TerrorWar
Jim H. Ainsworth in an article at American Thinker asks Obama to
"please explain why American lives are more precious in Iraq than they would be in Afghanistan-why you are willing to spend treasure and lives in this hostile land, but want to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq?"
I don't know what Obama would say if he answered this question, but I do know that there is no honest answer he can give, even if he were an honest man. Indeed, the whole warp and woof of the Afghanistan question cannot be answered honestly by any of the myriad Democrats and fellow travelers who have been boosting this canard for years.
Indeed, if you had to extract any current position on the war on terror promoted without hint or hindrance by Democrats over the past few years it is that "the real war is in Afghanistan." Yes, only there can we track, find, capture and bring to a court of law the evil doer Osama Bin Laden. And then we can declare, with the running to ground of this one man, not victory, but a win. And then we can go home.
This constant carping about the real war in Afghanistan is so much mirrors and smoke sent up from the smoldering brainpans of people who have no such opinion at all. They would be liars to a man if they were any real men among them.
Do not buy the Afghanistan lie.
Continued...
Image from Day by Day Cartoon by Chris Muir
[What follows is a slightly edited transcript of what I saw and how I felt on the 11th of September, 2001 from Brooklyn Heights in New York City. On that day I was posting to a West Coast Computer Conferencing system known as The Well. As a result, even though I was writing from Brooklyn Heights, directly across the river from the Towers, the time stamp reflects PST.
For a moving tribute that was made soon after the 11th see 911 in Pictures
For an excellent history of what has happened since see Lawhawk's 9/11: Seven Years Later]
Tue 11 Sep 01 08:07
Saw the first tower collapse from the Promeade across the river in Brooklyn. Fine white and pale yellow ash everywhere. Lower Manhattan covered in smoke with ash still drifting down.
Military jets overhead every five minutes or so.
Lower span of Brooklyn Bridge jammed with people walking out of the city, many covered with white ash. Ghosts. The Living Dead. BQE empty except for convoys of emergency vehicles.
Sirens in all directions. Ferry ships emerging from the smoke heading to the Brooklyn shore riding low in the water fully loaded.
This is monstrous.
Deaths in the thousands in New York.
My body is trembling with sorrow and rage. I saw the first tower fall. Everyone in it would have been killed. This, all this, must be stopped. Those who have done this must be wiped out to the last.
War with whom?
Continued...
The wind at Ground Zero during the first memorial service, September 11, 2002
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I.
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.
-- Christina Rossetti
10,000 FEARED DEAD
-- Headline, New York Post, September 12, 2001
AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY I lived in Brooklyn Heights in, of course, Brooklyn. The opening of the Brooklyn Bridge on May 24 of 1883 transformed the high bluff just to the south of the bridge into America's first suburb. It became possible for affluent businessmen from the tip of Manhattan which lay just over the East River to commute across the bridge easily and build their stately mansions and townhouses high above the slapdash docks below. Growth and change would wash around the Heights in the 117 years that followed, but secure on their bluff, on their high ground, the Heights would remain a repository old and new money, power, and some of the finest examples of 19th and early 20th century homes found in New York City.
When I moved to Brooklyn Heights from the suburbs of Westport, Connecticut in the late 90s, it was a revelation to me that such a neighborhood still existed. Small side streets and cul-de-sacs were shaded over by large oaks and maple that made it cool even in the summer doldrums. Street names such as Cranberry, Orange and Pineapple let you know you were off the grid of numbered streets and avenues. Families were everywhere and the streets on evenings and on weekends were full of the one thing you rarely see in Manhattan, children.
Truth: "uncool."
Nineteen-year-old Army Pfc. Aaron J. Ward, a Fort Lewis military policeman whose hometown was San Jacinto, Calif., was killed May 6 in Iraq's Anbar province when his patrol came under enemy fire. - Ranger, sub officer, MP with links to state died in war last month EDITOR'S NOTE: Each month, the P-I remembers the servicemen and servicewomen with ties to Washington who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"The American culture of cool has become a nation apart, an alternate-America..."
It was Easter Sunday in 2004 and we were two and a half years into the war. Good Friday evening was one of those nights when, in Southern California, the weather and the combine to create what are rightly called "balmy conditions." Balm, as in a kind of salve to the soul and the skin. The air is warm but not too warm. The skies are clear and the stars seem closer. My then wife and I had just seen some current comic book confection at one of the 20 screen multiplexes that are so numerous in this area that you can see the same movies 15 times within a ten mile radius.
We sat by a large sandstone and marble fountain in the stone circle between the vast theater and the vaster parking lot. It was date night and the beginning of Spring Break for the schools of Orange County. All around us kids from 11 to 18 were whooping and laughing and forming clusters of friends. They were dressed according to the upscale Goth-Surfer/Balkan Refugee dress-code common to the kid culture here on the coast. Most were too young to have tattoos or piercing, but you could see some were already planning where those lifestyle statements would go. They were slim, energetic and heedless of the future. In short, they were just reasonably rich kids in America in 2003. No different now in 2008, seven and a half years into a war they've been trained to hate or ignore.
The war was not and will probably never become these kids' concern. It isn't even something they consider outside of, perhaps, a few classroom exercises of dubious intent or merit. There is no reason they should consider war, nor do I wish that upon them. It isn't, in any real sense, their war. War isn't being asked of us or the affluent kids of Orange County, nor does it seem likely to be. Besides, war isn't what they're into.
TO: ISLAM
FROM: AMERICANS UNITED FOR OBAMA
RE: KILLING US SOME MORE
DEAR ISLAM,
You may have asked yourselves if, with the rise of Barack Hussein Obama, we American supporters of the candidate of the millennium are impatient with you. Yes, it's true. You are not fulfilling our desires which we believe we have made clear with our worship of Obama. Let's be clear about one thing, as supporters of Obama we thirst for death.
We would like you, at your earliest opportunity, to expunge our guilt - especially that of the whitest and therefore most guilty among us - by slaughtering us wholesale.
Just as you hate us for what we are so we hate ourselves for who we are. We have so much while you, the petulant children of a whacked-out god, oppressed by your own ratty cultures and fascist governments and unable to contribute anything to civilization for over 500 years, have so little except your "trauma." Because of this we feel it is only fair that you get to kill more of us at will.
[Republished from last year at this time.]
Five years in. An inch of time. Five years in and the foolish and credulous among us yearn to get out. Their feelings require it. The power of their Holy Gospel of "Imagine" compels them. Their overflowing pools of compassion for the enslavers of women, the killers of homosexuals, the beheaders of reporters, and the incinerators of men and women working quietly at their desks, rise and flood their minds until their eyes flow with crocodile tears while their mouths emit slogans made of cardboard. They believe the world is run on wishes and that they will always have three more.
Like savages shambling about some campfire where all there is to eat are a few singed tubers, they paint their faces with the tatterdemalion symbols of a summer of love long sent down to rot with the worms. They clasp hands and sing songs whose lyrics are ash. "We shall... over... come." Overcome what, overcome who? Overcome their nation? Is that their dream? It is the lifelong dream of those that lead them. That much is certain.
Five years in and we see these old rotting rituals trotted out in the streets like some pagan procession of idols and shibboleths, like some furred and feathered fetish shaken against the sky by hunkering witch-doctors, to hold back the dark, to frighten off the evil spirits and graven images that trouble the sleep of the dreamers.
Five years into the most gentle war ever fought, a war fought on the cheap at every level, a war fought to avoid civilian harm rather than maximize it. Picnic on the grass at Shiloh. Walk the Western Front. Speak to the smoke of Dresden. Kneel down and peek into the ovens of Auschwitz. Sit on the stones near ground zero at Hiroshima and converse with the shadows singed into the wall. Listen to those ghost whisperers of war.
Continued...[Note: First published on September 22, 2004 as WHY WE ARE IN IRAQ : Military Bases Are A Requirement, Democracy is Merely an Elective. Only the names have changed. The songs remain the same.]
"Did you ever get the feeling that you wanted to go?
And still get the feeling that you wanted to stay?"
-- Jimmy Durante
Resolved: To safeguard the personal and economic wellbeing of the civilized world in the 21st century, it is essential for the United States to control Iraq for strategic and tactical military purposes alone.
Let's take a step back from our always entertaining electoral circus to cast a cold eye on what needs to be done in Iraq beyond November and far beyond 2005. Don't watch the hand waving the magic wand around, watch the hand held behind the back. It holds what is going to be pulled out of the hat.
Instead of spending untold hours listening to this or that speech from the two sides of the American coin, it's more instructive to take down an atlas, turn to a spread displaying the middle-east and meditate on what needs to be done to control that section of the world.
And while you're at it here's a couple of things you can forget about:
- 1) Democracy in Iraq at all costs. Forget that "We" are in Iraq to bring the blessings of "democracy" to the people. It would be a nice gift to instill "democracy" in an Islamic state of the middle-east. We will spend a lot of money trying to achieve this. We will be sincere in our desire for it to be born. It will make our task easier in the short and long term. But "democracy" is not strictly necessary for the current strategic interests of the United States in the region.
- "Five years ago, Middle Eastern extremists were killing Israelis and Americans. Today they are killing each other. Why is it that some people persist in claiming that Israel's and America's Middle East policy is a failure?" -- Alan Chamberlain
A friend in Israel notes that, during the previous week, whenever the television news would announce a possible ceasefire between the Palestinian factions of Hamas and Fatah, her husband would shout towards the television, "No! No! Don't do it!"
Continued...The ever-expanding throng of those who want to "get out now even if we have to come back later" seem to be trial-balooning a new Middle East meme. To wit, "That troublesome region? Hah, it isn't really important. Just a bunch of Arabs and Jews bopping about. Who cares?"
The American Interest showcases this devil-may-care attitude with The Irrelevance of the Middle East by Philip Auerswald: "As the 21st century unfolds, the Middle East (leaving Israel aside for the moment) will matter less and less to the United States and to most of the rest of the world." You've got to love that aside about leaving Israel aside.
LURKING BENEATH OUR INTERNAL ARGUMENT concerning the relentless demographic expansion of Islam into the West without assimilation, is the persistent background question, "Oh, my, whatever shall WE do with THEM?"
WE are, you see, like muddlers and fiddlers since Nero, worried about THEM. Our doltish conservative muddlers and fiddlers worry about what "THEY will do to US" if we aren't very, very careful and selective about which of THEM we capture or kill while WE seek to give THEM the "gifts" of freedom and democracy. Our brave new fiddlers on the Left fiddle about worrying if THEY have enough to eat, enough to wear, enough respect, enough, in short, of the love THEY deserve for not killing US today.
Both bumbling groups may differ in the focus of their fretting, but fret they do. For the problem, as they have defined it, has to do with what is commonly stated as 'a statistically small group of Muslims around the world' who need to be dealt with in some manner so that greater Islam can get on with the historic task of being "a religion of peace and understanding." The majority of both camps of muddlers and fiddlers agree on this one thing: It isn't Islam that's the problem, just a few heretics that have gotten out of hand in their zeal to obey the will of God, and, hey, who hasn't done that from time to time?
One solution, commonly referenced as "the Left/Liberal" position is essentially "leave them alone and they'll come home. They know its for their own good." The other solution, "the Right/Conservative" position, is to force assimilation, modernization, reformation and democratic mechanisms upon Islam "for its own good."
But this conjoined pair of 'Recommendations' floats right to the top of the Surrender cesspool.
RECOMMENDATION 31: Amnesty. Amnesty proposals must be far-reaching. Any successful effort at national reconciliation must involve those in the government finding ways and means to reconcile with former bitter enemies.It would seem that to the cardboard cut-outs that fashioned this chunk of crap that the criminals who have been building bombs and shooting our soldiers must, for "the sake of the children," "world peace," or the end of Israel, or some such, be let to just walk away. What's more, Baker expects everyone to agree to this going in. No override from the executive or the legislature.RECOMMENDATION 37: Iraqi amnesty proposals must not be undercut in Washington by either the executive or the legislative branch.
Let's just suppose we, at some time in the far distant future, really do get out of Iraq. In the process, some group of criminals takes aim at a departing brigade and slaughters them by fair means or foul?
I guess that would be, from Baker's perspective, just dumb luck filed under "Shit happens."
That's the problem with all these pabulum reports and swatches of smarm oozing out of our "corridors of power" these days. There is simply no will to put some power in the proposals. Cardboard souls in empty skulls just wishing and hoping that somehow the party years will return and the American Happy World will roll along. As well it might.
For today. For, maybe, tomorrow.
But we all know, deep down, we're just waiting for the day of the bomb.
One of my more clear-headed email correspondents has a plan for a little R&R for Iraq Operations at this point in the game. To wit:
Continued...Their silence keeps me sleepless for I know:
Within the smoke their ash revolves as snow,
To settle on our skin as fading stars
Dissolve into bright dust at break of day.
Written September 4,2004 -- In another place and time.
The boy that lies in his father's lap covered with crusts of blood gazing upward at nothing, nothing at all except his own pain.
The soldier with the unlit cigarette carrying the little girl in filthy underwear with a long smear of blood across her nose and down her chin.
The child's small hand with the dry pool of blood in the palm and the small gold crucifix lying in it.
The stretcher being run past the camera carrying what might, under the burns and the blood, be a young girl.... and another, and another, and another, and another, and another....
I began to gather these images yesterday, I think. Or was it the day before? I'm not really sure. The cascade of outrages, the piling of atrocity on top of atrocity, has become so unremitting that it is sometimes difficult to know where one episode of evil ends and another begins.
Continued...
San Francisco Demonstration, August 2006
ANTI-SEMITISM IS NOT A SIGN, A SYMBOL, A BULLET, OR A GAS, IT'S A VIRUS. It is the oldest known virus to attack the human soul. The existence of Israel masks the existence of the virus by renaming it ("anti-Zionism"). Through the renaming of this ancient disease as a “political problem,” many people now become infected through their friends, families, at their schools, from their community, church, or nation, or from exchanging infected fantasies with infected ideologues. By changing the name of the disease it has become possible for many to deny that they have contracted the virus. This facilitates the current outbreak. It is a clever virus and this shape-shifting is one of its oldest methods of perpetuating itself.
THE NEW BATTLE FLAG now being waved high over the armies of Allah mustering across the world is not the banner of Muhammad, but a flag almost as ancient as the prophet, the Bloody Shirt. Among the weak in arms and courage and righteousness, the Bloody Shirt is their weapon of mass distraction; their attempt to storm the moral high ground and hold it as they wait for their reinforcements of love, peace, compassion and truce to flow in from the far corners of the world screaming "Stop this barbaric war that slaughters, for God's sake, innocent women and children!"
Harvey Logan: Rules? In a knife fight? No rules.
[Butch immediately kicks Harvey in the groin]
Butch Cassidy: Well, if there aint' going to be any rules, let's get the fight started. -- Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
"You hear me talkin', hillbilly boy? I ain't through with you by a damn sight. I'ma get medieval on your ass." -- Pulp Fiction
By rote and by ritual most Americans to assert that they "Support our troops." But as we all know, yet seldom admit, America has more of the known reserves of the world's bullshit than the Saudis have oil. The truth of the matter is that far too many Americans are becoming far too interested in our troops behaving correctly than actually supporting and sustaining them. They blather support out of one orifice while spewing disdain from the other. We hear these clapped-out flatulators daily at work, on the street, and over the tube of the boobs. I don't know about you, but for me these hyperventilating hypocrites are beginning to gripe my hindquarters big time.
BUSH STATES WHAT HAS BEEN OBVIOUS FOR OVER FOUR YEARS ( Bush says fight against terror is 'World War III' ) and the ripping sound of twisting knickers and busted bodices echos across the blogosphere.
Continued...If it's a Crusade, let's start crusading....
IS WAR ALWAYS POPULAR in America? Not since the Revolutionary War. The Continental Congress had to gain support on the home front if it was to defeat the British. John Adams estimated that only one-third of the population was in favor of the Revolution at any one time, one-third was opposed, and one-third was neutral. Some of this depended upon whose army was closest.
I was out at a bar and a concert the other night. One of the party showed up, bellied up to the bar, ordered a drink and, getting it, raised his glass and said: "Here's to the 33% popularity rating." Some polite assent was noted, but I somehow forgot to touch my glass.
"I don't think popularity has much to do with it now," I said. "Getting elected may be about 'popularity,' but once you're in and can't run again it's about doing what you want with the power you've got. By my count there can't be any change in the administration or its policies until late January, 2009. I make that about three years. Three years. A lot can happen. For instance, he's got two justices on the court.
Continued...
Pay me now for not kill you then.
FOR AN INSANE THUG WHO HATES THE JEWS, Iran's president has certainly learned and lived the meaning of hutzpah. Not content to play nuclear brinksmanship with a world that could reduce his country to a glowing puff of cosmic flatulence in an afternoon, Ahmadinejad now wants to get paid for all those years Iran didn't build a nuclear weapon.
Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says the West should compensate Iran for its past suspension of nuclear research as a way of building trust.-- Iran demands nuclear compensationAs the article notes, "Iran's suspension of uranium enrichment two years ago - the basis of his call for compensation - had been voluntary." But really, why should that make any difference to the mind set of this man and his whole demented cohort?
This is straight from the Yassar Arafat Playbook. First you threaten to kill a lot of people and drag an entire region of the world into chaos and war.
Continued...Nobody has ever died from a cartoon. If the worst thing the Nazis ever did had been to draw cartoons of death camps instead of putting Jews in them, six million Jews would be alive today. When was the last time any country decided to kill a Muslim anywhere in the world because they felt insulted? But the Muslims have created a new international law called the "insult law." This means they have the right to kill you whenever they please, and you have no right to do anything about it. If a Muslim were walking down a street in Israel with a picture of an insulting cartoon in hand, no Israeli would threaten his life. They would be too busy celebrating the fact that it was a cartoon and not a bomb. -- Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder: The ironies of the cartoon jihadHat tip to JC for the pointer.
MICHAEL TOTTEN, reporting from Iraq, takes you on a chilling tour of one of the holding sites for Abu Ghraib during the Saddam regime. His report, The Head of the Snake, ends with these words:
The hardest thing to see was the cell used to hold children before they were murdered. My translator Alan read some of the messages carved into the wall.No sense in saying the obvious. The pictures and words that come before say it all."I was ten years old. But they changed my age to 18 for execution."
"Dear Mom and Dad. I am going to be executed by the Baath. I will not see you again."
10,725 people were killed in this one building alone. All died during torture. Formal execution actually took place in Abu Ghraib.
If I listened long enough to you,
I'd find a way to believe that it's all true.
Knowing that you lied, straight-faced, while I cried,
Still I'd look to find a reason to believe.
-- "A Reason To Believe"
IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK that a rich and powerful organ grinder like the New York Times spend a little money and hire a "Stupidity Editor" (SE) ? No, not an internal SE, since just riding herd on the anonymous Editorial scribblers would be a full time job for at least five Pulitzer finalists, but simply an external SE to play "Katie, bar the door!" for all the gunk that consistently seeps onto the OP portion of the OP/ED page.
An old friend who works at the New York Times once confessed to me, not without a certain shame, that the overarching game plan of the Times was to become "the national newspaper of teachers and college professors." And in this they are, beyond a doubt, succeeding. But that does not mean they have to give space every other day to the kind of sludge seeping from the hyperbolic sump pumps that ceaselessly churn in the petrified forests of the Groves of Academe.
Today's seepage is entitled, in a heart warming and positive manner, We Can Live With a Nuclear Iran . It was pumped out of the fervid mind of one Barry R. Posen, a professor of political "science" at MIT. It is a soothing, calming item that, blithely overlooking the unremitting dementia that has ruled Iran for decades, purports to prove that a nuclear Iran would simply be a 'management' problem for the Western Elites to 'handle.' On the one hand, the message of the essay is "Don't worry. Be happy," while on the other it is the parallel message of "What? Me worry?"
While there may in some alternate universe be a cogent argument for simply kicking back and letting events in Iran unfold as they will, there's nothing resembling it in Mr. Posen's article. The unstated premise is that an Islamic nuclear weapon developed by the world's leading Radical Islamic state would forever remain specific to that state. This concept evolves from the idea that nation states are still the only social structures of significance in the 21st century. It's a tidy concept, but it is wrong. The globalization of ideology driven by instant communication and the ability of men and material to be anywhere on earth within 48 hours, makes Posen's premise of nation states as the only significant actors on the world stage quaint to say the least.
What the "What? Me worry?" intellectuals in our universities fail to see, or, seeing, fail to credit, is the fact that Islamic Fascism is a global virus which is replicating with all the speed of other viruses in the modern age. Indeed, it is currently outpacing avian flu. While it may take the resources of a state controlled by religious fanatics and fat with oil funds to create a nuclear weapon, the distribution network for such devices is already in place use them.
For example: If we can only monitor 5% of the containers coming into US ports, how many containers can Mexico monitor? Indeed, to deliver a nuclear weapon to Mexico, you don't need a container or a port of entry at all. A fast boat and a beach in the Yucatan will do quite nicely, thank you. Once that's done, you don't have to control a US port to attack the US with a nuclear weapon, or even drive it into the country. You
Continued...MISSING, SOMEHOW, from your morning newspaper: Investor's Business Daily: Saddam Had WMD
Continued...Even after the experience of the Great War, and the Depression, people on the eve of the Hitler war could not appreciate what was coming. It is only in retrospect that we understand what happened as the 1930s progressed -- when a spineless political class, eager at any price to preserve a peace that was no longer available, performed endless demeaning acts of appeasement to the Nazis; while the Nazis created additional grievances to extract more.-- David Warren, "Oncoming"This is precisely what is happening now, as we are confronted by the Islamist fanatics, whose views and demands are already being parroted by fearful “mainstream” Muslim politicians. We will do anything to preserve a peace that ceased to exist on 9/11. Not one of our prominent politicians dares even to name the enemy.
Hassan Bolkhari: "If you study European history, you will see who was the main power to hoard money and wealth, in the 19th century. In most cases, it is the Jews. Perhaps that was one of the reasons which caused Hitler to begin the anti-Semitic trend...."
FROM LGF comes this Memri video with subtitles .
It's important to watch this short video because it shows Professor Hassan Bolkhari, Iranian "mass media expert" and cultural advisor to the Iranian Education Ministry speaking calmly and in a soothing and persuasive voice to a group of what appear to be students. Among the things he is saying in explaining the deeper cultural subtext of "Tom & Jerry" is this:
Every Jew was forced to wear a yellow star on his clothing. The Jews were degraded and termed "dirty mice." Tom and Jerry was made in order to change the Europeans' perception of mice. One of terms used was "dirty mice."Now we will pass over this "Iranian expert's" stated belief that Tom & Jerry is a product of "the evil Jewish Walt Disney company." After all, the cartoon's producer MGM was also a Jewish company ( Louis B. Mayer / Walt Disney -- what's the difference, really? ). Instead, the video gives you a chilling view of the Fascist mind at work. Taking in the tone of voice, the calm demeanor, the slick look and the deadpan delivery, you might almost think this person believes every word he says. Continued...I'd like to tell you that... It should be noted that mice are very cunning... and dirty.
7. -- Increased delivery of Pizza to Pentagon
ANY QUESTIONS?
More photos from FROM the Muslim No-Cartoons-Ever Demonstration in New York .
Seriously, for serious we shall some day become about this matter, what are we to do about these children of a younger god? For, looked at from any adult perspective, children is what these acolytes of Islam are, and children is what they will remain -- growing ever stronger and more dangerous in the absence of any effective discipline -- until such time as they are instructed, in no uncertain terms, to sit down, shut up, go to their rooms and sleep off the spiritual intoxication which has become a danger to others and, most of all, themselves.
And yet, no such intervention seems readily at hand from the "leaders" of Western Civilization. With numbing regularity, we are reminded daily that Islam is the youngest of the world's monotheisms and hence, I suppose, we all need to cut it a bit of slack. We are reminded of this much as clever lawyers for adolescent school serial killers remind the juries of their clients' tender years in hopes they will ignore the bodies, the collections of weapons, and the hand-crafted web sites promising death daily to all those who will not respect their deadly dementias.
Our elected "leaders" -- interested as always in preserving the status quo ante that elected them and a smooth ride through the always approaching next elections -- are tireless in their tepid promotion of Islam as merely a moderate grouping of one billion misunderstood kids. In this our leaders' dinner party guests, vacation partners, celebrity intellectuals, pundits and entertainers join them in the maudlin plaint "What's wrong with peace, love and understanding?" It is the kind of bromide that those Krazy Kolumbine Kidz would have dismissed as "lame" and go on shooting. But consequences matter little to the private jet elite. Once you've an assured seat on a G5 you cease to inhabit a country and exist only in your own private fantasy island. The consequences of your political philosophies seldom visit this island. You can just emit gaseous slogans and fly, fly away.
Wouldn't it be refreshing for those of us left at the commercial aviation security gates to hear, just once, a bit of straight talk about Islam, the MTV religion that is devoted to getting its latest Gangsta video played in heavy rotation on the news around the world?
Just once wouldn't it be immensely gratifying to get hit with just a jot of a smidgen of the truth about this lethal spiritual confection? Just one time wouldn't you listen with rapt attention to one political pundit stepping up to the microphone and keeping it real about Islam; bringing it out from behind the smoke machine of it's current greatest hit, "A Peaceful, Loving Religion," by Cool Allah and the Gang? "Peaceful" and "Loving" might be the refrain but what we see in the videos is quite a different story. An honest politician might narrate it thus:
"Hey, kick back, relax and chill. These Muslims are just the teenagers of faith. It's a phase. We all went through it. What's a few bombings, stonings, riots, wars, clitorectomies, mass murders, honor killings, kidnappings, subway slaughters, car burnings, skyscraper demolitions, the odd beheading here and there and the fooling about with nerve gas and weapons grade plutonium? They're kids. They'll grow out of it. Love is all they need."
Continued...An excerpt from Dan Simmons' April message:
Continued...
The Time Traveler shook his head. "You've understood nothing I've said. Nothing. Athens failed in Syracuse -- and doomed their democracy -- not because they fought in the wrong place and at the wrong time, but because they weren't ruthless enough. They had grown soft since their slaughter of every combat-age man and boy on the island of Melos, the enslavement of every woman and girl there. The democratic Athenians, in regards to Syracuse, thought that once engaged they could win without absolute commitment to winning, claim victory without being as ruthless and merciless as their Spartan and Syracusan enemies. The Athenians, once defeat loomed, turned against their own generals and political leaders -- and their official soothsayers. If General Nicias or Demosthenes had survived their captivity and returned home, the people who sent them off with parades and strewn flower petals in their path would have ripped them limb from limb. They blamed their own leaders like a sun-maddened dog ripping and chewing at its own belly."I thought about this. I had no idea what the hell he was saying or how it related to the future.
"You came back in time to lecture me about Thucydides?" I said. "Athens? Syracuse? Sun-Tzu? No offense, Mr. Time Traveler, but who gives a damn?"
"It is because of these mid-flight 'Walter Mitty' adventures that I knew the morning of the massacre that the hijackers had used the Hudson River as a visual reference to guide them to Manhattan. I knew it before noon on that very day. I knew it, because I had seen it outside my window on many flights, and I too knew that as long as I followed that clearly defined river, that I could find the fabled island of Manhattan. There was no need to practice using navigation aids like GPS. Just look out the window,
Continued...There were, it is now believed, six bombs: two produced by Iran herself; two purchased from Kim Jong Il, desperate for cash to keep his movies rolling and his regime afloat; and the greatest prize: two high-yield nukes from the Russian Mafia. These broke the bank -- but oil prices were high, their target was priceless -- and money would be worthless after their use.Read what comes before and after. If you can bear it.
TO JUDGE BY NEWS AND BLOGSPHERE REACTION, you'd think an asteroid has hit the Earth and shaken the crust around the planet: Palestinian leadership hit by political earthquake. Everywhere you browse, jaws have dropped -- "I never saw it comin' ", "Whoa, Nelly!", and "Who'da thunk it?" reactions abound.
Me, I don't get all this "shock, horror, surprise." I'm not surprised for a nanosecond. I mean, really, why wouldn't Hamas win going away? They've got the will to kill and the track record. They've got the guns and the goons, and they've had them for years. They've got Jimmy Carter on deck certifying the latest Fascist election and Stephen Speilberg honoring their feelings and boosting their self-esteem. They are the cocks of the walk in the ratty strips of land bracketing Israel and they've got the money too.
Plus they ran on that winning campaign slogan that they've run on for years: "Let's just kill all the Jews now!"
This is a campaign slogan, program, policy and plan that Arabs of all stripes in
Continued...PJM News - Hamas captures majority of parliament seats ".... a devastating upset that is sure to throw Mideast peacemaking into turmoil."
Continued...
SOME GANG HAD PACKED UP most of the tall aluminum light posts in Seattle, laid them out lengthwise, and were carrying them through the streets on dog-drawn wagons. Now why do you suppose they did that?
Oil? No.Gunpowder? Yes.
Cannon barrels. The tall standing posts were smooth and hollow and made excellent cannon barrels.
The police had fled. They lived in the suburbs and they had their own families to take care of.
Things weren't that bad during the first few weeks because lots of families had supplies in the basements. Beans, baby-wipes, bottled water. The free-for-alls at the grocery stores during those first few days were amazing, predictable. What you'd expect. The strong do sometimes survive. Fights over cereal and parking lots filled with bodies, dead.
Dozens reported dead and wounded in Aspen, Colorado blasts**
Pool Coverage by Rodney G. Wentworth, ("Aspen Social Calendar"), Jack White ("Let's Ski Aspen!") and Jennifer Tiffany Beal, New York Times Spa Critic
Three explosions rocked Colorado Rocky Mountain resort town of Aspen on Monday night, leaving at least 30 people dead and 160 wounded.One blast hit the St Regis Aspen hotel, a second Olive's restaurant and the third explosion rocked the Whole Foods Supermarket in the resort town's tourist area about 7:15 p.m. local time (1715 GMT). Colorado authorities said the blasts were likely not caused by suicide
Continued...IN THE MIDST OF A GROUP HUG surrounding Feminist conscientious objector on Flickr comes this startling bit of information about what goes on during party time at Mecca. Here's how they get down!
Any questions?The following are excerpts from a rally of Iranian pilgrims in Mecca, aired on Iran's Channel 1 and Al-'Alam TV, on January 9, 2006. The speaker addresses the crowd in front of a backdrop showing the WorldTradeCenter and an American flag in flames.
TO VIEW THIS CLIP, VISIT: Iranian Pilgrims in Mecca
Crowd: "Israel is the enemy of Allah."
Man: "May the hands of the infidels be chopped off."
Crowd: "May the hands of the infidels be chopped off."
Man: "May the hands of the infidels be chopped off."
Crowd: "May the hands of the infidels be chopped off."
Man: "[Chopped off] from the land of the believers."
Crowd: "From the land of the believers."
Man: "The audience will now split into two groups: One group will settle the score with America, and the other will settle the score with Israel. This group now: Death to America!"
Crowd: "Death to America!"
Man: "Death to Israel!"
Crowd: "Death to Israel! Death to America!"
Man: "Death to America!"
Crowd: "Death to America!"
Man: "Death to America!"
Crowd: "Death to Israel! Death to America!" Death to Israel!"
Man: "All together now: Death to America! Death to Israel!"
Crowd: "Death to America! Death to Israel! Death to America! Death to Israel! Death to America! Death to Israel! Death to America! Death to Israel!"
File Under: No Semi-Bold Bush Deed Goes Comprehended
IN A SEMI-BOLD STEP: Bush to Call on Guard to Bolster Border, the President's actions prove to be too much for the stunted intellects of Congress, no matter what the party.
Example the first of what will be hundreds, Chuck-E-Cheese Hagel, who somehow passed the entrace exam for the Republican Party: "We have stretched our military as thin as we have ever seen it in modern times. And what in the world are we talking about here, sending a National Guard that we may not have any capacity to send up to or down to protect borders? That's not their role."
Not? Their? Role?
Perhaps as many as possible should phone or write to Hagel with this simple thought that even he could hope to comprehend.
"Hagel,
When you have and organization called 'The National Guard' one of the first purposes of it is to 'Guard the Nation.'
Press 2 if you wish to continue in English."
DENNIS PRAGER at Townhall this week published a column entitled: The war we are fighting needs a more accurate name which he concludes with:
We pray that there arises a strong Muslim group that is guided by the Quranic verse, "There shall be no coercion in matters of faith."But until such time, we had better understand that we are not merely fighting a war on terror, but a war against an ideology that wishes us to convert, be subject to Islamic law, or die.
Prager does not quite get around to finding "a more accurate name."
My own suggestion for Mr. Prager is taken from an essay I wrote in 2003 called "The First Terrorist War" in which I too bemoaned the weak and vacillating title "The War on Terror." Instead, I suggest that we should begin to understand this current global conflict as:
The War of Two Religions
Through the violent attacks of a Radical Islam, two religions have been brought into conflict. The first is that of Islam, a faith that at its core requires absolute submission from its adherents, and looks towards the subjugation of the world as its ultimate apotheosis. As the youngest of the monotheistic religions, Islam is at a point in its development that Christianity passed through centuries ago. And it is not with Christianity that Islam is currently at war. Islam is saving that for the mopping up phase of its current campaign. The religion that Islam has engaged is a much younger one, the religion of Freedom.
Ever since September 11, the subtext of this war could be summed up as something like, "Suburban Jason, with his iPod, godlessness, and earring, loves to live too much to die, while Ali, raised as the 11th son of an impoverished but devout street-sweeper in Damascus, loves death too much to live." The Iranians, like bin Laden, promulgate this mythical antithesis, which, like all caricatures, has elements of truth in it. But what the Iranians, like the al Qaedists, do not fully fathom, is that Jason, upon concluding that he would lose not only his iPod and earring, but his entire family and suburb as well, is capable of conjuring up things far more frightening than anything in the 8th-century brain of Mr. Ahmadinejad. Unfortunately, the barbarity of the nightmares at Antietam, Verdun, Dresden, and Hiroshima prove that well enough.Victor Davis Hanson -- Has Ahmadinejad Miscalculated?
FROM THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION'S IRAQ INDEX: Tracking Variables of Reconstruction & Security in Post-Saddam Iraq.
- US Troops killed in hostile action in Iraq, last 6 months, from October 2005 to March 2006, in order: 81, 76, 50, 49, 43, 25.
- Iraqi military and police killed in Iraq, last 6 months, from October 2005 to March 2006, in order: 215, 176, 193, 189, 158, 193 (and the three months before that were 304, 282, 233).
- Car Bombings, last 6 months, from October 2005 to March 2006, in order: 70, 70, 70, 68, 30, 30.
- Civilians killed in Iraq, last 6 months, from October 2005 to March 2006, in order: 527, 826, 532, 732, 950, 446 (upper bound, two months before that were 2489 and 1129).
[HT: Dadmanly]
An excerpt:
Continued...HENNINGER on the return of magical thinking:
There is reason to believe that pre-9/11 thinking will in time return and prevail.Defenders of Moussaoui's life sentence say he will "rot in prison." Perhaps in a better world Zacarias Moussaoui would share a cell with Hannibal Lecter. But if our moral betters aren't going to let Saddam's torturers rot in Abu Ghraib, if they aren't going to let the CIA's most important al Qaeda captives rot in "secret" foreign prisons, they certainly aren't going to let Moussaoui rot in Florence, Colo. He will be treated more than well.
Not to mention the Moussaoui trial itself. We arrive at the end of these interminable trial circuses of procedural delay and then claim "the system works" and "justice" has been done. No, it has done damage to the normal idea of justice. He saw the game early on and made a mockery of it. Moussaoui achieved a two-year delay in his trial by demanding to interview al Qaeda detainees. But our moral betters insist that the whole lot of Guantanamo detainees be given access to this same system of justice. They would diminish and crush it.
The odds were strong, as Moussaoui's lawyers knew and the government's should have known, that 9 of 12 jurors would vote that Moussaoui's childhood was "dysfunctional" and "mitigating." This is the therapeutic vocabulary that the West has developed to explain anything in the years from the postwar period to, say, September 11.
For quite awhile after September 11, we were a people united in the war on terror. By now we have let the adrenal pleasures of political fighting over the presidency dissipate the difficult emotions of staying united against a real enemy. The war in Iraq has contributed, but you can't lay it all off on Iraq. The ambiguity of the Moussaoui jury is a portent. See "United 93." It is very difficult. It should be."
-- -- Daniel Henninger: 'United 93' and the 20th Hijacker
LURKING BENEATH OUR INTERNAL ARGUMENT concerning the relentless demographic expansion of Islam into the West without assimilation, is the persistent background question, "Oh, my, whatever shall WE do with THEM?"
WE are, you see, like muddlers and fiddlers since Nero, worried about THEM. Our doltish conservative muddlers and fiddlers worry about what "THEY will do to US" if we aren't very, very careful and selective about which of THEM we capture or kill while WE seek to give THEM the "gifts" of freedom and democracy. Our brave new fiddlers on the Left fiddle about worrying if THEY have enough to eat, enough to wear, enough respect, enough, in short, of the love THEY deserve for not killing US today.
Both bumbling groups may differ in the focus of their fretting, but fret they do. For the problem, as they have defined it, has to do with what is commonly stated as 'a statistically small group of Muslims around the world' who need to be dealt with in some manner so that greater Islam can get on with the historic task of being "a religion of peace and understanding." The majority of both camps of muddlers and fiddlers agree on this one thing: It isn't Islam that's the problem, just a few heretics that have gotten out of hand in their zeal to obey the will of God, and, hey, who hasn't done that from time to time?
One solution, commonly referenced as "the Left/Liberal" position is essentially "leave them alone and they'll come home. They know its for their own good." The other solution, "the Right/Conservative" position, is to force assimilation, modernization, reformation and democratic mechanisms upon Islam "for its own good."
The two positions agree that "something must be done." They differ only in their specifications for "a New!, Improved! Islam" that can play well with other religions and nations in the post-modern world where "business as usual" is worshipped more than any other state of affairs. Both positions, whether they focus on "giving" the benefits
Continued..."Teach your children well,
Their father's hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you'll know by."
-- Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
JEANNE DEVOTO OF bitter sanity doesn't post daily, but when she does....
A few predictions
I've been thinking that it's only a matter of time before mainstream thought in this country begins the process of lionizing Saddam Hussein. With his trial beginning, the tone of media coverage is starting to bear out my worst fears. (You wouldn't think it would be possible to admire someone who has done what Saddam has uncontestably done, but in a country where people wear Guevera t-shirts without hiding their faces, I suppose just about anything is possible.)I predict:...
Continued...
Their silence keeps me sleepless for I know:
Within the smoke their ash revolves as snow,
To settle on our skin as fading stars
Dissolve into bright dust at break of day.
At dawn a distant shudder in the earth
Disclosed the flight of fire into steel,
The shaking not of subways underground,
But screams from out of flowers forged with flame.
We stood upon the Heights like men of straw
Transfixed by flames that started in the sky,
And watched them plunging down in death’s ballet
To land among those dying deep below.
By noon the band of smoke leaned low
Upon the harbor’s skin like some dark shawl;
A pall of smoke that in its curdled crawl
Kept reaching to extend its fatal fall.
The harp strung bridge held up ten thousand souls
Who’d screaming run beneath the paws of death,
Like dusted ghosts that lived but were not sure
They lived in light or only in reprieve.
They’d writhed and spun within that storm of smoke
And stumbled out to light and clearer air,
To find upon the river’s further shore
No sanctuary other than clear air.
The sirens scraped the sky and jets carved arcs
Within a heaven empty of all hope,
And marked its epicenter with one streak
Of black on polished bone where silver stood.
By evening all their ash had settled so
That on the leaves outside my window glowed
Their souls in small bright stars until the rain
Cleaned all that could not be clean again.
We breathed the smoke that bent and crept and crawled.
We learned to hate the smoke that lingered so.
We knew that blood could only answer blood,
And so we yearned to go and not to go.
That last, lost summer faded into ash.
Their faces faded as endless autumn flowed
Through chill and heat into our winter sea
Where warships prowled in search of stones.
Within the city, shrines were our resolve.
We placed them where we stood or where they lay.
Upon our walls and trees their faces loomed
To gaze at us from time beyond repeal.
In time, their smoke and ash became but shapes
Of stories told at dinner, found in books,
Or in the comments made by magazines
For whom the "larger issues" were of note.
At first their faces faded with the rains,
The little altars thick with wax were scraped,
But now beneath clear plastic they endure
To remind us all that we’ve not yet escaped.
Their silence keeps me sleepless for I know.
FILE UNDER "AGREEABLE PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE WHO AGREE WITH YOU, HOWEVER TARDY": THE FEDERALIST PATRIOT, August 19, 2005
One closely guarded objective in securing a free Iraq is to establish a forward-deployed presence in the Middle East -- a presence that would certainly include personnel but whose primary component would be massive military-equipment depots that could be tapped for future rapid-deployment military operations in the region. This forward-base objective is critical, given that it will ensure our military presence in the heart of Jihadistan, and an ability to project force in the region quickly without having to ramp up via sea and airlift. This alone will pay rich dividends by way of maintaining peace through preparedness.
AMERICAN DIGEST, First published on September 22, 2004
WHY WE ARE IN IRAQ : Military Bases Are A Requirement, Democracy is Merely an Elective.
Resolved: To safeguard the personal and economic wellbeing of the civilized world in the 21st century, it is essential for the United States to control Iraq for strategic and tactical military purposes alone.
Continued...File under: "Suffer the Little Children."
I don't know about you but I'm especially fond of the sub-title that tells us we are spending some quality time with "The family of Ahmed Assil, the first modern-day suicide bomber."
"First modern-day suicide bomber... Sort of gives you a real head's-up notice that the wiring in all human heads is not all exactly the same, doesn't it?
"We haven't had a real-time nuclear demo since Japan, 1945, and that was with one of the prototypes. We've never had a real-time nuclear demo live on TV, but it is on their scheduling. What we can't face is that the next time, many more than 3,000 will die and a lot of the dead will be our children. Just what do you think our mood will be the morning after they slaughter not only thousands of adults at their desks like they did on the 11th, but thousands of our children as well?"
-- In conversation, July, 2004
THE RUTHLESS DEDICATION OF OUR ENEMIES TO OUR DESTRUCTION was written across our sky with two pillars of flame and smoke in our largest city. We've seen that dedication continue, punctuated by car bombs, mortars, and random attacks against our soldiers. We've seen it continue in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Spain, Russia, Italy and England.
Our unluckiest citizens have had their heads severed from their bodies as pilot episodes of what promises to be a long running reality television series in which American heads are held up, to our horror and for the delight of those many millions that support those that take the heads. The message beyond this madness is that they
Continued...
San Diego, California. August 6th, 11:36AM
THE TECATE TRUCK was just like all the other Tecate Beer trucks that went back and forth daily at the border crossing, except that it was not owned by Tecate. The driver of that truck spoke fluent Spanish and the truck was always loaded with Tecate. In time the US border guards got used to it. The difference was that this truck had, at its center, a narrow, hollow space shielded with thin sheets of lead so that no ambient radiation would escape.
It had cost The Base over $150,000 to convert the truck at a garage in Ensenada a year before. That was little enough when it came to securing the device which had cost the same group more than $10 million in Russia in 1997. In any event, the truck did its job and passed without incident over the border and into the United States at Tecate, California on August 6th. Dates were important to The Base, and this date was especially significant. After all, what could be more significant than the day on which Hiroshima was destroyed?
After clearing the border the Tecate Truck followed Highway 94 north to it's merge with Highway 8 at La Mesa, California, and then drove west towards Highway 5. It pulled off the road at a rest stop where it picked up a technician in a Tecate uniform who was carrying a case with the necessary electronics and a couple of weapons. After that, the two men followed the road thought the heart of San Diego. It got off the freeway in downtown and quickly made its way to the intersection of North Harbor Drive and West Broadway. It's total travel time from the border to downtown San Diego was just over an hour. It was running close to schedule. It was about 11:30 in the morning.
The truck pulled over and parked along North Harbor drive and the technician took out some binoculars and scanned the harbor beyond the Navy Region Southwest Complex whose entrance was less than 100 yards away. Intelligence was correct. The USS Ronald Reagan was in its home port and riding comfortably at anchor.
The technician opened his case and took a wire that ran from the back of the truck along the floorboards. He plugged it into a jack in the simple switching device in the case. He looked at the driver and smiled. The driver smiled back. They both began to recite a prayer in Arabic while looking over the San Diego harbor. At some point in the prayer, without really thinking about it, the technician threw the switch. In the next instant, at the intersection of North Harbor Drive and West Broadway in San Diego, California on a warm August morning, a miniature version of the Sun appeared on the surface of the Earth.
Continued...
The Killer
There'll be the breaking of the ancient
western code
Your private life will suddenly explode
There'll be phantoms
There'll be fires on the road
and a white man dancing
You'll see a woman
hanging upside down
her features covered by her fallen gown
and all the lousy little poets
coming round
tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson
and the white man dancin'.
Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St Paul
Give me Christ
or give me Hiroshima
Destroy another fetus now
We don't like children anyhow
I've seen the future, baby:
it is murder.
No, whether this man had explicit help from other Jihadists or not, today we smelt the first Islamist cordite wafting through downtown Seattle, felt the first piece of Jihadi shrapnel in our flesh. Jews have been first in the line of fire elsewhere; today they were the first fallen on Seattle's battlefield. They will not be the last; the baby killers and torturers of children have promised us that. -- AskMom: Fear and Pandering in Seattle
The AskMom, for now, writes for me.
[Republished from 2004, now that we seem to have folks playing around with the London transportation system on a regular basis.]
It's no secret, when you got me jumping up and down
It's no secret, cause my heart is chained and bound
-- Jefferson Airplane
AN EMAIL ASKS WHAT IT MIGHT TAKE for Islamic terrorists to move to the next level in the United States. It wouldn't, as most of us realize, take all that much. Here's one approach, but only one. There are many.
The Elements:
One City: New York
Three Locations: The Brooklyn Bridge, Union Square, Penn Station
Terrorists: 4
The Equipment:
Plastique explosives ( 10-15 pounds) of good quality, preferably military, from one of the stashes hidden years ago around Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn Backpacks: 2
Ten penny nails and ball bearings: 4 pounds
Anthrax: 2 Liters from the New Jersey stash
Machine Guns: 4 (Small) with 2 extra clips each
The Time:
Late September to Early March when the weather makes wearing coats common.
Intellectual Equipment:
An understanding of the New York subway and bridge system, an understanding of symbolism in America, a willingness to die.
The Method:
For over a year after the Eleventh, I used to think about the nature of the Brooklyn Bridge, and how easy it would be to damage this 19th century structure every time I
Continued... Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons
packed up and ready to go
Heard of some gravesites, out by the highway
a place where nobody knows
The sound of gunfire, off in the distance
I'm getting used to it now
Lived in a brownstone, lived in the ghetto
I've lived all over this town
This ain't no party, this ain't no disco
this ain't no fooling around
No time for dancing, or lovey dovey
I ain't got time for that now
Transmit the message, to the receiver
hope for an answer some day
I got three passports, couple of visas
don't even know my real name
High on a hillside, trucks are loading
everything's ready to roll
I sleep in the daytime, I work in the nightime
I might not ever get home
This ain't no party, this ain't no disco
this ain't no fooling around
This ain't no mudd club, or C. B. G. B.
I ain't got time for that now
Trouble in transit, got through the roadblock
we blended in with the crowd
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines
I know that ain't allowed
We dress like students, we dress like housewives
or in a suit and a tie
I changed my hairstyle so many times now
don't know what I look like!
You make me shiver, I feel so tender
we make a pretty good team
Don't get exhausted, I'll do some driving
you ought to get you some sleep
Get you instructions, follow directions
then you should change your address
Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day
whatever you think is best
Burned all my notebooks, what good are notebooks?
They won't help me survive
My chest is aching, burns like a furnace
the burning keeps me alive
And remember kids, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." -- Leon Trotsky
What have I been doing for days? Here And here. And here.
What's more, I may have to travel. Give me a plane and I'm gone now.
But, as I say, I will be back, but in the meantime: "The Terrible Ifs Accumulate."
LAST MONTH Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit was taken to task for a time because of his standard catch-phrase, "Don't you know there's a war on?" To his critics it would seem as if this question, from sheer repetition, was a weak reed to use in criticizing others. In a way it is, but what is more interesting is the obvious answer to that question.
That answer , to judge by the rolling defeatism of the last week or so, is "No, most Americans evidently do not know that there's a war on." At least in the sense that the war that's on affects their daily life. As the steady drip of drivel continues unabated from the left, and as no real sacrifice shows up in the lives of vast numbers of Americans, it can clearly be seen that, in fact, there really is no war on at all in the sense that most would understand it.
Continued...A RESPONSE TO DANIEL HENNINGER'S :"Ghost Busters" in the Wall Street Journal:
"Iraq is just like Vietnam except: We occupy Hanoi. We've captured Ho Chi Minh.
The North Vietnamese have just held a free and democratic election. The North Vietnamese are working on a new constitution. Yes, Iraq is just like Vietnam." -- Art Fougner - Flushing, N.Y.
Pointer from The Anchoress.
SEPTEMBER, 2005: MARK STEYN notes in Terror war all but forgotten on home front
"Four years ago, I thought the "war on terror" was a viable concept. .... Of course, since then we've had the shabby habit of presidents declaring a "war on drugs" and a "war on poverty" and, with hindsight, that corruption of language has allowed Americans to slip the war on terror into the same category -- not a war in the sense that a war on Fiji or Belgium is a war, but just one of those vaguely ineffectual aspirational things that don't really impinge on you that much except for the odd pointless gesture -- like the shoe-removing ritual before you board a flight at Poughkeepsie. The "war on terror" label has outlived whatever usefulness it had."
OCTOBER, 2003: AMERICAN DIGEST notes in The First Terrorist War
"To say we are "involved" in a "war on terror" and to repeat this phrase ad infinitum extends our decades old infatuation with euphemism
Continued...WHILE PRESIDENT BUSH continues to field inane questions from the likes of Helen Thomas, and appear here and there about the land armed with standard soundbites, it falls, as it often does, to Britain's Tony Blair to articulate in a deeper and more meaningful way just what the stakes are in The First Terrorist War. Today 10 Downing released the transcript of Foreign Policy Speech I; the first of three speeches Blair will make on this issue in the near future: "In the second he will outline the importance of a broad global alliance to achieve our common goals and in the third he will say how the international institutions need radical reform to make them capable of implementing such an agenda."
This is an excerpt, but I commend the entire text to you as the definitive answer to "Why we fight:"
There is an interesting debate going on inside government today about how to counter extremism in British communities. Ministers have been advised never to use the term "Islamist extremist". It will give offence. It is true. It will. There are those - perfectly decent-minded people - who say the extremists who commit these acts of terrorism are not true Muslims. And, of course, they are right. They are no more proper Muslims than the Protestant bigot who murders a Catholic in Northern Ireland is a proper Christian. But, unfortunately, he is still a "Protestant" bigot. To say his religion is irrelevant is both completely to misunderstand his motive and to refuse to face up to the strain of extremism within his religion that has given rise to it....
This is not a clash between civilisations. It is a clash about civilisation. It is the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace and see opportunity in the modern world and those who reject its existence; between optimism and hope on the one hand; and pessimism and fear on the other. And in the era of globalisation where nations depend on each other and where our security is held in common or not at all, the outcome of this clash between extremism and progress is utterly determinative of our future here in Britain. We can no more opt out of this struggle than we can opt out of the climate changing around us. Inaction, pushing the responsibility on to America, deluding ourselves that this terrorism is an isolated series of individual incidents rather than a global movement and would go away if only we were more sensitive to its pretensions; this too is a policy.� It is just that; it is a policy that is profoundly, fundamentally wrong.
ALAN BROMLEY proposes some bold new Gitmo rules--
Continued...THE HEADLINE SAYS Operation Swarmer Expected to Last Days. And there will be as many nights too.
The announced use of aircraft centers on helicopters:
The U.S. command in Baghdad said it was the largest number of aircraft used to insert troops and the largest number of troops inserted by air, although larger numbers of troops overall have been involved in previous operations.
In recent months U.S. forces have routinely used helicopters to insert troops during operations against insurgent strongholds, especially in the Euphrates River valley between Baghdad and the Syrian border. U.S. warplanes are always in the air, ready to strike targets under direction from troops on the ground.
A Pentagon spokesman underscored that "no bombs, missiles or other ordnance were fired from the helicopters."
Now it goes without saying that air support is always close at hand for this kind of operation, but exactly what sort of air support might it be?
Well, without a lot of fanfare, this sort of air support is back in Iraq: