Tobacco Road Fogey

2003-09-20T09:35:00.000-04:00

News about hurricane blogging

Here's an article from the dead-tree press about bloggers and hurricane blogging.

Congrats to Bloviating Inanities, Wizbang, One Fine Jay, and Silent Running for being quoted in the article. I can't be sure, since the reporter didn't specifically cite this place, but I think I'm the anonymous North Carolina blogger who was "listening to ham radios while at the same time blogging."

Thanks to Say Uncle for sending me an email about this article.

2003-09-20T09:13:00.000-04:00

Another hurricane blogger

Check out Unfreezing. He is a ham radio operator who did emergency communications duty at one of the shelters in Pitt County, NC (near Greenville), much closer to where the eye of Isabel passed through the state.

He's a new blogger, so go over and encourage him to tell some of his hurricane stories.

2003-09-18T22:05:00.000-04:00

10 PM Update

Things are slowly heading back toward normal. The winds are down to around 10 mph sustained and 20 mph gusts. A very light mist is falling, and the streets and sidewalks are beginning to dry from the constant breeze.

Looks like this will be the last update for today, since my employer will be open for business tomorrow, barring any overnight accidents such as power failures.

Good luck and stay safe to all of you folks north and east of here. I'll be looking forward to seeing what kind of a dance you guys get from Isabel.

2003-09-18T20:08:00.000-04:00

8 PM update

Still some wind and rain, but the winds have subsided significantly. Occasional gusts that I can hear inside the house, but I haven't heard anything strike the house for about an hour or so.

The college students that live next door have been stirring around a little. I've heard a couple of car doors slamming over there.

Power has been on and steady for about an hour. Little "twinkles" here and there, but not enough to knock the TV off the air.

I think I'll fix myself some supper and watch Emeril Live. He's doing the "pork fat" thing with sausages tonight.

Mmmmm. Sausages.

2003-09-18T19:14:00.000-04:00

Power out

Power went out here at FogeyBase at 5:55 pm for the longest amount of time yet today. It was restored 55 minutes later, so no major problems here. We lost power for about 18 hours during Hurricane Fran in 1996, so 1 hour is not too bad.

During the power outage, I went outside to look around before sunset. Lots of leaves and small tree branches scattered around on the ground, but there was only a light sprinkle of rain and the wind gusts are much reduced in intensity. Besides, with no A/C or fans available indoors with the power out, the FogeyWife would beat me to death with one of our newly purchased flashlights if I were to light up a cigarette indoors.

So I went out to smoke. Conditions appear to be about what they were around noon, except for the wind direction, which is swinging around to the opposite of what it was this morning.

2003-09-18T17:01:00.000-04:00

Current conditions 5PM

Wind gusts are significantly stronger and last longer, and a strong rain band appears to be trying to move in to the Raleigh area, according to local TV. I heard a few branches or pine cones or something bounce off the roof about 5 minutes ago -- the first impacts of this storm.

Local TV is also starting to show large trees broken off and uprooted in areas much closer to FogeyBase. Also, more reports of localized flooding.

FogeyWife is in the bedroom taking a nap. I guess things aren't too bad if she's able to sleep. Of course, she slept through the second half of Fran in 1996 also.

2003-09-18T16:10:00.000-04:00

Take a look

Stole this idea from Michele:

NCDOT Traffic Cameras. Click on Triangle and then click on the "Exit 287 -- Harrison Avenue" link to get a view of I-40 about 6 miles from my house.

Local television is saying that the next 3-4 hours will be the worst for the Triangle area. The last radar view I saw has the eye of the storm over just east of Greenville, NC, or about 90-100 miles east of here. Wind gusts are still up in the 40's here. No hurricane force gusts reported in this area yet, but possible in the next few hours.

2003-09-18T15:45:00.000-04:00

Getting a little more serious

Just heard a call for ham operators to man communications at local emergency helters. A couple of shelters were open earlier, but it looks like the local emergency management officials are going to open several more in the next hour. Don't know if this was the plan or not.

Local ham repeaters are fairly quiet. Most of the wide-coverage repeaters in the area are reserved for emergency net operations, so not much chit-chat can be heard. I'm having to keep the squelch locked fairly tight on both radios to keep the computers from interfering with their scans.

More and more power glitches happening, with a couple of two-minute outages in the past hour. Looks like I'm pretty lucky with power so far, since large outages have been reported throughout the county.

I'm getting a kick out of watching the reporters from the local TV stations who are out roaming through eastern North Carolina. It's really glamorous to be out in rains whipped up by gale force winds, isn't it?

2003-09-18T15:00:00.000-04:00

Current conditions

Winds are definitely picking up. I can hear them whistling outside the house now, where I couldn't before. WRAL-TV is reporting peak gusts in the 40's here and 50's just about 60 miles to the east of here. Ham radio ops are reporting more power failures and trees down (largest thus far was about 20 inches in diameter, which fell into a pond in the eastern part of my county).

Barometric pressure is dropping steadily, down about 10 millibars in the last three hours. Only about an inch and a half of rain at RDU airport so far, though.

Amazing how much this is like Fran was a few years ago, except this is happening during daylight and not at night. Much less scary this way, in my opinion

2003-09-18T14:43:00.000-04:00

She's getting closer

Had to switch over to my laptop, because we're having too many of those annoying little power flickers that are just long enough to cause my desktop machine to go down and reboot.

I started to stop at Best Buy on the way home from work yesterday to buy a UPS, but changed my mind. Of course, I was also planning on going to work early this morning, which would have kept me from blogging.

Oh, well.

2003-09-18T13:44:00.000-04:00

FogeyWife is home

Yes! She's home and safe, if a little bit wet.

And she even brought me some burritos from Taco Bell.

I love that woman.

2003-09-18T13:13:00.000-04:00

Another hurricane blogger

Another NC hurricane blogger: The Blind Man Eateth Many A Fly

He's up on the northeast side of this storm, above Cape Hatteras.

Good luck, my friend. Batten down and take care.

2003-09-18T12:58:00.001-04:00

First trip out today

On Sunday, the FogeyWife and I went out to the local Wal-Mart and stocked up on the things we'd be likely to need as a result of Isabel -- batteries, bottled drinking water, flashlights, etc. We bought plenty of AA, AAA, and D batteries, but no C batteries since I couldn't think of anything that needed C cells.

Guess what? The portable radio I was planning to use in case of power failure uses C's. Murphy's laws in action, of course.

Just got back from a trip down to the local C-store for a couple of packs of C cells. Light rain, gusty winds, and a lot of leaves, pine straw, small branches, etc. blown down into the roads already. Nothing scary happening yet. The one local street that has a habit of getting a sizable flooding pool on it during heavy rains is starting to puddle up. And the eye of Isabel has just started coming ashore down in the Atlantic Beach area within the past hour.

Crap! I forgot to charge up my backup gel-cell for the ham equipment. At least I've got plenty of AA's for the two HT's. On receive-only, they'll last for days.

2003-09-18T12:58:00.000-04:00

Riding out Isabel update #1

Latest news heard on the amateur radio nets:

Flooding on low spots on local roads
The two-meter ham repeater used for SKYWARN and Emergency Operations Center communications announced that it had a power failure, so it's probably on backup power. In the past, it's had several hours of power available, so no worries just yet.
The National Hurricane Center seems to have lost touch with its teams at Cape Hatteras, NC. FEMA also appears to have lost touch with its teams in that area. Both agencies requesting amateur radio operators to assist in relaying radio traffic.
Power failures being reported in northern parts of Raleigh and Wake County. Had our first power flicker here about 15 minutes ago, but didn't cause anything to go down

2003-09-18T12:57:00.000-04:00

Blogging from the hurricane zone

Yeah, Hurricane Isabel is headed this general direction. The latest local weather reports have the eye of Isabel passing about 40-50 miles east of FogeyBase sometime mid- to late-afternoon today. The current weather conditions here are light rain and gusty winds (maximum about 25-30 mph). The forecast for later today is for increasing winds (40-60 mph) and heavier rain (1-4 inches here, more the further east you go).

My employer told us to stay home today, but the FogeySpouse had to go in this morning. She's a nurse at one of the medical clinics associated with our county's largest medical center, and the powers-that-be decided to keep the clinics open this morning. She called me about a half-hour ago to tell me that her clinic is going to close down about lunchtime, and she hopes that they'll let the staff go home, rather than redeploying them to locations in the main hospital. I'll know more in a couple of hours when she calls to let me know.

As for me, I'm sitting here monitoring my ham radios for reports from the SKYWARN spotters that are helping out the National Weather Service with reports about conditions in their areas. I just heard a SKYWARN report from Kill Devil Hills, NC, reporting heavy rain, sustained winds of 40 mph with gusts to 60 mph, and that power is now out on Hatteras Island and Okracoke Island. Also, RDU airport appears to have cancelled all of their outgoing flights, due to wind gusts approaching 40 mph in the area.

I'll try to keep blogging throughout the day, if the power stays on. I've also located some links for those of you who'd like to virtually experience an oncoming hurricane. Here are three of them, and I'll update with additional ones as I find them.

NWS radar loop from Morehead City, NC

WRAL-TV, Raleigh, NC live continuous coverage online. (requires Real Player)

Amateur radio link with National Hurricane Center in Miami, FL, via the Internet Radio Linking Project. I was able to listen to this using WinAmp. There appears to be a couple of minute delay between the audio I hear on my local IRLP node and the audio being streamed from NHC.

2003-09-18T12:53:00.000-04:00

Backup blogging here

Looks like an Instalanche has snockered my Blog-City site, so I'll be using this old place as a backup for my Hurricane Isabel blogging.

Maybe Blog*Spot will hold up better than Blog-City. Who knows? I'll transfer today's previous posts from the Blog-City site now.

2003-05-29T11:27:00.000-04:00

New stuff up at the new place

I've got some new pieces up at my new home. Please update your blogrolls and bookmarks -- or you might miss something.

2003-05-24T18:31:00.000-04:00

Taking the plunge

I'm moving Tobacco Road Fogey to a new blog home. The past week has been very trying for those of us here at Blog*Spot and I've decided to try a new host.

The location of the new Tobacco Road Fogey is here. I'd appreciate it if all of you could update your bookmarks and blogrolls to point to the new site.

I'll still be checking here for comments for a couple of weeks.

Many thanks to all of you who read here on a regular basis and I look forward to seeing you at the new place.

2003-05-19T01:44:00.000-04:00

Dear President Bush

Whether you know it or not, Mr. President, your "roadmap" for Middle East peace is already dead -- stillborn before it was ever released.

If Mexicans or Canadians were sneaking across our borders and blowing themselves up in our major cities, we'd be demanding that you be impeached if you refused to send our military forces into those countries to annihilate potential bombers and those who support them.

When you sent American forces against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, we supported you.

When you sent our troops into Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein and his Baathist regime, we supported you.

Why do you deny the same right of self-defense to Israel?

If the price of the pathetically meager support for the Iraq campaign by a few Arab nations was to sell Israel's security down the river, that price was too high.

What happened to "you are with us, or you are with the terrorists"? Where do the homicide bombers and the organizations that support them get their money and their explosives? Why are we pressuring the only democracy in the entire region to come to some kind of agreement with people whose sole purpose in life is to destroy the state of Israel and to drive the Israeli people out of the land of Israel?

When a terrorist crosses an international border to commit his act of carnage, it is an act of war.

If it's war that the terrorists want, then war they should get. And we should support that war.

If the dictatorships, monarchies, and theocracies of the Muslim Middle East cannot bring themselves to recognize Israel's right to exist and to bring all necessary pressure on those among themselves who support these terrorists, then they have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are not our friends.

And we should stop treating them as friends, and start treating them as the enemies they are.

If you really want my vote next year, Mr. President, you'll stand by our friends as they fight our enemies.

You have the chance to make your choice now.

I'll make mine in November 2004.

Which way are we going -- against our friends or against our enemies?

2003-05-14T00:48:00.000-04:00

Policy on trolls

For every blog, there is a troll,
And a time for every trolling in the blogiverse:
A time to read, and a time to ignore;
A time to provoke and a time to rebut;
A time to scorn, and a time to revile;
A time to rebuke and a time to denounce;
A time to revise, and a time to delete;
A time to warn and a time to ban.

(inspired by a good book)

2003-05-14T00:00:00.000-04:00

Books we'll never see

Due to cutbacks in the publishing industry and the fickle winds of fate, here are some books we're not likely to see on the shelves of our local Barnes & Noble:

Assessing Risk: Life's Lessons From the Casino Floor, by William J. Bennett, PhD.

Fundamentals of Journalism, by Jayson Blair

Reaching Out To The World, by Patrick J. Buchanan

Lone Star: My Favorite Texas Stories. by Natalie Maines

My Favorite After-Dinner Jokes, by Sen. Trent Lott

Cooperstown: A Tribute, by Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon

Mickey and Me, by Michael Moore

Heh: The Life of an Internet Pundit, by Glenn Reynolds

2003-05-12T00:34:00.000-04:00

No-beverages-near-the-monitor alert

If you are a Star Trek fan (original series or The New Generation), don't miss this top-ten list over at Happy Fun Pundit.

My monitor needed good-blog-humor-aftermath wipers at #5.

(via the crotchety ol' Cracker)

2003-05-11T04:47:00.000-04:00

A needed flashback

I was flipping channels on the TV yesterday afternoon when I just happened to land on CMT (Country Music Television, for those of you who don't frequent the channel). Being a good Southern boy, I stopped to listen for a few minutes and heard this song, immediately followed by this song.

Choked me up tighter than the local freeway at rush hour, and I had to shed a tear or two at some of the images on the Worley video.

For all of you who panned Darryl Worley when "Have You Forgotten?" came out, what happened to me yesterday afternoon happens to a lot of people down here in the South when they hear that song. You sophisticates may find the song simplistic or corny or even dead wrong, but it speaks volumes to some of us.

Love of country must be in our mothers' milk down here, because we take it in from the time we are born and it never seems to go away. If I see a battered old pickup truck sitting in a parking lot around here, I know I can count on finding an American flag decal stuck on it somewhere.

We may let on that we hate Yankees, but we grieved along with the New Yawkers during those awful days. And most of us still do.

It really is that simple.

And if the folks at CMT had added this song and this song right after the first two, I'd probably still be wiping away the tears.

I haven't forgotten.

And I never will.

2003-05-11T03:04:00.000-04:00

Navel-gazing about blogging and blogrolls

Now that the real world appears to be spinning properly on its axis again, I've noticed a goodly number of bloggers, high-profile and otherwise, have returned to the blogiverse's favorite irresolvable debates: how to build your blog traffic and who belongs on a blogroll.

Having read a fair number of these discussions in the past couple of weeks, let me present some of the eternal principles of knowledge I've managed to distill out of what I've read.

The Ten Commandments of Blogging

1. Thou shalt have no life before blogging, except to provide material for thy blog.

2. Thou shalt not make thy blog like any other, either in appearance or style, for the blogging gods are jealous of their godliness. (exception granted for the denizens of Blog*Spot, for they shall be taught the error of their ways).

3. Thou shalt not take the names of more popular bloggers in vain, else they will not link to thee.

4. Keep no day away from thy blog, for that will be the day that a more popular blogger will view thy site and find thy content stale, and all of thy work toward getting a link from them or being added to their blogroll will have been wasted.

5. Honor those more popular who link to thee. Reciprocate their link to thee and populate their comments and/or email with paeans of honor, lest they find thee unworthy and cast thee into outer darkness.

6. Thou shalt not delink one more popular than thee.

7. Neither shall thou link to those that they have delinked.

8. Neither shalt thou post material not thine own without a link to the source.

9. Neither shalt thou take sides in a blog war against one who links to thee.

10. Neither shalt thou covet the traffic of one more popular, nor a place on their blogroll, nor a graphic on their site.

And, as is usually the case with Ten Commandment lists, there is an Eleventh Commandment:

11. Fix thy permalinks and keep them in the best of repair always, for they are the path to traffic (and heaven).

(And to comply with commandment 8, here's a link to the inspiration for this post)

2003-05-07T01:10:00.000-04:00

Totten on liberals and conservatives

Michael J. Totten has a very incisive piece about some of the differences he's noticed between liberals and conservatives:

Why are liberal intellectuals less interested in the history of foreign countries than conservatives are? I have never heard anyone ask this question, and I wonder if others even notice the problem. Maybe they do, but until recently I hadn't noticed, and I assure you the left hasn't noticed. I'm not talking about who is right and who is wrong about history. I'm talking here about who is even interested in the first place.
I've pondered this for a while now, and I think I have part of the answer.
Liberals are builders and conservatives are defenders. Liberals want to build a good and just society. Conservatives defend what is already built and established. This is what the left and the right are for. What draws a person to one or the other is more a matter of personality than anything else.
The first priority of builders is the immediate surrounding environment, starting with the home and moving outward from there. Next is the community, followed by the city, the region, and the nation. The other side of the world is the lowest of all priorities. "Think globally" but "act locally" is a bumper sticker for the left. That we shouldn't meddle in other countries if our own needs work is also a liberal idea. It partly explains why Tom Daschle focused on prescription pills for old people in war time.
Defenders, unlike builders, are on the lookout for threats. This is what conservatism is for. In the absence of civil war or revolution, threats exist abroad. Canada isn't a problem, and Mexico isn't really either. The biggest threats are on the other side of the world. Conservatives don't write about China and Iran because they're into Taoism or because they swooned at the Persian film festival. The interest is there because these countries are dangerous.

An interesting viewpoint -- more fully expounded in the full piece, of course -- but it is somewhat specific to the present time. After all, during the time frame of the late 1930's to the late 1960's, it was the liberals in this country, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and other internationalist Democrats up through the New Frontiersmen of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, that favored and pushed for a greater role for the United States in world affairs. Ideas such as the Good Neighbor Policy, Lend-Lease, the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, and, last but not least, the United Nations were all products of the liberal intellectuals of the 1930's and '40's.

A simpler explanation for the apparent lack of interest in the history of foreign countries, in my view, is that such lack of interest is the legacy of post-World War II anticolonialist thinking. First, most of the world outside Europe and the Americas, with the exception of Russia, China, and Japan, were parts of one or another of the European empires prior to World War II. The pre-war histories of those nations, therefore, are distorted by their colonial occupation -- up to three hundred years in some cases -- and, therefore, not of interest to many intellectuals because of the great influence of the colonial power. The history of those colonies became absorbed into the history of the colonial power.

Second, the geopolitical machinations of the Cold War kept many of those newly constituted nations from developing without influence from either the non-Communist or Communist bloc. Once again, the influence of an outside power was more important in many respects than indigenous movements in the development of these nations and, therefore, the histories of these nations are absorbed into the history of the East-West conflict.

In short, there isn't much interest in the history of foreign countries among many intellectuals, liberal or conservative, because there really isn't much history there that hasn't already been explained and categorized in terms of either European colonialism or the Cold War. I can't say I agree with that attitude, because it seems to me to be patronizing and chauvinistic, but it seems to explain the lack of interest -- it's already been done, so why do it again. I hope and believe interest will pick up in the future, as more of these countries are able to chart an independent path to their own futures and we in the West become more interested in the historical underpinnings for the courses these nations take.

Note: I have some additional thoughts on the builders vs. defenders idea, but I need to mull them over a little more. Maybe I'll have something on that in a couple of days or so.

2003-05-06T23:29:00.000-04:00

Awww, Jeff! You had me hoping for one of those existential moments, and then you had to go and ruin it for me.

When I grew up, conservatives were the snobs: They ran the companies. They were white. They were privileged. They were educated. They were members of the exclusive society. Country club culture.
But today, liberals are the snobbier lot. They control the academe. They scold or exclude people based on sins of offensiveness, saying the wrong thing, thinking the wrong thing: political incorrectness. When I was a TV critic, I had to suffer so many of my fellow travelers who insisted that they watched only public television, not the grungy popular TV the rest of America and I liked. PBS culture.
Their cultural snobbery extends even to Iraq's museums.
The sad fact of it is that the left has lost -- or abandoned -- the masses.
The left used to defend the people against the elite but now they are the elite.
The left used to speak with the voice of the people but now the people have FoxNews and the New York Post. When they weren't looking, Rupert Murdoch came and stole the media masses away from the left. And if they're not careful, if they don't remember their roots and their raison d'etre, liberalism will lose its political legitimacy the same way.
Those roots should lead them -- no, us, my fellow liberals -- to fight for the rights of the Iraqi people and to put that above the value of museum pieces behind glass (not to mention rights to health insurance for Americans and quality education and ... well, you get the idea).

Speaking as one of "the people" or "the masses", statements like "rights to health insurance for Americans and quality education" make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. That statement conjures up a vision of yet another government agency staffed by the same mindless sadists who populate my local Motor Vehicles office. Or perhaps the not-so-helpful help-line employees manning the phones at the IRS. You know, the ones who say "if we give you the wrong advice, you're still responsible for the taxes."

If you want to fight for the rights of the people, either here or in Iraq, start by reducing the scope of government in all of our lives. Quit thinking of us as children who need guidance and start looking at us as sovereign in our own right. Remember that those tax dollars are mine first, since I'm the one who earned them, and that the government has justify to me why they need them, rather than me justifying why I should keep them.

The best government is that which interferes least in the lives of its citizens. And the best way to prevent that interference is to keep the government small.

2003-05-03T14:02:00.000-04:00

Keeping it simple

Michael Ledeen, on President Bush's speech from the U.S.S Abraham Lincoln:

George W. is the most amazing president. How could anyone have imagined that such a man, who lacks all the credentials to conduct foreign policy (he hasn't traveled, he hasn't studied foreign cultures, he doesn't speak foreign languages, his knowledge of world history is skimpy, and he hasn't memorized the last decade of the New York Times) would turn out to have the best foreign-policy instincts imaginable? He reminds me more and more of Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan. He has the most important quality of a great leader: He instinctively finds the words to express what the American people believe. And his are simple words, not fancy ones.

Let's see -- Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan were both derided as inadequate to be President by the political intelligentsia of their day, and both of them turned out to be well up to the task, as well as greatly admired by the American people.

Mighty good company for GWB to be running with, isn't it?

(via a comment at Little Green Footballs)

2003-04-27T01:31:00.000-04:00

She says it better

From my point of view, the final word on the Texas sodomy case goes to Mrs. du Toit:

As much as I support gays and feel personally that they may live their lives according to their own standards, I will not compromise my position on the role of the court and the standards of the Constitution.
It is DANGEROUS to establish precedent in these cases.
Do we really want the Federal government to have the power to decide what kind of sex people can and cannot have? I don't want the Federal government to HAVE that much power. If we give them the power to decide it in this case, we have given the Federal government the authority to decide these matters. Once we have given them that power, we'll never get it away from them.

Wouldn't it be nice if we had more judges that thought like that?

Of course, if we had judges like that, we'd probably not need quite so many of them.

Sounds like a good idea to me.

2003-04-27T01:10:00.000-04:00

Some more love for Dennis

More kudos for columnist Dennis Rogers from my hometown newspaper, the News & Observer:

Don't be lulled into thinking the danger has passed just because much of the war news has moved off the front page. There are still a lot of worried parents and spouses who would feel better knowing their prayers are not the only ones being lifted for those they love.
"I've had wonderful support from my family, friends, church and co-workers," Lori Tingen said. "They've shown me that this child, my baby boy, truly belongs to this community and not just to me."
So if you have a good thought to spare, think of Cpl. Clint Tingen, Apex High School Class of 1997, and his buddies in the 2nd MP Battalion, U.S. Marine Corps.
I know his mama and the folks on Tingen Road would appreciate it. They're still worried about their boy.

And while we're at it, lets not forget our military folks in other dangerous places in the world right now, such as Afghanistan, Korea, Bosnia, etc. They all need our prayers and support too, especially since they aren't in the limelight right now. They are doing what they do for us, too.

2003-04-25T22:46:00.000-04:00

A new reader...

Thanks to the magic of the people at Technorati, I discovered a new reader of this blog:

The Right Wing blogger at Tobacco Road Fogey is still ducking the issue, as I would expect.
[quote from my article snipped]
He claims, after looking at a few maps of Baghdad, that U.S. forces must not have been able to get to the National Museum and protect it, or perhaps it was low priority. Right. Fogey ignores the looting of other buildings.

"Right Wing"? Ms. Diva, you're never going to make the A-list at blogs like Atrios, Hesiod, and Kos if you don't get the terminology straight. It should have been "The Right Wingnut blogger at Tobacco Road Fogey..." Those guys are real sticklers for accurate usage of epithets.

2003-04-24T01:13:00.000-04:00

Calling Paul Harvey...

N. Z. Bear has the following to say about the looting of the Iraq National Museum:

Now, however, we have a clear example of something that U.S. forces did, indeed, screw up. It happens; the failure was not deliberate (to the best of my knowledge), and it's importance should not be overstated. But it should be acknowledged for what it was: an error.
Thus far, the pro-war side of the Blogosphere isn't faring too well on this test.

Although the media, here and in Baghdad, have been quick and vociferous in assigning blame to the U.S. forces for allowing the looting to occur, I'm not convinced we have gotten "the rest of the story" in this instance. I decided to take a look around for appropriate maps of Baghdad that might show the Iraqi National Museum, along with other parts of Baghdad that might prove to be relevant to develop some informed speculation about how the military situation might have developed in the area around the museum.

Here's an interactive map of Baghdad (Flash required). If you click on the + sign in the lower right corner four or five times, you'll see a marker for the Iraqi National Museum appear. Please note its location and its position in relationship to what is marked on the map as Central Railway and the Radio, T.V. and Telecommunications Center and verify it against the location cited in the fourth paragraph of this article, which dates from before the beginning of the war.

Now, take a look at this map,which was produced and released earlier this year by the National Imaging and Mapping Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense. If you center the horizontal and vertical sliders on your browser window, you should see the tigress River snaking from the upper left corner of the browser window toward the center before it bends around to exit the browser window at the lower left.

Over on the left side of this window, you should see a large white-colored area extending from the Tigris in the lower left part of the screen, all the way up the left side of the screen. About midway up the screen, you should see some purple lettering that says "Baghdad Central Railway Station". Diagonally up to the right from the Railway Station label, you'll see another purple label that says "Iraqi Dates Commission". Just on the other side of the north-south street beside the Iraqi Dates Commission label, there is a small beige or light brown icon which has no label. This, I believe, is the site of the Iraqi National Museum, especially since it is about half a mile due west of the icon labelled "S.O. Radio and T.V.", as is the Iraqi National Museum marker on the ABCNews map.

Take a look at some of the other features and structures near the museum on the NIMA map. The white area starting at the label "Mathaf Sq." and extending northwest for about two miles is a huge railway yard adjacent to the Central Railway station. A few rough calculations indicates that this area covers about one to one and a half square miles. And, if it's like every other large railway yard I've ever seen, it was probably full of train cars and all sorts of other places for a defending force to hide.

Remember that U.S. forces were approaching this area from the former Saddam International Airport, which is to the southwest of this area. Since this railyard is the main rail center for Baghdad, I feel confident that it was probably a high priority target for the U.S. forces and, given the fact that it is so large, I would think that it took a sizeable force and a significant amount of time to bring it under control.

Please note some of the other buildings labelled on the map. The Saddam Grand Mosque is about half a mile west of the railway station and about a mile west of the museum. There is another unlabelled mosque about half a mile south of the museum. Given the fact that the Fedayeen Saddam and other irregular forces had been using mosques as points of defense throughout the campaign, I'm sure that more troops and time were needed to bring these buildings under coalition control.

There is also a hospital about half a mile northwest of the museum site, which probably was also an objective for the U.S. troops, along with the T.V. and Radio Center about two-thirds of a mile to the west.

If fighting broke out at any of the locations that I mentioned, it would be easily heard in the area around the museum and might have served to alert anyone prone to loot the museum that time was getting short and the opportunity to loot might soon pass.

In short, until we get more details about how the U.S. forces moved into this area of Baghdad and the amount of time taken and resistance met during this phase of the campaign, I think it is premature to lay blame at the feet of the U.S. troops for failing to control the museum. All of the other buildings and areas that I have mentioned would appear, to me at least, to be of equal or higher priority as objectives for the advancing forces, based on the criteria I heard recounted in the media.

It probably was a situation of not enough soldiers to do too many things at one point in time. And I'm inclined to give our troops the benefit of the doubt in this kind of situation.

This is, of course, purely speculation on my part. Any information that supports or opposes this speculation would be gladly received.

I wish the media were also so inclined. Or at least honest enough to give us enough of the full story to make a more informed judgement.

UPDATE: Found a link to this article over at Too Much To Dream, with this information:

Mr George is clearly angry, claiming that the Americans left the museum unguarded for days. He is not the only one. Repeating an Iraqi conspiracy theory so universal that it is now received wisdom, Mohammed Sabri, a prehistoric specialist, said bitterly: "They were late. They should have been here from the first day. The Ministry of Oil was protected the first day, why not the museum. Why? Ask the Americans."
The Americans have a ready answer. "We were fighting the whole time," Captain Jason Conroy said, wiping his brow as he guarded the museum gate. "For four days we were taking machinegun-fire and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) from these buildings around here. They had a bunker around the back of the museum with a cache of RPGs. Guys were running out of that alley, firing Kalashnikovs at us.
When we shot them, they threw out hooks, dragged the bodies and guns back and came at us again."
After four days of intense street battles with Saddam's Fedayin and Special Republican Guards, Captain Conroy said, his company of Abrams tanks and armoured vehicles was ordered north on April 15 to destroy an anti-aircraft gun.
"When we got back the next day, everything was already on fire here and the press were here asking us: 'How come you weren't in the museum three days ago?' I said: 'If you guys had been here three days ago, you would know why.'"

More to follow, I'm sure.

2003-04-21T00:09:00.000-04:00

More about the draft

Since this blog and I first came to the attention of the blogosphere because of this article I wrote earlier in the year, I've tried to keep an eye out for articles about reviving the military draft. Lo and behold, I found this (link is perishable) in my hometown newspaper this morning. The lead article is here, and related articles are here, here, here, and here.

Please note the title and subtitle of the main article:

Whose children should fight our wars?
A campaign to reinstate the draft -- adding women to the mix -- revives questions about fairness and who should defend us.

A rather breathtaking display of the Rangel-Hollings agenda in pushing for the reinstatement of the military draft, don't you think?

And this paragraph from the main article:

Hollings and Rangel say that the burden should be carried by all segments of society and that a universal draft is the best way to guarantee it. They contend that an all-volunteer military relies too much on minorities and poor people who lack the career options of the better-educated and more well-to-do. Moreover, they suggest, the nation's leaders would be far less eager to send troops off to war if their own children had to go.

The way I see it, this proposal has nothing to do with military preparedness or improving the quality of our existing military, which has been amply demonstrated in the past few weeks. This proposal has everything to do with further domestically politicizing questions of war and peace in an attempt to poison the well against any decision by this president and his successors to take offensive military action against any future foes of this country.

The scare tactics are obvious. Make a demogogic populist allegation that the "better-educated and more well-to-do" citizens of this country, along with the nation's leaders, are not carrying their fair share of the national defense burden for this country (even though the more well-to-do are paying a disproportionate share of the federal taxes that go to purchase all of the wonder weapons and to pay the salaries and benefits of the people who serve in the military). Stir in a hint that not just the sons of those better-educated, more well-to-do, and leaders of the country should face this obligation, but their daughters ought to be considered for such service as well.

Given the fact that the current leadership in the Defense Department is openly opposed to the reinstatement of the draft and that our current campaign in Iraq has demonstrated the strength and vitality of the current volunteer force, why push this proposal now, if not for some twisted partisan political reason?

It's obvious to me that Senator Hollings and Congressman Rangel have an axe to grind with something or someone beyond the ranks of our fighting men and women. They appear to have dipped into the old class-warfare page of the Democratic political playbook, when they should be saluting and supporting the brave men and women who make our current volunteer military the best in the world.

It took the better part of a decade to fix the American military after Vietnam, and the success of the all-volunteer military we currently have is undeniable. Don't let these two egotistical pettifogging buffoons break what doesn't need fixing. If you really support our troops, leave them alone and let them continue to do what they do best -- defend this country like no other military force in history has been able to do.

2003-04-19T03:44:00.000-04:00

Lest we forget...

April has been a month of historic events in U.S. military history. Starting with Paul Revere's famous ride in 1775, such events as the battle of Shiloh in 1862, the Confederate surrenders in 1865, the invasion of Okinawa in 1945, and the linkup of U.S. and Russian forces at the Elbe River in 1945 have passed into our history as great victories for our forces. In the future, I'm sure we'll add the past month's campaign against Saddam Hussein to this illustrious list.

There is one historic April event, however, that we cannot remember with pride. 28 years ago this month, the forces of North Vietnam launched their final offensive against the forces of South Vietnam, culminating in the surrender of Saigon, the capital city of South Vietnam, on April 30, 1975. For those readers who are not familiar with that campaign, you can find some more detailed information here and here and here and here.

I was 17 years old that spring and I vividly remember the films of overloaded helicopters struggling into the air from the helipad atop the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. I remember seeing helicopters being pushed over the sides of U.S. warships into the South China Sea to make room for the next frantic flight of refugees fleeing the inevitable collapse of the Saigon government. And I remember seeing the films of ships and boats of all sizes, their gunwales barely above water and crowded to near bursting with more people than you could hope to count, trying to keep up with our Navy ships as our fleet withdrew from the area.

Why, you may ask, do I bring up this touchy subject now, when we are beginning to realize one of our greatest victories in the sands and marshes of Iraq?

I do it for one simple reason.

As you view the photos and read the articles in the links I've provided above, please keep in mind that the horrors of those days and the subsequent 28 years of tyranny suffered by the Vietnamese people are the result, mainly, of something we did, here at home.

We did what the antiwar faction wanted us to do -- we quit the war before it was won.

And the war and the freedom of the Vietnamese people were lost.

2003-04-19T00:39:00.000-04:00

Cry me a river

I've had to go into the back of my closet and dig out the old galoshes to deal with the river of crocodile tears being shed over the looting of the museum and library in Baghdad.

To those in this country and abroad who feel that this looting outweighs the liberation of the people of Iraq: maybe Rumsfeld, Franks, and company would have taken you more seriously in your warnings if they had thought that you were genuinely concerned with preserving history, rather than with rewriting it.

2003-04-14T00:05:00.000-04:00

It's a feature, not a bug

I find myself amazed at all of the indignation being raised by the antiwar side about the looting that has been occurring in Baghdad, Basra, and other places within Iraq.

I thought the left was in favor of the redistribution of wealth.

2003-04-13T23:59:00.000-04:00

No wonder he's upset

From The Guardian:

Jacques Chirac faced a backlash from his peace campaigning yesterday after warnings from his own party that France had gone too far in opposing Britain and the US, and now faced international isolation.
The French president, described by the newspaper Libération as the "king of peace without a crown", was criticised by leaders of his UMP party for three weeks of silence since the invasion.

Maybe this explains Mr. Chirac's strange behavior over the past few months.

Jesus was only the Prince of Peace, but he did get a crown -- of thorns.

Maybe we need to have one made up for dear ol' Jacques.

2003-04-13T23:28:00.000-04:00

A question of ethics?

By now, many folks in the blogosphere have written about these revelations by Eason Jordan of CNN concerning what CNN reporters and execs knew about the behavior of Saddam Hussein's regime toward its own citizens.

It strikes me that this is the journalistic equivalent of insider trading on the stock market. CNN knew this horrific information, knew that disclosing this information had the possibility of turning U.S. and international opinion against Saddam's regime (at the cost of their inside access to sources within Iraq), yet they set this information on the back burner so that they could keep their journalistic advantage over their competitors alive.

So much for the "public's right to know". Our right to know extends only as far as is convenient for our purveyors of the media. If it makes them less competitive with their rivals, we don't deserve to know it. If it costs them access to a source, we don't deserve to know it.

They would rather deceive us, the public, than to do the right thing if it suits their plan to get ever higher ratings.

Who watches the watchers?

(via many sources, but the first was Michele)

2003-04-10T01:13:00.000-04:00

Some thoughts on patriotism

Michele had a wonderful piece about patriotism on Tuesday. I'd just like to add a few thoughts of my own about the subject.

I've been thinking quite a lot about patriotism during the past few weeks. The best capsule definition of patriotism, in my mind, was stated by President John F. Kennedy in his Inaugural Address on January 20, 1961:

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you?ask what you can do for your country.

A patriotic act is an act done not for yourself, but for your country and for your fellow citizens.

It is an act which strives to make your country better.

It is an act which lifts your fellow citizens up, making them stronger than they were before.

It is an act which reflects the best your country has to offer the world and provides a positive example for those countries whose people long for the privileges you enjoy.

Patriotism does not require you to support your government when it is wrong, but it does require that you present your dissent from such policy in a well-reasoned, truthful, and respectful way.

Well-reasoned, in that you can demonstrate where your government is acting against traditional national values or universal human values.

Truthful, in that your claims are supported by readily available facts. Truthful, in that your claims do not depend on tortured misrepresentations of the positions of your opponents. Truthful, in that your proposed alternative is clearly stated and attempts to address the problems raised by your opponents.

Respectful, in that your dissent does not rely on demonization of your opponents. Respectful, in that consequences of your act of dissent do not trample the rights of your fellow citizens.

Unfortunately, I fear that the words "patriotic" and "unpatriotic" have been so poorly used over the past few weeks and months that they have nearly been divorced from their real meanings.

Smashing your Dixie Chicks CD is not a patriotic act.

Neither is carrying around a sign which compares President Bush to Adolf Hitler.

Peaceably protesting against the war is not unpatriotic, but using that protest knowingly to spread falsehoods about your government or your fellow citizens is unpatriotic.

And telling protestors that they need to go live in another country, if they don't like what this country is doing, is definitely not patriotic.

2003-03-30T03:24:00.000-05:00

Facts can be so inconvenient

Here's the best answer I've seen to Professor Nicholas "a million Mogadishus" De Genova, from Cato the Youngest:

Estimates of the Somali death toll at Mogadishu range from 500 to 1,000. Take the low number, and its a 500:18, or 27.7: 1, kill ratio. The CIA World Factbook - Iraq estimates the population of Iraq at a bit over 24,000,000. What the hell, let's round up to 25 million - 25,000,000 / 500 = 50,000.
There aren't anywhere near enough Iraqis for a million Mogadishus, even if you hand out AK-47s to the toddlers. (And what would De Genova think of giving guns to children?)

The way I figure it, Cato, Professor De Genova must be asking us to add a few more members to the Axis of Evil.

In that subtle, roundabout way that the antiwar leftists use to confuse us warmongering Neanderthals, of course.

2003-03-29T20:06:00.000-05:00

Hand him another harpoon

Mark Steyn skewers Michael "Moby D*ckhead" Moore:

Yet somehow the notion persists that an Upper West Sider adored on the Cote d'Azur is the authentic voice of blue-collar America. The vast bulk of his credibility in this regard derives from his vast bulk. Less of Moore would be a career disaster; he would be just another cadaverous limousine liberal nibbling on his curly endive.
Even in Flint, he was never a regular workin' stiff. He lasted one day on the assembly line. Other than that, he worked his way up through alternative radio shows and progressive magazines. Today, pushing 50 and working on a new film about the links between the Bush and bin Laden families, Moore knows there will always be a market for his shtick. He's a big whale in a small pond: the token funny man in an increasingly humourless Left.

You know the drill -- read the whole thing!

2003-03-29T19:27:00.000-05:00

Ranting Rangel update

Congressman Charles Rangel (D-NY) has confused his rectum with his mouth yet again. His performance on FNC's Hannity and Colmes program on Thursday night was, unfortunately, a typical Rangel RANT -- Rabid, Asinine, Nutty, and Truthless. NewsMax has a good summary of Rangel's despicable and disgraceful performance here. I watched the show and Sean Hannity went after Rangel like a starving piranha and even Alan Colmes was shocked into silence.

Apparently, Hannity didn't get enough of Rangel's rant on TV, so he booked him on the Friday Hannity radio program as well. According to this story on NewsMax, Osama bin Rangel started backpedaling from his Thursday remarks faster than Deion Sanders covering a fly pattern.

Charlie missed his real calling. He should have auditioned for that less-than-memorable remake of The Wizard of Oz, The Wiz. He could have saved the producers of that movie a lot of money because he is eminently qualified to replace Michael Jackson (Scarecrow), Nipsey Russell (Tinman), and Ted Ross (Cowardly Lion) -- three roles for the price of one.

Brainless, heartless, and gutless -- that's our Charlie.

2003-03-29T15:33:00.000-05:00

Captain Steve says a mouthful

In his latest note, posted by Meryl, Captain Steve gives us something to think about:

And let's face it. Not flying our flag has bought us no good will. Americans are not loved in this country we helped defend, and no amount of symbolic sacrifices will change that. As a matter of fact, acting ashamed of who we are is exactly what costs us the respect of people here. All it gets us is a hole in our morale where the symbol of our nation should be. Young Marines who fight and lose their friends in Basra, or An Nasariyah or Baghdad should not be deprived of the comfort of seeing Old Glory wave above the battlefield they have secured. And Iraqis who have yearned for freedom these long years should not be deprived of it either.

To be blunt, multi-culti sensitive crap like not raising the American flag over our camps and requiring our female military personnel to wear an abaya when they go out in public makes my blood pressure spike.

The way I see it, American flags raised over territory that we occupy are the symbol of the freedom that we take for granted and that we are trying to deliver to the people of Iraq. Let the totalitarian scumbags be outraged at the sight of the Stars and Stripes. It's the symbol of their failure -- and their impending doom.

2003-03-29T04:40:00.000-05:00

Random thoughts about the war

Just a couple of ideas that have been bouncing around in my head over the past day or two.

1. If it bleeds, it leads -- unless it doesn't

In my opinion, all of the gloom and doom being bandied about by the media (especially the 24-hour cable news services) in the past few days is primarily due to the fact that they haven't gotten the flash-bang-boom visuals that they were counting on at the start of the war. All of them were counting on being able to have the best views of the expected "shock and awe" fireworks show over Baghdad on the first day of the war (like CNN had during the first Gulf War). They also expected that their embedded reporters would be able to show running firefights as the coalition forces slogged their way up-country.

Unfortunately for the networks, the war started a day or two earlier than had been planned. There were no fireworks over Baghdad on the first night, leaving all of the expensive talking heads and their "hired-gun" military experts with little beyond educated guesses to fill all that airtime. And the images sent back by the embedded reporters mainly consisted of dust clouds and the rear-ends of Bradleys and Abrams cruising down an endless highway.

The networks started rallying when "shock and awe" made its dramatic debut, two days into the war, but the massive sandstorm that settled into the war zone during the weekend pretty much killed the momentum that was starting to build.

End result: all the pre-war hype about how comprehensive the coverage was going to be was left high and dry. All of the mega-bucks spent on the fancy sets, the retired generals, and the satellite phones for the embeds appear to be giving a much-reduced return on investment. And now, with the apparent 4-6 day pause in the campaign, I think we can expect even more gloomsaying until the ravenous beast can be fed.

2. Diplomacy bred delay

Did all of the diplomatic efforts at the U.N. give Saddam time to pour enough resources into Basra and Umm Qasr to put a serious crimp in the allied war plan? The British forces have gotten tied down trying to bring those critical cities under allied control, instead of moving up the eastern flank of the allied thrust. I'm not denigrating what the British have done so far, but maybe the intelligence guys just missed the indicators of how big a fight Saddam really intended to put up in the Basra/Umm Qasr corridor.

3. First to market makes the market

World opinion seems to being driven by Iraqi TV and their fellow travellers at Al-Jazeera. Our side is not spending enough time and effort attacking the obvious lies and disinformation being flashed around the world by the other side. When are we going to meet these enemies on the propaganda battlefield?

For example, why did we wait so long before taking down the Iraqi TV satellite service? If they can't uplink their video to Al-Jazeera, it's a lot harder for them to get their propaganda out.

More later....

2003-03-29T03:35:00.000-05:00

David Warren again!

If you are not reading David Warren's columns for the Ottawa Citizen, you are missing a true treat. Here's a link to his Thursday column, and here's the link to his Saturday column.

A brief sample from Thursday's column:

On the large scale, we have the persistent display of doubts about tactics and strategy from journalists without any qualifications to judge them: who know no military history, indeed hardly any history at all; nor are they in possession of many current facts. Their motives are, moreover, clear enough: for many are people whose anti-Bush and anti-American attitudes were on display long before the war.

And here's a sample from today's column:

The people who didn't grasp, and still haven't grasped the nature of this enemy, are the media and the Bush administration's mendacious critics. And if these latter want bad news and good quotes, there are any number of retired U.S. Army generals, whose noses were put out of joint by Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon shake-ups, who also don't grasp it, and will be happy to talk. Very selective quotation from officers and soldiers in the field will supply the necessary updates. (I know this game, I work in it; or rather, whenever possible, around it.)

Needless to say, Mr. Warren is probably not very popular with his fellow journalists, but he is well worth the read if you've gotten tired of all the gloom-and-doomsaying that seems to be so pervasive on the 24-hour news networks over the past few days.

2003-03-25T22:22:00.000-05:00

Don't miss this!

If you haven't read this article from TheDissidentFrogman yet, you have missed a real treat. Here's a sample:

And what really upsets me is that, consequently and as always, it's the silent, the weak, the downtrodden, those who stand next to the common graves, waiting for the bullet, those who die slowly, feet first in plastic shredders, screaming in inconceivable pain, those who are forced to watch their wives raped or their children tortured, or those who are "just" condemned to a life in misery and deprivation of their most basic rights who are sacrificed while the anti-war movement is dancing to Samba music in the streets, enjoying a grand day out with elaborated costumes and signs in the comfort of a democratic state that guarantees their right to criticize it without reserve.

Sliced, diced, and quick-fried "human shields". Now for a good wine to go with that main course. It'll also come in handy to toast the Frogman (raises glass).

(via Kathy Kinsley at On The Third Hand)

2003-03-25T22:02:00.000-05:00

A deal for the antiwar folks

So, you're tired of having your patriotism questioned. And you want the rest of us to know that you support our troops, even if you don't support their commanders.

Boy, do I have a deal for you.

For clarity's sake, let's agree on a few basics. First, it takes at least two sides to constitute a conflict, right?

Second, if one of the opposing sides in a conflict retires from that conflict, the conflict ends, right?

Third, what you really want is for the war in Iraq to stop, right?

Here's my deal. Use this as the slogan of the day for your marchers and your speakers, free of charge and no credit to me necessary:

Saddam, surrender now!

Here's the reasoning. If Saddam's regime surrenders, the war stops. That would solve your primary problem, right? No more troops or civilians being killed.

If Saddam's regime surrenders, he and his cronies lose their political and military power and the Iraqi people get a chance to start afresh with a new government that won't be killing, torturing, and oppressing the citizens of Iraq.

That meets my needs.

So, do we have a deal? I'll even march with you in that rally.

What do you say?

2003-03-24T01:20:00.000-05:00

A little overstatement...

I've been watching Fox News Channel war coverage tonight and one phrase kept popping up throughout the evening. "Today was a tough day" seemed to be the "party line." Greta van Susteren said it so many times in the first half-hour of her show that you would have been knee-walking drunk if you had taken a shot of liquor each time she said it.

Even the New York Times seems to be pushing this line, with the headline "Allies and Iraqis Battle on 2 Fronts; 20 Americans Dead or Missing, 50 Hurt" leading their front page on the Times website.

Admittedly, we lost some fine people today. They and their families are in my thoughts and prayers tonight and for the next several days. If and when we can bring them home, they should be honored as the heroes that they are.

But we have to put today's events in perspective. Compare the numbers in the Times headline to the numbers on this page.

Takes your breath away, doesn't it? One U.S. division, two days -- over 900 casualties. Yet we count D-Day as the beginning of one of our greatest victories.

I have no desire to minimize the sacrifices made today by our lost soldiers and their families. I am incensed over the Iraqi mistreatment of some of our people.

But we insult the valor and the memory of those brave soldiers by exaggerating the circumstances in which they were lost.

They were lost in a victorious battle, not a loss. Their comrades continued to fight despite their losses and broke through the enemy resistance, allowing our forces to continue their advance toward the ultimate showdown with the murderous Iraqi regime.

In 1944, it took our forces months to break out from the Normandy beachhead. In 2003, our troops may be in sight of the enemy capital in less than a week.

Iraqi forces may have taken the lives from our lost soldiers, but let us not take their honor from them.

They were, and are, victorious.

2003-03-20T20:31:00.000-05:00

A question...

...to all of the protesters in San Francisco, Austin, TX, Washington, DC, and other places:

If you are arrested by the local police in the course of your civil disobedience, please note:

1. There are no acid tanks in your local jail into which you could be immersed.

2. You will not be subjected to electrical shocks to your genitals or other sensitive areas of your body.

3. When you are released from jail, you will still be able to lick an ice-cream cone or a lollypop, because your tongue will not have been severed from your mouth as a punishment for your anti-government statements of today.

4. Unless they were present with you and also committed acts of civil disobedience, your family members will not be arrested.

If you were a citizen of Baghdad or Basrah and had you attempted to do in one of those cities what you did in your city today, you probably would be facing any or all of the above, or possibly something even worse.

Yet you took the action you did today in protest against the quickest, most effective route to stop these horrors faced daily by the Iraqi people.

How can you love peace so much that you would condemn the Iraqi people to even one more day of this kind of treatment from their government?

Don't they deserve to have the same rights that you so thoroughly exercised today?

In my opinion, they do.

Have fun on the protest lines, folks.

At least you can.

2003-03-19T04:46:00.000-05:00

Thoughts on the eve of war

I've never thought of myself as a warmonger. In the eyes of the antiwar folks, though, I became a warmonger on September 11, 2001.

I'll never forget the rage that coursed through me that September morning as I watched the WTC towers burn and collapse, remembering how long it took to clear those towers after the 1993 bombing and knowing that the towers hadn't stayed up long enough for everyone to get out.

That rage boiled up, unbidden, after watching multiple replays of the last seconds of the second plane crashing into the tower when it became undeniable that someone, unknown at the time, aimed that plane at that tower as an improvised missile -- a weapon of terrible destruction -- and that the other plane, in the other tower, and the plane that hit the Pentagon were all part of a premeditated strike against this country.

"They -- whoever they are -- started this war with us. Let's finish it -- and them -- with all of the fury and might that we can possibly muster. Who cares if they hate us, as long as they fear us? If they stick their heads up out of their holes, make sure that a bullet hits them, right between the eyes"

Those thoughts popped into my head during those September days. They still do, but not as often or as intensely as they did then.

Now, there are a quarter of a million warriors -- ours and those of our allies -- waiting, in the Kuwaiti desert and on ships in every sea surrounding the Middle East, for that final command, or for those final seconds before the execution of an already-given command, to force their way into a hostile land to destroy a regime that supports people like those who attacked us in September 2001.

I think of 9-11-2001 or of the bloody images from Israel that we see far too often, and I hope that our troops will strike a terrifying blow against the supporters of terrorism -- a blow so thunderous that the fanatics and those states which support them will pause in their murderous preparations long enough to consider the magnitude of the wrath that they are toying with and, perhaps, turn away from their evil path.

Yet, in the course of delivering that blow, those brave warriors will see and do things no one should ever have to call upon them to see and do, because the success of their mission depends on the effective delivery of death and destruction and horror to their enemies. Bodies and minds will be maimed or destroyed, and some of them will be those of our brave warriors.

My mind will be haunted by the images of these earnest and dedicated warriors that I've seen on my television for the past few weeks, knowing that they'll never be the same after the next few days and months. They and their families will pay the immediate price of the horrors ahead.

As far as I know, I don't personally know anyone who will fight this war, but I imagine that there probably is someone I don't realize is there.

But, for the next war -- and there will be one, since the enemy we fight is not just in Baghdad -- or possibly the one after that, my oldest son will be joining the survivors of this war to continue the fight against the onslaught of the madmen.

Those future comrades of my son will be his brothers on the battlefield, and that makes them my sons, as well.

May God watch over you and protect you, my sons. May your journey be swift and sure, and your path straight. And may you return safely to those of us that love and miss you so much. My prayers are with you all.

2003-03-13T10:38:00.000-05:00

Standing for the troops

Dennis Rogers, a columnist for my local newspaper, in response to some antiwar protestors at one of our local universities, wrote the following:

As a recovering hippie with impeccable credentials -- I saw Jimi Hendrix perform in Charlotte and don't remember a bit of it -- let me say you modern war protesters are a pale imitation of the real deal.
You're like little kids playing dress up. You're trying hard to act grown, but mostly you're just cute and clumsy.
Part of your problem is that we don't know exactly what you're against, except for that Republican in the White House. You need to focus, baby, focus.

The rest of the column was similar in tone, poking fun at college students in general and their "priorities" in life.

Well, ol' Dennis received the predictable response of hate mail from the antiwar folks and here's his answer to them, in his next column:

'How does it feel to have reduced yourself to a sniveling sycophant for the right wing?" one e-mailer asked.
He deserves an answer.
He and others who wrote in outrage deserve to know why I am not protesting war in Iraq with them. They deserve to know why I used barbed humor Saturday to poke holes in the smug sense of moral and intellectual superiority I see enveloping the antiwar movement.
I should be standing beside them in protest of an immoral and illegal war, they tell me, not making fun of them. I should be smart enough to "see through the lies of George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld," one reader wrote.
The reason I'm not is a promise I made to a little girl.
She looked to be about 5. On a springlike day, with her blond hair shining in the sun, she was the picture of sweet innocence.
But instead of a well-loved doll or a one-eyed teddy bear, she held a sad sign that read: "Please support my daddy."
That's why.
When I looked in that little girl's eyes, and in the eyes of the military wives, children and parents who thanked people for turning out at a Fayetteville rally supporting Fort Bragg's soldiers on Saturday, I knew that, right or wrong, I would make my stand beside them.
[...]
All jokes aside, as much as I respect some protesters and even share some of their doubts, I cannot stand with them. I was a soldier for eight years. I know how it hurts to be abandoned by your countrymen. I will not do that to these Americans.
So I stand beside a little girl and tell her that her country is as proud of her daddy as she is.
I stand beside lonely military spouses who must ease the midnight fears and kiss away the tears and find the courage to face their uncertain futures.
And I stand beside our soldiers so they'll know that if they must die, some of us believe it will be for something more worthy than presidential pique.
I'll tell the president what I think of him in a private voting booth on Election Day.

I don't always agree with Mr. Rogers on political matters, but I'm mighty proud of him right now.

God bless you, Dennis.

And may He look after all of the men and women who serve our nation.

2003-03-12T01:15:00.000-05:00

Dear Tom Robbins

In this article in the Seattle Weekly, you are quoted as having said the following:

Quite probably the worst thing about the inevitable and totally unjustifiable war with Iraq is that there's no chance the U.S. might lose it. America is a young country, and intellectually, emotionally, and physically, it has been exhibiting all the characteristics of an adolescent bully, a pubescent punk who's too big for his britches and too strong for his age. Someday, perhaps, we may grow out of our mindless, pimple-faced arrogance, but in the meantime, it might do us a ton of good to have our butts kicked. Unfortunately, like most of the targets we pick on, Iraq is much too weak to give us the thrashing our continuously overbearing behavior deserves, while Saddam is even less deserving of victory than Bush.
Don't get me wrong?I don't want American soldiers killed. But I don't want Iraqis killed, either. I'm just not one of those people who believes that American lives are more valuable than the lives of others.

Let's take these remarks point-by-point, shall we?

Quite probably the worst thing about the inevitable and totally unjustifiable war with Iraq is that there's no chance the U.S. might lose it.

Although I am pleased to see that you have a realistic appraisal of American military power in comparison to that of the Hussein regime, it appears that you need to study some recent history concerning the termination of hostilities between Iraq and its opponents in the first Persian Gulf War, circa 1991. Violation of the terms of this ceasefire by the Hussein regime would justify the resumption of military action against Iraq by the members of the original U.N. coalition forces and the forces of any other countries who choose to join with the original members.

America is a young country, and intellectually, emotionally, and physically, it has been exhibiting all the characteristics of an adolescent bully, a pubescent punk who's too big for his britches and too strong for his age. Someday, perhaps, we may grow out of our mindless, pimple-faced arrogance, but in the meantime, it might do us a ton of good to have our butts kicked. Unfortunately, like most of the targets we pick on, Iraq is much too weak to give us the thrashing our continuously overbearing behavior deserves, while Saddam is even less deserving of victory than Bush.

Very colorful language, but logically unsupported. To what "characteristics of an adolescent bully" or a "pubescent punk" do you refer? What behavior do you call "arrogance"? How long is "continuously", and how do you define "overbearing"? Until we have a common definition of these terms, it's impossible to know what you are talking about.

It seems to me that you are exhibiting several of the characteristics of an intellectually lazy polemicist -- inflammatory language, lack of supporting evidence, logical inconsistencies.

Don't get me wrong?I don't want American soldiers killed.

A truly marvelous logical inconsistency. How do propose that we "have our butts kicked" in a war without having American soldiers killed? Do you prefer that American civilians be killed instead of American soldiers -- perhaps Saddam could attack the American homeland instead of our invading troops? Would that satisfy your desire that we get the "thrashing" you think we deserve?

But I don't want Iraqis killed, either.

I hate to be the one that breaks this to you, Mr. Robbins, but Iraqis are being killed every day. The Hussein regime executes many of its domestic political opponents, along with their familiies. Other Iraqis, especially the very young and the very old, die of the effects of malnutrition and disease because the Hussein regime will not abide by the U.N. resolutions governing the "oil for food" program. Instead of complying with the various U.N. resolutions currently in effect, which would lead to the lifting of U.N. sanctions against Iraq, the Hussein regime continues to defy the U.N., and the Iraqi people continue to suffer in their silent isolation from the rest of the world.

I'm just not one of those people who believes that American lives are more valuable than the lives of others.

I thnk it would be a safe bet that you believe that at least one American life is more valuable than the lives of others -- your own. You certainly appear to think that your opinions on the war with Iraq should be accepted without question, since you provide no evidence to support your eccentric conclusions, so it is logical to assume that you think that you are more valuable than the rest of us. After all, we need your enlightened guidance if we are to discover a path through these scary times in our history.

It's also very comforting to know that you think that the lives of your family, your friends, your neighbors, and your fellow American citizens are of no more value than the lives of "others." I'm sure that the "others" will be just as accepting of your eccentricities as those who know you so well now.

Thanks for producing such an entertaining short piece of fiction.

(link via Instapundit)

2003-03-07T01:41:00.000-05:00

More from David Warren

More good stuff from north of the border:

Assisted by his poetical foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, France's President Jacques Chirac has identified a "logic of peace" in opposition to the U.S. "logic of war". This "logic of peace" requires the French and their supporters (with Canada trying to occupy the non-existent middle ground) to embrace the premise of a bald lie -- the "success" of inspections -- in the specific hope of preserving one of the most hideous dictators on the face of the earth from the action that would remove him.
There are not two "logics" -- I advise my reader to be always alert to such verbal fraud. This one begins with the notion that there can be "peace" when one is living under a violent threat. It is a false logic that was spawned, unfortunately, by the experience of the Cold War, when we all lived under a threat that never materialized; because our Soviet enemy was sane, and finally agreed to collapse without a nuclear war. But we are now dealing with enemies whose sanity cannot be presumed upon.
There is one reality, not two; both sides cannot be right. "Old Europe" is working on the logic of an alternative universe, where "9/11" did not happen, and the proliferation of genocidal weaponry among the West's most lethal and reckless enemies is not happening. They posit an international order that has ceased to exist -- one in which they imagine it is safe to break the solidarity of the civilized nations.

They think, or at least hope, that it will never happen to them if they continue to pander to the Islamofascists. Their aim is to direct all of the Islamofascist terror toward the U.S. and toward Israel.

I guess they've never read the fable of the frog and the scorpion.

God help them when their "logic" meets up with that of the Islamofascists, up close and personal.

2003-03-07T00:37:00.000-05:00

A liberal worth listening to

Give this a thoughtful read. Michael J. Totten has it exactly right, in my view.

I'll also say that the right could use some introspection of the same kind when it comes to domestic policies. I've been a Republican since the mid '70s, and even I'm getting tired of the Republican right's obsession with reducing the tax burden borne by the super-rich.

Could this be the start of the rebirth of the great American center? I hope so.

2003-03-03T01:55:00.000-05:00

Oooh, that's gotta hurt

Vox Day, at WorldNetDaily, concerning some recent comments from Janeane Garafolo:

The most amusing thing about the whole situation is that celebrities like Ms. Garofalo are becoming rather defensive about their right to hold an opinion. Of course you have a right to speak out, poor darling, but those of us who have actually read more than six books in our lives have the right to tell you that your opinion is baseless nonsense as we laugh at you.

Or, in other words, freedom of speech does not equal freedom from criticism.

Except for our friends on the left, of course. Their opinions are always right, and criticism from the right has to be an attempt to oppress them.

Of course, if the left would weed out its own nutcases, those of us on the right wouldn't have to.

2003-03-03T01:31:00.000-05:00

This really is over the top

A new retirement destination for Saddam Hussein:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has offered political asylum to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, according to a front page story in Sunday's South China Morning Post.

Truly a fate worse than death, I'd say.

2003-03-03T01:10:00.000-05:00

Line 'em up and watch 'em fall

Joel Mowbray, on the "democracy domino theory":

Regardless of what people think about the connections between Saddam and al Qaeda, there is no denying that a stable, democratic Iraq would serve as a bulwark against terrorism. A free Iraq would not just be an active partner in the war on terror, but its very existence would sap the recruitment strength of the worldwide terror network -- and that factor would spread to neighboring nations as freedom does.
Terrorism can exist in free nations -- look at Spain, Mexico, or even the terror cells in the United States -- but it cannot flourish. Radicalism spawns far more frequently under radical leadership. If people breathe free and have hope for the future, the impetus for signing up with al Qaeda is nearly gone. Finding people willing to lose everything is a lot harder when people actually have something to lose.

This is the nightmare scenario for the foreign and domestic opponents of the U.S. effort in Iraq. If we succeed in deposing Saddam's regime and reclaiming freedom for the Iraqi people to determine their own destiny, we will have demonstrated the bankruptcy at the core of our opponents' ideology.

We propose to deliver power to the Iraqi people. Our opponents defend totalitarian power over the Iraqi people.

Which do you think the Iraqis prefer?

2003-03-03T00:26:00.000-05:00

A Canadian with Clue™

Here is a marvelous article by David Warren. A sample:

It is human nature, only to remember the times when you were right, and so the people who are never right must be content with remembering nothing.
Whereas "the right", as it is called, in the U.S. and elsewhere, has this notoriously long memory. It is almost the definition of what is today called a "conservative" -- a word that fails to convey the philosophical position. But I will take it to mean: that a "conservative" is a person who can remember today what he learned yesterday.
What we learned yesterday, and must constantly re-learn, is that when a power arises and grows in the world, that publicly threatens our very existence, we will sooner or later have to confront it. And, sooner is invariably better than later.
It is perhaps the simplicity of that idea that our clever people find so unappealing. For the "logic" of self-defence takes only one step, there is no cumbersome parade of reason.

And, while you are at Mr. Warren's website, you should also read this article, concerning the peace marches from a couple of weeks ago. A sample:

Today is peace march day. Around the world, and especially across Europe, perhaps millions will march in solidarity with Saddam Hussein; while the people of Iraq continue to live under one of this world's most murderous and vicious dictatorships, glumly anticipating American liberation, but fearing they'll be let down once again.
Chic exponents of abortion on demand will accuse President Bush of wanting to kill Iraqi babies; socialist proponents of public theft will accuse him of trying to steal Iraqi oil; and people whose safety and freedom have been guaranteed by U.S. military protection all their lives, will chant that "Amerika" is a fascist country.
It is a scene of human depravity, worthy of description by the Hebrew prophets.

Read all of Mr. Warren's articles. You won't regret it.

2003-03-02T23:36:00.000-05:00

And the Clue™ sinks in...

I see that some of the "human shields" have decided to go home from their posts in Iraq.

One of the nine said: 'When I saw the army base I was to be assigned to, my whole body started to tremble with fear. I could foresee the whole base being obliterated by cruise missiles.'
Another said: 'All my family and friends have been telling me I must be mad to be a human shield. Seeing what is really involved, I have now come to my senses.'

So much for their superior morality and principles.

I've spent a good deal of time trying to decide what I think of these people and their domestic compatriots who didn't find it necessary to join the peace pilgramage to Baghdad. My first impression was that they were well-meaning but naive -- that they foolishly believed in the pacifism that they were mouthing.

Now, I've decided that they are nothing more than exhibitionists. They want to parade themselves on the media stage in an attempt to impress the rest of us with how earnest they are and how progressive their ideals are. They want the rest of us to think less of ourselves because we are not willing to put ourselves on display for our beliefs.

I wonder how that crow they are dining on tastes to them now

2003-03-01T12:48:00.000-05:00

Public service announcement

To all of those anti-war elementary school teachers in Maine who felt compelled to impart their "wisdom" concerning the impending war in Iraq to the children of our military personnel:

Save your political fulminations for your moral, ethical, and intellectual peers.

Providing, of course, that you can find any snakes, slugs, or toads willing to remain in your recto-cranially-inverted presence once they've gotten a whiff of the gas you've been passing along to the kiddies.

2003-02-23T17:58:00.000-05:00

Crunching the numbers.

Estimated number of participants in local antiwar rally last weekend: 10,000

Population of Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill Metropolitan Statistical Area (2000 U.S. census records): 1,187,941

Protestors as percentage of local population: 0.84179 % or 8.4 protestors per thousand residents

Can I stop being impressed with how many people gathered to protest the war now?

2003-02-19T13:40:00.000-05:00

I'll be back...

Sorry to have been away so long. Somehow, I contracted a rather nasty head and upper respiratory bug that left me almost bedbound for about 4 days. I've taken some time over the last day and a half to catch up with what's hot in the blogosphere and will have something new later today.

2003-02-13T00:43:00.000-05:00

Standards of proof revisited

Received the following in e-mail from a reader of this blog:

If today's democrats had been in power during World War II they would have opposed the Manhattan Project. "What proof is there that Hitler or Hirohito is trying to build an atomic bomb? And even if they did how would that affect us? They don't have a bomber that can carry such a weapon across the ocean. It's no threat to us. We should adopt a 'wait and see' attitude. We really should not take any action unless we are provoked. All we'll do is make things worse."

Change "today's democrats" in the above to "today's antiwar activists" and I'll agree completely. In fact, I'm willing to go one step further.

I'd like to see the antiwar folks prove, using the same standards of evidence and proof that they demand of the Bush administration with regard to Saddam Hussein and Iraq, that the U.S. actually possesses nuclear weapons.

Let's shoot down a few of the assertions they would make, right up front:

The U.S. has admitted that it possesses nuclear weapons.

Answer: The U.S. has been boasting of these weapons for nearly 60 years, but no accredited U.N. inspector has ever been able to confirm that the U.S. does indeed possess these weapons. It is entirely possible that U.S. statements to this effect are intended to create uncertainty among regional rivals of the U.S. which might deter those regional rivals from committing aggressive acts toward the U.S.

But the U.S. used atomic weapons against Japan in 1945.

Answer: All evidence we have of these alleged uses of atomic weapons against Japan in 1945 is from less than optimally reliable sources. No neutral observers were present in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, so we must factor potential bias into the existing eyewitness accounts of the event.

Japanese eyewitnesses may have been traumatized by the event and its aftermath and, therefore, may have their judgement colored by post-traumatic stress disorder. Until the psychological stability of those eyewitnesses can be certified, we cannot accept their testimony at face value.

The only American eyewitnesses to the events were military personnel subject to security regulations and the possibility of punitive sanctions for violation of those security regulations. Therefore, the American eyewitnesses may not be able to provide true information concerning these events and their part in the events without being provided relocation and possible asylum in a third country for themselves and their families.

Additionally, the only recorded measurements of the events by scientific instrumentation do not have a sufficiently documented chain of possession to guarantee their objective reliability. As far as we are aware, the surviving extant measurements have been in the possession of elements of the U.S. government since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki events and, therefore, may have been surreptitiously altered in order to provide support for the U.S. claims concerning these weapons.

Finally, it has been alleged that, at the time of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki events, there were no other atomic weapons available in the U.S. arsenal. At this time, we do not have independent confirmation that additional nuclear weapons have been assembled and deployed, even though we have received reports about the construction and activation of large facilities capable of producing nuclear material or the delivery systems for that material.

But there are several facilities scattered across the U.S. with extensive security measures consistent with a higher than normal level of protection for something.

Answer: The mere existence of unusual structures or equipment in the immediate proximity of a suspect site is suggestive, not probative, of the existence of nuclear weapons at that site. Many of those pieces of equipment or structures may be used at the site for protection of non-nuclear weapons as well. Further cooperation from the U.S. government will need to be negotiated before we can determine whether nuclear weapons do indeed exist at those sites.

You see where I'm going with this, don't you? If you have any suggestions for other assertions and answers for those assertions, feel free to add them in the comments.

2003-02-12T23:41:00.000-05:00

A random thought

Let's figure out which of our allies need to upgrade their national defenses -- newer aircraft, newer tanks, etc -- and then we'll get the U.N. Security Council to declare an arms embargo against those allies.

Once the arms embargo is in place, the French, Germans, and Russians will fall all over themselves to make sure that those countries will have all the weapons they can handle.

Sounds reasonable to me

2003-02-11T00:19:00.000-05:00

Who in the heck wants an empire?

I don't. And I don't know anyone who does. I know folks who are for war in Iraq and I know folks who are against war in Iraq, but I don't know anybody who thinks that America should take over the world.

Shoot, most of us think that this country might be better served if a few places that we already have would secede from the Union. Most of my right-wing friends probably wouldn't shed too many tears if the big quake came along and broke most of California off into the Pacific. On the other hand, I'm sure that my left-wing friends wouldn't be too terribly upset if a few pieces of Texas decided to reclaim their status as an independent republic, starting with Tom DeLay's Congressional district and probably including the area immediately surrounding Crawford.

That's why I wonder if some of the journalists out there who write the "American empire" crap I've been reading for the past few months have bothered to visit any part of this country besides a few leftist-friendly bars in New York City, Washington, DC, or Los Angeles.

Does anybody really think that the vast majority of Americans would be comfortable with the idea of a Federal government position called "Imperial Governor of Whatsitstan"? Would it be appointive or civil service? Would it require Senate approval? Heck, would anybody even apply for the job if it existed?

We don't want an American empire. More specifically, we won't tolerate an American emperor. The divine right of kings isn't included in our Bill of Rights.

Our President may be the most powerful man in the world, but we've never trusted that kind of power in the hands of a single individual. And we're not planning on starting now.

We see the men who become President of the United States at their worst long before we ever elect them to the job. We see them stumbling through their canned speeches. We see them squirm when some enterprising reporter comes up with a particularly tricky question. We see the beads of perspiration on their brow when the pressure is on, and we see the bags under their eyes at 2:00 in the morning at some non-descript airport in yet another podunk town.

At the end of a presidential campaign, we've seen most of the warts on the frogs in the pond, yet we pick one of those frogs, kiss him, and suddenly he's the next President of the United States.

President, not prince, because we know he's still one of the frogs in the pond.

And we'll be more than happy to pick another frog if he doesn't jump the way we want him to.

Frogs become princes in fairy tales, not presidential politics.

2003-02-09T20:59:00.000-05:00

Put up or shut up dept.

David Warren tells it like it is, or at least how it should be:

One of the more irritating phrases through the last few years has been, "Speaking truth to power." It is what Doctor Johnson referred to as a "canting phrase" -- one which declares nothing but the speaker's own pretension to virtue and piety.
"Look at me," he is saying, "look how wonderful I am, standing at the barricades against Big Bad Bush, fearlessly speaking the truth to him, and shaking my fist, like Beethoven!"
Does he think Mr. Bush is going to send him to Guantanamo? (Only in his fevered imagination.) Does he think the Mukhabarat will throw him in a windowless cell, that he'll be suspended by his feet and have his tongue cut out, that members of his family will be picked up in the night, and raped and murdered in his presence? (For that is what happened to more than one man who "spoke truth to power" -- in Baghdad.)
It takes two sides to make a war, and two sides to make a peace. You cannot "speak truth to power" only in Washington. Go then to Baghdad, and shake your fist at Saddam. Or if you will not, and for obvious reasons, then put the fist back in its pocket.

Amen.

2003-02-09T03:59:00.000-05:00

More good stuff from Rummy

U.S. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, today, in a speech to the Munich Conference on Security Policy:

Konrad Adenauer once said that "history is the sum total of things that could have been avoided." With history, we have the advantage of hindsight. But we must use that advantage to learn. Our challenge today is even more difficult: it is to connect the dots before the fact - to prevent an attack before it happens - not to wait and then hope to pick up the pieces after it happens.
To do so, we must come to terms with a fundamental truth - we have reached a point in history when the margin of error we once enjoyed is gone. In the 20th century, we were dealing, for the most part, with conventional weapons that could kill hundreds or thousands of people. If we miscalculated - if we underestimated or ignored a threat - we could absorb an attack, recover, take a deep breath, mobilize our forces, and go out and defeat our attackers. In the 21st century, that is no longer the case; the cost of underestimating the threat is increasingly unthinkable.
There is a momentous fact of life we must come to terms with: it is the nexus between terror and weapons of mass destruction. On September 11th, terrorist states discovered that missiles are not the only way to strike Washington - or Paris, or Berlin. There are other means of delivery - terrorist networks. To the extent a terrorist state transfers weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups, they could conceal their responsibility for an attack.
To this day, we still do not know with certainty who was behind the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. We still do not know who is responsible for the anthrax attacks in the U.S. The nature of terrorist attacks is that it is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to identify those responsible. And a terrorist state that can conceal its responsibility for an attack would not be deterred.
We are all vulnerable to these threats. As President Bush said in Berlin, "Those who despise human freedom will attack it on every continent." We need only to look at the recent terrorist bombings in Kenya and Bali, or the poison cells recently uncovered here in Europe, to see that is the case.

This excerpt contains the most important point that I think the antiwar folks either fail to recognize or, worse yet, willfully ignore. We no longer have the luxury of waiting for terrorists to strike first, as we learned on September 11, 2001.

How many casualties do you think we might have had on September 11, 2001 if those planes had crashed into the WTC towers a couple of hours later than they actually did -- between 11AM and noon rather than 8:45AM and 10AM?

What if the hijackers had chosen to wait for a few more weeks or months and had crashed their plane(s) into Yankee Stadium during the World Series, or into the Super Bowl at the Louisiana Superdome, or one of the major college football bowl games.

At the risk of sounding callous, we were lucky on September 11, 2001. We were lucky that the hijackers and their co-conspirators didn't do their homework as thoroughly as they could have.

We were lucky that the architects and builders of the WTC anticipated that the towers might be struck by an aircraft someday, so they factored that possibility into their design, and the measures those architects and builders added to their design might have bought us a few extra minutes that saved hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.

We were lucky that the September 11th hijackers were more interested in striking symbolic targets than in killing as many of us as they possibly could on national television. Imagine one of those jetliners crashing into the Super Bowl -- it would almost certainly have killed more people instantly, and on worldwide television to boot.

How lucky do you feel today? Are you willing to bet your life on it?

If you aren't willing to bet your life on it, don't ask the rest of us to bet ours.

UPDATE: Forgot to link to the speech. It's here.

2003-02-07T00:23:00.000-05:00

Typecasting?

What to say about this:

Mikhail Gorbachev and Bill Clinton are following in the footsteps of Dame Edna Everage, Boris Karloff and David Bowie as they narrate a new recording of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.
The former leader of the Soviet Union will join the former US president in a special performance of the work by the Russian National Orchestra under the command of Grammy-winning conductor Kent Nagano. The recording will be Mr Gorbachev's English-language debut.

Gorby's got to be the wolf.

Wonder who's going to be playing Bill's flute?

2003-02-07T00:08:00.000-05:00

Calling Inspector Clouseau...

The European Union's anti-fraud office is investigating the potential misuse of EU funds donated to the Palestinian Authority, a spokesman said Thursday.
The investigation follows allegations of corruption and claims by Israel that some of the funds have fallen into the hands of terrorists.
The EU provides more than $10 million of the PA's $90 million monthly budget and European money is meant to pay the salaries of public workers.
A spokesman for the anti-fraud office said that the investigation was sparked by information "from a number of sources over a number of months" but declined to get more specific.
Anti-fraud investigators refused to comment further on the allegations, and the spokesman said it was impossible to tell how long the inquiry might last.

Any wagers on what the EU anti-fraud inspectors will find and when they'll admit it.

My bets: nothing and never.

2003-02-07T00:00:00.000-05:00

Slipped under the radar dept.

An interesting statement from the U.S. ambassador to Germany, Daniel Coats:

According to Coats, Germany should be worried about the consequences of its Iraq policy.
"Serious doubts have arisen in the American public whether Germany is still a dependable partner," he said. "This harms our relations, and it certainly harms Germany.
"There is always the possibility that behavior in other areas could also influence economic relations," he said.

Sounds to me like the Ambassador is suggesting that there might be an economic backlash in the U.S. against German-made products.

As my old economics professor used to say, money talks and BS walks.

Let's let our money talk, and we'll see where the German BS walks.

2003-02-06T23:35:00.000-05:00

Dear Ambassador Villepin

You say that we need to increase the number of weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq.

I agree.

About two hundred thousand of them, wearing desert camouflage and packing M-16s.

Their predecessors did a heck of a job in western Europe in the mid 1940's. Found a whole pile of Hitler's secret weapons.

Found a whole bunch of documents containing the bureaucratic legacy of the Third Reich, too.

Hope your French companies sold Saddam a bunch of paper shredders, along with all the other goodies you sold him.

Because, if Saddam and his minions don't get rid of the evidence, we'll find it.

And then we'll know what kind of allies you guys really are.

2003-02-06T23:08:00.000-05:00

You go, girl!

Great rant by Deb over at insomnomaniac. My wrists ache just from looking at it, but I think she says some things a lot of us have been thinking, if not saying quite so directly.

(link via Emperor Misha I)

2003-02-06T01:10:00.000-05:00

A question for the peaceniks

Just what is it going to take for the Bush administration to "prove its case" against Iraq?

Can you even put it into words?

And if you can't put it into words, why should I give a damn what you think?

2003-02-06T00:39:00.000-05:00

Talking tough

Richard Perle really laid it on the line with these comments:

"France is no longer the ally it once was," Perle said. And he went on to accuse French President Jacques Chirac of believing "deep in his soul that Saddam Hussein is preferable to any likely successor."
... "I have long thought that there were forces in France intent on reducing the American role in the world. That is more troubling than the stance of a German chancellor, who has been largely rejected by his own people," Perle said, referring to the sharp electoral defeat suffered by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's party in state elections Sunday.
... "Very considerable damage has already been done to the Atlantic community, including NATO, by Germany and France," Perle said.

I have to differ with Mr. Perle on one point: the damage was done to the Atlantic community a long time ago, when the European states decided that bribing their own voters with social programs was more important than providing for their own defense. The cracks have been in the foundation for a couple of decades -- now they are breaking through to the surface where they are impossible to miss.

And I'm inclined to tell them to mix their own mortar for a change, if they can find anybody willing to get off the dole and do some heavy lifting for themselves.

2003-02-06T00:18:00.000-05:00

An interesting observation

From a comment at Little Green Footballs:

The other terrible irony in this is that the leftie freaks who castigated Bush & Co. for "allowing" 9/11 to happen by "not connecting the dots" are the SAME leftie freaks who are trying so desperately to interfere with the connection of these new dots. Idiots!
It baffles me how some people can live with such an internal mass of self-contradiction.

In a word, it takes practice. Practice, practice, practice...

Right now, it suits the antiwar folks' agenda to not have the dots connected, so you can depend on them to raise any argument that prevents the connections from being made. They'll also attempt to add more and more dots to the figure, relevant or not, just to be obstructive. They can't offer anything constructive to the debate at this point, so they only have obstructive tactics left.

2003-02-05T23:49:00.000-05:00

Shhh! You'll give away the secret.

Here is a superb article by Ralph Peters in the New York Post. A sample:

Today, claims of territorial sovereignty by dictators and illegitimate regimes amount to the biggest con in history. No matter how unfairly borders are drawn, no matter how monstrously tyrants behave toward their populations, no matter how ruthlessly a strongman seizes power, the world pretends that those who hold the reins in the capital city are entitled to do whatever they want on their own territory.
The current system is the greatest collective violation of human rights in our time. The United States must shatter this antiquated scam designed by kings and princes to protect their personal fiefdoms. In the 21st century, a government must earn its right to claim sovereignty.

For lack of a better word, this concept is revolutionary. Probably too revolutionary to ever gain any traction, but it does cast a whole new light on the notion of "legitimate" government. It's at least worth further debate.

2003-02-05T23:01:00.000-05:00

Bass ackwards dept.

I got bruises on the bottom of my chin (from my jaw dropping open and striking my keyboard) when I read this from an op-ed piece in the Washington Post by former Senator Bill Bradley:

3. The president minimized the importance of allies in a war against Iraq, as he has in many other areas. The major foreign policy job of the American president is to maintain healthy relations with the great powers -- Europe, Russia, China and Japan. If the United States conveys a vision in which each power can find the realization of its own interests, that job is easier.

This is a stunning example of the left's obsession with process, rather than goals. The major foreign policy job of the American president is to take any and all actions that ensure that the activities of foreign governments and their citizens do not cause harm to U.S. citizens. Negotiation or consultation with foreign governments, great powers or not, is only one of the tools that a president can use to prevent harm to U.S. citizens.

It's no wonder that the left can't show any type of vision in foreign affairs -- they keep putting the cart before the horse. Adherence to process is a sign of dogmatism, not vision.

2003-02-02T03:23:00.000-05:00

A few quiet thoughts

I wonder if my sons and their peers will ever understand why a space disaster, like the one on Saturday morning, affects me so much. I'm sure they wonder why my voice grows husky when I try to speak about it; why I have to turn my eyes away when the TV shows the video of the waving, smiling astronauts on their way to the launch pad on that bright morning when the mission lay in front of them.

For them, space shuttle flights are routine events, like the World Series or the Super Bowl. The spacecraft goes up, stays a few days, and then returns.

Occasionally, a mission is special because it involves some sort of planned interaction with schoolchildren. They watch the downlinked video, usually a quick lesson about the physics of weightlessness. They see people and objects hanging in mid-air; water globules that shimmer and pulsate as if they were alive; the occasional video shot of the Earth drifting by below, with the blue of the oceans, the browns and greens of the land masses, and the white swirls of the clouds.

Sometimes, they work with their teachers to try to invent an experiment that might be carried aboard a shuttle mission. Should they send seeds for some common local plant to see if they grow the same way in zero gravity as they do in the backyards of our town? Maybe they'll try more of a chemistry experiment, precipitating crystals out of some solution to see how the lack of gravity affects the pattern of the crystal formation.

To my children and their peers, the space shuttle is a wondrous laboratory, where a fumbled item remains near your hand to be recovered with only slight inconvenience. To them, the video pictures of the Earth sent down from the shuttle confirm what they see on the globe and maps in their classroom -- the water and the land, the day and the night, the small Earth and the vastness of space.

My sons have known only a short time when the shuttles didn't fly. The oldest was barely a toddler when the Challenger flight went so horribly awry, and his brother was two months away from being born. They were far too young to notice the 32 months between January of 1986 and September of 1988 or to understand the hearings of the Rogers Commission. By the time they could relate to events in the greater world around them, shuttles were flying again.

Now, they'll know the grief that I've known twice before. The word "Columbia" will be forever associated with trails of smoke across the blue Texas sky, just as the word "Challenger" is associated, for me, with trails of smoke across a bright Florida sky.

They'll remember President Bush telling the nation that our astronauts were tragically lost, just as I remember President Reagan telling us about the loss of the Challenger and President Johnson telling us about the horrible fire that claimed the crew of Apollo 1 on the launchpad at the Cape.

To them, this is the first space tragedy they've had to face. They'll see and hear a national outpouring of grief and sympathy. Soon, they'll hear about a prestigious panel of experts convened to discover why this event happened and, in time, they'll get some answers.

The grief will pass and the wounds will heal, unless and until another space accident happens. Then they will be the ones remembering the brave men and women who lost their lives yesterday. Feelings from yesterday, today, and the days to come, stored deep in their memory, will come rushing back.

And then they'll know that it doesn't get any easier the second time.

And why their fathers, mothers, grandfathers, and grandmothers wept on that long-ago day.

2003-02-01T19:01:00.000-05:00

President Bush's remarks

My fellow Americans, this day has brought terrible news and great sadness to our country. At 9:00 a.m. this morning, Mission Control in Houston lost contact with our Space Shuttle Columbia. A short time later, debris was seen falling from the skies above Texas. The Columbia is lost; there are no survivors.
On board was a crew of seven: Colonel Rick Husband; Lt. Colonel Michael Anderson; Commander Laurel Clark; Captain David Brown; Commander William McCool; Dr. Kalpana Chawla; and Ilan Ramon, a Colonel in the Israeli Air Force. These men and women assumed great risk in the service to all humanity.
In an age when space flight has come to seem almost routine, it is easy to overlook the dangers of travel by rocket, and the difficulties of navigating the fierce outer atmosphere of the Earth. These astronauts knew the dangers, and they faced them willingly, knowing they had a high and noble purpose in life. Because of their courage and daring and idealism, we will miss them all the more.
All Americans today are thinking, as well, of the families of these men and women who have been given this sudden shock and grief. You're not alone. Our entire nation grieves with you. And those you loved will always have the respect and gratitude of this country.
The cause in which they died will continue. Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand. Our journey into space will go on.
In the skies today we saw destruction and tragedy. Yet farther than we can see there is comfort and hope. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, "Lift your eyes and look to the heavens. Who created all these? He who brings out the starry hosts one by one and calls them each by name. Because of His great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing."
The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth; yet we can pray that all are safely home.
May God bless the grieving families, and may God continue to bless America.

2003-02-01T17:30:00.000-05:00

Why they are heroes...

Peggy Noonan, on this morning's tragedy:

We forget to notice the everyday courage of astronauts. We forget to think about all the Americans doing big and dangerous things in the world--members of the armed forces, cops and firemen, doctors in public hospitals in hard places. And now, famously again, astronauts. With their unremarked-upon valor and cool professionalism. With their desire to make progress and push on.
Buzz Aldrin captured it this morning. He tried to read a poem about astronauts on television. He read these words: "As they passed from us to glory, riding fire in the sky." And tough old Buzz, steely-eyed rocket man and veteran of the moon, began to weep.
He was not alone.

No, he was not alone.

Nor should he be.

2003-02-01T15:58:00.000-05:00

R.I.P., Columbia (STS-107)

Lord, guard and guide the men who fly
Through the great spaces in the sky.
Be with them always in the air,
In darkening storms or sunlight fair;
Oh, hear us when we lift our prayer,
For those in peril in the air!
Mary C. D. Hamilton, 1915
Eternal Father, King of birth,
Who didst create the heaven and earth,
And bid the planets and the sun
Their own appointed orbits run;
O hear us when we seek thy grace
From those who soar through outer space.
J. E. Volonte, 1961

Alternative verses to Eternal Father, Strong to Save, also known as the "Navy Hymn".

Crew:

Commander Rick D. Husband
Pilot William C. McCool
Payload Specialist Michael P. Anderson
Mission Specialist Kalpana Chawla
Mission Specialist David M. Brown
Mission Specialist Laurel B. Clark
Payload Specialist Ilan Ramon, Israel

2003-01-31T02:24:00.000-05:00

I'm just curious...

One of the latest, greatest objections to going to war with Iraq that I've been reading and hearing lately is "innocent people in Iraq will be killed if we go to war with Iraq."

My question to those who offer this objection is: aren't innocent people in Iraq being killed every day?

Haven't innocent people been killed for the entire 23 years that Saddam has been in power.

Here are some quick calculations.

There have been at least 8395 days in the reign of Saddam Hussein (365 days/year x 23 years).

If only 1 innocent person per day, on average, have been killed by Saddam and his internal security forces, that adds up to more than 8,000 people over the 23 years.

Add in another 20,000 dead Iraqi soldiers (estimated) for the Persian Gulf War (which Saddam started) and another 375,000 (estimated) for the Iran-Iraq war. That comes to a total of 403,000+ people in 23 years.

An average of 17,500+ people per year. 48 people per day, every day for 23 years.

An NFL football team dead, every day. Two Major League Baseball teams dead, every day. Four NBA basketball teams, every day.

A busload of commuters, every day. For 23 years.

Isn't it time for Saddam's killing to stop?

2003-01-30T23:04:00.000-05:00

A tripleheader for the Telegraph

Another great article from our friends across the pond, courtesy of John Keegan:

The new appeasers seem to recognise that the arguments of the 1930s will not wash today. First, the democracies have all the power, enjoying both nuclear and conventional supremacy. Second, the dictators, in this case Saddam, are men of straw. Saddam is certainly a master of diplomatic trickery, but a huff and a puff will blow his house down.
The new appeasers cannot therefore terrify the public with warnings of a battlefield holocaust. Nor can they advocate direct appeasement of the troublemakers, who clearly do not merit it. Appeasement therefore takes a new form.
The objection to war now stated is not the danger it threatens to one's own side, but, paradoxically, that it threatens against the other. It has become commonplace for the appeasers to speak of "millions of deaths" among the opponents' civilian population and to warn of widespread ecological and economic disaster. War itself, not the suffering to Britain that it might bring, is now the enemy. So the blacker the horrors painted, the better the new appeasement's cause is served.
...The history of appeasement does not change. Hitler was once a weak little man - and it was the concessions of the appeasers of his day that allowed him to grow strong. Once Saddam has his nuclear weapons, he will beat the drum of war. It will be a war that the new appeasers, like the old appeasers who rallied to Churchill after Hitler's first blitzkrieg, will bitterly regret that they did not fight when they had the chance to win.

In the words of the song, "everything old is new again."

At least it is for those who choose to ignore or are ignorant of the lessons of history.

2003-01-30T22:54:00.000-05:00

Telling it like it is...

Toby Harnden, in the Daily Telegraph, gets it:

Yet for many opposed to war, the UN process has been elevated to an end in itself - and the unstated truth is that most who cite the overweening importance of UN resolutions and inspections see them less as a mechanism to force Saddam to dispose of his weapons, than as a way of disarming Mr Bush politically by mounting a diplomatic filibuster.
Their Gulf policy is one of containment - containment of America, that is, rather than Iraq. The fact that many supported military intervention in Kosovo without UN backing exposes the dishonesty of their current stance. Those calling for more time for inspections must realise that, without American forces stationed on Iraq's borders, Saddam is less rather than more likely to disarm. It is as if anything to postpone the day of reckoning will do - and Saddam knows that, if he can survive into the hot days of April, then he will have faced down the world once again.
...Resentment of American power and appeasement of a despot with a track record of internal repression and external aggression are no basis for a foreign policy. And it is imperative that we realise that the world will be a better as well as a safer place once Saddam has gone.

I couldn't agree more.

2003-01-30T22:33:00.000-05:00

The burning question...

Janet Daley asks the tough question:

I wonder what the Blix report would have to have contained for the anti-war lobby to have thrown up its hands and said: "Well, that's that then. No more argument. We've obviously got to get rid of this regime."
...Shall we try to imagine what these voices of the liberal conscience would have said if the white South African authorities had used chemical weapons against the black population in Soweto? Would they have been arguing for British inaction and a lifting of economic sanctions against Pretoria?
There is always a lot to be said for not going to war, even against an evil dictator, when your own country does not appear to be under immediate threat. But if the main argument against the war is primarily self-interest, then the anti-war lobby should drop its claim to the moral high ground.
Is it worth risking British lives to bring freedom to Iraq, and to help install rational government in the most dangerous area of the world? That is the question that the Left needs to answer.

I wonder how the antiwar folks here in the U.S. would answer this question. They've been able to dodge it so far, but now it's on the table.

Let's keep it there, at least until they answer it.

2003-01-30T22:23:00.000-05:00

A high risk strategy?

An interesting suggeston from Deborah Orin in the New York Post:

"If you support Bush on Iraq and he wins, you gain zip," explained a Democratic strategist. "If you support him and he loses, you lose along with him. But if you oppose him and things go bad, you stand to be a big winner."
That is both breathtaking and revolting.
At a time when U.S. troops seem headed in harm's way, this strategist - and several other Democrats who are disgusted with their own party - suggest some Dems are calculating they could gain politically if there are body bags.

Ms. Orin doesn't address the fourth possible case -- oppose Bush and he wins. That should make such a politician completely irrelevant on matters of national security in the future, but we know from our experience with the first Persian Gulf War that the big national media won't let their buddies on the antiwar left fall into their well-deserved oblivion.

This is a prime example of what I like to call "moving the goalpost." Every time the Bush administration has gone around or over an obstacle placed in their path by the antiwar left, the peaceniks come up with a new hurdle to cross. Their sympathizers in the big media then trumpet the new position as yet another reason why the administration should not keep going forward.

What these folks don't seem to realize is that moving the goalpost on the old playing field won't affect the Bush administration -- this President has moved the game to a new field, forced upon him by the events of 9/11, with new rules. In short, this is not the '60s and the war on terror is not Vietnam. If the antiwar left insists on continuing to view the current situation through the Vietnam lens, they'll soon become as relevant to the national security politics of the 21st century as Harold Stassen was to Republican presidential campaigns in the 20th century -- always around, always ignored, and always a loser.

2003-01-29T02:20:00.000-05:00

Is a new day dawning?

Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity.
GWB, 1-28-2003

I hope that this is truly going to be a guiding principle of our foreign policy from now on. It is no longer acceptable for those who would be our allies simply to be opposed to our enemies. They must share this fundamental value if they wish to sit at our table.

We owe it to those who paid the ultimate sacrifice to preserve our liberties.

We owe it to those, yet unborn, who deserve the chance to live in freedom.

We owe it to ourselves, to remind us that our freedom is not the norm in our troubled world, and to encourage us to work to preserve it and to pass it on.

2003-01-29T02:03:00.000-05:00

I still don't get it...

Just heard one of the antiwar talking heads on the tube complaining about the possibility of civilian casualties in Iraq if and when we start the war. The only conclusion that I can draw from hearing this over and over for the past few weeks is that they think it is OK if Iraqi citizens are sitting ducks for Saddam for his own purposes, but we shouldn't go in and remove Saddam unless we can guarantee that we won't kill anyone.

I guess they are holding out for a super bomb full of that gas the Russians used in the Moscow theater last year -- but with better control of the dosage.

2003-01-28T23:55:00.000-05:00

My impressions of the President's speech

Overall, a good speech, not a great speech. Leading with the domestic issues was probably necessary, but it introduced a certain amount of partisan divisiveness and negative feeling, which colored the listeners' response to the foreign policy section of the speech. In short, the President's opponents got fired up against him in the first part of the speech and probably didn't really hear the second part of the speech.

I was surprised by the AIDS/Africa initiative. I wonder if the prominence given to this issue is an attempt to curry some favor among the African members of the UN Security Council -- Guinea, Angola, and Cameroon. Guinea will hold the presidency of the Security Council during the month of March (following the February presidency of Germany), which is where the best estimates for the start of hostilities against Iraq are coming in.

The President may have overdone it a little on his presentation of evidence against Saddam Hussein, while glossing over detail on policies toward Iran and North Korea. Using the facts and figures from UNSCOM/UNMOVIC was effective, but citing the source of other bits of information about Iraq as "our intelligence officials" or "U.S. intelligence" was, in my opinion, begging the question. The CIA and FBI still have too many unanswered questions about their handling of intelligence before 9/11/2001 to be cited as definitive and credible sources of information.

Additionally, if the President is really planning to send the Secretary of State to the U.N. Security Council next week with "information and intelligence about...Iraq's illegal weapons programs, its attempt to hide those weapons from inspectors, and its links to terrorist groups.", then there was really no point to giving a point-by-point indictment in tonight's speech. A couple of particulars followed by the promise to reveal more at the U.N. next week probably would have sufficed.

Given that the closing theme for the speech seemed to be a "crusade for freedom" (in the words of a couple of TV pundits, immediately after the speech), I think the President should have shown how Saddam has sought these horrible technologies for use against his own people first, against his regional rivals second, and let the audience draw the obvious conclusion that he would use them against more distant rivals (the West) as he developed the technology to even further levels. This would have made the point that every despot starts by oppressing his own people and expands from there. Therefore, taking out a despot while he's still in his "domestic" phase will prevent harm from going beyond the borders and allowing the despot to become an international threat. The flipside of that conclusion is that the possibility of a despot getting aggressive intentions toward his neighbors is sufficient cause to prevent him from acquiring domestic power in the first place.

In short, this was a tale of two speeches -- one dry and partisan and the other, inspirational. It would have been more effective to recast the domestic issues in light of their effects on the foreign issues (and vice versa), where possible, to tie the packages into an integrated whole. We need more inspiration -- more vision -- and less partisanship. Unfortunately, we got too much of the latter and not enough of the former, tonight.

2003-01-28T11:21:00.000-05:00

Thoughts on using nukes

Here's a thought-provoking article about situations where the U.S. and its allies might use nuclear weapons to pre-empt WMD strikes by Iraqi forces.

Here is one of the key paragraphs of the article:

I don't expect that we would use a pre-emptive strike on these facilities, unless we had incontrovertible proof that Iraqi WMD were about to be used. Even then, considering the refusal to accept anything said by the Bush administration on the part of, say (1) fanatic radicals here in the US, (2) the major media and academia, or (3) anybody from France or Germany, there would still be an impossible amount of political fallout for decades (I have yet to meet a World War II veteran - and I've known many - who wasn't delighted that we ended that war with atomic bombs, sparing hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people on both sides. Yet consider how that topic is handled today.)

Emphasis added by me.

In my opinion -- and I am not and never have been a military professional -- this points out that a weapon whose use is hamstrung by political considerations is no weapon at all. If we are indeed fighting a foe who is determined that we should "assimilate or die", what is the political consideration holding us back? How much clearer do they have to be?

Perhaps we need to make it equally as clear to them -- if you want a fight to the finish, then no military option of any kind at any time is off the table as far as we are concerned. You may start the war, but we will do everything in our power to finish it, with maximum damage to you and minimum damage to us.

If you aren't already reading Rev. Sensing's blog, you should be.

UPDATE: Rev. Sensing has noted in the comments, and I should have made clear in my summary, that the quoted material is from a guest post on his site, and does not represent his opinion on the issue. My apologies to Rev. Sensing for any confusion that I caused.

Please check the site in the next day or so for an article detailing Rev. Sensing's view on the issues raised by the guest post.

2003-01-26T23:27:00.000-05:00

When it's not your butt on the line

Donald Sensing has a powerful piece rebutting this proposition put forward in a New York Times article:

Germany, too, is unimpressed. "The likelihood of using force is deterring Saddam, but it is also deterring the allies," said Karsten D. Voigt, the coordinator for German-American cooperation in the country's foreign office.
Mr. Voigt is scornful of German colleagues who refuse to recognize that, in his view, the arms inspections in Iraq have only gotten this far because Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair have been willing to put forces on the Iraqi border. But using them, he says, is another thing.
"We know about containment," he said at breakfast the other day, gesturing in the direction of where the Berlin Wall once stood. "We lived with it for 50 years. It worked. And at the end, we got regime change."

Let me add my 2 cents worth to the arguments against this proposition.

Mr. Voigt's statement is cynical in the extreme. It is very easy for him to make this statement since he does not live under the rule of Saddam Hussein. In fact, it is quite likely that he has never lived as a citizen/subject of a regime like that in Iraq. Thus, it is patently ridiculous for him to assert that "we lived with it for 50 years".

During the 50 years of the Cold War, citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany lived in opulence compared to their compatriots on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The Federal Republic was part of the free world, not the oppressed and enslaved world behind the Iron Curtain. It is very easy to prefer the status quo when it is comfortable.

How generous is Mr. Voigt to offer regime change in Iraq at some unspecified time in the future, at no cost to him or his country but patient waiting? Would he be so patient if someone was attaching live electrodes to his genitals? Would he be so accommodating to Saddam if his son or daughter were being immersed slowly into a vat of acid?

Just one question for you, Mr. Voigt. Would you be willing to trade lives with the average Iraqi? If not, then you should keep your "we lived with it" to yourself.

2003-01-26T18:36:00.000-05:00

On supporting the troops

Steven Den Beste has a nice article about Bob Hope and his USO tours to entertain U.S. troops overseas. He concludes his article with this:

There is much disagreement amongst us here in America about this war, in Afghanistan or in Iraq or wherever it ends up taking us. Some think we must fight it; some think it the greatest mistake we can make. Some think that it is needed to prevent great evil; some think that it will cause great evil. Some think we have to fight elsewhere to prevent attacks on our homes; some think that fighting elsewhere will encourage attacks on our homes. Even when it's over, no matter when that happens or how it ends, there will never be unanimity about whether we should have fought at all, or whether we fought it the right way.
But I must forthrightly state that no matter what anyone thinks of the war, we all must support the troops who fight it. They didn't cause the war; they didn't make the decisions that led to it. But they're the ones who are out there risking everything on behalf of us all ? even those with "Not in my name" bumper stickers on their cars.
I do not say that any person who opposes the war is unpatriotic. I do not condemn people for holding that position. Dissent is part of our tradition, and I feel that the encouragement of disagreement is one of our greatest strengths and virtues. If we actually are making a mistake, we need people who are brave enough to say so and try to convince the rest of us of that fact.
But any American who sneers at the soldiers themselves, or blames them for the war, or hopes that they die or be wounded, is beneath contempt.

I couldn't have said it better, myself. Shorter, perhaps, but not better.

2003-01-26T16:58:00.000-05:00

The truth slips out

The title of this article in yesterday's Washington Post says it all:

In Britain, War Concern Grows Into Resentment of U.S. Power

Consider this:

"There's no question the anxiety is moving into the mainstream," said Raymond Seitz, a former U.S. ambassador to Britain who is vice chairman of Lehman Brothers Europe. The debate here, he said, has shifted. "It's not about how you deal with weapons of mass destruction or how you combat the threat of terrorism in the world, it's about how do you constrain the United States. How do you tie down Gulliver?"

Isn't this a wonderful expression of what Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was speaking of when he referred to "old Europe"? Don't worry about the big issues confronting all of the civilized world. Worry about how to keep the U.S. from doing something about those issues.

Criticism of America here begins with Iraq but quickly broadens to accusations that Washington is aiding and abetting Israeli repression of Palestinians and is a gluttonous society of large cars, fast food and environmental degradation seeking cheap Iraqi oil to feed its consumption habits.
"People in America don't understand that Blair is a rather lonely figure within his own party and within the country as a whole" concerning war and the alliance with the United States, Michael Gove, a columnist for the Times of London newspaper, said. "Anti-Americanism is a real force here and a growing one. It starts with tightly focused arguments but broadens into the crudest of caricatures."

Makes you wonder how long it will be before we see editorial cartoons from European newspapers where a "hook-nosed Jew" is skipping along, hand-in-hand, with Uncle Sam (redrawn to resemble the Sta-Puf™ marshmallow man) over crumpled, emaciated bodies wearing kaffiyeh?

For the traditional left, said Emmanuele Ottolinghi, a research fellow at the Middle East Center at St. Antony's, anti-Americanism has replaced a belief in socialism as the common denominator that holds disparate groups together. It also binds the left to Britain's growing Muslim population, anti-globalists and anti-Zionists. "Anti-Americanism is glue that holds them together, and hatred of Israel is one aspect," he said.

If you can't beat 'em, find some other reason to hate them. Please note the twin targets -- Americans and Jews.

Former ambassador Seitz said the fears of the British are compounded by the realization that they have little or no control over what happens. "At the end of the day, the British do not control their own fate," he said. "They've hitched their wagon to the American juggernaut, and the decisions that can pose danger to British forces and interests are essentially taken in Washington, not London."

Here is the heart of their problem, both in Britain and in the rest of Europe. By turning inward -- substituting European union for foreign policy and denuding their militaries in favor of domestic subsidy -- the Europeans have given up any effective leverage over nations outside the continent. When they cannot buy off antagonists, they are left impotent in the face of their enemies. And, given the restiveness of the Muslim communities within some of those nations, they are beginning to see that they really do have enemies.

Of course, it's a whole lot easier to criticize friends than it is to stand up to enemies. Once again, they take the path of least resistance, at the cost of being able to defend their principles.

So they waver, swaying in the wind like dead leaves on autumn's trees, waiting only for that moment when a sudden gust breaks the tie which holds them above the cold earth. They appear not to know that they must fall before the new growth of spring can revitalize the trees.

2003-01-25T17:06:00.000-05:00

Wish I'd said that

Mark Steyn responds to Sheryl Crow's famous remarks:

That great thinker Sheryl Crow declared the other day: "War is based in greed and there are huge karmic retributions that will follow. I think war is never the answer to solving any problems. The best way to solve problems is to not have enemies."
In the Falklands, war solved a lot of problems. For 20 years, the islanders have lived in peace and freedom. So, in their own chaotic Latin fashion, have the liberated peoples of Argentina and most of the rest of the continent. If the best way to solve problems is not to have enemies, then the best way not to have enemies is to get rid of them. Thank you, Mrs. Thatcher.

Emphasis added by me.

I hope someone at the White House or the State Department is reading Steyn.

2003-01-23T22:58:00.000-05:00

Do we really care?

The French and the Germans appear to be quite upset with some remarks U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made on Wednesday.

French Finance Minister Francis Mer said he was "profoundly vexed" by Mr Rumsfeld's remarks - which branded France and Germany "old Europe - while a former employment minister described the US as arrogant.

Sounds to me like we need to get the Clonaid folks to make us up a few extra copies of Rummy. That way we can have a Rumsfeld clone as the ambassador to each of the EU countries.

Then, at least, they'd never be able to complain about not knowing what we are going to do or how we think.

Bravo, Mr. Secretary!

2003-01-23T21:35:00.000-05:00

Former senator joins the Rangel club

Former U.S. Senator John Glenn called Wednesday for the reinstitution of the military draft.

"I think all strata of our society should share in this next 20 years we have ahead, which is undoubtedly going to have a lot of combat situations come up," former Ohio Democratic Sen. John Glenn told CNSNews.com .

"We're not looking forward to just a little bit of combat once in a while; this is liable to be a much greater combat role than anybody ever thought we were getting into," Glenn said.

The first identifiable memory I have in my life is of watching the television news broadcasts of Sen. Glenn's Friendship 7 Mercury mission. During much of my youth, he was one of my biggest heroes. As I grew older and he became more prominent in politics, I found some points of disagreement with Sen. Glenn, but still admired him.

Unfortunately, with statements like these, Sen. Glenn bears less resemblance to the hero of my youth and more resemblance to Ed Harris (the actor that portrayed Glenn in the movie The Right Stuff). The presumption that some socioeconomic groups in this country would fail to shoulder their share of the load, should our war on terrorism raise military manpower requirements beyond what the current volunteer system can handle, is insulting to all Americans. Apparently, all that Sen. Glenn remembers about the American public is the class warfare stereotype that the modern Democratic party loves so dearly.

It's thinking like this that shows why Ronald Reagan, an actor who played American heroes on the silver screen, was able to get elected President, while Sen. Glenn, who once was a real hero, could never even get the nomination of his party to run for President.

2003-01-23T18:51:00.000-05:00

Ratcheting up the rhetoric

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice pushed a few more chips into the pot with this op-ed piece in the New York Times.

Instead of a commitment to disarm, Iraq has a high-level political commitment to maintain and conceal its weapons, led by Saddam Hussein and his son Qusay, who controls the Special Security Organization, which runs Iraq's concealment activities. Instead of implementing national initiatives to disarm, Iraq maintains institutions whose sole purpose is to thwart the work of the inspectors. And instead of full cooperation and transparency, Iraq has filed a false declaration to the United Nations that amounts to a 12,200-page lie.

...Many questions remain about Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and arsenal ? and it is Iraq's obligation to provide answers. It is failing in spectacular fashion. By both its actions and its inactions, Iraq is proving not that it is a nation bent on disarmament, but that it is a nation with something to hide. Iraq is still treating inspections as a game. It should know that time is running out.

I anticipate that we are going to see more of these types of statements from the Bush administration over the next few days, building to a climax with the president's State of the Union message on the 28th.

Opponents of the administration's policy toward Iraq have been asking for proof. It looks like they are going to get all they can stand, short of compromising intelligence sources and methods. I predict that their next tactic will be to raise their standard of proof even higher than they already have, and that the administration has the equivalent of the Kennedy missile-sites-in-Cuba waiting for them, once they've crawled out on the end of the limb.

Stay tuned. The president has more than just Iraq in his sights.

2003-01-23T12:16:00.000-05:00

Interesting doings in Iraq

Opposition to Saddam Hussein appears to be growing among the Iraqi people.

Anti-Saddam slogans, such as "For how long will the Iraqi people sleep?", have been daubed on statues and photographs of the Iraqi leader. Leaflets predicting Saddam's downfall have also been circulated. The campaign of dissent, which is punishable by death for anyone caught, has apparently been co-ordinated by two opposition groups emboldened by the prospect of a looming war. The Iraqi authorities are said to have cracked down on suspected opponents. But they have also attempted to buy the loyalty of people close to the regime with payments and increased rations of food.

Looks like word of the American and British military buildup is getting through.

2003-01-23T11:31:00.000-05:00

In support of the people of Venezuela

Visit here to support our Venezuelan blogging compatriots. Times are tough down there.

2003-01-21T02:33:00.000-05:00

O.K. -- enough already

I hadn't planned to write much about the weekend's antiwar protests (other than pointing out a few moronic quotes picked up by Big Media), but the lame responses posted by the antiwar folks in this discussion over at Tacitus' place have my blood pressure elevated.

The way I see it, there are basically two main types of antiwar groups. For simplicity's sake, let's call them the idealists and the legalists. There may be groups that combine various aspects of my two classifications, but I don't plan to deal with them here.

The idealists are those who are morally opposed to war and all other sorts of violence. This would include religious groups such as the Quakers. It can also include secular groups such as radical libertarians who oppose the formation of state-contolled armies.

I can respect the stands of idealist antiwar groups, because I feel confident that they are opposed to all forms of war. However, I think they tend to be dangerously naive. All martyrs have a couple of things in common -- they are dead and their persecutors/killers outlived them. Martyrdom may be very principled, but it is ultimately self-destructive in the face of a persistent enemy. Nonetheless, it is their right to offer themselves as martyrs to their cause.

The legalist antiwar groups, on the other hand, are the ones I tend to have some problems with. The legalist groups insist that some set of conditions must be met before a state can go to war and, when these conditions are met, they will support the war effort.

In theory and given the right conditions, I could agree with some legalists. There are certain situations in which war is the best, if not only, solution, and those are the situations where we should go to war. In other situations, we should not go to war. In the current state of our world, however, some of the conditions set by some of the legalists are vacuous and disingenuous at best and ludicrous, if not dangerous, at worst.

What are some of the legalist arguments currently being bandied about that bother me?

This country should never be the aggressor, but should wait until we are attacked before responding.

To the proponents of this position, I have but one question: how many of your fellow citizens are you willing to sacrifice in order to satisfy this condition? One? A dozen? A hundred? A thousand?

Is your principle so sacred that the human rights of your fellow citizens become meaningless?

Save the "white hat" for the movies, where the victims get up after the shooting stops, wipe off the fake blood, and go out for a drink with the "shooters" after the work is done. In this age of weapons of mass destruction, the potential toll at risk by waiting for the first punch is far too high to condone in the name of some abstract principle.

We can only go to war if the United Nations approves of our going to war.

To the proponents of this position, I say: since when do we have to have the approval of other nations to defend our own citizens? Do you honestly believe that the United Nations is a fair and objective forum for debating such issues, and that we should be unconditionally bound by the decisions emanating from that body? Should any government voluntarily cede its responsibility to defend its citizens to a multinational body?

Should we even care what the Cuban government thinks about our policy in the Middle East? How about the North Koreans or the Libyans? Does any other country, ally or non-ally, decide how it is going to use its vote in the U.N. on the basis of anything but its own self-interest? If so, why should we voluntarily bind ourselves to serving their interests and not our own?

At this point in history, the U.N. is an impotent, bureaucratic debating society which lays a thin pseudo-democratic veneer over naked state ambition. When a country's membership in the U.N. becomes contingent on that country having implemented true democratic governance of its people, then we should take heed of what the U.N. says. As long as a dictatorship is allowed the same vote as a democratic nation, the U.N. is a farce and should be treated as such.

We supported Government X in the past. It would be hypocritical for us to go after it now.

To the proponents of this position, I say: times change and sometimes we must change with them. Our support of that government in the past may have been justifiable, or it may have been a short-sighted mistake. Shouldn't we attempt to correct our errors once we have seen them?

By this logic, we shouldn't be supporting the governments in much of eastern Europe because we were opposed to them in the past. Heck, we shouldn't even be supporting the British -- after all, isn't that the country that we originally revolted against to form this nation. Should we have continued to support Marcos and his cronies in the Philippines, or Pinochet and his cronies in Chile?

If we have wrongfully supported a government in the past, we owe it to the people of that nation to rectify that mistake. After all, they are the ones who likely have suffered most from our mistake.

We have no proof. Where's the smoking gun?

To the proponents of this position, I say (borrowing from Rachel Lucas): a gun only smokes after it is fired.

How much proof do you need? If an enemy is determined to keep his activities hidden, it is almost impossible for us to obtain hard proof without putting "boots on the ground" to overcome the resistance of the government in that country. In the case of WMD, the first definitive proof of the existence of such weapons might be a mushroom cloud over some city, either here or abroad.

During WWII, we only had anecdotal evidence of the Nazi death camps -- mostly, stories told by survivors who managed to escape from those camps. We didn't have satellite surveillance that showed us overhead views of Auschwitz or Treblinka or Dachau. When Allied troops overran these camps, we finally had the "hard" proof -- but at what price to the victims.

Conflict between nations is not like that in a courtroom. Power rules, not procedure, and the stakes are high -- possibly life or death. If only one side plays "by the rules", that side has taken on a disadvantage which might be fatal to its citizens. That, in my view, is a government that betrays its citizens.

We should let diplomacy work.

To the proponents of this position, I say: talking for talking's sake is counterproductive. It wastes time and energy. If only one side is seriously negotiating while the other is stalling for time, diplomacy has no chance of succeeding. The problem is in distinguishing the situations where only one side is negotiating in good faith.

If one side is found to be abusing the diplomatic process, then diplomacy must be immediately and summarily concluded, not to be reopened until the offending party changes its ways.

In conclusion, let me say that I am not condemning any of the antiwar protestors as people. They are my fellow citizens and have the same right to speak out as I have. All I ask is that they look at the arguments that they are making from my point of view, just as they ask me to look at the issues from their point of view.

In healthy and honest debate, we can find truth. And isn't that what we all are seeking?

2003-01-20T23:57:00.000-05:00

If you can't argue with them, ignore 'em

Grognard, over at Sgt. Stryker's place, had the following remark concerning this weekend's antiwar protests:

I was inspired ot write something about the "peace protests" that have come to the media's attention over the weekend. But, I can't figure out what to say. You can't have a battle of wits with idiots, because they drag you down to their level, and then beat you with experience. Logical arguments have no place in their illogical ravings.

Well said, Grognard, well said.