Editing History

Much was made of the story a little while ago of Attorney General John Ashcroft covering up a statue in the interests of modesty. Undoubtedly this is ridiculous and should be criticized as such. Yet, if we are to criticize the covering up of a statue, shouldn't an attempt to cover up history be criticized even more harshly? This editing of history is not very different from the editing of history in a different time and place. But if we start down that road, where do we decide that it has gone too far?

Press Freedom

In our war with the Islamofascists one of the most important elements is undoubtedly "the war of ideas". We need to show the people of the Arab world that our institutions and our society are better than theirs, and that if they ever want to progress out of the tyranny and economic malaise that has afflicted them for so long they, will need to emulate in some way the system that we have. For this end the US has set up a number of information outlets that broadcast to the Arab world in an attempt to "win hearts and minds". As of now, these have been marginally successful, in large part because our campaign is being undercut by the defeatism of our own media and even more so by the anti-American propaganda, outright mendacity, and incitement of Arab news services like Al-Jazeera. As Ralph Peters writes: "Al-Jazeera not only encourages the assassination of American soldiers, but pulls out all the stops to excite anti-U.S. hatred throughout the Arabic-speaking world." Yet despite this, Al-Jazeera is allowed to continue its propaganda campaign in Iraq because the Coalition Provisional Authority believes that this is an example of freedom of the press. Peters goes on to point out why this is absurd:

This is idiocy, a perverse political correctness based upon a rejection of common sense.

Press freedom is a treasure of our civilization, but it's also distinctly a product of our civilization — one that doesn't always export well. It works in our society for numerous reasons.

First, despite undeniable excesses, there's a fundamental respect for facts in our media. Second, our press is not rewarded for encouraging mass murder. Third, we have libel and hate-crime laws that work. Fourth, the great majority of journalists take pride in the standards of their profession — despite popular notions to the contrary.

We also have healthy, vigorous, combative competition. In the end, the members of our media keep each other honest. One should never underestimate the jealousy journalists feel toward one another as a factor in exposing fabrications. The glee with which reporters unmask the sins of more successful colleagues is an unappreciated virtue of the profession.

Al-Jazeera has no such controls. It's Pravda without the truth — in living color. As long as the network glorifies its host, the Emir of Qatar, and avoids anything beyond the most lightweight criticism of select Arab leaders, it's allowed to incite hatred, assassination and genocide.

Facts are never allowed to interfere.

Undoubtedly freedom - any kind of freedom - must be counterbalanced by responsibility; you can not have the first without the second. By allowing Al-Jazeera's (and others like it) presence in Iraq, we are teaching the wrong lesson - that freedom exists in a vacuum, without the burden of responsibility.

BBC Bias

Tom Gross has a very illuminating column on NRO. It is stunning to see the blatant anti-American and anti-Israel propaganda that gets passed off as news by BBC. This "news service" reaches more people world-wide than pretty much any other news service.

The English-language version of the BBC seems to be just the tip of the iceberg. My friend Kamran al-Karadaghi, an urbane, moderate, and thoughtful Iraqi, who was for a decade the political editor of the Arabic-language newspaper al-Hayat in London, and who until last week served as head of Radio Free Iraq, tells me that the BBC Arabic-language service is not just far worse than the English-language BBC. It is "even worse," he says, than al Jazeera, in the vitriol it pours out against America and Israel.

Is it any surprise then, what the attitudes around the world are to America and Israel?

The Great Divide

Since the attacks of 9/11 American society and opinion have gotten more polarized. Perhaps one reason for that is that serious issues emerged - as opposed to before when our main concerns were whether Bill slept with Monica - and suddenly there was something to actually disagree about and get upset about. Victor Hanson breaks down the split in society and characterizes one as "angry, but also therapeutic", held by the Left, and the other as "somewhat tragic, largely upbeat about our recent accomplishments", held by the Right.

How to adjudicate these two conflicting views of the present situation? We cannot. Why so?

The answer is that our interpretations of the present crisis are predicated on our own larger views of mankind itself. The tragic sense accepts us as flawed and thus expects setback, mistakes, and even moral lapses. The therapeutic view in contrast demands perfection right now and thus allows for few, if any, mistakes. Some of us look to history and thus gauge our present war rather humane at least by the losses of prior conflicts, the mess in rebuilding Japan and Germany, and the audacity of trying to bring consensual government to an autocratic Middle East.

Others trust more in the promises of social science, and thus are ignorant of the horror of past American wars, but fault us daily for our inability to use the proper wisdom or protocol to restore full power, stop all violence, and ensure professional behavior on the part of our soldiers.

Liberal Entitlement

Keith Burgess-Jackson in today's TechCentralStation column attacks Paul Krugman's criticism of Bush's tax policies. The heart of the matter is the differences in the conceptions of ownership and entitlement between liberals and conservatives in the US (and elsewhere). The philosophical difference boils down who owns the fruits of one's labor. For liberals, society owns it and is free to do what it wills; alternatively, for conservatives, ownership resides with the individual.

Krugman says that unless taxes are raised, social programs will have to be cut. These programs help poor and middle-class families, not the families of the well-to-do; so cutting them hurts poor and middle-class families (but not the families of the well-to-do). The Bush administration, however, is adamant about not raising taxes. So, in effect, the Bush administration makes things better for the well-to-do and worse for everyone else.

What Krugman conveniently ignores -- perhaps because it undermines his position -- is the question of entitlement. He writes as if nobody is entitled to anything. Suppose that were the case. A policy that hurt many and helped only a few would indeed be unjust (not to mention irrational). But when you factor in entitlement, the situation changes completely from the moral point of view. Lowering taxes isn't giving the well-to-do something to which they're not entitled. It's not a boon to them, or a windfall. It's letting them keep that to which they're entitled!

In Krugman's twisted mind (I say that endearingly), not taking your money against your will is giving you money. Read that sentence again, slowly and carefully.

It all goes back to liberal first principles. Nobody, to the liberal, has a valid claim on anything, even his or her talents. Those who produce or acquire wealth do so not because of effort, initiative, creativity, or sacrifice. They're just lucky. They were born healthy and into loving families. Others are unlucky. They were born unhealthy or into indifferent families. Since none of us is entitled to what we have at birth, none of us is entitled to anything we produce thereafter. We might call this, to borrow a term from the criminal law, the fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree doctrine. Wealth, to the liberal, belongs to all of us in common, not to any of us in particular. There are possessions, but not property.

Amazing Technology

In its battle against Palestinian terrorists Israel yesterday reported plans for a moat on the Gaza border. Along with this ancient defensive measure, Israel will also be deploying amazing high tech measures: Israeli Army Wants 'Remote Control' Border.

An Israeli army think tank has been working on a new border design for months, the military officials said. The planners envision a "remote control" border that will cut down on the number of troops being deployed in the area. High-tech equipment for border control is already being tested, they added.

A computerized observation system will allow the army to identify "hostile elements" and fire deep into Gaza, Yediot said. The system will even choose the most appropriate weapon to use to hit a specific target.

In addition, the army is testing unmanned patrol cars that can identify and defuse explosives by remote control. Planners have prepared alternatives in case the technology is not useable in time, military officials said.

Israel's Victory

Charles Krauthammer writes today that while no one was looking the Palestinian Intifada ended, and as has happened for the Arabs in every other war they have fought against Israel, the lost. This loss has damaged the Palestinian "cause", whatever that may be, by removing them from the decision making process of future events.

Arafat failed, spectacularly. The violence did not bring Israel to its knees. Instead, it created chaos, lawlessness and economic disaster in the Palestinian areas. The Palestinians know the ruin that Arafat has brought, and they are beginning to protest it. He promised them blood and victory; he delivered on the blood.

Even more important, they have lost their place at the table. Israel is now defining a new equilibrium that will reign for years to come -- the separation fence is unilaterally drawing the line that separates Israelis and Palestinians. The Palestinians were offered the chance to negotiate that frontier at Camp David and chose war instead. Now they are paying the price.

It stands to reason. It is the height of absurdity to launch a terrorist war against Israel, then demand the right to determine the nature and route of the barrier built to prevent that very terrorism.

Eloquence

Mark Steyn, in his latest column compares the "romantic eloquence" of Reagan with Bush and their overall world-views. In some ways, Bush's rhetoric has had to be tempered by the times that we live in, and Steyn thinks that this has hindered the ability of the Administration to get people to understand the nature of the conflict in which we are involved.

But, in the broader sense, Barnett might be right — that the very name of the war was its first polite evasion, the product of a culture which has banished the very concept of ‘the enemy’. From grade school up we’re taught that there are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven’t yet accommodated. One sympathises with Bush’s difficulties: in the early days, every time he tried to name an enemy, he got undercut. When he denounced the Taleban, Colin Powell said, au contraire, we’re very interested in reaching out to moderate Taleban. So Bush switched to the more general term ‘evildoers’, and crossed his fingers that Powell wouldn’t go on Meet the Press and claim the administration was interested in reaching out to moderate evildoers.

Three years on, I think one can make the argument that this fuzziness about the precise nature of the enemy is one reason so many Americans have checked out of the war. The President is getting his way, in Iraq and at the UN. But at home he doesn’t seem able to package it all into a great cause the way Reagan did. I mentioned two years ago that ambitious presidents take advantage of extreme circumstances — the way FDR did in the Depression. Bush had an opportunity to shift the broader cultural landscape in 2001 — to take on the enervated, self-loathing, multiculti self-absorption that in the days after 9/11 looked momentarily vulnerable. But he chose not to do so. Unlike Roosevelt, he declined to seize the moment.

But even FDR couldn’t have done it without the help of Wall Street and bread lines. What makes Reagan the most impressive president of the century is that he shifted the landscape without any external assistance — no Depression, no 9/11, no nothing: like the Queen and Comrade Bishop, everyone was in ‘Can’t we all just get along?’ mode vis-à-vis the Soviet Union as it gobbled up more and more real estate. Reagan got a notion to win the Cold War at a time nobody else had. And he made it happen.

Moat

It seems that when battling an ideology and society perpetually stuck in the 12th century, it is necessary to resort to 12th century defenses: Israel Launches Gaza Moat Plan.

Saddam and Osama

The press has been full of stories yesterday and today claiming that the 9/11 commission, in its report, stated that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. The actual story is much more complex than that, and when looked at closely actually states the exact opposite. The report concludes that Saddam was not involved in 9/11, but this was never an actual claim of the Bush administration. The claim was merely that there was a connection between these two and the details of the report bear this out. Andrew McCarthy dissects the report and shows its internal contradictions and errors. Joel Mowbray looks at the media reactions to the report.

Nevertheless, the media in its need to further its own agenda of "Bush Lied" and assisting the campaign of John Kerry does not delve in to these issues.

Quite an Endorsement

It is said that a person can be judged by the type of friends he has. Michael Moore's new "film", Fahrenheit 9/11 is being offered help from the usual friends of the Left, the Guardian reports:

According to Screen International, the UAE-based distributor Front Row Entertainment has been contacted by organisations related to the Hezbollah in Lebanon with offers of help.

Europe

Some good articles on Europe today. Tim Worstall assails the new EU Constitution set to be agreed upon this weekend.

The governmental leaders of Europe will gather this weekend, along with aides, mistresses and varied leeches upon the tax payers (assuming that those classes are mutually exclusive), to attempt agreement upon the new European Union Constitution. I am not sure which to pray for: a failure to agree and subsequent collapse of the idea, or an agreement so that we can then get on with voting the thing down in referenda across the continent. For the basic document itself is hopeless, a mish mash of every semi-thought that evanesced across the synapses of its octogenarian progenitor, Giscard d'Estaing, and his merry committee of statist political pygmies.

The US Constitution is about 15 pages long, including all the Amendments that have been added over 200+ years. Despite many disagreements on the meaning of many items that have been adjudicated, it is a fairly concise document laying out the general structure and operation of the government of the United States and the rights of its citizens. By contrast, the EU Constitution comes out to more than 200 pages and contains lines like "The Union shall work for the sustainable development of Europe" and "It shall contribute to peace, security, the sustainable development of the earth."

Meanwhile, James Glassman and The American Thinker discuss the societies and failing economies of Europe. The one hope that Europe has, if it continues on its present course, is that the new countries of the EU (Poland, Slovenia, etc) will be able to drag the "Old Europe" away from its decaying, statist ways. This won't happen, however, if France and Germany continue to bully these new members into molding their economies to be more like theirs.

More on Mubarak

Israel Army Radio is reporting that Mubarak unexpectedly cancelled his meeting with Ahmed Queria, and Debka is saying that he appeared "ill and his speech labored" at his last public appearance. Maybe there is some truth to yesterday's rumors of his health problems.

Iran and Regional War

Iran, by its proximity and interest in Iraq as well as its development of nuclear weapons, has emerged as the primary opponent of the US in its goals in the Middle East. In a very interesting article, Herbert London analyzes the implications of various Iranian actions and US reactions to counter them.

If it wasn't clear before, it is crystal clear now that the war in Iraq is a regional war. At stake are the tyrannies that hold sway over the Middle East. At the epicenter of this tyrannical world is Iran, a nation feverishly panting for nuclear weapons and simultaneously funding and supporting terrorist organizations of every stripe. Iran is terror central. The mullahs in this peculiar nation realize that a stable Iraq on its border that will make strides economically challenges willy-nilly the very existence of the present Iranian government.

If we are to triumph in the War on Terror we will need to in some way confront Iran and defeat them.

As I see it, Iran is the wild card in the region. Unrestrained, it will cast an ominous shadow over Syria, support Hamas in the Palestinian territory, send troops into Afghanistan, and foment terror in Turkey. Some of these conditions already exist and others could be moving in an ominous direction.

Iraq is the first step in forestalling Iran. We must realize that and realize as well that this is a regional war in a high stakes effort. To fight half-heartedly won't send the appropriate message. There is much more at stake here than some barren desert land.

The future of mankind is contained in this cradle of civilization. History has anointed the United States as global protector. We cannot shun this responsibility. In fact, as I see it, there isn't any alternative other than defeating Iranian extremists and radical Islamists so that we can win the war on terror.

Mubarak Dead?

Rumors going around that Hosni Mubarak has died. Northeast Intelligence Network.

Unconfirmed reports by multiple posters on multiple Arabic language message boards claim that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has died.

The reports indicate that Mubarak's health took a turn for the worse late last night, and he was rushed to a Cairo hospital. According to the report, the Egyptian government is expected to not release news of the death until an orderly succession can be ensured.

The site is fairly alarmist, so this should probably be taken with a large grain of salt.

Neoconservatism as Realism

The neoconservative policy and agenda and agenda have been under assault for the past few years as unrealistic. Michael McClellan argues the exact opposite, that it is entirely realistic and in fact the best alternative we have in defending ourselves from Islamist terrorists, as well as changing the very nature of the region that produces these murderous ideologies.

Such democratic construction is an ambitious endeavor. However, the neo-conservative vision is a far cry from an idealistic or reckless Wilsonian crusade. In 2004, democratic realism is the most pragmatic form of realism. The massive nature of the task merely reflects the tremendous danger of the threat.

Regime change will only effectively alter the Middle Eastern status quo if bolstered with the permanence of democratic construction. Likewise, defeating terrorist organizations and defending the US homeland depends upon altering the terrorist-producing status quo of the Middle East. Locating and pursuing al Qaeda operatives and hardening US targets at home and abroad are vital, necessary measures. Alone, however, such measures are insufficient. If hostile regimes are permitted a nexus to terrorists, the terrorists will eventually arm themselves with WMD and use them against the United States. If the underlying terror-supporting factors in the Middle East are not addressed, more terrorists will simply emerge in al Qaeda's stead. Abandoning any element of the 4D strategy risks the grave potential of overall strategic failure.

Jews and Democrats

American Jews have overwhelmingly supported the Democratic party throughout the 20th century. There are probably many reasons for this, but one of the main ones is probably that the Democratic party was viewed as the "progressive" party - interested in fairness and creating a system of social support for all of society, both at home and abroad. But times have changes, and as Ben Shapiro argues, the Democrats no longer represent these principles.

It was Rep. Jim Moran, a Democrat from Virginia, who claimed that a Jewish cabal stood behind the Iraq war. It was former Rep. Cynthia McKinney, a Democrat from Georgia, who took money from anti-American and anti-Israeli terrorist supporters during her candidacy for Congress. It was Vermont's Howard Dean, a Democrat, who labeled Hamas members "soldiers." It was Sen. Robert Byrd, a Democrat from West Virginia, who was once Grand Kleagle in the Ku Klux Klan. It was Sen. Ernest Hollings, a Democrat from South Carolina, who blamed the Iraq war on pro-Israeli interests. Beyond all the rhetoric about Jewish relatives, the Democratic Party stands for a thinly veiled hostility toward Judaism and Jews.

At the same time, the resistance to the Republican party was partially based in the perception and fear of the religiosity of many Republicans. For Shapiro this is something to be embraced, not feared. He contends that it is the secularists who have been most anti-Semitic and damaging to Jews. Of course this has been the case primarily in modern history; before that religious fervor produced the most destructive events for the Jewish communities (i.e. Inquisition, blood libels, etc.) Shapiro believes that Jews must reappraise their attitudes to the Republican party:

President Bush and the American right have been the best friends to the Jewish community in the annals of modern history. It is President Bush and his administration that have staunchly maintained their support for Israel, even in the face of withering attacks from the world community. It is President Bush and his administration that have stood up against the neo-Nazi ideology of Islamism. It is President Bush and the Republican Party that have fought for American morality; it is they who zealously guard the Judeo-Christian ethic that has made America the greatest power in world history. It is they who uphold the concept of a culturally, economically, morally strong Jewish people.

It's about time the Jewish community recognized that fact and realized that allegiance must be to principles, not to parties.

Bush beats Europe

Irwin Seltzer at the Weekly Standard believes that last week's EU elections show that Bush and Blair are triumphing over Chirac and Schroeder.

So these countries, and the German business community, are telling Schröder to tone down his anti-American rhetoric--which he can't do without antagonizing the voters he has persuaded to hate America in general and George W. Bush in particular.

TO ADD TO the Franco-German discomfort, the U.N. Security Council unanimously approved the new Iraqi government, led by Ghazi al-Yawar, who was educated in America. And when the heads-of-state show moves on to Istanbul later this month for the NATO summit meeting, after a two-day stop in New Market-on-Fergus in Ireland for an E.U.-U.S. summit meeting, Chirac is likely to find that his resistance to NATO involvement in Iraq's reconstruction will be ignored by an organization desperate to prove that it is relevant to the 21st century. All in all, it seems that in a single week the reputations of George W. Bush and Tony Blair have moved from the valley of despair to the bright uplands reserved for those who get it right in the tough world of geopolitics.

Additionally, this could all be very bad for Kerry.

All of this is a misfortune for John Kerry. His campaign rests on a three-legged stool. The first leg is that Bush is a job-destroyer; but the economy has created almost one million jobs in the past three months, and is probably adding better than 10,000 every day. The second leg is that Bush has antagonized America's allies and is isolated; the 15-0 Security Council vote to recognize the Bush-backed Iraqi government saws that leg off. The final leg is that the Bush tax cuts have been a disaster. Ronald Reagan's death has brought renewed attention to the fact that the late president's tax cuts helped to end the recession he inherited from Jimmy Carter, just as Bush's cuts kept the Clinton recession short and mild.

Iraq Poll

A recent poll requested by the Coalition Provisional Authority has some pretty disheartening results. Granted the poll is somewhat skewed because the Kurds were not included, but in another way it makes it more important, since the Kurds are known to be firmly in the US camp and very grateful to the US. The poll shows that the vast majority of the rest of Iraqis have a very poor view of the CPA - a favorable rating of just 11%, while coalition forces received a favorable rating of just 10%. Additionally 92% of Iraqis view coalition forces as occupiers, and just 2% view them as liberators.

Its difficult to make out what this really means. Has the US really lost the window of opportunity of the good will of Iraqis, as Andrew Sullivan believes? Or is this merely an expression of frustration of the continuing problematic security?

Another way to look at this is that the Iraqis are now feeling a lot more confident in themselves and their future government, and therefore don't want or think they need US troops there any more. More interesting will be the polls a few months after the handover of power to the Interim Iraqi Government.

End of EU?

The recent elections in Europe for the European Parliament have exposed some huge cracks in the supposedly united Europe. The elections were supposed to be the largest transnational elections ever, but instead of confirming a united Europe, they instead showed how many euro-skeptics there really are. As Scott Norvell points out, many of the new parliamentarians are going there with the express purpose of undermining the system.

The outcome couldn't have come at a worse time for Euro-lovers. Even as the last votes were being tallied Sunday, foreign ministers were jetting off to Brussels to try and finalize a constitution for the bloc. They had hoped to have an agreement ironed out by the time heads of state from all 25 members of the union gathered on Thursday and Friday.

Now, the constitution may have to wait while they chew on the possibility that people in Krakow and Riga don't necessarily share Jacques Chirac's ideal of forcing 35-hour workweeks on everyone and spending those extra five hours coddling Middle Eastern dictators.
[...]
What's most astounding about the exercise is that even as Kilroy and company were plotting their sabotage, the people who should have been paying heed to the vote still failed to notice the truck barreling toward them.

In a dispatch from Brussels Monday afternoon, Reuters relayed the argument of the European Commission -- the EU's executive body -- that the Parliament didn't have enough power, and that's why people voted the way they did.

Yea. That's right. That's the answer.

It seems to me that the EU, as anything more than a free-trade zone, was doomed to failure from the very beginning. It is impossible to create a common economic policy for countries that are so economically different. It didn't help that Germany and France decided to violate the very rules that they created by going over the spending limits, while trying to penalize the smaller countries for doing the same. And if economic integration is difficult, attempting political integration of 25 countries with very distinctive histories and often strong nationalisms is absurd.

So the question is where does Europe go from here? Most likely the economic integration will continue, though at a slower pace as England is far less likely now to join the Euro. Political integration has now been made even more difficult than it already was. And it seems that a political arrangement that was initially created by the US to keep France and Germany from fighting, will be doomed by the arrogance of an allied France and Germany.

Iran Acting Up

The Washington Times is reporting that according to the Saudi newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat, Iran has moved four battalions of troops to the Iraqi border. This doesn't seem to have anything to do with "readying troops to move into Iraq if U.S. troops pull out, leaving a security vacuum", since there is no indication that US troops will be leaving anytime soon and since four battalions really are not going to have much of an effect anyways. Most likely this has to do with the current issues that Iran is having with the IAEA.

The anniversary of the revolution is approaching, and this has usually been the time of a pickup in demonstrations against the government. Until we see what the result of these demonstrations are on the mullahs, it is unlikely that the US will do anything vis a vis the Iranian nuclear program.

Great Economic News

Reuters is reporting that the Manpower employment survey is showing that "U.S. companies are gearing up to create jobs at rates not seen since the height of the 1990s boom...adding to evidence that job growth will keep the U.S. economic recovery rolling." And of course, now that the economy is an issue that would help President Bush, the media is no longer reporting on it.

The New Realism

In a very interesting article in The New Republic (registration required), Lawrence Kaplan traces the course of the Administration's and others' thinking about the war in Iraq. As violence in Iraq has continued, and progress is difficult, more and more people have begun to propose a more "realist" view of what can be accomplished. For many, the idea of creating a democracy there has given way to simply creating "stability". "Which is too bad. Because, no matter what you think of Iraq, realism can't win the war on terrorism."

Obviously much of the problem has been because of the continuing violence:

The genesis of the new realism is, of course, America's problems creating democracy in Iraq. But today's problems in Iraq do not derive from failures of democracy. They derive from failures of security, which have made democracy difficult to achieve. Those failures owe to a well-chronicled fact--the United States lacks the troop levels required to provide security. It should be axiomatic that, as former Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) adviser and democracy expert Larry Diamond puts it, "you can't have a democratic state unless you have a state, and the fundamental, irreducible condition of a state is that it has a monopoly on the means of violence." In Iraq today, not even the U.S. Army, much less the interim government, possesses such a monopoly.

Kaplan argues that the "realism" of simple stability is no longer possible:

The lack of "realistic" alternatives to democracy in Iraq applies equally to the Middle East as a whole. Complaining that democratic idealists "incorporate Wilsonian ideas into their vision in urging the spread of democracy," prominent realist G. John Ikenberry of Georgetown University scoffs at the notion that this "is not merely idealism, according to them; it is good national security policy." Meanwhile, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies argued in The New York Times last week, "What we need now is pragmatism and not ideology. ... We must do everything we can to help the region's more moderate and friendly regimes--the Saudis and others--to defeat terrorism and improve the protection of foreign workers and oil facilities." Likewise, Republican Senator Pat Roberts insists that Washington must restrain its tendency toward "social engineering where the United States feels it is both entitled and obligated to promote democracy."

But the United States is entitled--on September 11, the aim of a democratic Middle East became a matter of our national well-being, even survival. And the United States is obligated--because either pressure for democracy in the Arab world will come from the United States or it will come from nowhere at all. For the source of America's entitlement, look no further than the region's "friendly regimes." Not only has repression fueled terrorist movements in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt; the very governments we prop up have sanctioned the worst elements as a way to deflect popular anger from their palace gates. The absence of civil society, the weakness of independent media outlets, the weakness of secular opposition parties--all these things underpin the truth that, as Bush said in a recent speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, "as long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready to export."

This is more than conjecture. A recent study by Princeton's Alan Krueger and Czech scholar Jitka Maleckova analyzed data on terrorist attacks and measured it against the characteristics of the terrorists' countries of origin. The study found that "the only variable that was consistently associated with the number of terrorists was the Freedom House index of political rights and civil liberties. Countries with more freedom were less likely to be the birthplace of international terrorists." Unfortunately, according to the U.N.'s Arab Human Development Report, not a single Arab state offers such freedoms. One could plausibly have argued before September 11 that this was none of America's business. But, on that day, the Arab world's predicament became our own--thrusting the United States into a war of ideas to which realism has no adequate response.

Nor will victory in this highly ideological war be accomplished by standing by while Arab states leisurely pursue their "own path" to democracy, as Powell puts it. When it comes to the Arab world, either the spur for democratization will come from without or it will not come any time soon. Realists like Republican Senator Chuck Hagel insist the solution to the lack of freedom in the Middle East cannot be that "we are going to go forth and impose democracy." If Hagel means to suggest we should not regularly resort to arms to do so, he has a point. Yet, the realist critique refuses to distinguish between war and democracy promotion. (In this, it takes its cue from the White House, whose revised case that it waged war for the explicit purpose of creating democracy--rather than to topple an aggressive tyrant and then implant a democratic political order--has created the impression that America cannot promote democratization by means other than force.) Yes, America will need to "impose" democracy in the Arab world, but it can also rely on peaceful tools, such as broadcasting, financial aid, diplomatic pressure, public support for regimes that pursue democracy, and public opprobrium for those who do not. If this amounts to an imposition on the sovereignty of dictatorial regimes, so be it.

The notion that we ought not impose what Cordesman derides as "our own political values"--that is, democracy--on others misses the fact that, as democracy scholar Joshua Muravchik has pointed out, if people do not want to be governed by consent, they can always vote for a tyrant. In fact, defining democracy as a universal rather than specifically American aspiration means the United States would not stop such an outcome. More compelling is the argument that some countries might not be ready for democracy. No one has espoused this view more vigorously than Powell, who, in his memoirs, dismisses the idea of a "desert democracy where people read the Federalist Papers along with the Koran." This line of reasoning mirrors the logic that American policymakers applied to other formerly undemocratic regions of the world. Joseph Grew, the State Department's chief Japan expert, cautioned President Truman that "the best we can hope for is a constitutional monarchy, experience having shown that democracy in Japan would never work." Awash in cultural relativism, his colleagues and successors made the same point about East Asia, Germany, and South America. Now that the tide of democracy has swept over these regions, they are making the same point about the one part of the world it has yet to touch.

To be sure, with Iraqis killing Americans every day, the temptation to yield to such pessimism may prove irresistible. But, when they advertise Iraq--like they advertised Vietnam before it--as the repudiation of a larger democratic war of ideas, the realists encourage a more pessimistic conclusion than circumstances justify. A policy can be measured by its successes, and it can be measured by its failures. When it comes to America's record in promoting democratic change, the former surely outweigh the latter. The world may not change easily, but, because of America, it has changed. Having come so far, and confronted with a new totalitarian threat, how "realistic" would it be to quit now?

Keep Winning

More and more evidence is emerging that the Intifada, if not yet over, is ending. As posted earlier, there have been a number of articles talking about Palestinian terrorists hiding and running instead of planning attacks; residents of Gaza have been attacking Palestinian tunnel-diggers and weapons smugglers, blaming them for the destruction of homes there; and terrorists proposing cease-fires. As today's Jerusalem Post Opinion points out, this has been accomplished by Israeli military strength and, contrary to the constant bleating of the left about "no military solution", etc.

It wasn't supposed to be thus. We have spent the last several years listening to sanctimonious lectures about how (1) there is no military solution to the conflict; (2) any "escalation" on Israel's part leads to a commensurate Palestinian escalation; (3) "walls never solved anything;" and, finally, (4) what the Palestinians need is hope, not fear.

All this turns out to be demonstrably false. Israeli military escalation has led, unfailingly, to Palestinian de-escalation. Israeli pressure has been followed, unfailingly, by Palestinian reasonableness. The security fence is working as planned everywhere it has been erected. Israeli concessions – giving the Palestinians hope – has merely created openings for violence.

More broadly, the longer Israel prevents the Palestinians from scoring a tactical success, the more Palestinians despair of scoring one. The more they despair, the less they try. The less they try, the easier it is to interdict. And so on. It's what economists call a virtuous cycle.

As the Jerusalem Post also points out, there is now more than ever the need to finish the fight; to not give in to the entreaties of the Left to "show good will"; and to show the Palestinian leadership and population that violence will get them nothing except more hardship and death. This is the same thing that the US needs to do with the Baathists and Sa'drists in Iraq, but has not yet brought itself to do.

Polls

There have been a number of articles and polls in the last week that have shown some very interesting trends in the Presidential race (the usual caveat is that there is still a very long time to the election). Last week an LA Times poll showed Kerry leading Bush by approximately 6 points. The methodology of that poll was problematic in that, like the CBS News poll of two weeks ago, it oversampled Democrats and thus produced a somewhat skewed result. Nevertheless, the most interesting part of this poll, especially taking into account the oversampling, was that it showed a Job Approval of 51% for President Bush. This is consistent with the Rasmussen Poll showing Job Approval ratings of between 51% and 53% for the past week. Looking at a number of polls together from RealClearPolitics.com, there is a definite improving trend in Bush's Job Approval ratings. In the last week, all the major polls show positive Job Approval ratings for Bush, and are a marked contrast to the polls at the end of May. (Arguably, Job Approval ratings are more accurate predictors than polls of head to head races.) Undoubtedly Reagan's death and funeral are producing a bit of a bounce in the polls for Bush and it is still too early to tell whether this bounce will last or not.

Additionally, there were two articles today (one in the Washington Post and the other in National Review Online) showing how even Democrats are not excited or energized by Kerry and that his support among his core constituency is significantly lower than Bush's. With the economy growing rapidly, oil prices dropping and the Iraq handover gaining more support, it is very possible that Bush's numbers have bottomed and will continue to rise barring any horrible news from Iraq.

Apologies

The Arab world demands apologies from the US for Abu Ghraib. Mike Adams provides one:

Dear Arabs,

I am truly sorry that Americans decided to take up arms and sacrifice their own youth in the defense of Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, and the first Gulf War. After we clear up this mess in Iraq, we will refrain from any such activity in the future.

I am truly sorry that I did not hear any of you call for an apology from Muslim extremists after 911. After all, the hijackers were all Arabs.

I am truly sorry that Arabs have to live in squalor under savage dictatorships throughout the Middle East. I am also sorry that the “leaders” of these nations drive their citizens into poverty by keeping all of the wealth in the hands of a select few....

Are We Ready?

In another excellent article, Victor Hanson analyzes our relationship with the terrorists. Despite the 9/11 attacks and the attacks since then, the pattern of our actions has barely changed from previous 30 years. We have still not been able to gather our determination to actually fight and extinguish the terrorist threat. Instead, after every outrage we threaten, retaliate in some minor way, and then wait for the next slaughter. Al-Qaeda and its associates have figured this out:

Murdering 3,000 Americans, destroying a city block in Manhattan, and setting fire to the Pentagon were all pretty tough stuff. And for a while it won fascists and their state sponsors an even tougher response in Afghanistan and Iraq that sent hundreds to caves and thousands more to paradise. And when we have gotten serious in the postbellum reconstruction, thugs like Mr. Sadr have backed down. But before we gloat and think that we've overcome our prior laxity and proclivity for appeasement, let us first make sure we are not still captives to the Minotaur's logic.

True, al Qaeda is now scattered, the Taliban and Saddam gone. But the calculus of a quarter century — threaten, hit, pause, wait; threaten, hit, pause, wait - is now entrenched in the minds of Middle Eastern murderers. Indeed, the modus operandi that cynically plays on Western hopes, liberalism, and fair play is gospel now to all sorts of bin Laden epigones - as we have seen in Madrid, Fallujah, and Najaf.

Hanson believes that the actions of the terrorists are completely rational given the expectations of our responses that we have created. And until we gather our strength and decide for ourselves that the only way to triumph is stop pausing and start acting definitively, the attacks will continue and the West will get weaker and weaker.

Aristocratic and very wealthy Democrats - Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, and John Kerry - employ the language of conspiracy to assure us that we had no reason to fight Saddam Hussein. "Lies," "worst," and " betrayed" are the vocabulary of their daily attacks. A jester in stripes like Michael Moore, who cannot tell the truth, is now an artistic icon - precisely and only because of his own hatred of the president and the inconvenient idea that we are really at war. Our diplomats court the Arab League, which snores when Russians and Sudanese kill hundreds of thousands of Muslims but shrieks when we remove those who kill even more of their own. And a depopulating, entitlement-expanding Europe believes an American president, not bin Laden, is the greatest threat to world peace. Russia, the slayer of tens of thousands of Muslim Chechans and a big-time profiteer from Baathist loot, lectures the United States on its insensitivity to the new democracy in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Iraq, and the rest of the Middle East, we see the same old bloodcurdling threats, the horrific videos, the bombings, the obligatory pause, the faux negotiations, the lies - and then, of course, the bloodcurdling threats, the horrific videos, the bombings...

No, bin Laden is quite sane - but lately I have grown more worried that we are not.

UNSCAM

It has been quite a few months since the first details of the scandal of the UN Oil-for-Food Program first came to light. In this time, Paul Volcker has been appointed to investigate, and a Congressional committee has requested some documents. But nothing else has happened. The very people who were so "outraged" by the Enron scandal, have been silent regarding this scandal which in terms of dollars was ten times worse than Enron, and in terms of human damage was immeasurably worse. Even the appointment of Volcker seems to be nothing more than part of the cover-up, since he has no power to either subpoena documents nor compel testimony under oath. William Safire has been writing about this scandal and has another column today - Tear Down This U.N. Stonewall. This of course is the same organization that Kerry and Co. claim can bring legitimacy to Iraq.

Pathologies

Caroline Glick presents more evidence that the intifadah has failed, and that many Palestinians are themselves admitting that.

Under the headline "Palestinians turn on tunnel men," Reuters reported Sunday that in the aftermath of the IDF's recent operations in Rafah aimed at uncovering underground tunnels used to smuggle weapons from Egypt to Gaza, Palestinians in Rafah have been threatening and attacking weapons smugglers. Mustafa, a tunnel smuggler told the news service, "Many people now oppose our work. I know of cases where people have noticed others digging a tunnel and they have assaulted them."

The essence of this story is that, in spite of what the Palestinians say, they know perfectly well just who is responsible for the IDF's actions in Rafah. It is not Israel that is morally responsible for the destruction of homes. It is the Palestinian terrorists who hide behind civilians in order to smuggle terrorist munitions who are responsible for the rubble.
[...]
The underlying understanding here among average Palestinians is that the PLO and its terror partners have failed the Palestinians. If the Palestinians are to have a chance of living a reasonable life and bring prosperity to their communities and security to their society, they must first replace the PLO and its Palestinian Authority with powerful moderates from Jordan.

Yet, even with this, she contends that Sharon and the Israeli leadership are unable to escape their own pathology - the need to rescuscitate the failed plans of Oslo.

Sadly it is in the Israeli government where the third pathology lies. Rather than admit the failure of the PLO option and search for different, better options, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Deputy PM Ehud Olmert are telling us that our menu of policy choices is limited to those that have already failed abysmally in the 11 years since we went down the garden path of coexisting with the world's most accomplished terrorist organization.

These policy choices are the very ones that Israelis rejected overwhelmingly in the 2001 and 2003 elections. In 2003 we rejected the plan to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza that Sharon gleefully forced his cabinet to accept on Sunday.

In 2001 we overwhelmingly rejected the plan to divide our capital city, and Olmert this week has told us that that is next on the agenda. That is, rather than joining forces with and strengthening the Palestinian rank-and-file as it quietly seeks out realistic policy options to sidestep the failed Oslo process, Sharon is insisting, in a breathtaking display of stupidity and irrationality, that we must resuscitate it.

What Today's Reactions to D-Day Might Be

Victor Hanson imagines the possible responses of John Kerry and Co. to D-Day.

France...

This is what our "ally" has come to and the behaviors it accepts and condones: France, land of hatred As the writer points out "What France should never forget is that in history it always starts with the Jews. But then who will be next?"

Reagan and Bush

In an excellent article in the Jerusalem Post, Saul Singer compares Reagan and Bush in terms of the enemies they faced and their idea on what it will take to win.

It is fitting that Bush was in France to commemorate the 60th anniversary of D-Day when he said these words on the passing of Ronald Wilson Reagan. D-Day began the rollback of fascism in Europe. Reagan led the rollback of the Soviet communism. And America has, since 9/11, taken on the rollback of the third great global bid to spread tyranny in the world in the modern era, the jihad against America and Israel.
[...]
Like World War II, the Cold War is now viewed retrospectively through American eyes as inevitable, just, and ending in the West's victory. But as Reagan himself pointed out in his farewell address, the policies that he espoused were widely derided as "dangerous" before and during his tenure.

Reagan's critics accused him of risking nuclear war. Reagan seemed almost alone in understanding that the only way to end the Cold War was for the Soviet Union to cease to exist, and that that day would come. In the end, it came even quicker than he imagined.

Reagan was vilified at the time for calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire," much as Bush has been derided for fingering the "axis of evil." And Bush seems to have a similarly unpopular insight that the jihad will only end when the regimes that support it have gone the way of either Gaddafi or Saddam and the entire region is on the path to freedom.

In all three modern global conflicts the pattern has been the same: a Western reluctance to recognize both the scope of the danger and the power of its own secret weapon, the power of freedom. In World War II the need for complete victory was eventually recognized, but in the Cold War and the current conflict, the assumption of indefinite, perhaps even deteriorating, stalemate is widespread.
[...]
After 9/11, America rediscovered that the quest for freedom could not exclude a particularly recalcitrant region, the Middle East. It is a notion that even today is widely met with skepticism and derision. Someday, however, as in the case of other global conflicts, we will look back and see that peace was not possible without victory, and freedom was victory's measure. Ronald Reagan was the father of moral clarity. He remains an inspiration for the road ahead.

Both of these men have been denounced as stupid or incompetent, or worse. Yet they understood something that their critics did not - that the quest for freedom of all people would invariably make America safer.

Ronald Reagan

As George Will writes in his obituary, Reagan was the perpetual optimist. It was said that if Reagan had entered a room knee-high full of horse shit, his first question would inevitably have been "Where is the pony?" His optimism was reflected in his entire presidency - striving to make America and the world better. And in many ways he succeeded where the "more intelligent" and less judgmental failed. He was instrumental in bringing down the "evil Empire", in large part because he was able to call it by its true name - evil. Mark Steyn recounts one telling story in his obituary to "The Great Communicator"

Thanks to his clarity, around the world, governments that had nations have been replaced by nations that have governments. Most of the Warsaw Pact countries are now members of Nato, with free markets and freely elected parliaments.

One man who understood was Yakob Ravin, a Ukrainian immigrant who in the summer of 1997 happened to be strolling with his grandson in Armand Hammer Park near Reagan's California home. They happened to see the former President, out taking a walk. Mr Ravin went over and asked if he could take a picture of the boy and the President. When they got back home to Ohio, it appeared in the local newspaper, The Toledo Blade.

Ronald Reagan was three years into the decade-long twilight of his illness, and unable to recognize most of his colleagues from the Washington days. But Mr Ravin wanted to express his appreciation. "Mr President," he said, "thank you for everything you did for the Jewish people, for Soviet people, to destroy the Communist empire."

And somewhere deep within there was a flicker of recognition. "Yes," said the old man, "that is my job."

Yes, that was his job.

He was seemingly a simple man and much like our current President, he was accused of being an idiot by the "thinking people". And like our current President, he was not afraid to judge our enemies and call them enemies without the nuance so beloved by the Left.

President Bush's statement on learning of Reagan's death is simple and to the point.

The Internal Civil War

David Warren writes about the internal civil war of Western Civilization.

For in the U.S. there is a huge constituency that thinks just like post-modern Europeans. Who blame America, even when America is attacked. Who apologize for what they are, but will make excuses for any enemy. It is a set of views that fit naturally with a low birth rate, as we know from history: with an unending campaign to tear down every moral and spiritual marker in a cause which reduces finally to nihilism.

The extraordinary thing about the West that was exposed, in the lightning of 9/11/01, is that it is one country, in an advanced state of decadence, turned against itself. And for one of the parties to this spiritual and intellectual civil war (not a battle of ideas, but a battle of "ideas against anti-ideas"), it is more important to defeat their internal enemy than to confront any threat from abroad. The loyalties are no longer to nations. Instead, an Italian who votes for Berlusconi has more in common with an American who votes for Bush, than either of them has with his own countrymen who vote the other way.

Vacation

Blogging will be light next week as Nudnik and Nudnikette are off to see the family in the Holy Land.

More Anonymous Endorsements

Having not learned anything from the beating he took after claiming that many foreign leaders endorse him, Kerry is at it again with more claims of anonymous endorsements: Kerry: Many U.S. Military Back Him as Their Commander

Germany as Victim

In postmodern Europe, D-Day is no longer just the liberation of Europe from the Nazis; it is now also the liberation of Germany. Turns out that Germans were the victims of World War II. Denis Boyles reviews the ridiculous journalism of France surrounding this year's D-Day commemorations.

Americans, as NRO's Cliff May told a skeptical BBC World Service presenter last week, are persistently forward-looking. Shrinks and analysts could give you reasons, but my hunch is that we look forward as a nation because we're driving the big global bus, and if we don't keep our eye on where we're going, we all take the big plunge.

Europeans, on the other hand, are passengers — and lousy ones. Think of a coachload of belligerent drunks, and you get the idea. Not only are they clueless about what lies ahead, but their preoccupations are entirely about what they think they've just seen. They forget that there are good reasons why they're not driving: most of which are scattered all over the road behind them.
[...]
But last weekend, as the day approached, Schroeder and others began inflating the kind of idea that can only gain buoyancy in the artificial air of the new, improved Europe: The significance of D-Day for the Germans, he told RTL and others, was the liberation of all of Europe, including Germany, from totalitarianism. It's an idea that has been growing in popularity in Europe for some time. As this report in the Guardian shows, when you can adjust history to fit, you can even make Germans the victims of Germany, if you want.

So seeing D-Day as the beginning of German "liberation" had a certain excitement to it. The bizarre notion wafted like a mylar trinket above the heads of the press in Europe and America for day or two, as preparations unfolded for what is seen here as Bush's begging for European help in waging what he has successfully been able to characterize as an apologetic war. So, yes! Of course! Not only France, but Germany too had been liberated, according to this report in Libération, by the French resistance — and, okay, maybe with help from all those gum-chewing barbarians from America that l'Humanité was talking about. As I called around Paris on Monday, the idea seemed to have been greeted with a kind of awe. To a dark planet filled with the gloom of having to celebrate an American triumph, Liberated Germany was God's own light bulb. Why does war always have to have winners and losers? Can't we all be winners? "You must admit, it is a mature way of seeing things," one magazine writer told me.

Teaching History

In a number of previous posts I have mentioned that many of today's ideas regarding the war and post-war situation in Iraq, as well as views on Israel are shaped by people's lack of knowledge of history. A large part of the problem is that high schools as well as universities are largely no longer teaching the history of events, but are instead focusing on history of individuals and groups. There has been a trend in historical scholarship from macro-history to micro-history. Undoubtedly it is interesting to learn the circumstances of ordinary life hundreds of years ago, but when this pushes out the learning of the macro circumstances that shaped these ordinary lives it makes historical study close to useless. For example, on this 60th anniversary of D-Day, many high schoolers in the US do not know the basics of when WWII was, who was involved, and why it occurred. They do however know very well the stories about Rosie the Riveter and the internment of Japanese-Americans.

Tiffany Charles got a B in history last year at her Montgomery County high school, but she is not sure what year World War II ended. She cannot name a single general or battle, or the man who was president during the most dramatic hours of the 20th century.

Yet the 16-year-old does remember in some detail that many Japanese American families on the West Coast were sent to internment camps. "We talked a lot about those concentration camps," she said.
[...]
Among 76 teenagers interviewed near their high schools this week in Maryland, Virginia and the District, recognition of the internment camps, a standard part of every area history curriculum, was high -- two-thirds gave the right answer when asked what happened to Japanese Americans during the war. But only one-third could name even one World War II general, and about half could name a World War II battle.

Diane Ravitch, an educational historian at New York University, said the big emphasis in high schools today is on the internment camps, as well as women in the workforce on the home front and discrimination against African Americans at home and in the armed services.

"Then, too, there was a war in the Atlantic and Pacific," she said.

A similar problem is evident at the university level, where topics like the founding and founders of the United States are not taught, and there are simply no professors who are experts in these fields. Instead, the period is studied primarily from the perspective of a "race/gender/class framework."

All of this is not to say that good scholarship cannot be produced within the "race/gender/class framework." Some surely is. After all, contemporaries of Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood and Edmund Morgan produced a brilliant body of scholarship on American slavery. And there is room for more than one kind of history; the problem is that many advocates of the race/gender/class framework want to stamp the other kind out. And one suspects that much of the scholarly work being done on these subjects is unreadable, jargon-ridden, didactic denunciations of Dead White Males and of America as an inherently oppressive society. In other words, garbage. One suspects most students with any knowledge of American history understand that they are being indoctrinated, not taught, and figure out how to give their professors the kind of answers they want and forget the whole thing once they've turned in their exams. But students who enter college without such knowledge - and it is easy to graduate from high school without it - may be taken in.

Our National Affliction

In another excellent article, Victor Hanson reviews the "conventional ignorance" of the Iraq war and the media's and Washington's inability to see the long term.

We do have a grave problem in this country, but it is not the plan for Iraq, the neoconservatives, or targeting Saddam. Face it: This present generation of leaders at home would never have made it to Normandy Beach. They would instead have called off the advance to hold hearings on Pearl Harbor, cast around blame for the Japanese internment, sued over the light armor and guns of Sherman tanks, apologized for bombing German civilians, and recalled General Eisenhower to Washington to explain the rough treatment of Axis prisoners.

We are becoming a crazed culture of cheap criticism and pious moralizing, and in our self-absorption may well lose what we inherited from a better generation. Our groaning and hissing elite indulges itself, while better but forgotten folks risk their lives on our behalf in pretty horrible places.

Judging from our newspapers, we seem to care little about the soldiers while they are alive and fighting, but we suddenly put their names on our screens and speak up when dozen err or die. And, in the latter case, our concern is not out of respect for their sacrifice but more likely a protest against what we don't like done in our name. So ABC's Nightline reads the names of the fallen from Iraq, but not those from the less controversial Afghanistan, because ideological purity — not remembering the departed per se — is once again the real aim.
[...]
Partisanship about the war earlier on established the present sad paradox of election-year politicking: Good news from Iraq is seen as bad news for John Kerry, and vice versa. If that seems too harsh a judgment, we should ask whether Terry McAuliffe would prefer, as would the American people, Osama bin Laden captured in June, more sarin-laced artillery shells found in July, al-Zarqawi killed in August, al-Sadr tried and convicted by Iraqi courts in September, an October sense of security and calm in Baghdad, and Syria pulling a Libya in November.

These depressing times really are much like the late 1960s, when only a few dared to plead that Hue and Tet were not abject defeats, but rare examples of American courage and skill. But now as then, the louder voice of defeatism smothers all reason, all perspective, all sense of balance — and so the war is not assessed in terms of five years but rather by the last five hours of ignorant punditry. Shame on us all.

Historic forces of the ages are in play. If we can just keep our sanity a while longer, accept our undeniable mistakes, learn from them, and press on, Iraq really will emerge as the constitutional antithesis of Saddam Hussein, and that will be a good and noble thing — impossible without America and its most amazing military.

Once again, we see that the people who purportedly are the opinion-makers either lack historical perspective or suppress their knowledge to further a short-term political agenda - getting rid of George Bush.

Soros Confuses Money for Intelligence

George Soros has now officially joined the loony-left blame-America-first crowd. In a speech at the Take America Back Conference (exactly how far back do they want to take America is the obvious question) Soros equated the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to 9/11. According to Soros, the US is now the perpetrator in the War on Terror. To make such comparisons is not just irresponsible, it is the lowest form of moral equivalence and obtuseness. It seems that it is much more important for this crowd to defeat President Bush than it is to defeat Islamist terrorism.

Stability vs. Democarcy 2

Mark Steyn, in today's Spectator column, writes that the "realist" view of the Middle East is not very realistic, and what is really needed is some "creative destruction" in our dealings with them.

For two-and-three-quarter years now, there’s been a continuing debate between, loosely, the ‘neoconservatives’ and the ‘realists’. The old realpolitik crowd dispute that the war on terror is a war at all, except in the debased sense of the ‘war on drugs’. That’s to say, terror, like drugs, will always be with us, and the best thing to do is manage and contain the situation through the usual long-established mechanisms — a quiet word with Crown Prince Abdullah here, a modest initiative with M. Chirac there. Insofar as I can remember anything Sir Crispin Tickell or Lord Hurd said in these pages a few issues back, that seems to be the gist of it.

The problem, as some of us saw it, is that the realists aren’t very realistic. Arguably, it’s 40 years of Washington realpolitik in the Middle East that gave us 9/11. I said as much here a couple of weeks afterwards, advocating the dismantling of Saudi Arabia, and I’ve said it on many occasions since. Used to get appreciative notes from chaps at the Pentagon, and even on occasion from the State Department.

But not any more. The current thinking is that the neocons have overplayed their hand, with their insane plans to make the world safe for truth, justice and the American way. The US is said to be suffering from ‘pre-emption fatigue’. No one’s in any mood to liberate Syria or destabilise Iran. According to the Washington Post, ‘Kerry Says Global Democracy Is Not His Top Issue’. If Bush wants to play Woodrow Wilson, Kerry’s happy to run as Henry Kissinger. Indeed, even Bush seems to be moving to a post-pre-emptive strategy. You get the feeling that if they got wind that North Korea was going to nuke Tokyo on Wednesday, the Administration would wait to see what ideas Jacques and Vlad wanted to kick around at the emergency Security Council meeting on Thursday....

Stability vs. Democracy.

In the last few years, Republicans and Democrats have swapped their political ideologies in the realm of foreign policy. After 9/11, the Democrats became the party of the status quo, preferring to maintain stability and the old order and lacking a true vision for the future. And it was the Republicans, under the leadership of President Bush and the much maligned neo-cons, who realized that the old systems that had been created after WWII and congealed during the Cold War could no longer be effective in this new age of non-state actors.

The vision that emerged in the Bush Administration was one of radical transformation of the Middle East from the established support of useful dictators – the “he might be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch” approach – to democratization as the only way forward. This was again expressed by President Bush in his Air Force Academy Commencement Speech:

For decades, free nations tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In practice, this approach brought little stability, and much oppression. So I have changed this policy. In the short-term, we will work with every government in the Middle East dedicated to destroying the terrorist networks. In the longer-term, we will expect a higher standard of reform and democracy from our friends in the region. Democracy and reform will make those nations stronger and more stable, and make the world more secure by undermining terrorism at it source. Democratic institutions in the Middle East will not grow overnight; in America, they grew over generations. Yet the nations of the Middle East will find, as we have found, the only path to true progress is the path of freedom and justice and democracy.

With the perceived difficulties in Iraq many, including some conservatives, have taken a step back from this. Still, the majority seem to continue to harbor the belief (or at least the hope) that such a transformation will succeed.

Alternatively, the new Democrats including Kerry have no such beliefs and hopes. As Jeff Jacoby writes in today’s Boston Globe, their goal is not change but stability.

Similarly, Kerry told reporters in April that the United States should not get hung up on trying to democratize Iraq.
"I have always said from day one that the goal here . . . is a stable Iraq, not whether or not there's a full democracy," ... And in case the intended contrast with Bush, who speaks often about the importance of bringing democracy to the Middle East, wasn't clear, Kerry's foreign policy adviser, Rand Beers, underscored it. "We have been concerned for some time," he told the Los Angeles Times, "that Bush's position about having some kind of democratic state was too heroic."
This is how members of the so-called "realist" school of statecraft talk. Theirs is a cautious, managerial worldview, one that values what it sees as concrete interests much more highly than broad democratic ideals.
[…]
The problem with Kerry-Bush I Realpolitik is that the stability it champions is often beneficial only in the short term, and sometimes not even then. American backing for Middle Eastern dictatorships helped turn the region into an incubator of terrorism. The supposedly "realistic" decision to bolster Saudi Arabia's royal family by leaving thousands of US troops within its borders after the Gulf War inflamed an Islamist fanatic named Osama bin Laden. Iraq under Saddam was certainly stable. It was also a threat to its neighbors, a supporter of terrorism, and a savage violator of human rights.
[…]
A free and democratic Middle East will do more to make America secure in the long run than Kerry's focus on stability will. Whether Bush can make good on his vow to transform the region is very much an open question. It is an enormous undertaking, and Bush may fail. But his eye is on the right prize. His opponent's -- like his father's -- isn't.

The stability that Kerry and the Democrats seek does not solve the problems that exist; it merely perpetuates the existing corrupt and violent systems, and as Thomas Friedman shows in his column (at least in the beginning of it) breeds the next generation of tyrants.

Give That Man a Medal

Not content with simply surrendering to terrorists after the March 11th train bombings, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Prime Minister of Spain, is apparently handing out medals to the Spanish Defense Minister and 3 Spanish generals for retreating from Iraq.

Tenet Resigns

CNBC reporting that CIA head George Tenet resigned "for personal reasons". This should have happened quite a while ago. Seems like the White House didn't want it to appear that he was resigning because of the intelligence failures.

Chalabi

Last month's raid on Ahmad Chalabi's house and the subsequent accusations that he passed sensitive information to Iran have raised a number of questions. Chalabi has long been a favorite of the Defense Department as a potential leader in the new Iraq. At the same time, the State Department and the CIA have continually dismissed him and looked very unfavorably on him. So did Chalabi really engage with Iran against the US or is this simply a political attempt to discredit him and his backers in the DoD and the White House? While Newsweek reports that the investigation is just starting, and that there is potentially much more there than has yet been disclosed, the Washington Times's Bill Gertz reports that Chalabi is simply being set up.

Within the Bush administration, Mr. Chalabi created enemies at the State Department and CIA, an official said.
"The State Department is petrified he's going to become the prime minister in Iraq and the CIA is afraid that if he becomes a leader, he will never let them into the country," the official said.

Richard Perle, a Chalabi supporter who until recently was a member of a Pentagon policy advisory board, said he doubts that Mr. Chalabi would disclose such information or that Iran would risk revealing that it had learned of the compromise through a suspect communications exchange.

"I think it's absurd on its face to think that if the Iranians had learned from Ahmed Chalabi or anybody else that their most sensitive communications channels were compromised they would reveal that in those channels," Mr. Perle said.

"Instead, they would use those channels for disinformation and would not reveal their knowledge. That's [Intelligence] 101. It doesn't pass the laugh test."

Art on Fire

Theodore Dalrymple comments on last weeks conflagration that consumed the "art" collection of advertising magnate Charles Saatchi. This is the collection that a few years ago caused an uproar after it was exhibited in the Brooklyn Museum.

Stealth Transition

Over the past few months we have been constantly warned and reminded that as the June 30th date of transition in Iraq approaches, we will see more and more violence; that there would be increasing resistance from Syria and Iran, as well as the Baathists in Iraq, to try to prevent the formation of an interim Iraqi government. And while there has been a large number of terrorist acts (three car bombs in the last three days), something else has also happened. In the last week a Prime Minister acceptable to everyone was chosen, a President was chosen, and the Governing Council was dissolved. In effect, the transition has occurred in all but name. David Warren suggests that by these actions the Bush Administration has outmaneuvered the UN, as well as those who would try to prevent the transition.

The formal transfer of power from Paul Bremer's occupation authority to the new Iraqi government waits till the end of the month, but with the self-dissolution of the interim Iraqi Governing Council, we have witnessed an effective transfer. From now on, American advisers won't be running Iraqi ministries -- won't dare try -- and allied troops on the ground will be consulting Iraqis before launching new raids on assorted bad guys. Best of all, the region's governments, including nefarious Iran and Syria (up to their eyeballs fomenting trouble within Iraq), will know it's too late to sabotage the hand-off -- because it has already occurred, by surprise, ahead of deadline.

No one else will say this, so I will. The Bush administration has handled the transfer of power in Iraq more cleverly than anyone expected, including me. The summoning of the U.N. envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, looked like very bad news (a poisonous old Arab League chauvinist who brokered the sell-out of Lebanon to Syria in 1982). In grim moments, I believed the Bush people were cynically using him to wash their hands of Iraq, and as it were, dump the quagmire back in the swamp of the U.N. Instead, they froze the ground beneath Brahimi's feet, and skated rings around him, haggling behind his back with Iraq's new political heavyweights to leave him endorsing a fait accompli. If it were not vulgar, I would say the Bushies suckered the U.N. into signing on to the New Iraq through Brahimi. A sovereign, free Iraq which will, incidentally, have a few things to say about the U.N.'s $100-billion "oil-for-food" scam, in due course.

While it is still too early too say that everything has worked out, and Warren is sufficiently sanguine about the prospects, there is definitely reason for optimism. Undoubtedly in the near future we will see more anti-American statements from the new Iraqi government. It will be tempting to get angry and dismiss them as ingrates, this would actually be a positive sign; it would show the increasing independence of the government there and a sign of progress.

Los Angeles to be Renamed

Well, not really. But the ACLU is threatening to sue the County of Los Angeles because the logo has a small cross in it, among other things, including oil derricks, a ship, a cow, and a large Goddess Pomona. So obviously the next logical step in the crusade to keep religion out of everything is to rename Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Providence, etc. County Supervisor Mike Antonovich is right when he says that these people have way too much time on their hands. Nevertheless, in order not to waste money and time defending themselves in the potential lawsuit, Los Angeles is caving in and changing its logo.

France and Terrorism

While France has clearly been trying to obstruct US policy in Iraq, they have ostensibly been cooperating with the US on counter-terrorism. The issue is that their definition of terrorism is not quite the same as ours. For France, Hizbullah and Hamas are not terrorist organizations, but social welfare organizations. This, despite the leader of Hizbullah stating “Death to America was, is and will stay our slogan.” The American Thinker describes a recent interview with Jean Francois Cope, Spokesman of the French Government and Vice Interior Minister, and Jean David Levitte, French Ambassador to the US.

Intifadah is Over

The Jerusalem Report has an interesting article from Tulkarm. It seems that at least in that city, once a hotbed of terrorists, the intifadah is over.

Aweideh, who used to work in a picture framer’s shop, insists that there is still an intifada in Tul Karm. "Only two days ago soldiers opened fire on one of our guys," he notes, adding that 10 days ago there were six more "martyrs" from the Qata’eb in the Nur Shams camp adjacent to the town. But ultimately his protests only serve to confirm what the others are saying. Asked what exactly the Qata’eb want, he replies: "All we want now is to defend ourselves. That’s it. Nobody is giving us any hope or any security."
Residents of Tul Karm are no longer willing to provide refuge for the armed men in their houses, local sources say, for fear of ending up on the army’s demolition list. Furthermore Aweideh, his fingers nervously drumming on the back of his chair, an eye fixed on the door, reveals that it is not only the Israeli actions that are curbing the militants. "The Palestinian Authority used to support us, but we’ve had no funding from them for the past two months," he claims. "They make promises, but nothing ever materializes. The PA wants to calm the situation, but Sharon doesn’t," he concludes.
Hiding has become the armed men’s main preoccupation, since the apparently inexperienced Aweideh attests to "100 per-cent difficulty" in launching attacks. The last local operation took place in early April when a gunman from the Tul Karm refugee camp infiltrated the nearby Avnei Hefetz settlement fatally shooting Ya’acov Zaga, 40, and wounding his teenage daughter. The gunman, 18-year-old Ramzi Arda, was killed by soldiers during the incident, though an accomplice who had driven him there got away.

The success of shutting down this terrorist haven and ensuring that the main thing the terrorists are doing is protecting themselves, completely contradicts the Left's line that there is no military sollution to terrorism. Turns out there is. Once a decision is taken, and proper force brought to bear, terrorism can be stopped. The main problem has been will, not ability.

Arab Ambulances

As Michelle Malkin shows in her article in FrontPage magazine, the UN and the Red Crescent(the Arab version of the Red Cross) are committing war crimes. As has been documented by a Reuters cameraman (video available on AccessMiddleEast.org), Palestinians are using ambulances to transport terrorists and weapons. This, of course is in addition to the UN "peacekeepers" allowing (or possibly even helping) Hizbullah kidnap and kill Israeli soldiers, and then covering it up.

If U.N. peacekeepers worked with Hezbollah terrorists, there is no doubt in my mind that they would work hand in glove with Iraqi terrorists and their allies. Why would we expect American soldiers to be treated with more respect than Israeli soldiers by an organization that actively supported the Saddam Hussein regime? Why should we continue to use our tax dollars to support enablers of international Islamic terrorism?

This is the organization that Kerry and the Europeans want to empower to run Iraq and "assist" the US in foreign policy.

Knowing History

John Keegan, one of the most important military historians of our time, puts the post-war situation in Iraq in historical perspective. As should be obvious, to realize that what is happening there now is not a "quagmire" or "disaster" requires knowledge of history (something that Dershowitz referred to in his speech at Berkeley regarding attitudes towards Israel), knowledge that is either lacking in journalists or is purposefully ignored for political reasons. Comparison of the conditions after the Iraq war to conditions after World War II, one that is frequently made, are meaningless and simply incorrect. Such comparison ignores the vast differences between these two wars.

The Second World War, which has largely formed Western attitudes to war termination, ended neatly for simple reasons: both the Germans and Japanese had had the stuffing knocked out of them. Their cities had been burnt out or bombed flat, millions of their young men had been killed in battle, so had hundreds of thousands of their women and children by strategic bombing. The Japanese were actually starving, while the Germans looked to their Western occupiers both to feed them and to save them from the spectre of Soviet rule. Two highly disciplined and law-abiding populations meekly submitted to defeat.
[...]
History boys can explain easily - and convincingly - why some wars, as that against Germany in 1945, end in unopposed occupation of enemy territory and why others, as in Iraq in 1920 and 2004, do not. In the first case, the defeated nation has exhausted itself in the struggle and is dependent on the victor both for necessities and for protection against further disaster - social revolution or aggression by another enemy. In the second case, the war has not done much harm but has broken the power of the state and encouraged the dispossessed and the irresponsible to grab what they can before order is fully restored.

A proper comparison of conditions after previous wars similar to the Iraq war shows that conditions now are much better than they were in those other cases.

On Armistice night, Lloyd George, leaving the House of Commons with Winston Churchill, remarked: "The war of the giants is over. The war of the pygmies is about to begin." The pygmies, in civil wars in Germany, Hungary, Poland, the Baltic states, Finland and above all Russia, went on fighting for years, killing or starving to death millions. A full-blown war of conquest by Greece against Turkey ended in a Greek humiliation but also 300,000 deaths.

And there was, of course, a war in Iraq, caused by Britain's attempt to enforce the mandate to rule granted by the League of Nations. Britain eventually prevailed, but at the cost of 6,000 Iraqi deaths and 500 in its own forces. British casualties in this war scarcely exceed 100. Then, as now, the occupiers complained that "every Iraqi has a rifle".

Keegan concludes with some advice to the current crop of doommongers:

I do know that...the serried ranks of self-appointed strategic commentators who currently dominate the written and visual media's treatment of the Iraq story, have a duty to stop indulging their emotions and start remembering a bit of post-war history. Iraq 2004 is not Greece 1945, not Indochina 1946-54, not Algeria 1953-62 and certainly not "Vietnam".

It is a regrettable but not wholly to be unexpected outcome of a campaign to overthrow a dangerous Third World dictator. If those who show themselves so eager to denounce the American President and the British Prime Minister feel strongly enough on the issue, please will they explain their reasons for wishing that Saddam Hussein should still be in power in Baghdad.

Iraq PR Problems

Robert Kaplan was with the Marines during the battles in Fallujah, the only reporter with them. In an excellent article he recounts what he saw, and why the perception we have of what happened there is so skewed.

We live in a world of burning visual images: As Marines assaulted Fallujah, the administration should have been holding dramatic slide shows for the public, of the kind that battalion and company commanders were giving their troops, explaining how this or that particular mosque was being militarily used, and how much was being done to avoid destroying them, at great risk to Marine lives. Complaining about the slanted coverage of Al-Jazeera--as administration officials did--was as pathetic as Jimmy Carter complaining that Soviet Communist Party boss Leonid Brezhnev had lied to him. Given its long-standing track record, how else could Al-Jazeera have been expected to report the story? You had the feeling that the Pentagon was reacting; not anticipating.

And had the administration adequately explained to the public about what the Marines were doing after Fallujah, there might have been less disappointment and mystification about quitting the fight there. But instead of a gripping storyline to compete with that of the global media's, spokesmen for the White House, Pentagon, Coalition Provisional Authority and the Baghdad-based military coalition, in their regular briefings about events in Iraq, continue to feed the public insipid summaries, with little visual context, that have all the pungency of watery gruel.

Gore Gone Crazy 2

Following up on last week's post, it seems that there is a clinical term for Al Gore's derangement. Dr. Henry Miller diagnoses it as Narcissistic Personality Disorder and describes the symptoms, which seem to fit Al Gore pretty well.

Saddam and Osama

An oft-repeated claim of the Left has been that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. The argument has been that the secular Saddam and the religious extremist bin Laden would never have anything to do with each other. Stephen Hayes, of the Weekly Standard, has just published a book that details the fallacy of that argument. In an article in this week's Weekly Standard, he describes on element of that fallacy.

In late February 2004, Christopher Carney made an astonishing discovery. Carney, a political science professor from Pennsylvania on leave to work at the Pentagon, was poring over a list of officers in Saddam Hussein's much-feared security force, the Fedayeen Saddam. One name stood out: Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed Hikmat Shakir. The name was not spelled exactly as Carney had seen it before, but such discrepancies are common. Having studied the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda for 18 months, he immediately recognized the potential significance of his find. According to a report last week in the Wall Street Journal, Shakir appears on three different lists of Fedayeen officers.

An Iraqi of that name, Carney knew, had been present at an al Qaeda summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on January 5-8, 2000. U.S. intelligence officials believe this was a chief planning meeting for the September 11 attacks. Shakir had been nominally employed as a "greeter" by Malaysian Airlines, a job he told associates he had gotten through a contact at the Iraqi embassy. More curious, Shakir's Iraqi embassy contact controlled his schedule, telling him when to show up for work and when to take a day off.

Mohammed Atta's meeting with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague was the first bit of the connection that was ignored. And now, as would be expected, this story is receiving absolutely no attention from the mainstream press. As of course neither did the story of last week's find of a Sarin gas artillery shell. Bit by bit all the arguments of the "anti-war" Left are being dismantled, but since they control the press, this story is guaranteed not to get out.

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In Defense of Israel

Alan Dershowitz recently gave a speech at the UC Berkeley, one of the most virulently anti-Israel universities in the United States. He asserts that much of the anti-Israel sentiment on campuses has to do with the fact that college students simply don't know the history and are easily swayed by the Arab propaganda.

Many of the students who attended were not Jews and held no firm views of Israel. They all came up to me afterward and said the same three words: "We didn't know!"

"We didn't know Israel first offered a two state solution, a Palestinian state, but the Arabs rejected it!"

"We didn't know in 1967 Israel accepted Resolution 242, in which the United Nations called for the return of territories captured in exchange for full peace and secure boundaries."

All Arab states rejected it saying, "no peace, no recognition, no negotiations," but students today said, "We didn't know!"

These Harvard students didn't know that in the years 2000 and 2001 Ehud Barak along with President Bill Clinton had initially offered the Palestinians everything they were asking for -- a state made up of 97% of the West Bank and all of Gaza, a capital in Jerusalem, control of East Jerusalem, control of the Temple Mount, 30 billion dollars in a compensation package, and symbolic return of several thousand refugees. Instead of accepting it or coming back to the negotiating table, Arafat walked away and started the intifada and all the violence. The Harvard students kept saying, "We didn't know!"

"We didn't know that Prince Bandar at Taba called Arafat's rejection of the offer a crime against the Palestinian people and against all the people of the region."

The students just didn't know.

Barry Rubin, in his Jerusalem Post column also attributes the change in attitude towards Israel, that Dershowitz mentions, to:

The greatest hasbara disaster in history: Why, many ask, did international attitudes turn so sharply and fiercely against Israel, even raising anti-Semitism to the highest point since the 1930s?

While there are many factors involved, I would suggest the most important reason lay in the reinterpretation of the conflict – engineered, ironically, by Israel and the US during the Oslo process.

Before that time, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was seen along familiar lines: external aggression and subversive terrorism trying to destroy an existing state, Israel. But Israel, Jews around the world, and the US explained throughout the 1990s that the Palestinians simply wanted their own state and an end to occupation, and if offered this would make peace.

Since it was inconceivable that anyone would reject such benefits, the world concluded that the true bad guys were not really making the offer. Paradoxically, Israel's approach of taking risks and offering concessions for peace ended by transforming the paradigm into the equally familiar one of an evil occupying force brutally suppressing a people that simply wanted self-determination.

The issue was no longer seen as extremist aggressors ruthlessly trying to destroy a smaller victim, but as imperialists and colonialists greedily trying to oppress others.