbas, who is what passes for a moderate among Palestinian leaders, is losing out to Hamas. The AK-47 is for Palestinian youth what the cellphone is for youth in civilized societies. Of 1.5 million Palestinians, 80 percent live in poverty, with unemployment running 25 to 66 percent. Arafat's children have inherited a Hobbesian Hell.
With the "Quartet" Road Map plan of a Palestinian state with "East Jerusalem" as its capital moribund, Israel is mulling several unilateral withdrawal options for the 240,000 settlers living on the West Bank, once it has completed the 420-mile barrier. One is a minimal drawback of 10,000 settlers by 2007; a bigger plan would withdraw 100,000 by 2010.
Writing in the 10/22 Opinion Journal, WSJ editor Bret Stephens demolishes the argument that Israeli checkpoints, 18-hour curfews, closures, "petty harassments" and targeted assassinations are the reason for Palestinian pathologies. Prior to the restoration of Yasir Arafat none of this caused widespread violence and barbarism; Palestinians were mobile and employable. Stephens observes that neither bringing terrorists into the political process without disarming them, nor statehood, will cure these pathologies. He does not think Abbas can survive.
With oil-rich Arab states raking in billions each week, de Borchgrave
notes, a few days worth of aid could help make the Palestinian land a
viable city-state. Will not happen. Worse, 43 will not press for
this. Arab states see Palestinian misery, as they have since 1948, as
a weapon to use against Israel. It's still, as Dooley Wilson sang in Casablanca, "the same old story"--except that the Mideast version is not romantic love, but romantic death.
de Borchgrave: Mobocracy vs. Xanadu
Stephens: Palestinian Suicide
Fareed Zakharia writes in the 10/10 print edition of Newsweek that Germany is in fact a lot like the US of A, but that Germans do not like this. Said one German politicians of the train-wreck election held a month ago: "German voters have spoken. We don't want to become Americans." Germany's slow-growth, high-unemployment economy needs restructuring, and voters know it, but....not all at once, Angie (Merkel). Germany, writes Zakharia, realizes that reform must come;( France does not). The German economy is the world's leading goods (not services) exporter, despite an economy 1/5 US GDP. The only other major country to grow exports in the past five years has been China.
German politicians, writes Zakharia, have been too dark, stressing pain and sacrifice. They could learn from Ronald Reagan, whose sunny optimism carried America through its painful 1980s restructuring. Zakharia strikes one false note, quoting a former US Ambassador to Germany on how the US trashes Germany too much, considering what a friend Germany is, yadda, yadda. Gerhard Schroeder and his nasty fellow SPD cabinet members get yet another pass from a prominent US columnist. Ignore this, love Bach, Beethoven, etc., hope the best for Angela Merkel, and tell Gerhard Schroeder and his SPD cronies what they can do with a rolling donut.
The Wall Street Journal graciously gives Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas space to state his case for reviving the 4-power Road Map (US, EU, UN, Russia) blueprint; he seeks wider access for his people within Israel and is upset with the building of what he (and, to be fair, the International Court of ([In-] Justice) calls an illegal "wall." To begin with, the fence is only a wall as to about three percent of its length, in places where Palestinians had been shooting into Israel. Israel's fence was erected in response to a campaign of stupefying barbarity--not even Attila sent children to do his killing--launched on the flimsiest of manufactured pretexts. As for "access" Abbas--and his Road Map allies--wish to bootstrap: Palestinians need access in order to succeed as a state. The fact that access would not be a problem absent years of terrorism escapes Abbas and his friends. Our position should be: Let Palestinian access to Israel be earned by cessation, once and for all, of acts of terror.
Abbas: Access, Please
Larry Wilkerson, ex-Chief of staff to ex-Secretary of State Colin Powell, yesterday brought out into the open what everyone watching closely has known for five years: State (allied with the CIA, albeit Wilkerson's quoted remarks do not say this) has waged the bureaucratic equivalent of nuclear war against its most despised adversaries. Al-Qai'da? Nope. Iranian mullahs? Nope? North Korean nutcakes? Nope. Try...Defense and the White House. Wilkerson assailed Cheney and Rumsfeld for Abu Ghraib in Iraq, failing to unite with the Europeans re Iran and failure to engage North Korea. Wilkerson called the military "overstretched and demoralized." He accused Condoleeza Rice of being too close to 43 while at NSA, asserting: "She would side with the President to build her intimacy with the President." Loyalty to a President who bucks the career bureaucracy is, to Wilkerson, no virtue.
Wilkerson capped his broadside by citing 41--not 43--as the example of a leader who knew how to make foreign policy work, calling 41 "one of the finest Presidents we have ever had....There is a vast difference between the way George H. W. Bush dealt with major challenges, some of the greatest challenges at the end of the 20th century, and effected positive results in my view, and the way we conduct diplomacy today." Wilkerson said of 43 that he was "not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either."
It is fair to say that Rumsfeld and Cheney deeply distrusted the traditional bureaucracies--with good reason. The unceasing war mounted by State/CIA against Ahmed Chalabi--waged with lies and selective blame--alienated a man who would have been one of America's most powerful friends in postwar Iraq. Re 41, Wilkerson apparently sees nothing wrong with 41 allowing Saddam to survive, even after he had torched the Kuwaiti oil fields and fouled the Persian Gulf, instead of toppling him and siding with the insurgents of 1991, who were not terrorists and Baathists but people fighting for freedom in 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces--and at a time when we had 540,000 US boots on the ground. 41 urged rebels to rise up, then stood by while Saddam violated his accord with Gen. Schwarzkopf and butchered the rebels. Our long-term presence aroused one Usama bin Ladin. 41 also, BTW, opposed much of Ronald Reagan's victorious Cold War policies.
And just as State supported leaving the tyrant in place in 1991, so this time they wanted a Baathist thug in power, not attempting the daunting task of changing the face of the Mideast. Cheney, too, supported the 1991 ending, but 9/11 changed him. Wilkerson is a 9/10 person--as is Powell and, institutionally, State and CIA are; Cheney and Rumsfeld are 9/12 persons, changed by 9/11. 9/10 folks, as I stated in my 9/12 LFTC piece, believe that 9/11 was a stepped-up terror attack that could be dealt with within the traditional framework of US foreign policy, embedded in Europe and the UN, limited to Westphalian pre-emption--only used against imminent attacks--preserving existing political entities, and accepting in full the norms of international law such as the Geneva Conventions. 9/12 folk see 9/11 as a transforming event that required escaping the straitjacket of flaccid allies and multinational institutions, precluding certain potential attacks even if not imminent, not being fully bound by Geneva and transforming failed states that have been the incubus of terror. Wilkerson's jeremiad brings this dispute out into the open.
Amazingly, Wilkerson went public over the opposition of none other than Colin Powell, at the expense of their relationship, according to Wilkerson.
Wilkerson: Cheney-Rumsfeld Cabal
The clock ticks towards October 28, when the grand jury convened by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame CIA-agent leak affair expires. Reports have two top White House aides facing possible indictment--not for the original, bogus charge of "outing" James Bondette Spy Gal Val, but for possible perjury, obstruction of justice or unauthorized disclosure of classified information. If the ax falls on Scooter Libby or Karl Rove (or both), the primary blame should fall not on proven liar & faker Joe Wilson. (As Steven Hayes' article below shows, Wilson lied to the Senate Intelligence Committee about pretty much everything. Contrary to Wilson's claims: his wife did push him for the special mission to Niger--and no, it is not plausible that he did not know of this; his "report" did not convince the CIA that the uranium story was false--analysts at the agency and elsewhere were split; he did not expose one document as a forgery--his mission was eight months prior to the document turning up.) Nor should Wilson's myriad shameless hills in MSM, whose outrageously dishonest reporting created a scandal out of nothing, be blamed above all.
No, the blame will fall on 43 and his White House, for three reasons: (1) confronted with the initial charge that the WH had no basis for inserting the uranium yellowcake story in 43's State of the Union speech in the run-up to Iraq, the WH retracted the insert--which explicitly cited the Brits as source, despite Tony Blair's standing on British Intelligence having two independent sources confirming the story; (2) confronted with a pack of press hounds baying for a special prosecutor, the WH caved, to kick the can down the road past the 2004 election; and (3) when Wilson's lies to the Senate were revealed in a bi-partisan Intelligence Committee report, the WH failed to have the Justice Department investigate Wilson for perjuring himself before a Senate Committee, for which indictment there is clearly more basis than anything Wilson alleges.
The moral of this sad affair--even if all WH aides escape indictment? Panic is perilous in the face of political attacks. Your adversaries are emboldened, not placated, by weakness. Kicking the can down the road did zilch to quell the press pack howls. All the WH had to do when Wilson's risible op-ed appeared in the Washington Post (July 2003) was respond: : "Even if Joe Celebrity is right about one source, Tony Blair assures us that British Intelligence has two independent sources supporting the story. We place our trust in Tough Tony over Celebrity Joe." As for calls for a special prosecutor, the WH could have asked Justice to investigate, defending the integrity of career prosecutors. They'd have come back with this: "We've investigated the allegation, and find that it is not even a close call that Spy Gal Val is an agent covered by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 (50 U.S.C. sec. 421), and thus there is not need for a special anything." And the WH should have had Justice investigate Wilson's testimony before the Senate, for possible perjury charges. Would Democrats and MSM have howled? Sure, but they did anyway. Simply put, nothing the White House did to try to tamp down the political or legal assault has borne fruit, so it may as well have fought back while taking the partisan hits.
Instead, due to panic the WH: (1) embarrassed 43 by retracting his SOTU words; (2) embarrassed true-blue ally Tony Blair by slighting the work of British Intelligence; (3) set in motion a politically-driven prosecutorial process that makes for Captain Ahab hunts; (4) seriously distracted top WH aides at critical times; (5) left these aides "twisting slowly, slowly in the wind." And if any top aides are indicted: (6) permanently, perhaps, fatally, wounded an Administration already in deep political trouble. All this for running from a hot-air B.S. accusation by a partisan, self-promoting jerk and his equally partisan, equally self-promoting spouse--who so fears for her life that she is the life of Beltway parties, and a media celeb in her own right.
This is one area where 43 could have learned from his predecessor, who, facing far more damning--and often true--allegations of wrongdoing (some criminal)--fought back ferociously (often unethically and perhaps at times illegally). True, 42's WH had MSM on their side (save for the WH Travel Office scandal that involved hurting WH staff friends of the reporters). But could 43 have fared worse fighting back? It seems hardly likely.
Meanwhile, read Bill Kristol's two-pager on how key conservatives have been targeted for trumped-up charges. Plus for one last showing as to how mendacious Wilson is, and how partisan MSM is, read Steven Hayes' 12-pager that runs over the whole sorry mess.
Hayes: Senate Finds Wilson's Story Utterly False
Kristol: Criminalizing Conservatives
Ralph Peters writes in the 10/18 NY Post that media folks refuse to see the good news in Iraq, no matter what: we lost the war, democracy can't work, the constitution won't be ratified, Sunnis won't vote, etc. Brings to mind al-Qai'da number two Zawahiri's letter to Zarqawi, noted last week on LFTC, in which he said the media was more than half of jihadist strength, the great equalizer. Michael Rubin writes in the 10/18 Opinion Journal that Iraqis are more optimistic than outsiders as to their prospects. Robert Pollock interviews General David Petraeus in the 10/16 Opinion Journal; the General sheds more light on Iraqi security force progress.
Oh, and by the way, another abject failure: Baghdad will not host the 2012 Summer Olympic Games.
Peters: Iraq Success Ignored
Rubin: Iraqis More Optimistic Than Outsiders
Pollock: Gen. Petraeus Optimistic
The Palestinian Authority reports that for the first nine months of 2005 the number of Palestinians killed by other Palestinians exceeded those killed by Israeli security forces, 219 to 218. This is the first official tally that showed more killed by the locals. Past tallies have, of course, not included all sorts of killings concealed from an outside world singularly uninterested in knowing, but an official acknowledgment of any kind is news. The intifada, like the deity of Roman legend, is devouring its own children. Question of the day: Which government or multinational entity will be first to blame the Israelis? France? Turtle Bay? Perhaps a ship's pool is in order.
NY Post: Palestinian Death Toll Rises
A Mythology Refresher
Anyone who expresses admiration for Eurosocialism will enjoy learning that Germany is pressuring parents to stop giving their offspring hyphenated last names that contain the last names of both parents, a practice common in Europe. The EU judiciary is reviewing the matter. Reminds me of the old Cold War joke re the difference between rules in America, France, Germany and Russia: In the US you can do anything that is not prohibited; in France you can do anything, even if it is prohibited; in Germany you can only do things specifically permitted; and in Russia you can't do anything, even if it is permitted. What a delicious irony in a country whose leadership is now Merkel-Someone--or is it, depending upon whose commentary one buys into, Someone-Merkel?
Wall Street Journal: Germany Nixes Names
Author William Shawcross eloquently writes in today's NY Sun that the war protesters trying to drive the US out of Iraq do not have the moral high ground. Abandoning Iraq to the terrorists who blow up Iraqi civilians and slit the throats of schoolteachers is hardly a moral posture. It is moral to fight Saddam's thugs and Zarqawi (whom Shawcross labels Iraq's Pol Pot) and his murderous minions. Contrary to what deluded Cindy thinks, Casey Sheehan did not die for nothing. Ask the Iraqis.
Shawcross: Iraq's fight Is Ours
Today's Wall Street Journal editorial calls the Nobel award to the IAEA and its chief inspector "an act of political pre-emption." The WSJ editors suggest that the award would better have been given to a Finnish ex-President who ended fighting in Aceh, Indonesia. WSJ also published a more optimistic take on the award, from non-proliferation ace Henry Sokolski. The NY Sun editors chastise the Nobel Committee for rewarding "inaction and failure" and say the Prize ought be renamed the War Prize, given past recipients like Yasir Arafat and Le Duc Tho. The Sun notes that Ronald Reagan never won for leading a coalition to victory in the Cold War (neither did Margaret Thatcher nor Pope John Paull II, for helping RR win). The Sun also provides a chronicle of just how ineffective the IAEA has been in checking nuclear proliferation.
Had the Nobel folks honored (as noted in LFTC on 10/7) super-sleuths Rolf Ekeus, Richard Butler, etc. in the 1990s Sokolski's take would be more plausible. For my money, if the Nobel Committee really wants to honor efforts to stop nukes, how about awarding the Prize to the eight Israeli pilots (posthumously to Ilan Ramon, who perished on the shuttle Columbia) who risked their lives flying F-16s yards above the deck to destroy Saddam's reactor in 1981? Oh, and do not forget General David Ivry, who masterminded the strike. Nine Nobels that surely will never be awarded.
WSJ: Nobel Pre-Emption
Sokolski: Nobel Aids IAEA Role
NY Sun: The War Prize
So the Nobel Committee, having given arch-appeaser and North-Korea savior Jimmy Carter a Nobel in 2003, returns to its evil ways by making up for the black eye it gave Iran in 2004, when it awarded the Nobel to Iranian dissident Shirin Ebadi. The 2005 prize goes to...the International Atomic Energy Agency and its current chief faceless bureaucrat, Mohamed elBaradei. In other words: America, do not interfere with the ineffectual work the IAEA is doing in Iran, or circumvent the feckless UN to stop Iranian nuke efforts. Above all, do not attack Iran. Way to go, guys. Where was the Nobel Committee when Rolf Ekeus, Richard Butler and David Kay were literally risking their lives to uncover Saddam's WMD program int he 1990s? Out to lunch, naturally.
Mary Anastasia O'Grady writes in today's Wall Street Journal that Fidel continues to get a free ride on the real torture that goes on at his Guantanamo facility, with the usual gaggle of media and human rights types blissfully uninterested in Fidel's abuses. Much more fun to harass the US in its war effort.
Meanwhile, what did John McCain do to push the Senate on this? Nothing. He and his colleagues were too busy acting to ban "torture" at US facilities. McCain, does, to be fair, deserve immense respect for his immortal heroism as a POW resisting torture by the North Vietnamese. And it is understandable that he brings to this issue a passionate opposition to torture. But al-Qai'da is not US fliers waging a limited war against tyranny; they are fanatics waging an apocalyptic war against civilization. If we fail to learn about a WMD strike due to tying our hands as to interrogating prisoners we will live--no, die, in large numbers--to regret our gracious gesture. Out intel is simply not good enough--not nearly so--to pass up the benefits of indefinite incommunicado interrogation. As noted in LFTC several times in the past, Geneva Convention protections need not be extended to non-compliant parties like terrorist groups. We recklessly risk our national and societal safety when we do so.
McCain believes, as his eloquent statement (see link below) says, that torture produces bad intel. No doubt sometimes, but is that always the case? His amendment would establish the Army Field manual standards for interrogation, and prohibit "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment. He asks about retaliation against US soldiers, but al-Qai'da does not do reciprocity; it will torture and kill our soldiers regardless of what we do. McCain also asks what we we say to the world? Most of our critics come from countries with worse practices; we tell them to clean their own stables first. We say to the rest: We fight for our very existence, and do not have the luxury of hewing to Marquis of Queensbury rules--when you fight for your life in an alley you reach for the broken bottle. McCain says we should do this for ourselves, but increasing the risk that vital WMD intel may not be uncovered is doing something not for ourselves, but to ourselves.
O'Grady: The "Other Gitmo"
Senate Votes to Ban Torture
McCain's Floor Statement in Support of the Amendment
Arnaud de Borchgrave explains in the 10/6 Washington Times that the European consideration of Turkey for EU membership is but a charade, and that the Turks are coming to realize that. By the time Turkey could integrate into the EU it will be the most populous member, which alone means, he says, that it will never happen.
DeBorchgrave: Turkey Ploy
Helle Dale's Washington Times op-ed today spotlights a true rock/hard-place choice facing the European Union: (a) admit Turkey and further blur Europe's Christian identity at a time when Muslim communities inside Europe are restive, not integrated and growing; or (b) reject Turkish EU membership and undermine political and economic reform in a country that has been the bulwark of NATO's southern flank and is key to modernizing the Mideast. Dale argues for inclusion to save Turkey, and may well be right. But the specter of what historian Bat Ye'or calls "Eurabia" looms large, too. The last best hope for Europe: find a way to integrate Muslim communities under Western rules--no jibabs in school, no honor killings, etc. "In Rome, do as the Romans do" must trump (think bridge, not Donald), once and for all, multiculturalism. Tony Blair gets this, post -7/7 (wife Cherie does not). His Continental counterparts need to get it, too.
Dale: EU & turkey at the Crossroads
Leave it to an imbecile federal judge to decide that the world has not seen enough of photos from Abu Ghraib. Alvin K. Hellerstein granted an ACLU petition that the military release 74 photos yet unpublished, to assist in checking on treatment of prisoners in Iraq. This comes days after one of the chief offending dolts was sentenced by a military tribunal for her role in gratuitously humiliating Iraqi prisoners. How 74 photos, on top of the hundreds released to date, will inform us in any meaningful sense is beyond comprehension. It is not beyond imagining, however, that young Muslims might think these evidence of fresh prisoner abuse, and thus become enraged, join the neighborhood terrorist group and commit to jihad against America. The ACLU does not care, but one would think a judge would be capable of balancing marginal benefit to the public and possible risk of inciting new recruits. Appellate judges, call to arms.
Judge Orders Abu Ghraib Photos Released
This article in today's Wall Street Journal is signed by top European officials, and details Iran's duplicity and the extent of engagement by Europe in an effort to stop prolfieration. Now, do the signers of this article really mean what they say ("2, 4, 6, 8, Iran must not proliferate!")? Stay tuned.
Europeans: Iran Must Not Proliferate
Condi should not have called the Palestinian looting in the wake of Israel's departure a "success," writes Diana West in a 9/17 Washington Times op-ed. West notes that the US has given, since Oslo (1993) $1.5 billion to the Palestinians, of a total $7 billion--of which half wound up in the pockets of Arafat and his cronies. And now the State Department is ignoring that the Palestinian Authority's book of the month is a collection of poems celebrating a female suicide bomber whose charming nom de mort is "Rose of Palestine." Plus, the State Department ignores Israel's aid offer re Katrina, for fear of offending Arabs. Compare that to Rudy Giuliani telling a Saudi moneybags after 9/11 to shove his $10 million offer after the Saudi expressed support for Arafat. A certain amount of diplo-blather is part and parcel of any Secretary of State's public utterances, but Condi should do better at drawing the line.
West: US Marginalizing Israel
Unable to win (yet) the post of UN Secretary-General and transform that into a de facto World Presidency, Bill Clinton has launched the Clinton Global Initiative. Jimmy Carter would love the post, but lacks the credibility and charisma; Carter did, however, inaugurate the concept of a post-Presidency position in the limelight, something we can expect from now on from Democratic ex-Presidents. Carter began modestly, but with public memory of his pathetic Presidency fading and help from MSM friends, he has been able to violate the Logan Act (which bars private citizens from conducting public diplomacy) with impunity--lobbying in 1991 against the launching of the Gulf War, giving North Korea the deal behind which it could develop nuclear weapons, legitimating Yasir Arafat's 1996 coup masquerading as an election, covering up Hugo Chavez's phony referendum recall count last year. Quite a tally for the Nobel Laureate.
Comes now William Jefferson Clinton, who at Andrews Air Force Base in 2001 told us on Inauguration Day that he was still here and not going away--alas, how true. Now he is gathering the global NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) in an effort to bypass 43 and, to a lesser extent, even the UN, which by its abysmal performance has been discredited. And if Hill gets the White House come 2008, there will be a second dual Clinton Presidency. A check of the advisory panels for the four main initiatives reveals a gaggle of the usual suspects--Democrats and their Euro-Socialist types; the presence of a few speakers at the conference who will offer alternate views provides little reassurance. From the Permanent Campaign to the Permanent Presidency. Off "Billary" go. Hold on to your hats.
Clinton Global Initiative
Matt Drudge reports 9/12 that Michael Kinsley, longtime lib and ex-editor of the LA Times editorial page, gave away a trade secret: Mainstream Media (MSM) coaches folks. CNN, it seems, coached CNN anchors to act angry on the air re Hurricane Katrina. (A 9/13 Fox Cable News report says that CNN denies this, but the guest affirms it.)
"The TV news networks, which only a few months ago were piously
suppressing emotional fireworks by their pundits, are now piously
encouraging their news anchors to break out of the emotional
straitjackets and express outrage. A Los Angeles Times colleague of
mine, appearing on CNN last week to talk about Katrina, was told by a
producer to 'get angry.'
AL Times; CNN Coaching re Katrina
The Airbus A380, Europe's 840-passenger Flying Fat Albert, made its maiden flight in Germany yestereday. Presumably, local birds knew to get out of the way. It enters service late-2006.
A380 Flies (Barely)
Ex-WSJ editorial maven Max Boot writes in the 8/16 LA Times in support of Israel's Gaza pullback, noting that if rockets are fired into Israel it will be easier for Israel to strike back, as no longer will Palestinians have the "occupation" excuse. More intriguing is his speculation that an unanticipated consequence of Israel's pullback could be that Gaza-based terrorists strike outside Israel. Israel being heavily defended, Europe and the US, he suggests, are more promising targets. If he is right, Europe will be the target. It is closer, more softly defended, and harbors more Muslim communities to shelter the terrorists before and aid their escape after. Europe may yet pay an extra premium price for its tilt against Israel and appeasement of the Arabs.
Comes now David Frum in his NRO blog with his own, equally intriguing, theory re Gaza pullout. He believes that Sharon did it to put an end to the fiction that the Palestinian troubles are the fault of Israeli suzerainty. Frum sees Sharon calling the West's bluff; Western diplomats wanted slow, negotiated change in tandem with the West Bank and Jerusalem. Instead, Sharon chose rapid change without negotiation. Israel out of Gaza will create a Palestinian Somalia and hotbed of radicalism, whose chief target will be...Egypt. Israel will no longer patrol the Gaza/Egypt border. So Palestinian terror will head for...Cairo.
Boot: Gaza's Risk
Frum: Gaza's Secret
Jacques Chirac giving Arik Sharon the full-monty state guest treatment this week in Paris? All for appearances or something good coming? A Wall Street Journal Europe editor says it is real. The reason is not Sharon's imminent Gaza pullback, which in any event will buy political peace for about 5 minutes from the usual anti-Israel set. Rather, the explosion of Muslim violence against French Jews shook the French governing establishment to its core. After 38 years of appeasing Arab and Muslim countries in pursuit of cheap oil and peace from terror, including giving the Palestinians a pass on the second, barbarous suicide-bomber campaign launched in late 2000, France's leaders saw French Muslims repay serial kindnesses by launching their own mini-jihad. Add in the assassination of Lebanese leader Rafik Hariri, a close Chirac pal.
So, the French, ever pragmatic, are trying out a stiffer spine policy. This may include as well pressing Iran on its nuclear proliferation that the French did so much to help for decades. If Captain Reynaud could shift sides in "Casablanca"....or, as Victor Laszlo said to Rick: "[W]elcome back to the fight. This time I know our side will win." As between France and Israel, surely not "the beginning of a beautiful friendship," but anything beats the last 38 years. Seems that, per the Mideast's famed parable, the frog was stung by the scorpion once too many times.
WSJ: Chirac Shifts
Details emerging from London reveal that the bomber who planted a bomb on a double-decker bus on 7/21 was given a passport despite a prior violent criminal record. Seems the little dear had done 5 years for participating in a series of knife-point muggings at age 17. He was released early for good behavior, despite having converted in prison to radical Islam. It is believed that he then met none other than shoe-bomber Richard Reid at 2 mosques. His parents, law-abiding citizens, turned his name into police after seeing a photo of him taken by a security camera.
Which brings up a column on 7/26 by NRO's Richard Lowry, arguing (correctly) that civil libertarian extremism is blocking many steps we can take to improve our defenses. Security cameras, Lowry concedes, rarely will stop a crime or terror attack. But beyond cavil they can identify perps and help police find them before the strike again. They are credited with reducing IRA bombings during the 1990s, and in several American cities with reducing subway vandalism and open-air drug activity.
Complaints about possible "racial profiling" raised by ACLU absolutists caused NYPD chief Ray Kelly to assure the public the police would not profile. This is yet another example of pre-emptive self-surrender. Comedian Jackie Mason (one of the few celebrities with brains and common sense) and divorce lawyer Raoul Lionel Felder write today on TAS:
"Superimposed upon all of this is the nonsense about racial profiling. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to know that the bombers in the past have not been blond-haired, blue-eyed Scandinavian transsexuals wearing snowshoes. Virtually all of the bombings have been perpetrated by certain groups of people coming from one particular part of the world. It would make no sense to deny our police the right to husband their resources and direct it toward those most likely perpetrators rather than have to waste their time -- and risk our safety -- searching little old ladies. We have the best police force in the world."
NRO's John O'Sullivan, writing today in the Washington Times, sees a clash between the irresistible force of Muslim terror and the immovable object of British public opinion. True, terror does not have the backing of a majority even in the Muslim community. But a substantial minority is at least sympathetic to terror and thus unlikely to help catch terrorists, and the number of potential active terrorists runs in five figures to the left of the decimal point. O'Sullivan notes that IRA terror was conducted by 2 percent of the Irish Catholic population, supported by 10 percent and tolerated by another 20 percent, yet it failed. The recent Daily Telegraph poll numbers charting Muslim attitudes show far higher percentages of UK Muslims in the latter two categories. O'Sullivan believes that a nuke strike by Islamists could trigger a domestic anti-Muslim pogrom, but that nothing short of that kind of catastrophe would do so.
David Ignatius writes in today's Washington Post that the split between Muslims can be drawn on economic lines: the radical rich and the moderate poor, who stand to lose most. His article has compelling examples of the attitudes in the two economic camps.
Tony Blair held a press conference yesterday--the full transcript link is below; it is long, but well worth reading as a survey of Blair's anti-terror thinking as it has evolved. Among other things, Tough Tony acknowledges a "liberal twitch" now and then when proposing sterner domestic security measures. He distinguishes IRA terror in two ways: (a) negotiable political program; (b) no aim to commit mass terror. His government has proposed domestic security measures that include: (1) extending pre-charge detention from 14 days to 3 months, (2) tightening passport control; (3) broader intercept powers; (4) crackdown on extremist bookstores; (5) targeting preparation of materials and training for terrorist acts, expanded to include indirect participation. (The Law Lords struck down earlier domestic measures; Blair said he hopes they will take keep in mind 7/7 and 7/21 when new laws are brought before them for review.)
Tough Tony repeatedly stressed that terror is never justified, regardless of its justification. He told reporters: "September 11 for me was a wake-up call. A lot of the world woke up for a short
time and then turned over and went back to sleep again."
Times of London: Bomber Had Record
Washington Post: Blair Says Folks Went Back to Sleep
Lowry: The ACLU Is Suicidal
Mason & Fowler: Defend Ourselves With Common-Sense Security
O'Sullivan: Brits Will Stay Ready
Ignatius: Muslim Economic Divide
Blair 7/26 Press Conference Transcript
Lance's "magnificent seven" consecutive Tour de France wins completes a 2005 trifecta for faux ami Jacques: (1) losing the EU Constitution vote; (2) blowing the 2012 Olympics vote; (3) seeing Lance set a perhaps unattainable Tour de France record. As the oldest champion since 1952 Lance bows out at the perfect moment, on the cusp of vulnerability, as the article below explains. France did shine in one respect: the girls kissing the various victors on the podium--deux jeaunes filles nouveaux pour chaque vainquer--show that France still produces glorious living distaff architecture.
NY Sun: Lance Leaves Just In Time
Taranto's BOTW found a beaut in a NY Times editorial arguing against giving the FBI broad administrative subpoena power for many types of records--enabling warrantless searches without notice to the target and bypassing judicial approval--in terror cases. But the Times thinks it OK, Taranto notes, for some cases. The quote, then Taranto's comment:
"'The bill's defenders note that administrative subpoenas are already allowed in other kinds of investigations. But these are generally in highly regulated areas, like Medicaid billing. The administrative subpoena power in the new bill would apply to anything the F.B.I. deemed related to alleged foreign intelligence or terrorism, and could, in practice, give the F.B.I. access to almost any private records it wanted.'
"So in the Times' view, it's worth making some compromises on civil liberties when something really weighty is at stake, like Medicaid funding. But terrorism just doesn't rise to that level of importance."
Meanwhile Daniel Pipes gives kudos to...the French, for setting up joint counter-terror intel (Alliance Base, with 6 Western governments) while the UK hosts radical jihadists. France is taking tough steps domestically while the US and UK authorities are stymied by their libertarians.
Taranto: NY Times Jaw-Dropper
NYT: Curb Counter-Terror Powers
Pipes: French Oui, UK No
So there are these 3 guys in a restaurant--a German, a Russian and a Frenchman-- talking about a mutual British acquaintance. The Frenchman says to his pals: "Did you hear the one about the Britisher's sister?...." Leave it to Frere Jacques to get 43 off the G8 Summit griddle. As reported in the Washington Times, based upon a tape recording made by an attending reporter, Chirac told his stuff-the-US chums Gerhard Schroeder and Vladimir Putin:
"As Mr. Chirac, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Russian
President Vladimir Putin traded belly laughs at a cafe in the Russian
city of Kaliningrad -- where they met to mark the city's 750th
anniversary -- Mr. Chirac said, 'the only thing [the British] have
given European agriculture is the mad cow....You can't trust people who cook as badly as that....After Finland, it's the country with the worst food.' At that point, Mr. Putin suggested that American hamburgers
might rank the worst of bad food. '"No, no,' Mr. Chirac replied, 'the
hamburgers -- that's nothing in comparison.'"
Chirac completed his insult trifecta (England, Finland and Scotland) by disparaging as "unappetizing" the Scottish delicacy haggis, which is minced heart, lung and liver boiled in a sheep's stomach. This one the eve of Scotland's hosting the G8 at Gleneagles and from the President of a country that serves calf's brains and snails.
Let's see: Britain helped save France's bacon (pate?) in two world wars; Finland held Stalin's Russia to a standstill; Scotland's William Wallace beat the Brits in 1386. France? It took taxi drivers from Paris to rescue their grand armee in 1914 ("Miracle of the Marne"--Sept. 1914). No wonder 43 is not eager to have French soldiers "help" in Iraq? Who needs crepes Suzette in 130-degree heat?
Thanks for becoming the story of the G8, Jacques. And now with London selected as host of the 2012 Summer Olympics, beating--sacre bleu!--Paris, you're off to a stellar summit. (Oh, and Vlad, your countrymen might line their stomachs with hamburgers before chugging the vodka.)
Washington Times: Chirac's Anti-UK Tirade
Wesley Pruden notes in his 7/5 column what one of the rock-star idiots called Live 8: "This is the greatest thing that's ever been in the entire history of the world!" To which he answers: "Since 'the entire history of the world' includes the extinction of the dinosaurs, the eruption of Krakatoa, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the construction of the pyramids, the Resurrection of Christ and man's landing on the moon, Live 8 had to be impressive mush."
Pruden then cites figures recently released by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission: In the 45 years since Africa gained independence from colonial rule $387 billion has been siphoned off by African "leaders"--nearly all that was sent there (what Sidney Greenstreet told Bogie in Casablanca were "incidental carrying charges"). In current dollars, Pruden informs us, that equals 6 Marshall Plans. Spent on what? Palaces, guns, rockets, mistresses (and hookers), shopping sprees in New York, London and Paris, strip clubs, grand cuisine worldwide, prisons, firing squads, skimming oil revenues (one Nigerian despot's take, $5B). So naturally the UN--no piker at oil scams, the Euro-grandees and rock stars call for...a seventh Marshall Plan.
To be fair, some rock stars have wised up. A WSJ op-ed today quotes U2's Bono, appearing on NBC's Meet the Press, re 43's 5-year, $15 billion AIDS program: "I think he's done an incredible job, his Administration, on AIDS. And 250,000 Africans are on anti-viral drugs. They literally owe their lives to America." Live 8 promoter Bob Geldof compares US and French aid to Africa; Geldof told Time last month: "Actually, today I had to defend the Bush Administration in France again. They refuse to accept, because of their political ideology, that he has actually done more than any American president for Africa. But it's empirically so."
The US Ambassador to Kenya, William Bellamy, knows this as does his boss, one 43. Bellamy startled his hosts at a July 4 dinner in Kenya, by saying: "Turning on the fire hose of international compassion and asking Kenya and other African nations to drink from it is not a serious strategy for promoting growth or ending poverty." This, as Anne Applebaum reports in today's Washington Post, every literate economist knows--the key is "trade, not aid." The US and UK have offered to jettison farm subsidies if the European continentals do so. Fat chance.
The late Lord P.T. Bauer once famously called traditional foreign aid "the transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries." Ready to throw more money down the sewer? The UN and its Euro-pals are.
Wes Pruden: Slaking Thirst With a Fire Hose
Applebaum: Live 8 Meets Big 2
WSJ Op-Ed: G8 & Africa
Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum reports on global anti-Americanism and finds that those overseas who like us do so for two reasons: (1) because they perceive themselves to have been tangible beneficiaries of US help--the over-60 set in countries the US was allied with in World War II, the 30-44 set who appreciate Ronald Reagan's press to free Eastern Europe; or (2) because many embrace "aspirational" values and see America as a shining example of upward mobility. N.B., The aspirational class differs from country to country"; it denotes low-income folks in Britain and South Korea, but middle- and high-income folks in India.
Nuggets from the Pew Global Attitudes Project whose findings Applebaum relies upon: 43% of French, 42% of Chinese & Lebanese and 41% of Germans like us. Most French who disapprove hold a highly unfavorable view of us; more Spanish like the Chinese than like us; Canadian support for America has declined sharply. Applebaum notes what she calls "a surprising degree" of support in Vietnam, Indonesia, Brazil and the Philippines.
One factor Applebaum omits clearly plays a major role in anti-US feelings: foreign press reporting on the US. Thomas Friedman said earlier this year on TV that European press coverage of the US in the Mideast is no better than that offered by al-Jazeera. Thus, most of what folks abroad get from domestic news organizations about the US is lies and half-truths.
Applebaum's bottom line: The US should woo support abroad via Presidential visits and diplomatic initiatives. No argument from here. Why doesn't 43 pay a visit to the Antipodes--not for a day or two, but for 10? Best-pal Australia, whose youth are not keen on us, should be a top-priority visit. There are, however, some attitudes.... So the Spaniards like the Chinese more than us? The Chinese are friendlier to Spain than we are (this sentence replaces one ill-chosen yesterday)? Our response to this idiocy in Iberia? Pass. Try playing CDs of Alicia deLarrocha (classical piano), Andres Segovia (classical guitar) and Manitas de Plata (flamenco), and loft a premium Manzanilla. Savor the glories of Spain.
Applebaum: Attitudes Towards Uncle Sam
Ever-witty and on-target Mark Steyn writes in the UK Spectator that if a country wants help it should ask the Pentagon and the Royal Australian Navy, not the UN or the Europeans. Bosnia, Steyn writes, is a mess, riven with Muslim fanaticism and in worse shape than Iraq. Much tsunami relief aid sits on docks, or has been skimmed off by the usual suspects--corrupt locals who loot right under the noses of name-NGOs that profess to care about the world's poor. Steyn suggests that the two best ways to help Africa are free trade and to "stop making a multicultural virtue of denuding the continent of its best and brightest--Birmingham now has more Malawian nurses than Malawi."
Steyn quotes a Quebec acquaintance whining re the tsunami response: "Can you believe those Americans? A humanitarian disaster strikes and they send an aircraft carrier!" Yep, and while the American and Australian militarize saved lives, the European diplo-sharks hung around the tsunami-country hotels with their UN pals, holding conferences to plan how to help and making sure they had 24/7 room service and the usual amenities.
A visit to the now defunct Diplomad website will provide juicy details. (You will have to scroll down a week or two of articles to reach the good stuff, but if you have not seen it the wait is worth it. His blog ran from Dec 26 until it ended Feb. 5.) As Diplomad pointed out, the UN regards aid funneled through the UN as aid, but not US aircraft carriers. Hudson Institute's Carol Adelman (full disclosure: I am a Hudson trustee) has written on the phony numbers on foreign aid, with more detail than anyone else; she shows Uncle Sam is number one, not dead last, among developed-nation givers.
To Steyn's twin nostrums I would add a third: regime change in grotesquely misgoverned places. Do not hold your breath for the usual suspects in the international aid merry-go-round--the UN and its Euro-pals--to do any of the above, or recognize US generosity.
Steyn rightly identifies America's true best friend as Aussie PM John Howard, and concludes with a neat quote from Aussie Foreign Minister Alexander Downer: "Iraq was a clear example about how outcomes are more important than
blind faith in the principles of non-intervention, sovereignty and
multilateralism.... Increasingly multilateralism is a synonym for an
ineffective and unfocused policy involving internationalism of the
lowest common denominator. Multilateral institutions need to become
more results-oriented." That'll be the day.
Steyn: Action Stations
Diplomad: A Mad Mad World Indeed
Carol Adelman: Bio & Articles
A New York Times article today informs us that former French President Valery Giscard D'Estaing blames current French president Jacques Chirac for the defeat of Giscard's 448-article EU constitution. Giscard told Chirac not to send French voters the entire text--it would "confuse" voters--but Chirac went ahead because he believed the law required him to send it. Giscard is not modest about his handiwork, having recently rated it " as perfect as, perhaps less elegant than, the Constitution of the United States of America." One would think that in the land whose greatest wines are perfect due to their unmatched elegance that Giscard would know you cannot have the one (perfection) without the other (elegance).
Giscard had been called "the Mozart of politics" for his draftsmanship. The 18th century Mozart was famous for penning compositions without corrections--the music simply flowed from brain to paper. If Giscard penned 448 articles without hitting the delete key he may indeed qualify as a genius of sorts. Make of him an "anti-matter Mozart," as elegance and 448 articles go together like Mozart and rap music. Wait for the movie (Chirac as Salieri?). For now, read the entire article and savor.
NY Times: Giscard Blames Chirac
If there remains any doubt that the 43-Tony Blair love-fest has passed its zenith, Bob Novak shows convincingly that fondly though we will always remember Tony hanging tough on terror, he has returned to his Europhile roots. Novak reports that at next month's G8 meeting in Scotland, Blair will push Bush hard on Kyoto--he already has lobbied Senators behind 43's back. Novak then offers a juicy soundbite from Swedish EC VP Margot Wallstrom's 2001 take on Kyoto: "[Kyoto is] not a simple environmental issue...this is about international relations, this is about economy--about trying to create a level playing field."
A WSJ editorial last week presented numbers compiled by the Copenhagen Consensus, a group featuring three Nobel Laureates in economics, started by Danish author-statistician Bjorn Lomborg, whose book, The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge Univ. Press 2001), enraged Greens worldwide. His group estimates that to reduce global temperature rise from 7.3 to 6.1 degrees centigrade (from 13.1 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2300--yes, three centuries from now--would require global expenditure of $94 trillion--yes, trillion--in 1990 value, i.e., in 2005 dollars, $139.81 trillion. Rounding, for a one-degree centigrade (i.e., 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) reduction over three centuries we pay $140 trillion up front.
To say nothing of the flimsy foundation underneath Kyoto: climate models that are laughably unreliable. A sound computer model requires two things: (1) sufficient density of data points; (2) an algorithm that accurately mimics system behavior. On the first, climate data remain notoriously sketchy. On the second, we still do not know how the immensely complex global climate engine works, and thus cannot model it. Garbage in, garbage out. Errors cumulate with each wrong calculation. We can design airplanes on a computer--as was done with the Boeing 777--because we have dense data points for the entire airframe, and we know exactly how the atmosphere 2 to 10 miles up interacts with an aluminum tube slicing through it at high subsonic speeds. If planes were built using models like those used to model climate, the good news is they would not get off the ground. If they did, then would come the bad news.
So Kyoto is quintessential EU-nomics: level down by hamstringing America, instead of leveling up by competing honestly in the marketplace, and bankrupt everyone in the bargain. WSJ shows a chart from the Copenhagen group that ranks from best to worst how the world might spend $50 billion. At the top: HIV/AIDS, malaria prevention, micro-nutrients and trade liberalization; at bottom, Kyoto. Check out the entire chart.
Oh well, it was wonderful while it lasted. To be fair, Tough Tony will always rank as a true friend, and not the faux amis that Weenie Watch normally chronicles. But when true pals "go weenie" they must be called on it. Tony, it's nothing personal. We still love ya.
Novak: G8 Kyoto Full-Court Press
WSJ: Trillions for Enviro-Defense, One Degree Tribute
The Inflation Calculator
The felicitous external event of my weblog hiatus was the French/Dutch-voter twin missiles aimed at the fuselage of the Constitutional blimp produced by former French Prexy Valery Giscard D'Estaing. Call it the Airbus A380 Constitution: Just as the A380 is a Flying "Fat Albert" so the EU Constitution is a draftsman's "Fat Albert." Compared to it the US model is a "Dreamliner" Constitution after Boeing's fabulous 787. (Numerologists: 1787 to 787; did Boeing see this? Probably not: 787 simply comes after 777. Suffice to say that the US edition did fly and the Giscard edition has been grounded.)
The 6/11/05 Daily Standard has a delicious parody that captures Giscard's pomposity and prolixity perfectly. As best as I can recall, Giscard at one point compared his work, with characteristic Gallic modesty, to that of Jefferson. It is unclear whether Giscard knew that Jefferson was (where else?) in France when the Constitution was drafted--the 1787 document was the work primarily of New York delegate Gouverneur Morris (known for amatory escapades the French celebrate) and Pennsylvania's James Wilson (later a Justice on the original Supreme Court). Presumably Giscard knows that the Wizard of Monticello did draft the Declaration of Independence. The EU "Fat Albert" shows Giscard did not learn anything from the Declaration's elegant prose. BTW, TJ thought the Presidency as proposed (and adopted) in the 1787 Constitution "a bad edition of a Polish king." Wonder what he'd a thunk of the EU?
OK, making a parody on the EU Constitution is a redundancy, but enjoy anyway.
Daily Standard: Parody of EU Constitituion
WSJ op-ed writers present evidence that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is deeply biased against America. Leaks from interviews in Iraq and at Guantanamo designed to embarrass the US, inviolation of ICRC pledges of confidentiality in return for access; describing indefinite detention as "tantamount to torture" when POWs may, even under the Geneva Convention (which does not apply to terrorist group members), be confined for the duration of war; an ICRC official comparing US detention practices to--yes--Nazi Germany. Yet another international body in thrall to the international Left, and given sacred cow status by its mythic name. Hagiographic coverage of such groups is another old media mortal sin.
WSJ - ICRC Bias
Excessive fastidiousness about legal rights gives a new lease on life to yet another arch-terrorist, courtesy of a European tribunal whose rulings will likely influence the International Criminal Court that the US rightly resists joining, reports a WSJ op-ed. If so,the ICC would bid fair to do for international criminal justice what Earl Warren did for the US and the European Commission on Human Rights (ECHR) is apparently doing for Europe: transform the right to a fair trial into an entitlement to a perfect one. A Turkish court convicted the former leader of the Turkish PKK, a Marxist terror group, but now the ECHR throws the verdict out in what the WSJ terms (probably rightly) an "open-and-shut case." The defendant was, after all, the leader of the terror group. Why toss out the verdict? Because (a) a military judge presided for part of the trial, (b) alleged undue delay in bringing charges, and (c) supposedly not enough time given for the defendant to consult with his lawyer.
Just the kind of case for the ECHR to apply hyper-formalist jurisprudence. Much like the Zacharias Moussaoui case here, which tied the US prosecution up for close to four years. Such procedural perfectionism cost thousands of US lives in the past forty years. Applied to terrorists it could easily cost many more lives in in a far briefer time-span. Try hundreds of thousands in a single afternoon.
Procedural formalism is to liberals the ultimate test of seriousness; striking a balance between formalism and real-life imperfection is the lodestar for conservatives. And in wartime that should tilt much closer to erring on the side of getting maximum information from captives and keeping them isolated until they cooperate--and even after, in the most serious cases.
Donald Rumsfeld deserves credit for one thing his critics seem to
want to forget: The US is in a war for its national life. Once more
with feeling: We are at war. When fighting for your life in an
alley, the Marquis of Queensberry Rules are not the first thing you
think of. You may elect restraint, but never forget: IN WAR, WINNING
UGLY BEATS LOSING PRETTY.
WSJ: Terror Court
Newsweek columnist George Will sees three "interesting--and dismaying--facets of the contemporary European mind" (1) Putin's Stalinist pretensions, which are wrecking Russia and endangering Euro-peace; (2) Chirac's anti-US venom--he styles US-UK policy as neo-communism; and (3) the aggressively secularist orientation of the European public that Pope Benedict hopes to "re-evangelize." Putin's superpower aspiration Will puts in perspective, noting that Russia's GDP is roughly the same as that for Los Angeles County (not a misprint). Will wonders if even 5 percent of today European public really think about history; he notes that while there was a mega-outpouring of Euro- grief over John Paul II's passing, so was there for the passing of Princess Diana. Will is right. A public that mourns equally the passing on of a titan and and a glitzy, ditzy celebrity is not one with a true collective sense of history.
Will: Aspects of Europe's Mind
Corriere Della Sera, an Italian paper generally reasonably fair to the US, believes that the US has been insensitive in its handling of the Iraq checkpoint shooting of two Italians, discussed in my May 3 posting (The Italian Job). Here is their (translated) editorial.
The US Attitude Toward the Calipari Case
John O'Sullivan offers his take on how to interpret the May 5 UK election results. It is full of intriguing, to borrow a Kerry-ism but use it in an approving sense, "nuance." I shall not attempt to sum it up. His piece makes for entertaining reading, too.
O'Sullivan: Election Tea-Leaves
The Italians released the full Pentagon report--including classified sections naming soldiers and describing checkpoint procedures--on the accidental fatal shooting of an agent and wounding of a journalist as their car approached an American checkpoint near the Baghdad airport. The report blames stress, fatigue and inexperience of the American soldiers. Imagine, stress and fatigue in a war zone. Imagine, stress and fatigue on the most dangerous road on the planet.
It gets better. The Italians blame the US for failing to figure out that the car was carrying Italians--even though the Italians now concede that they failed to notify the US about the car. Yet in the fog of war the US was supposed to divine innocent cargo. A CBS report based on satellite photos said the car was traveling 60 mph--that's 88 feet per second, at which speed a car covers a football field in 3.4 seconds. So with seconds to decide and no prior warning from the Italians, in a war zone, stressed, fatigued soldiers were supposed to figure everything out.
A New York Times story carries more intriguing details: (1) the Italians decided that secrecy was best for the operation; (2) there had been 135 attacks on the airport road in the previous four months--i.e., more than one attack per day; (3) American soldiers at the checkpoint had been warned that night that two suicide-bomber cars were in the area, one black and one white; (4) the Italians' Toyota was white. (The Times story gives a 50 mph speed for the car. The Italian passenger-journalist, Ms. Guliana Sgrena, says her car was going only 30 mph, but she is a liar--see below. The driver also claims it, but how likely is it that a car on a secret mission would travel at such a leisurely pace? OK, split the difference on the assumption that the driver, unlike Ms. Sgrena, is truthful, and use 45 mph--a football field would then be traversed in 4.5 seconds.)
Normally sensible, moderate-left blogger Mickey Kaus suggests that because the Pentagon has an interest in discrediting Ms. Sgrena, its assertion is dubious. But what about the claims of Ms. Sgrena, a communist America-hater who accused the soldiers of deliberately targeting her? (Originally, her claim was 300 to 400 shots fired--see Roger Simon blog link below.) She would have us believe American soldiers can't hit a car and kill all the occupants, were that their intention. Ask fighters in Fallujah how well Americans shoot.
For the Italian view to be taken seriously, a standard of near perfection must be applied to the conduct of soldiers at the checkpoint. In wartime. In the dark. Without prior notice. Warned that a suicide-bomber car of similar color was in the area. Regardless of physical or mental condition of the soldiers. A life or death call--in less than five seconds. Score one more for mendacious, anti-US Euro-media and whiny European publics. BTW, when is the last time anyone saw an Italian driver going only 30 mph? They park at 40.
WSJ: Italians Release Report on Iraq Shooting
NY Times: Italian Report
Kaus on the Satellite "Claim"
Roger Simon 3/5/05 Blog: Comments
Mark Steyn tells us that this Thursday Tony Blair will win, but that Gordon Brown will succeed him in mid-term. Brown shares his party's anti-American views. It will, Steyn notes, take French rejection of the EU Constitution on May 29 to contain the damage. But Blair was, Steyn continues, only a friend of ours on the war--and at that, foolishly hyper-legalist in his approach. Tough Tony stood strong with us on the war, but he is no John Howard, who stands strong with us on everything.
NRO's John O'Sullivan sees Tony falling short as well, and neatly states what the Tories saw that law-minded Tough Tony did not see: "The Tories saw where this naïve internationalism led — dressing up a Russian or French veto, actually cast from squalid self-interest, as the collective moral judgment of mankind." O'Sullivan (who was an adviser to Lady Thatcher), further notes that Blair's pro-EU stance is at odds with his Mideast position on Iraq. Tory leader Michael Howard, by contrast, said that even absent WMD he would have supported toppling Saddam. But Howard is given no chance to win.
Like the Maggie for Major (John) trade in 1990, this will be a bad trade for the US. Major spared Saddam in 1991, something Maggie surely would not have done ("There you go again, George, being wobbly; you can't let that man stay after all this!"). Of the three Western European leaders who most publicly supported 43's Iraq venture, one is long gone, one is soon going and the third, Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, is under siege.
At bottom, blame the European press and the public. Most of the Euro-media is, as NY times columnist Thomas Friedman recently observed, no better than al-Jazeera in its war and Mideast coverage. As for the public, the news is even more depressing: The Spanish allow al-Qai'da to pick their leader, the British public worries about international law while multiculturalism rots their social fabric and the Italians listen to an America-hating communist journalist's lies about US troops trying to kill her at an Iraqi checkpoint. And our Europhile State Department wants a united Europe, as if a stronger Europe united in opposition to America is a good thing.
Steyn: Buddy System Wins, Loses
O'Sullivan: The Iraq Effect
TAS Online's Jed Babbin warns us that Vladimir Putin has allied Russia with Syria and Iran, and plans to sell armored personnel carriers to the Palestinians. He has already sold missiles to the Syrians, which could endanger US warplanes should 43 decide to strike. A half-century ago Moscow sought Mideast influence by backing pan-Arabist Gamal Abdel Nasser, who promptly nationalized the Suez Canal and ignited revolution elsewhere in the Mideast. In July 1958 radical regimes seized power in Syria and Iraq. From there until 2003 it was mainly downhill.
Comes now Vladimir Putin, seeking influence in the Mideast. Having backed Saddam he now aids Bashir Assad in Syria. Putin, who openly laments the collapse of the Soviet Union and admires arch-mass-murderer Stalin, has outlived his usefulness to the US (helping in Afghanistan, allowing the ABM Treaty to lapse). We cannot openly break with him, due to the need for Russian cooperation in dismantling its nuclear arsenal. But we should, as the saying goes, keep our powder dry. Putin is not quite Stalin, but he is not Boris Yeltsin either.
Babbin: Russia's Mideast Move
The State Department is not called Foggy Bottom for nothing. NRO"s Andrew McCarthy informs us that State's weenie bureaucracy declines to release the latest data on global terrorist attacks. Last year the 2003 numbers were spun--inaccurately, it turns out--by Colin Powell and his deputy, Rich Armitage. So we are in a war on terror and cannot have basic metrics? The numbers include non-Islamic groups unrelated to our war. And as McCarthy notes, progress in the war is not a raw quantity. No 9/11 since 9/11 is a better yardstick, as is democracy's march.
Making matters nuttier, Condi apparently was persuaded by Philip Zelikow, her counselor, who was staff director of the 9/11 panel. Numbers were 22 in 2002, 175 in 2003 and 655 last year. Iraq went from 22 in 2003 to 198 in 2004. The Iraqi jump is entirely consistent with the insurgents' all-put campaign to derail elections. Craziest of all: Does anyone think State's decision will stand? The State Department still needs, as former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick said, a Department of American Interests.
Andrew McCarthy: "Release 'Em
Washington Post: Terror Figures Rise in 2004
NRO's John O'Sullivan reports that a left-wing newspaper's publication of a government legal analysis stating that without UN approval the Iraq War was illegal, a report that Tough Tony ignored--and, perhaps more significantly, denied receiving in the run up to the war, will not lead to Labor's defeat, but more likely will lead to Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown replacing tough Tony as British PM. Bad news for the US, as Brown shares his party's dovish, UN-first instincts. Regrettably, so does the British public. The Liberals, not the Tories, will benefit from the damage to Tough Tony. Which means that the UK is poised to become Brussels West.
Does this mean that 43 was wrong to bypass the UN and go to war? No. Going to the UN was an unfortunate necessity if the Brits were to join us (and the Aussies as well). UN approval would never have come--even if WMD were found, as France and Russia would have blocked it, if only to continue profiting from Saddam's largesse. But the bald fact of life facing the US is that around the world the UN is regarded as a source of legitimacy. That the UN on its historical track record has shown, with exceptions all too rare, that it can neither organize a two-car funeral nor stop a candy store robbery, is simply beside the point to the anti-US set.
So what to do if Blair loses? Soldier on, with such coalitions of the willing as we can muster, on a case-by-case basis. US Republicans and most Israelis are from Mars; US Democrats and Europeans are from Venus. If people--and their governments--think the UN and international lawyers can stop the likes of bin Ladin and al-Zarqawi, what Alexander Solzhenitsyn said in his 1978 commencement address at Harvard, in the Cold War context, applies even more today.
Regarding Western hopes for detente, the great writer warned: "There is, for instance, a self-deluding interpretation of the contemporary world situation. It works as a sort of petrified armor around people's minds. Human voices from 17 countries of Eastern Europe cannot pierce it. It will only be broken by the pitiless crowbar of events."
Solzhenitsyn's speech, given during the time of Jimmy Carter, proved excessively pessimistic. Within three years Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, leaders without self-delusion, came to power. Karol the Great, Maggie the Magnificent and the Gipper heard the voices of freedom from Europe's East, and led the West to victory. Sadly, the prospects of three such leaders coming forth at a given time are never good, and hardly seems likely now. Awful to say it, but it may well take a WMD 9/11 to wake up the Venus set to the UN's impotence.
John O'Sullivan: War Now Major UK Election Issue
Solzhenitsyn: "A World Split Apart"
The French vote on the new European Constitution, all 511 pages of it, on May 29. D. Kelly Jones, writing in TAS online, notes that Turkey's EU admission is a big issue, and that May 29, 1453 was the date that the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople. OOPS! Look at the bright side: May 29, 1453 was a Tuesday; it will fall on Sunday in 2005. Also, the Turks conquered Byzantium, not Europe (they tried the latter, but failed to breach the gates of Vienna in 1683, leaving coffee for the locals). Then again, the people we call Byzantine called themselves Romans, as they were the seat of the Eastern Roman Empire. Which brings us (and the French) back to Square One.
Jones: Springtime in Paris
Tom Lehman writes in The Weekly Standard that French voters may yet pull the rug out from the EU Constitution come May 29. Chirac's recent public appearance increased to 56 percent the anti-EU poll number. Seems that the prospect of Turkey entering the EU intersects with rising concern over Franc's unassimilated Muslim population, now 10 percent of the total. Surely it also does not help that the Constitution, drafted by former French PM Valery Giscard D-Estaing, is nearly as long as War and Peace, but without Tolstoyian eloquence. Will the Battle of Brussels supplant the Battle of Borodino as an historic ignominious French defeat (one of many)? Chirac, who has Napoleon's flaws without his virtues, will need media propaganda to pull this one out.
Lehman: "Chirac's Constitution"
NRO's John O'Sullivan warns about May 5 UK election. Tough Tony will try to steer a middle course between Tory "Market Britain" and the liberals "Official Britain." The former stands for free markets and gave the UK the world's fourth largest economy; the latter are the UK's equivalent of Unclee Sam's teachers' unions. But the Tories have not made their case.
Tale of Two Britains
Tough Tony is a friend, but Labor is not. So worry big time about this election. UK weenies are on the march, and Tough Tony is as much as a target as are the Tories.