From the World Magazine blog:

Read on, Rush

Rush Limbaugh was wrong. A mainstream newspaper was right. That's a reversal from the position WORLD often takes, but we're glad that The Chattanooga Times Free Press this morning stood by its feisty embedded reporter in Iraq, Edward Lee Pitts.

Here's the background: Yesterday Mr. Pitts suddenly found himself the subject of the Drudge Report, CNN, Rush Limbaugh and others after an email purloined by Drudge revealed he helped Spc. Jerry Wilson ask Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld a pointed question about armored vehicles for soldiers in Iraq.

Mr. Limbaugh, as usual thinking first with his mouth, quickly blasted Mr. Pitts as another mainstream media monster out to manipulate a story with an anti-war slant. Mr. Pitts is in fact a hard-working reporter whose work (we hope) will be featured in upcoming issues of WORLD.

Mr. Pitts has covered this particular unit, Tennessee's 278th National Guard,
from training in California and Mississippi to prep in Kuwait, and is now on
his way with the unit into hostile territory east of Baghdad. He is sleeping on a cot, using a latrine, traveling with sweaty soldiers in perhaps less-than-ideally armored vehicles.

The issue of properly outfitting soldiers, as his boss and publisher Tom Griscom points out, has been a front-burner since June 2003 when IED explosions first maimed our men in significant numbers. The Army is big enough and techno-savvy enough to do something about it. But the Pentagon bureaucracy fiddles. Frankly, Mr. Rumsfeld should be cornered on it. Reporter Pitts has covered the issue extensively since taking up this assignment, and a front-page story in last week's Times Free Press carried a photograph showing members of the 278th welding scrap metal to protect their vehicles before the harrowing trek into Iraq.

Journalists in the posh seats—including conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh and cyber-hyperbole Matt Drudge—should be ashamed of going for a journalist in the hot seat without first getting the whole story.

Found on Brandywine Books, from Bartleby.com:

"To Christ" by John Donne (1572-1631)

WILT thou forgive that sinn, where I begunn,

Which is my sinn, though it were done before?

Wilt thou forgive those sinns through which I runn

And doe run still, though still I doe deplore?

When thou has done, thou hast not done,

For, I have more.


Wilt thou forgive that sinn, by which I'have wonne

Others to sinn, and made my sinn their dore?

Wilt thou forgive that sinn which I did shunne

A yeare or twoe, but wallowed in a score?

When thou hast done, thou hast not done,

For I have more.


I have a sinn of feare that when I have spunn

My last thred, I shall perish on the shore;

Sweare by thy self that at my Death, thy Sonne

Shall shine as he shines nowe, & heretofore;

And having done that, thou hast done,

I feare noe more.

From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Novelist mates his words with Marah's music
By Dan DeLuca
Inquirer Music Critic

Philadelphia rock bands and British novelists don't normally do shows together, so the sold-out crowd at the North Star Bar on Wednesday was curious: What exactly were Marah's Bielanko brothers and Nick Hornby going to do together?

Guitarist Serge Bielanko told the back story. Hornby became a Marah fan in 1998 after - full disclosure here - I went to a reading and gave him a copy of the band's wide-eyed and freewheeling debut, Let's Cut the Crap and Hook Up Later on Tonight. Since then, the scrappy rockers and the author of High Fidelity have become friends.

This was their third show, after ones in Europe last month. Hornby read five autobiographical essays, each inspired by a band pivotal to his life as a music fan. After each, Marah played a song.

The first was inspired by a 1972 Rory Gallagher concert, but was really about being a 15-year-old "blank sheet of paper" and the excitement of seeing a band that "made me realize that I knew nothing about anything, and all the things that I was going to know about were going to be great." The band, fronted by Serge's brother Dave, played Gallagher's version of "Tore Down," segueing into Marah's torrid "East," from this year's 20,000 Streets Under the Sky.

And so it went: a smart, funny essay about the Clash or Prince would be followed by "Lost in the Supermarket" or "Darling Nikki."

You may not agree with Hornby that Marah deserves an exalted place in the musical universe, but he's a master at writing about how music and culture shape our identities. And the loose, sweaty set that Marah closed the night with, which included a teeming-with-life "My Heart Is the Bums on the Street" and Darlene Love's "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" made a persuasive argument that they're worthy of his enthusiasm.

From Martha Bayles' Arts Journal blog, Serious Popcorn:

"Kinsey": All Bonobos and No Chimps
By Martha Bayles

Behold the bonobo, Dr. Kinsey tells his enraptured students. They're our closest relatives, and they have sex all the time, with as many partners as possible, while living together in peace and harmony!

Way cool, we say. But depending on our knowledge of primate evolution, we might also ask why the kindly prof doesn't mention chimpanzees, those larger cousins of bonobos who really ARE our closest relatives (just a few chromosomes away from Uncle Fred). Is it because recent field research suggests that chimps in the wild take giddy delight in such activities as rape, mate-battering, and murder?*

Personally, I don't put much stock in sociobiology. It's fascinating to compare ourselves with animals, but for a couple of millennia, human beings have understood that, like it or not, we are different. For one thing, animals don't conduct scientific studies of their own sexual behavior, publish them in best-selling volumes that contribute to significant changes in social organization (if not behavior), then make movies celebrating only one side of the story.

To be fair, "Kinsey" tells its one-sided story gracefully. Bill Condon is a deft director with a flair for sexual themes (see his excellent 1998 "Gods and Monsters"). And Liam Neeson is a vast improvement on the original Alfred Kinsey - not only is he better looking, with a better sense of humor, he is also better behaved.

Oops. This is science, folks. We're not supposed to judge behavior as better or worse. That belongs to the dark ages B.K. (Before Kinsey), when ten-year-old boys were forced to wear cruel contraptions to keep them from masturbating.

Huh? Where did I get that idea? From a gripping scene in which it is revealed that the suffering flesh of Kinsey père (John Lithgow) had been mortified in this bizarre way. As it happens, there's no evidence that such a thing ever occurred. Why then add it to the movie? The answer is simple: to make the dark ages look even darker than they were.

America had no lack of sexual hangups in the 1950s: anti-gay prejudice, racist myths, and gross disinformation about female sexuality (thanks a lot, Sigmund). A more measured film would not feel the need to add sexual morality to the list. I say this because the last I checked, sex was a pretty strong passion that sometimes needs channelling, if not curbing. (I assure you, my acceptance of this hard fact does not compel me to strap chastity belts on ten-year-old boys.)

One one level, "Kinsey" accepts this hard fact. There aren't many erotic practices out there that most people agree are wrong, but raping children is one. So "Kinsey" includes a moment of moral indignation at it, as though trying to reassure the audience that this is a movie about noble scientists, not nasty libertines.

The trouble is, Kinsey and some of his associates WERE libertines, and like all libertines they ended up hurting and violating one another. There are some hints of this: a scene where two researchers who've been sleeping with each other's wives succumb to jealous anger; and one great line: "When it comes to love, we are all in the dark."

But these are only hints, which is too bad, because underlying this story is a compelling set of questions about what science can and cannot tell us about ourselves. For example, love is not the only thing science cannot illuminate. Morality is another. Can it be proven scientifically that raping children is wrong? Of course not. That is a truth of another kind, no less true for not being subject to the experimental method.

If "Kinsey" went a little further in addressing such questions, instead of pulling back from them (for fear of appearing prudish?), then it would be a great movie instead of merely a good one.

* My source is the work of anthropologist Richard Wrangham, whose 1997 book, "Demonic Males," uses solid research to buttress a less-than-solid brief for what might be described as the bonobo lifestyle.

From Wired.com

The End of TV As We Know It
By Frank Rose

We live in the age of the digital packet. Documents, images, music, phone calls - all get chopped up, propelled through networks, and reassembled at the other end according to Internet protocol. So why not TV?

That's the question cable giants like Comcast and Time Warner and Baby Bells like SBC and Verizon have been asking. The concept has profound implications for television and the Internet. TV over Internet protocol - IPTV - will transform couch-cruising into an on-demand experience. For the Internet, it will mean broadband at speeds 10, 100, or even 1,000 times faster than today's DSL or cable. Online games would be startlingly realistic; the idea of channels would seem hopelessly archaic. Why not indeed?

So far, the answer has been inertia. But competition is a powerful stimulus. For years, DirecTV and EchoStar have been adding subscribers far faster than cable, so cable companies want something satellite can't match. At the same time, voice over IP is enabling cable operators to poach phone customers from telcos. Combine VoIP, truly high-speed broadband, and totally on-demand TV - and you've got such a compelling proposition that the Bell companies figure the only way to survive is to do likewise.

IPTV is not to be confused with television over the Internet. On the public Net, packets get delayed or lost entirely - that's why Web video is so jerky and lo-res. But private networks like Comcast's are engineered, obviously, for reliable video delivery - which means IPTV will look at least as good as TV coming from digital cable or satellite.

It will be accompanied by another, equally critical change. Instead of broadcasting every channel continuously, service providers plan to transmit them only to subscribers who request them. In effect, every channel will be streamed on demand. This will free up huge amounts of bandwidth for hi-def TV and high-speed broadband. Add IP and you get interactive services like caller ID on your TV. And the system will be able to track viewing habits as effectively as Amazon tracks its customers, so ads will be targeted with scary precision. Put it all together and you've got television that's as intensely personalized as 20th-century broadcasting was generic.

But that scenario is a good five years out. First there's a lot of upgrading to do. The Bells have the worst of it: Their copper lines max out on current-generation DSL, never mind TV. SBC is testing an advanced form of DSL that promises 7 times the bandwidth it delivers now. Verizon plans to spend billions to provide its 30 million customers with direct fiber connections offering nearly limitless bandwidth. Cable companies have already upgraded their networks, at a cost of some $85 billion, but it will be 2007 before they complete the transition from analog to digital and some time after that before all their customers get IP-addressable set-top boxes.

Meanwhile, work continues. CableLabs is working on IPTV as part of its Next Generation Network Architecture project, a semi-secret effort to optimize cable for all-digital delivery. Microsoft has developed an IPTV software platform that's being tested by SBC and Bell Canada, among others. It's also partnered with electronics maker Thomson to develop boxes, and with Intel and others to put IPTV on a chip.

But the cable industry is as intent on keeping Redmond out of IPTV as it was on fighting the company's earlier efforts to get inside the set-top. That's no surprise. Cable networks pass 95 percent of US households and - once the conversion to digital is complete - could feed each of them more than 5 Gbits per second. That's like having 100 T3 lines. The Bells won't be able to match that without taking on a mountain of debt, and satellite operators can't do it no matter what they try. Which means that Comcast and its ilk could be as dominant in this century as the Bell system was in the last.

Frank Rose (rose@wiredmag.com) is a Wired contributing editor.

From The American Conservative:

Realists Rebuffed
A vulgarized neconservatism in the saddle

By Scott McConnell

How inscrutable the last remaining superpower must seem to the outside world! Only six months ago, informed Washington opinion held that neoconservatism was a spent force. New Republic senior editor Lawrence Kaplan, a shrewd observer of Capitol power flows and a neoconservative himself, announced a “springtime for realism” and a twilight of the neocons. He quoted the once again voguish realist totems George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, and John Mearsheimer on the futility of armed crusades for democracy and noted the creation of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy as a counterpoint to the already established neocon lobbies. Democrat presidential designee John Kerry was making clear that democracy promotion was less important than the quest for stability. Most troubling, in Kaplan’s view, were signs that the Bush administration itself was cooling on the neocons.

While the president “still often channels [Woodrow] Wilson” (neocons frequently style themselves as muscular Wilsonians), Kaplan saw wobbling everywhere. The White House signed off on a raid on Ahmad Chalabi’s headquarters—the neocon favorite who turned out to be an Iranian agent—without first informing Doug Feith or Paul Wolfowitz. Condoleezza Rice formed the Iraq Stabilization Group inside the National Security Council without consulting the Pentagon. Robert Blackwill, a former Henry Kissinger aide, was suddenly wearing the big hat inside Rice’s NSC. The neocons on Dick Cheney’s staff were “consumed” by the Valerie Plame investigation. Cheney himself was soliciting advice from Kissinger. Rice was talking to Brent Scowcroft, the most prominent Bush I official to oppose publicly the invasion of Iraq.

Kaplan was not alone in reading the tea leaves that way. A month before the election, the invariably well-informed Bob Novak forecast that Bush would withdraw from Iraq and “end the neoconservative dream of building democracy in the Arab world.” Pat Buchanan in these pages claimed that the Iraq mess had tempered any Bush lust for further imperial adventures. George Will, probably the most influential conservative columnist of all, began advertising his own disenchantment with neoconservative foreign policy in every other column, mocking the idea that Iraq would be democratic anytime soon (“Iraq is just three people away from democratic success. Unfortunately, the three are George Washington, James Madison, and John Marshall.”) and skewering the notion that democracy could be imposed by force from without. The neoconservative democracy crusaders, Will observed dryly, ought to remember an elemental principle of moral reasoning: “there can be no duty to do what cannot be done.”

That apparent right-around-the-corner return to realism heralded the restoration of a natural order. Around the country are thousands with lifetime Republican attachments who supported or even served in the administrations of Nixon, Reagan, and George Bush I for whom the neoconservative ascendancy was almost too bizarre to be believed. They thought that eventually reality would reassert itself. George W. Bush would talk to his father and mother or to Laura, and they would warn him that American foreign policy was running off the rails. Dick Cheney would understand. Donald Rumsfeld, who had begun to question whether we had a “metric” to know whether we were actually winning the War on Terror, would finally see the light. Yes, the United States went through a trauma on 9/11, and yes, Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith and David Wurmser happened to be right there to dust off and present a Mideast attack plan from a Benjamin Netanyahu/Project For the New American Century coven from the mid-1990s. While Washington was off guard, they saw their opportunity and took it. But Iraq had proved such a mess that the ship of state would right itself. Had to.

This was less wishful thinking than the natural human tendency to believe that the social patterns one has lived with for one’s entire adult life—those that one’s parents had lived with—would inevitably reassert themselves. It was a belief perhaps akin to the German Jewish bourgeoisie’s as they watched the rise of Hitler: No, things couldn’t get really bad, not in our Germany. In America, the phase is “it can’t happen here.”

One must be clear what “it” is. The Patriot Act is not a giant step towards domestic fascism, and we are not halfway to martial law. George W. Bush bears no hatred towards any minority group or even any domestic constituency.

For contemporary America, the “it” is the setting in full motion of an aggressive, reckless, militarized foreign policy, viewed as lawless by much of the world—one whose almost inevitable outcome is nuclear war. While Pinochet and Franco and for most of his reign Stalin kept within their own borders, Bush has ambitions of global scope. Of course they are idealistic ambitions, beautiful ambitions. The spread of democracy—especially if it springs up from a country’s indigenous institutions and populace—is a very good thing. But the Bushites now see democracy’s spread as necessary for America’s own survival. The world, particularly the Muslim world, must become democratic now, or we will perish. The neoconservatives in the administration believe that democracy will spread only if the president commits more and more troops to Iraq and topples the regimes in Tehran and Damascus. As alarming as the neoconservatism of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, Danielle Pletka, and John Bolton is, more alarming is the spirit that has spread in its wake—a kind of neoconservativism without a graduate degree.

You see it on certain blogs and hear it in the rants of some of the most widely listened to right-wing talk-radio hosts. If the Arabs don’t want to be democratic, we should nuke them. We have no choice but to nuke them for our own safety. It’s a vulgarized neoconservatism —no one from the American Enterprise Institute speaks like this (in public). But this talk is around in the heartland and growing, and it is wind in the sails of the new administration.

At this writing, the staffing of a new foreign-policy apparatus is not complete. But the broad strokes are plain. At CIA, there is a new emphasis on loyalty to the president over readiness to provide objective analysis; Porter Goss will ensure that the agency provides information that the White House wants to hear. At the cabinet level, the direction is clear. Colin Powell is leaving, exhausted by his losing tussles with the Pentagon, semi-humiliated by the president. His crime was that he was right about war in Iraq, right that we needed allies and more forces for the invasion, right that postwar Iraq would be chaos and quagmire. His caution about the use of force —the Pottery Barn rule—must have irked the president every time he saw him, so better to banish him. Promoted instead are those who were consistently wrong. Rumsfeld remains, though his neocon aides “stovepiped” phony intelligence about Iraq’s WMD capacity, he botched the post invasion, and was responsible for the Abu Ghraib torture. Stephen Hadley, who “forgot” to remove the false claims about Iraq’s yellowcake purchases from the president’s 2003 State of the Union speech, is the new National Security Adviser. Condi Rice, whose TV musings about “mushroom clouds” helped frighten a nation into an unnecessary war, becomes the nation’s top diplomat.

What became of the realists? Like the neocons, they are only policy intellectuals and bureaucrats, dependent on the politicians who appoint them. Among educated Americans, they won the foreign-policy debate decisively. No one doubts it. There are scores of bright people from George Will to William F. Buckley to Kenneth Pollack who are born-again realists; no one has recently converted to neoconservatism. But the realists did not win the debate inside Bush’s brain—indeed, there is no sign at all that the president was aware that there was a foreign-policy debate going on. Instead a 51-48 percent victory, a pitiful margin for an incumbent during wartime, is treated as a landslide of Reaganesque proportions and a mandate for the president to promote those whose foreign-policy advice has proved egregiously wrong.

How has the country changed? Two years ago, when National Review editor Rich Lowry said that an appropriate response to a WMD attack on the United States might be to nuke Mecca, there was a fair amount of outrage. But Lowry, recall, was imagining how the United States might respond to a massive terrorist attack. Now the American airwaves and blogosphere are rife calls to nuke those whom military invasion couldn’t turn into democrats. “Could it happen here?” the old question goes. In one sense it already has.

December 20, 2004 issue

From the Village Voice:

Cloud Over the Constitution
The Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee lack the grit to stop Alberto Gonzales
by Nat Hentoff

December 10th, 2004

The problem with Gonzales is that he has been deeply involved in developing some of the most sweeping claims of near-dictatorial presidential power in our nation's history. These claims put President George W. Bush literally above the law, allowing him to imprison and even (at least in theory) torture anyone in the world, at any time, for any reason that Bush associates with national security . . .

—Stuart Taylor Jr., former New York Times Supreme Court reporter, "America's Best Choice?," Legal Times, November 15, 2004

------------------------------------------------------------------------

In a scathing lead editorial (November 22), "Mr. Gonzales' Record," The Washington Post challenged the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will soon hold a confirmation hearing on the president's appointment of Alberto Gonzales to be this nation's chief law enforcement officer, the daily protector of the Constitution: "Above all, Mr. Gonzales should answer this question [before the Senate Judiciary Committee]: Why is a lawyer whose opinions have produced such disastrous results for his government—in their practical application, in their effect on U.S. international standing and in their repeated reversal by U.S. courts—qualified to serve as attorney general?"

As I wrote in my last two columns, the editorial summarized some of the disastrous advice from this man without any law enforcement experience, who always tells George W. Bush what he wants to hear: authorization for torture of noncitizen detainees; approval of violations of international law; and the breathtaking assertion that the president, without going to the courts or to Congress, can imprison American citizens indefinitely, without charges, and without access to lawyers.

Actually, The Washington Post's challenge is to the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Republican members will vote, in lockstep, for Gonzales. But I have found out that most, if not all, of the Democrats will also cave in—after harrumphing at Gonzales for some hours.

I know this from an inside source whom I cannot name. I very rarely use blind sources, but there are times when to report on what's actually going on, I have to protect a source. The Democrats on the committee know what I, and others, have been telling you about Gonzales. In their possession, for instance, is a copy of the July/August 2003 Atlantic Monthly article by Alan Berlow that documents how Gonzales, as legal counsel to then Texas governor George W. Bush, sent 56 death row inmates to be executed after giving three-to-seven-page memos on their cases to Bush that rubber-stamped the lethal decision of the notoriously murderous Texas courts.

Even the Democrats' attack dog on the Judiciary Committee, Charles Schumer, has said he prefers Gonzales to John Ashcroft. That's like saying you prefer Torquemada to Attila the Hun. Indeed, the ranking minority member on the committee, Patrick Leahy, has said that with Bush re-elected, if he sent up Attila the Hun to replace Ashcroft, he'd get his way.

The Democrats prefer to hold their fire until the next Supreme Court nominee. As a result, for the next four years, the manipulative Alberto Gonzales will be finding additional ways to expand the Patriot Act, integrate the further surveillance of us all into government data banks, and, as he already has, make the Bush administration the most secretive in American history.

In a recent detailed summary of Gonzales's record as White House counsel, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (I'm on its steering committee) emphasized: "Alberto Gonzales has been an active defender of what is best described as a quasi-executive privilege, invoked repeatedly by the Bush administration in attempts to keep government information from public scrutiny."

So, as we are abandoned by the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, what can we do? For one thing, keep in touch with the website of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (bordc.org). It has a continuing record of cities and towns passing resolutions pressuring their members of Congress to pass liberating anti–Patriot Act (and future anti-Gonzales) legislation. (A number of such bills will be reintroduced in the next session of Congress.) And the website includes organizing strategies and useful news reports.

Also, while I have substantial differences with certain American Civil Liberties Union policies and with the quality of some of its top leadership, the ACLU staff is persistently effective in countering, through communication and lawsuits, the administration's subversion of the legacy of Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Eugene Debs, Bayard Rustin, and other freedom defenders.

The ACLU membership has increased in direct ratio to the ascendancy of Bush, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, et al. And the more members it gets, the more it can accomplish. I suggest you join the ACLU (the national office is in New York: 125 Broad Street, 18th floor; Attention: membership department; NY, NY 10004; 212-549-2585).

Whenever I speak at a school, or at any gathering, I bring the late Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas into the conversation. As a defender of constitutional liberty, he was the direct opposite of Alberto Gonzales. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights, Douglas once wrote to a group of young lawyers, are not self-executing.

He warned: "As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air—however slight—lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."

The changes in the air have become much more than slight. The twilight is deepening, but so is the resistance—despite the retreat of the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. The fatuous Michael Moore will not save us. Only we can. All through our history, dissent and resistance have beaten back the darkness. Tom Paine and Martin Luther King knew that, and like Joe Hill, their lives still resonate.

"Conservative" Disgrace

In the light of the revelations that troops in Iraq have insufficient armor for their vehicles, and that disabling and crippling injuries are increased because death is more readily stayed, one might have expected conservatives to be heard on these issues. Well, they were, but not in the way that served themselves or the men making sacrifices in the Middle East well.

Instead of being filled with outrage over the situation regarding inadequate armor, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity were exercised becaused a REPORTER DARED TO QUESTION DON RUMSFELD!. There was no emphasis on whether or not the question was justified (and it obviously was, judging by the reaction of the troops to the inquiry). Any fair minded person can read the e-mail the reporter wrote about how and why he spent time developing questions with the troops with which he is imbedded, and see that the intent was honest, and even noble.

The thrust of the chickenhawks Hannity and Limbaugh was to make the questioning seem like some kind of insidious conspiracy to "plant" a question that would bring disrepute to the Secretary of Defense. Well, it seems he's done a pretty good job of that himself over the last year with the idiotic outworking of the post war strategery. (A "plan" so stupid it doesn't rise to the level of having the word "strategy" associated with it.)

A couple of days before the armor story broke, Limbaugh took time from his effort to obscure his cajoling of a Mexican housekeeper into scrounging Oxycontin to ridicule the concern over the transformation of servicemen into cripples as complaints that not enough people were dying in the war. It evidently never occurred to the former Kansas City Royal flunkie that with the saving of lives, not only a great amount of physical mutilation is occurring, but a huge toll in psychological damage is being caused as well.

Every day that passes brings into sharper focus what a moronic notion going into Iraq was in the way we did, with the forces we have, and with our limitations of materiel. The cruel irony is, the guy who got it right, Colin Powell, is leaving the administration. All the neo-cons who ginned up the race to war and who are bearing none of the blame for the post war mess are getting to stay. Lucky us.

The "It's Better to Remain Silent and Be Thought a Fool Than to Speak and Remove All Doubt" Department

From The San Francisco Chronicle:

"Clemens said he didn't have any comment on baseball's steroid controversy. Asked if he thought Barry Bonds' records were tainted because the slugger reportedly testified he took substances that federal prosecutors say are steroids, Clemens said, "No," and took no more questions."

Gee. Wonder why?

Andrew Sullivan on Rumsfeld

"We are almost two years into a conflict and critical defense weaponry is not available to soldiers who might die needlessly as a result. This is not that complicated. When Rumsfeld said, "you go to war with the Army you have," he was apparently forgetting that we went to war months and months ago. The fact that soldiers are still unprotected, that we still have too few troops there, that prisoner abuse is still occurring, that the borders are still not even close to being sealed, that the insurgency is still threatening the entire future, that we still haven't confronted the question of our global manpower needs ... well, these issues go to the heart of the question of Rumsfeld's and Bush's competence. This is not knee-jerk anti-war sentiment. This is knee-jerk pro-war sentiment. The question of whether we should fight is to me an obvious one. The question of whether Bush and Rumsfeld have a clue what they're doing is less easily answered. But we sure know they think they're perfect. And their arrogance has just intensified. Not encouraging."

Too bad the trustees aren't as invested in this issue as they are in getting the basketball and football coaches they want. From FrontPageMagazine.com;

UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hatred of the West
By Jon Sanders

December 9, 2004

The study of Western civilization, once a rite of passage for the college-educated, has taken a back burner in modern curricula. These days, trendy universities focus almost entirely on multiculturalism. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the outcry over a proposal to revive "Western Civilization" shows just how deeply the academic Left hates it.

Some background: In North Carolina, of the eleven UNC schools surveyed, just a third still require a course in Western history or Western civilization. That's according to "How Solid is the Core? A Study of General Education Requirements at 11 North Carolina Institutions," a study conducted by the National Association of Scholars and released this fall by my organization, the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. But about two thirds "require a multicultural or cultural diversity course." The study declared this finding "at best a sign of interest in non-Western cultures, but all too often an exercise in politically correct 'education.'"

Furthermore, "[n]ot one institution requires all undergraduates to take a course in United States history."

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will have a new curriculum soon, but the Pope Center study found that whereas the previous curriculum required students to take "one course in a period of Western history before 1700," under the new curriculum students "will no longer be required to study any segment of Western history."

It's a deficit the College of Arts and Sciences at UNC-Chapel Hill seeks to address. This particular college proposed bringing a Western civilization program to its campus, and it approached the John William Pope Foundation for financial support.
The subsequent outcry was so vehement that one would think the college had proposed replacing the university's beloved Old Well with a statue of George W. Bush. To defeat the proposal, campus leftists attacked the donors on the basis of their records of funding conservative causes, most specifically, my organization, which has written critically of UNC-CH. (But they say it's not critically correct: "Criticism is one thing, hostility is another," UNC-CH English professor Reid Barbour complained recently.)

The Triangle's leftist tabloid The Independent fired the opening shots in October, warning that the Pope Foundation "has an agenda that's antithetical to the principles of academic freedom and cultural diversity" and insinuating that the university's proposal would be tainted by association. Writer Barbara Solow wrote that the "critical drumbeat" from the Pope Center -- a think tank founded with seed money and support from the Pope Foundation -- "is what led many who attended last week's faculty meeting to question the implications of taking money from the Pope Center's financial backers for academic programs at UNC." She quotes sociology professor Sherryl Kleinman, who asks, "What does it say about a university if its leaders accept 'gifts' from those who support organizations that systematically attack the university's faculty and programs?"

"While several faculty members said they had little problem with the program's academic specifics, many said they couldn't stomach its existence knowing where the money came from," reported the Herald-Sun of Durham. "Most pointed to the Higher Education Policy center [i.e., the Pope Center] and its Web site."

The campus leftist listserv called for a protest, demanding in bold-faced type "Should UNC-CH Accept $12 Million from Racist, Sexist, Classist, Homophobic Donors?" The posting announced, "The donors are John and Art Pope, whose family funds the John William Pope Foundation, the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, and the John Locke Foundation. These organizations have systematically attacked and discredited many programs and professors at UNC-Chapel Hill and other universities."

UNC-CH's Graduate and Professional Student Federation joined the fray, passing a resolution against the university taking a grant from the Pope Foundation. The resolution cited work by the Pope Center as "work[ing] to create a hostile climate to academic freedom for instructors."

At the time of this writing (Nov. 23), UNC-CH's Student Congress is preparing to vote on a resolution opposing the Western Civ. Proposal because of "the foundation's ties to the Pope Center, which has repeatedly criticized University academic programs and actions, and any power the foundation might gain at UNC by funding the program."

Beginning to detect a theme? Yes, the ostensible case being presented at UNC-CH against a program in Western Civilization is that the donors approached by the university also fund conservative critics of the university. Such an unthinkable act is supposedly against academic freedom -- even though the donation would expand course offerings on campus, and even though the Pope Center held a conference last month on bringing more freedom to universities (which included David Horowitz discussing the Academic Bill of Rights, a notion the academic Left here called an extreme view and using "seemingly benign suggestions" to "promote a political agenda")

Normally, leftists decry wealthy capitalists and tell them they ought to give back to the community. Here they're telling those that are doing so (not just at UNC, but elsewhere as well) that their money is tainted; that since "politics is not divorced from education," UNC-CH should not be "married to the politics of the Pope family" by accepting their grant. In effect: "Stop the hate; stop the fear; we don't want their money here."

But the Pope Foundation's money is already there. The foundation has made several donations to UNC-CH concerns, and as the Herald-Sun reported, "Matt Kupec, UNC's vice chancellor for university advancement, said he's never heard a word of complaint about the Pope family or demands they may have made in regards to their donations."

Furthermore, the foundation recently funded new courses in economics and political science at nearby North Carolina State University. "We gave them a proposal, and they accepted it," N.C. State political science Prof. Andrew Taylor told the Herald-Sun. "We have the funding for five years with no strings attached. There's no control."

Could it be, then, that the real problem isn't with the donor, but with the study of Western Civilization itself? A look at criticisms of the proposal suggests that this may be the case.

"Where are the students, where are the faculty, that are dying to have this?" asked political science Prof. Pamela Conover asked in a meeting over the proposal.

"Students don't want it," Student Body President Matt Calabria declared at the same meeting.

"UNC administrators are being seduced by the promise of a gift that will expand a program that faculty, after careful study, decided against expanding," wrote geology professor Altha Cravey. "It's clear that money, not faculty initiative or student need, is driving this process."

A posting on the UNC-CH leftist listserv dismissed the idea of a Western civilization program as "history dealing solely with the disenfranchised plight of rich, white, Protestant men."

Conservative culture warriors would be unwise to dismiss this controversy. UNC-CH is, after all, one of the most prestigious public universities in the nation. The outlook for bringing a Western Civilization program here grows dim, even as Western history is phased out of the required undergraduate curriculum. This is the same university that has just recently instituted programs in "Social and Economic Justice," "Sexuality Studies" (made possible by a grant, no less), and "Latina/o Studies." Faculty who favor the Western Civ. program are frightened to speak out for obvious reasons. The inmates are running the asylum.

Jon Sanders (jsanders@popecenter.org) is a policy analyst for the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh, North Carolina

Lowest fatality rate, highest rate of invalids and cripples, all because Bush's Likudnik advisors got a hard on to go to war when we didn't need to and weren't prepared. From washingtonpost.com:

U.S. Combat Fatality Rate Lowest Ever
Technology and Surgical Care at the Front Lines Credited With Saving Lives
By Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, December 9, 2004

Ten percent of soldiers injured in Iraq have died from their war wounds, the lowest casualty fatality rate ever, thanks in large part to technological advances and the deployment of surgical SWAT teams at the front lines, an analysis to be published today has found.

But the remarkable lifesaving rate has come at the enormous cost of creating a generation of severely wounded young veterans and a severe shortage of military surgeons, wrote Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

The war in Iraq has produced the "largest burden of casualties our military medical personnel have had to cope with since the Vietnam War," said Gawande's report in the New England Journal of Medicine. By contrast, 24 percent of soldiers wounded in the Vietnam War or the Persian Gulf War did not survive.

"It used to be our thinking that the number of deaths reflects the violence of the war," Gawande said in an interview. "Now, the number of deaths reflects how well surgical teams are doing in saving lives."

More than 10,300 U.S. service members have been injured in Iraq and more than 1,000 of them killed in action, according to Defense Department statistics cited in the report. "This can no longer be described as a small or contained conflict," Gawande wrote.

He praised the military's strategy of positioning close to the fighting smaller, "leaner and more mobile" surgical teams with the ability to erect a battlefield hospital in less than 60 minutes. Traveling in Humvees with hand-held ultrasound machines, portable ventilators, supplies of red blood cells and an array of surgical tools and pharmaceuticals, the teams focus on stabilizing patients and moving them for further treatment in less than two hours.

During the Vietnam War, it took injured soldiers an average of 45 days to reach a hospital in the United States. At the beginning of the Iraq war, the average was eight days, and now it is four. One airman hit by a mortar attack in September "was on the operating table at Walter Reed" Army Medical Center here "just 36 hours later," Gawande said.

The battlefield triage is called "damage control" because the emphasis is on stopping bleeding, keeping a patient warm and leaving almost everything else to doctors at a permanent hospital.

"The combination of Kevlar vests and a system that allows them to stop the bleeding makes it possible for them to survive injuries that were unsurvivable before," he said. "How you rehabilitate physically, let alone emotionally, someone who has that kind of loss is a serious question."

For every soldier killed, an average of 10 are injured, he said. Gawande found similarly low fatality rates among soldiers wounded in Afghanistan.

Early in the Iraqi conflict, when the fighting was more traditional battlefield combat, the most common injuries came from wounds to limbs that were not protected by body armor. More recently, as the engagement has shifted to guerrilla-style warfare with explosive devices, more injuries result from shrapnel that hits under vests and through neck- and armholes, Gawande said.

"And with suicide bombers, you see not just metal shrapnel, but also clothing, dirt and even bone from the attacker that is infectious," he said, "and can lead to more extensive surgeries and multiple surgeries."

With just 120 general surgeons on active duty in the Army and a similar number in the reserves, Gawande argued the teams are overextended and operating in far more dangerous circumstances.

"Many surgeons have been on a second deployment or an extended deployment, and even this has not been sufficient," he wrote. "Planners are having to contemplate pressing surgeons into yet a third deployment."

The American Medical Association and the state surgeon of the Wisconsin Army National Guard have expressed concerns that the Selective Service System may revive procedures for drafting medical personnel. Such a plan "was not undertaken at the request of anyone" at the Pentagon, a Defense Department statement said yesterday. "Furthermore, there is no need for such a plan."

Col. John B. Holcomb, commander of the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research, agreed that Iraq can no longer be viewed as a minor conflict. But he said the casualty rate and severity of injuries is not inconsistent with other wars.

A review of historical documents shows that "head and extremity injuries predominate, at least back to World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam," he said. Perhaps Gawande, who lacks military experience, was unaccustomed to the level of trauma seen in war, Holcomb said.

"The injuries in combat are devastating compared to what most civilian surgeons are used to seeing," he said, adding that the closest parallel he could think of were injuries sustained by someone run over by a train.

The number of general surgeons serving in Iraq is not as high as in the Persian Gulf War 13 years ago, Holcomb acknowledged. However, he said the key was placing the right doctors and nurses in the right place.

Iraq has brought other unanticipated medical challenges. Soldiers were suffering a "dismayingly high incidence of blinding injuries" because they refused to wear goggles that they described as " 'something a Florida senior citizen would wear.' So the military bowed to fashion," Gawande said, and purchased hipper protective eyewear that appears to be serving its purpose.


© 2004 The Washington Post Company

More great news from Iraq. Now let's have Victor Davis Hanson talk about how it was in Peloponnesia.

From washingtonpost.com:

Rumsfeld Gets Earful From Troops
Complaints Cite Equipment Woes, Extended Tours and Pay Delays
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, December 9, 2004

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, speaking in Kuwait yesterday to troops deploying into Iraq, got an earful of complaints about poor combat equipment, personnel policies that keep soldiers in the Army beyond their terms of enlistment, and other issues that reflect the strains the war in the Middle East is placing on the U.S. military.

In one of the exchanges during the town-hall-style meeting, Spec. Thomas Wilson complained that he and his comrades were rooting through junkyards to find improvised armor for their military vehicles to protect against bomb blasts and small-arms attacks.

"A lot of us are getting ready to move north relatively soon," said Wilson, an airplane mechanic with the Tennessee Army National Guard, according to a transcript of the meeting released by the Pentagon. "Our vehicles are not armored. We're digging pieces of rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass that's already been shot up . . . picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take into combat. We do not have proper . . . vehicles to carry with us north."

Rumsfeld replied: "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time."

He added: "If you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up."

Another soldier, from a logistical support unit based at Fort Bragg, N.C., complained that she was being kept in the Army against her wishes by a Pentagon "stop-loss" order.

"It is something you prefer not to have to use, obviously, in a perfect world," Rumsfeld responded. "It's been used as little as possible."

When a third soldier, from the Idaho Army National Guard, complained that Guard units were being issued "antiquated" equipment inferior to that given to regular Army units, Rumsfeld said that the Army is trying to be equitable but that somebody has to get the older gear.

The one question that seemed to give Rumsfeld pause came from a lieutenant colonel who said that many of the soldiers in his unit are having trouble receiving all the pay due them, causing problems for their families back home who are being pestered by collection agencies.

"Can someone here get the details of the unit he's talking about?" Rumsfeld asked. "That's just not right."

As a whole, Rumsfeld's responses provoked a wave of criticism from congressional Democrats. Rep. Ted Strickland (D-Ohio) called Rumsfeld's remarks "callous." Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) termed them "contemptuous." Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) labeled them "stunning."

"When I visit Iraq, I ride around in an armored vehicle, and I am sure the secretary does as well," Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.) said in a statement. "If it is good enough for the big shots, it is good enough for every American soldier."

Some military experts agreed with the criticism. "Any problem mentioned, he's in denial," said retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey.

"Troop frustration is growing," especially as some soldiers head back to Iraq for their second occupation tour as the security situation there deteriorates, said another retired four-star general, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Officers and senior sergeants are worried, he noted, because, in his view, "we are breaking a small, great professional force."

The series of pointed questions shot at Rumsfeld reflect a consequence of the Pentagon's increasing reliance on National Guard and reserve units to carry out the U.S. mission in Iraq. Almost 45 percent of the 130,000 Army troops there now are drawn from the part-time components. Unlike active-duty troops, Guard and reserve troops tend to be older, more "civilianized" in their behavior and less deferential toward authority.

Some Guard units preparing to deploy to Iraq have been vocal about their morale problems, and an Army Reserve unit already there made headlines in October when it refused to carry out a convoy mission it considered too dangerous. Earlier this week, eight U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq and Kuwait filed a lawsuit challenging the "stop-loss" policy, which forces them to serve beyond the end of their terms of enlistment.

Rumsfeld's spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said the meeting was hardly unusual. "The range of questions was quite typical," he said at a Pentagon briefing. "I thought it was a very standard event."

He also said that the question posed by Wilson, the Tennessee Guardsman, was misleading, in that it made it appear that soldiers are being sent into a combat zone in unarmored vehicles. Any Humvees -- the military's jeeplike light trucks -- that lack armor are carried into Iraq atop flatbed trucks and, once there, are used only inside the relative safety of U.S. bases, he said.

The Army is moving to produce as many armored Humvees as it can, he added. In the fall of 2003, there were only 15 made each month, he said, but after the need for more became clear, the rate of production was boosted to 450 a month.

Some military experts agreed with Di Rita in finding the meeting unexceptional. "This is what leaders are supposed to do, meet with troops and get their honest feedback," said retired Army Lt. Col. James Jay Carafano, now an analyst at the Heritage Foundation. "No one should be surprised when our troops say what they mean; that's what makes the American soldier great."

Likewise, Robert Andrews, a former Pentagon official, said: "This is vintage Rumsfeld. He doesn't talk down to these guys. He talks to general officers the same way."

But some others were more critical. Part of the problem, said Daniel Goure, another former Pentagon official, is that Rumsfeld acts less like a head coach and more like the owner of the football team. "For this reason, he doesn't do well at 'win one for the Gipper'-type speeches," he said.

A transcript of Rumsfeld's meeting with the soldiers is available at www.dod.mil/transcripts/2004/tr20041208-secdef1761.html.

From washingtonpost.com:

A Stain on Baseball
By George F. Will

Wednesday, December 8, 2004

"When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws."

-- G.K. Chesterton, 1905

To understand the damage that the steroids scandal is doing to baseball, consider this: Probably sometime late in the 2005 season or early in the next one, Barry Bonds, who already has 703 career home runs, will begin a game with 754, one short of Henry Aaron's record. Would you cross the street to see Bonds hit number 755?

Bonds, 40, is intelligent and severely aware of his body. When, a year ago, Bonds's lawyer said his client might have "unknowingly" used steroids, Bonds and the gaudy numbers his dramatically transformed body has generated since he turned 35 became, strictly speaking, incredible.

In recent decades athletes have learned that, using nutrition, strength training and other means, it is possible to enhance performance. But not all that is possible should be permissible. Some enhancements devalue performance while improving it, because they unfairly alter the conditions of competition. Lifting weights and eating your spinach enhance the body's normal functioning. But radical and impermissible chemical intrusions into the body can jeopardize the health of the body and mind, while causing both to behave abnormally.

Athletes chemically propelled to victory do not merely overvalue winning, they misunderstand why winning is properly valued. Professional athletes stand at an apex of achievement because they have paid a price in disciplined exertion -- a manifestation of good character. They should try to perform unusually well. But not unnaturally well. Drugs that make sport exotic drain it of its exemplary power by making it a display of chemistry rather than character -- actually, a display of chemistry and bad character.

If a baseball fan from the last decade of the 19th century were placed in a ballpark in the first decade of the 21st, that fan would feel in a familiar setting. One reason baseball has such a durable hold on the country is that, as historian Bruce Catton said, it is the greatest topic of conversation America has produced. And one reason is the absence of abrupt discontinuities in the evolution of this game with its ever-richer statistical sediment. This makes possible intergenerational comparisons of players' achievements.

Until now, only one radical demarcation has disrupted the game's continuity -- the divide, around 1920, between the dead ball and lively ball eras. (A short-lived tampering with the ball produced the lurid offensive numbers of 1930 -- nine teams batted over .300; the eight-team National League batted .304.) Now baseball's third era is ending -- the era of disgracefully lively players.

What is, alas, continuing is the idea that everything is the federal government's business. The steroid scandal may yet become redundant confirmation of Chesterton's century-old insight quoted above. Because some players have broken a big law of life -- don't cheat -- we may now get a federal law against their particular form of cheating. To be fair, John McCain, aka The National Scold, who acquired from his father the admiral and from his own training as a naval officer an admirable sense of honor, hopes that his threat of legislation will prod the players' union to make legislation unnecessary by consenting to a more rigorous regime of drug testing.

The Major League Baseball Players Association -- the union -- is democratic, so it surely will want to consent. A large majority of players are honorable or prudent or both. They do not use steroids, which are dangerous as well as dishonorable. But consider the plight of the marginal major leaguer, a category that includes most major leaguers at some point in their careers and many of them throughout their careers. The marginal player knows that some of the competitors for his roster spot and playing time are getting illegal chemical assistance. So he faces a choice of jeopardizing either his career or his health. And surely all non-cheating players dislike playing under the cloud of suspicion that their achievements are tainted.

Happily, this tawdry steroids episode benefits an exemplary gentleman. Until last season, when David Aardsma played for the San Francisco Giants, Henry Aaron's name was the first in the alphabetical listing of the almost 16,000 fortunate persons who have played in the major leagues. Aaron deserves to rank -- and in the hearts of serious fans will rank, long after Bonds retires -- first on the list of career home runs, properly achieved.

georgewill@washpost.com

This is why boxed sets were created;

The Moon's A Harsh Mistress: Jimmy Webb in the Seventies
Available from Rhino Handmade / Dec. 14, 2004

Raised in Oklahoma and west Texas, Jimmy Webb launched a celebrated songwriting career while still in his teens, his "Up, Up And Away" topping the charts for The Fifth Dimension in 1967. During the Flower Power era, his lush, romantic pop songs -- "MacArthur Park" for Richard Harris and "By The Time I Get To Phoenix" for Glen Campbell, to name a couple -- represented everything creatively vital about a Tin Pan Alley that was fast being overshadowed by songwriting performers like Dylan and The Beatles.

Success or no, Webb quickly saw the writing on the wall. "One thing I always knew was that once they know who you are, you're dead," he explains in Ben Edmonds' liner notes to this release. "I saw that I was rapidly pigeonholed, strapped into an electric chair called 'middle of the road songwriter.' I couldn't let that happen."

So in 1969 Webb embarked on a performance career noted for its studio innovation, large-scale ambition, and delicate song craft. While his 1970 debut, Words And Music, was tailored to the rock audience, Webb subsequently re-consolidated his orchestral gains, culminating in the back-to-back extravagance of Land's End (1974) and El Mirage (1977), the latter produced by George Martin.

Webb consistently impressed critics but sold few records. His peers have always recognized his genius, bestowing prestigious songwriting awards as well as Grammys for music, lyrics, and orchestration (Webb remains the only artist to be awarded in all three categories). And then there are the legions of loyalists. "It has been a somewhat strange career -- sometimes triumphant, sometimes bittersweet -- having this almost maniacal following of people who will travel anywhere to hear me perform, yet not ever having grasped the brass ring of major acceptance as a performer," he says in these liners.

This five-disc limited-edition boxed set contains the albums Words And Music (1970), And So: On (1971), Letters (1972), Land's End (1974), and El Mirage (1977), as well as previously unreleased 1972 live performances and a disc's worth of previously unreleased outtakes.

The Moon's A Harsh Mistress: Jimmy Webb In The Seventies is available in an individually numbered limited edition of 2,500 copies.

TRACK LISTING

SLEEPIN’ IN THE DAYTIME     (5:09)  
   P.F. SLOAN     (4:14)  
   LOVE SONG     (3:37)  
   CARELESS WEED     (3:16)  
   PSALM ONE-FIVE-O     (4:40)  
   I. SONGSELLER     (4:24)  
   II. DOROTHY CHANDLER BLUES     (6:04)  
   III. JERUSALEM     (5:29)  
   THREE SONGS: (LET IT BE ME, NEVER MY LOVE, I WANNA BE FREE)     (2:18)  
   ONCE BEFORE I DIE     (4:26)  
   MET HER ON A PLANE     (3:03)  
   ALL NIGHT SHOW     (3:03)  
   ALL MY LOVE’S LAUGHTER     (4:10)  
   HIGHPOCKETS     (5:24)  
   MARIONETTE     (2:32)  
   LASPITCH     (6:04)  
   ONE LADY     (3:30)  
   IF SHIPS WERE MADE TO SAIL []     (2:17)  
   POCKETFUL OF KEYS     (4:01)  
   SEE YOU THEN     (4:53)  
   GALVESTON      (4:10)  
   CAMPO DE ENCINO     (4:52)  
   LOVE HURTS     (3:58)  
   SIMILE     (3:15)  
   HURT ME WELL     (4:10)  
   ONCE IN THE MORNING     (3:07)  
   CATHARSIS      (3:29)  
   SONG SELLER     (3:30)  
   WHEN CAN BROWN BEGIN     (4:16)  
   PIANO     (3:59)  
   LOVE HURTS (single version)     (3:17)  
   OCEAN IN HIS EYES     (4:30)  
   FEET IN THE SUNSHINE     (3:30)  
   CLOUDMAN     (3:54)  
   LADY FITS HER BLUE JEANS     (4:05)  
   JUST THIS ONE TIME     (4:59)  
   CRYING IN MY SLEEP     (4:16)  
   IT’S A SIN     (3:16)  
   ALYCE BLUE GOWN     (5:01)  
   LAND’S END/ASLEEP ON THE WIND     (9:08)  
   THE HIGHWAYMAN      (3:51)  
   IF YOU SEE ME GETTING SMALLER I’M LEAVING     (3:53)  
   MIXED-UP GUY     (3:40)  
   CHRISTIAAN, NO     (3:07)  
   MOMENT IN A SHADOW     (3:39)  
   SUGARBIRD      (3:25)  
   WHERE THE UNIVERSES ARE     (3:34)  
   P.F. SLOAN     (4:17)  
   DANCE TO THE RADIO     (3:06)  
   THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS     (3:06)  
   SKYLARK (A MEDITATION)     (3:37)  
   NO GOOD INDIAN      (3:34)  
   JET LAG RAG     (3:26)  
   YOU MIGHT AS WELL SMILE     (4:04)  
   WHISTLETOWN     (6:10)  
   IT WILL STAND     (4:33)  
   HOT ROD QUEEN     (3:36)  
   SEE THAT GIRL     (3:58)  
   IT AIN’T RAINING     (3:38)  
   VAGABOND QUEEN     (4:54)  
   IF THIS WAS THE LAST SONG     (3:34)  
   SATURDAY SUIT     (3:03)  
   CLOUDMAN     (3:44)  
   FINGERPAINT ME     (3:53)  
   CATHARSIS      (3:29)  
   SIMILE     (3:30)  
   PIANO     (4:16)  
   LOVE HURTS – Jimmy Webb & Harry Nilsson     (3:24)  
   OVERTURE     (4:33)  
   SLEEPIN’ IN THE DAYTIME     (5:23)  
   BY THE TIME I GET TO PHOENIX     (3:45)  
   MACARTHUR PARK     (6:53)  
   WICHITA LINEMAN (instrumental)     (4:33)  
   DIDN’T WE     (3:44)  
   MY GUITAR WANTS TO KILL YOUR MAMA     (5:53)  
   POCKETFUL OF KEYS     (4:26)  
   WHEN CAN BROWN BEGIN     (3:45)  
   ONCE IN THE MORNING     (3:33)  
   SONG FOR MY BROTHER     (3:46)  
   WHERE’S THE PLAYGROUND, SUSIE?     (4:34)  
   JERUSALEM     (7:04)  
   GALVESTON      (3:31)  
   WHISTLETOWN     (6:45)  
   PIANO     (3:53)  
   WICHITA LINEMAN (vocal)     (2:43)  

From ChristianityToday.com:

Pop Love for a War-Torn World
Atomic Bomb is classic U2, with a prescription for healing the world.
By Scott Calhoun

Larry should be pretty happy with the new U2 album. After recording Pop in 1997—a thoughtful, tongue-in-cheek disco-techno experiment followed by a now infamously extravagant tour—Larry Mullen Jr., U2's drummer, quipped that the next time they make an album it should have some real pop songs on it. That next time was All That You Can't Leave Behind (2000), a much more accessible album for the masses and a huge commercial success. In their follow-up, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, with enough up-beat songs and a few crooning ballads to bend the world's ear, U2 reminds us they are still a contender for the title "best band in the world."

How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb sounds both old and new and seems to intentionally rely on something tried and true. This is pure U2. Warm, quick-pumping hearts, creative minds at play, shrewd timing, and a loud Christian conscience. The world tour, starting next March, will surely fill stadiums.

This album's forty-minutes includes songs that, in classic U2 fashion, will bring you to your feet. Others will make you melt with lead guitarist The Edge's high-flying riffs. It's almost too much to take, and excess, as U2 fans know, is also a part of their history. Many fans will find themselves stuck with this frustration: there's not much new on this album, but they can't stop playing it. No matter that most songs sound made-for-the-big-screen, ready to drop into any autumnal Miramax film. We love that about U2, though we're reluctant to say so.

You will like Bomb either because you used to like U2 (that is, the 1980s U2), or you have always liked U2 (especially because they didn't stay "the 80s U2") or because you just heard about a band called U2 via an Apple iPod commercial during the World Series or last weekend's SNL performance.

For the title of "best band in the world," U2 has only been shadowboxing for many years. The 11 songs on this, their 11th album, secures their position with plenty of Top 40 tunes. Bomb is not as pioneering an album as was The Unforgettable Fire (1984), and it just can't match their best work to date on Achtung Baby! (1991). But because they've grabbed a little from each of these two great albums, as well as from Boy (1981), The Joshua Tree (1987) and All That You Can't Leave Behind, this one will be an instant classic. That's no small feat, and it's no small praise to say so in this age of over-hyped musical artists. Produced by Steve Lillywhite, with touches from Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno, Chris Thomas, and others from the band's past, the U2 sound is there, better and louder than ever before.

Larry's finally got his pop album. As the band-mate who tends to be the toughest to please (and the toughest looking), if Larry's happy we should all be happy.

If you are thinking pop music is a category no respectable band should want to compete in, think again. Think like U2. "At our very best, at anyone's very best, the great rock bands could always make a pop 45," Bono recently told the New York Times. Here he's thinking of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Who. And then think about effective means for spreading a message. Pop music reaches the world faster than any other genre. If you've got something to say to the world, why not craft a great pop song that will be both for the moment and for all time?

U2's message hasn't changed over the 28 years they've been together. It's elementary: Love. It has been an answer and an admonition running through their every album, their every tour. "Do you know how to dismantle an atomic bomb?" Bono reportedly asked Michael W. Smith earlier this year. "With love," Bono said. "With love." They leave the listener at a place where the streets have no name.

Bono and The Edge describe the album's running order as taking the listener from a place of fear, confusion, and dizzying temptations to a place where hope, peace, and love reign supreme. The first track, "Vertigo," is a bombs-away, fast-paced confessional from someone who sounds like they got more than they bargained for. The remaining songs wind their way through personal fears of death, loss, and distance from others, to global fears of wars and apathy toward the weak, the sick, and the forgotten.

As a concept, love is a little hard to grasp. Give it a body, a mind, a voice, or an action and we can know it more easily. U2 has done that, by drawing upon some very personal experiences for song material. On a surprising number of songs, that stirring U2 chemistry is at work. Bono's voice swells into, and through, the chorus while The Edge picks his way around Bono's full-bodied passion with the simplest notes.

Bono sings in "Sometimes You Can't Make it On Your Own" of his father's death in 2001 and his subsequent struggle to come to terms with missing a man he couldn't get close to. Brendan "Bob" Hewson's death, Bono has said, placed an atomic bomb in his life he wasn't ready to deal with. "Miracle Drug" pays tribute to a paraplegic school mate of the band's who, with the care of his mother and the help of a drug, was able to peck poems out on a keyboard with a stick attached to his forehead. "I want to trip inside your head/Spend the day there/To hear the things you haven't said/And see what you might see" the song begins. Credit must be given to Bono for giving poignancy to what might be the most preposterous simile in music: "Freedom has a scent like the top of a newborn baby's head."

It doesn't take long for this song, as with most of them, to yield their metaphors to more direct lines on love and its power to keep a man and a woman together ("A Man and A Woman"), make armies lay down their arms ("Love And Peace or Else"), and heal the world's wounds ("Crumbs From Your Table"). "All Because of You" praises love's power to sustain a person and make them whole again. The Edge lets himself go a little wild on this one, as he does on "Vertigo" and "City of Blinding Lights," their tribute to both New York and a loved one.

"Original of The Species" is written for Bono's goddaughter—The Edge's eldest daughter—imploring her to "Please stay a child somewhere in your heart" but to also "Come on now, show your soul/You've been keeping your love under control." And the last song of the album is "Yahweh", an eloquent, beautiful tribute to you know who.

Too bad a song called "Mercy" with lines such as "Love's got to be with the weak/Only then love gets a chance to speak" and "Love is the end of history/The enemy of misery" was cut at the last minute from the album. At over six minutes, it breaks the rule for a pop tune. But it is available through other means and its lyrics are included in a hard-back book that accompanies a deluxe edition of the album.

Another song also not on the album, but available on the deluxe edition, is "Fast Cars." As a sort of cousin to "Vertigo", it's a song hinting at the unfulfilling pleasures we can so easily have when what we need is something tougher to come by but permanently more satisfying. It features a surprising Spanish-style guitar and rhythm section and is the song with the lyric about dismantling an atomic bomb.

In How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, U2 delivers a one-two punch with taut tunes on an eternal truth. Love never fails.

Scott Calhoun is an assistant professor of English at Cedarville University and a news writer for @U2.com.

JOURNALISM AND PATRIOTISM
by Joe Sobran

November 18, 2004

As all the world now knows, a U.S. Marine shot and
killed an unarmed captive in a mosque in Fallujah. The
incident has inflamed the Arab world like nothing since
the Abu Ghraib scandals, canceling the military gains of
U.S. forces in the city and damaging the Bush
administration's attempts to win "hearts and minds" in
order to gain popular support for January's scheduled
elections.

It has also enraged American hawks against the
American media. Writing in the WALL STREET JOURNAL, the
military scholar Edward N. Luttwak says the incident was
revealed by "a pool of unpatriotic American television
reporters and the Marine officers who started an
immediate judicial investigation, for strict American
legalism is alive and well even in the Marine uniform."

This passage stopped me. The reporters are
"unpatriotic" for revealing the truth -- or "deceptive
fragments of the truth," as Luttwak puts it -- but those
Marine officers are only being legalistic?

During the Vietnam war, reporters like Seymour Hersh
were called unpatriotic for revealing American
atrocities. Many people felt that American journalists
had a duty to conceal American war crimes, a feeling that
is far from dead. It was, and is, all the stronger when
such crimes are shocking and sensational. This is why the
military prefers "embedded" journalists to independent
ones, who may not cover the war the way the military
wants it covered.

But the rest of us should prefer independent
journalists, precisely for patriotic reasons. If you love
your country, you should want to know what your
government and its military arm are doing in your name.
Luttwak even acknowledges that we should be "thankful,"
for "the last thing we should want are patriotic
reporters who would conceal errors, embarrassments, and
crimes in our armed forces." But this still implies that
candid reporting is unpatriotic but dishonest reporting
is patriotic.

An editorial on the same page implies the same
thing. It says that the point of revealing the incident
"seems to be to conjure up images again of Abu Ghraib,
further maligning the American purpose in Iraq." That's
reading a lot into a moment of taping a story whose power
nobody can deny. Would it have been better to suppress
it?

The editorial goes on to complain that the tape
didn't show the "context" of the killing: a ferocious
battle for the city against "an enemy that neither wears
a uniform nor obeys any normal rules of war.... These
killers hide in mosques and hospitals, booby-trap dead
bodies, and open fire as they prepare to surrender." The
Marine had been wounded the day before and "had seen a
member of his unit killed by an insurgent pretending to
be dead."

The editorial asks, "Who from the safety of his
Manhattan sofa has standing to judge what that Marine did
in that mosque?" Finally, it condemns the "moral
abdication" of equating "deliberate televised beheadings
of civilians with a Marine shooting a terrorist, who may
or may not have been armed, amid the ferocity of battle."

So the Marine who shot an unarmed man is presumed
innocent, while the dead man, in the space of a few
paragraphs, goes from being a mere "insurgent" to being
judged, without evidence, a "terrorist." All this from
the safety of a Manhattan sofa, as it were.

Maybe the Marine had some excuse. But an excuse
isn't the same thing as a justification. What he did was
a war crime, even if he did it in the heat of battle. Who
put him, and thousands of others, in that situation? How
many other such acts have been neither reported nor
caught on tape?

The answers to such questions don't depend on the
particularities of Fallujah, nor on the tactics, however
grisly, of the resistance. They depend on the reasons
President Bush gave for the invasion of Iraq in the first
place: the "threat" of Saddam Hussein, his alleged
arsenal, his alleged links to terrorism. All these
reasons have been exploded.

So here's the picture: A superpower, the greatest
military power that has ever existed, invades a weak
country on false pretenses, deposes its government,
excites a popular resistance movement unconnected to the
defunct regime -- then not only complains about the new
enemy's guerrilla tactics, but uses them to justify
continuing the invasion.

And journalists who show us unedifying details about
the invaders are unpatriotic.

From 60 Minutes. This story is an embarrassment and a disgrace. With every day that passes the Bush administration war agenda looks more illconsidered and stupid.

Old Soldiers Back On Duty

Dec. 5, 2004

This past week, the Pentagon announced it’s boosting the levels of U.S. troops in Iraq to its highest point ever – 150,000.

It’s sending in paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne, extending the tours of Marines, and it has started drawing from a pool of semi-retired soldiers called the Individual Ready Reserve.

It's a sign that the Army needs able, and not so able, bodies very quickly. And many of the men and women being mobilized from the Ready Reserve – approximately 5,000 this year – are not very happy about it.

In fact, a third of these soldiers who’ve been called up haven’t shown up. But if old soldiers never die, as the saying goes, the Army isn’t letting them fade away. Correspondent Bob Simon reports.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Many of those soldiers who have answered the call have come to Fort Jackson, S.C., for training. It's a place none of them really expected to be. In fact, very few expected to be mobilized at all.

"I automatically started crying for about two hours. I couldn't stop, because I knew I was gonna have to leave my babies," says Spc. Carey Trevino, who was called up in August.

She's 31, and has three kids – the youngest a 7-month-old baby boy. She'll be leaving her children behind when she goes to Iraq, for another year-and-a-half.

"I need to serve my country and the call has come out, so I am doing that," says Chief Warrant Officer Margaret Murray, who did her active duty back in the '60s.

She's 55, and 4 feet, 8 inches tall. Her M-16 is almost as big as she is, but that didn't stop her from qualifying as a marksman this week.

Does she find it unusual that the Army is now calling up a female soldier in her 50s, who has been in the reserves for 40 years?

"No. Although I think what they need to look at is our ability to perform in a tactical environment," says Murray. "For myself, I am going to find that a difficult thing to do physically."

Especially if Murray winds up in a place like Fallujah. Does she find that daunting? "Scary," says Murray. "[But] I need to do my job. … I did not retire. And so, now the Army's calling me back to service. And I'm here to do that."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
There are 110,000 men and women in the Ready Reserve right now. They generally don’t train or get paid or belong to units, but they can be called up in case of war or national emergency.

This already happened during the first Gulf War, when 20,000 Ready Reservists were mobilized for 120 days. But this time around, they’ll be there for up to two years.

Pvt. George Sayegh is keeping his obligation as best he can. He may not look tough, but he is very tough on the guys who are not reporting for duty. "When you abandon your country in time of warfare, I feel that, knowing what your obligation is, I believe that it is an act of cowardice," he says.

But you'd be hard-pressed to call one woman 60 Minutes talked to a coward – even though she is resisting the call to return for duty. "Mary," as we're calling her, is a senior special agent with a federal law enforcement agency. She does undercover work in the war on drugs – which is why she appeared in disguise.

"You come up against a lot of big-time criminals. And they're prepared to kill and to shoot to get out of certain situations," says Mary, of her work in the war on drugs.

Is she reluctant to return to the Army because she is afraid of danger? "No, my reluctance is because what's right," says Mary. "I thought my time was up. And they're telling me that it's not."

Like many Army officers, Mary signed up for eight years -- four years active duty, and four years in the Ready Reserves. She received her discharge certificate in 1998, but she was called up this past June to serve as a transportation officer.

"I called the Delay and Exemption Board. And the young lady that I talked to said that date [on my contract] meant nothing. That my new date is 2018," says Mary.

"I was in shock. I was like, 'What do you mean? I have a piece of paper that tells me that that's my obligation.' And for them to just send me orders and disrupt my life and pull me back, it's disheartening and I feel betrayed, I guess you could say. … The military is betraying me, because I served my time."

What Mary didn’t realize is that, as an officer, she remained in the Ready Reserve -- even after her eight years were through -- because she hadn’t resigned her commission as an officer.

But she’s not alone. Many officers say they were never made aware of that -- that no mention is made of it in the enlistment agreements they signed. The Army, which declined a request by 60 Minutes for an interview, counters that the requirement is referred to in the agreements – if ever so obliquely.

"It's a six-digit reference to an Army regulation, that that's put in a remark section in these agreements," says Mark Waple, a lawyer who specializes in defending soldiers. "It borders on being a deceptive recruiting practice. I’m not suggesting it was intended that way."

Waple is a graduate of West Point and was once a judge advocate general in the military himself.

Nevertheless, he calls what the Army’s doing now "a backdoor draft." And since June, he’s been getting dozens of calls from officers around the country who are convinced the Army has no right to call them up.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Todd Parrish was the first to call. He served his four years of active duty in the 1990s as an artillery officer.

Unlike many Ready Reserve soldiers, who say they never knew they had to resign their commissions, Parrish knew, and did.

He believed that legally he was out of the military forever. But last July, Parrish and his wife, Collette, were shocked when he received one of those letters from the Army.

But when he called Army Personnel to tell them a mistake had been made, they seemed to know very little about him. In fact, they told him that he had never done his active duty.

"I said, 'Well, I served active duty. I have the records.' And then I said, 'Do you have my DD-214?,'" says Parrish.

"The DD-214 is the one that says honorable discharge on it. It's a record of everything you've done. And they said, 'No. We do not have that on file. But we can request it.' And I said, 'Request it? You're the Human Resources Command. Shouldn't you already have that before you call somebody to active duty?' They told me, 'Oh, you'll have to report, and we'll work it out from there.'"

Parrish, a veteran, knew that once he reported, he would have "given up all your rights." "Once you show up, you're gonna go to Iraq," says Parrish. "No matter how right you may be."

But should all bets be off now that the country is in a state of emergency?

"I think if they're saying that, then what they're saying is there needs to be a draft. It's over and over it's told, 'We're an all-volunteer Army. We're an all volunteer armed forces,'" says Parrish's wife, Collette.

"And if it's going to be all volunteer, it needs to be the people that have actually volunteered and want to be there - not the people who served and wanted to go on and be civilians."

Parrish is challenging his orders in federal court, where the Army is now arguing that his resignation should never have been accepted in the first place - that it was a clerical error.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rick Howell also thought a mistake had been made when he received his notification last August. He’s 47 and disabled from an accident he suffered in the military.

"I can’t run anymore. If somebody was shooting at me and chasing me I couldn’t run away from them. I can’t, you know, if I lift anything more than 30 or 40 pounds, I literally, the rod in my arm tingles," says Howell.

He joined the Army in 1981, and became a helicopter pilot. He flew along the DMZ in Korea. Finally, in 1997, after almost 16 years of active service, he retired.

"My goal was to move back and get that life that I never had because for 16 years the Army," says Howell. "I mean, I gave the Army my life. Of course, you know, I wanted a family, you know. I wanted to marry someone and to settle down and to have a home."

And so he did. His son was born two months ago. Going back into the Army would be a major inconvenience, to say the least.

But Howell says he’s willing to do it if he can serve in the United States, which he put in the form of a prayer on Thanksgiving this year.

This past week, the Army rejected Howell’s offer and sent him a letter saying his exemption has been disapproved, and he has to report for duty early next year. But Howell intends to keep fighting.

What is he going to do if he has to go to Iraq?

"I don’t have a choice. They’re going to have to come and get me. I mean literally," says Howell. "They’re going to have to come get me. And at that point in time, if they come get me, I don’t have a choice. They’ll have to drag me away and make me go."

From The Guardian:

You're not laughing any more
U2 have returned to their early, embarrassing style.
But Alexis Petridis can't help punching the air

Friday November 19, 2004

Even by the usual drug-drenched rock autobiography standards, Julian Cope's Head On has an exotic supporting cast. We meet rock managers who believe the Beatles' success was down to ley-lines, Scouse mystics theorising that humanity is controlled by an all-powerful duck, and an adolescent Courtney Love, dealing LSD provided by her father. But perhaps the most surprising cameo comes from U2, struggling post-punkers in the brief period when Cope's Teardrop Explodes were Britain's hippest band. Their sense of purpose was so at odds with the Teardrop's drug-addled nihilism that they become a running joke. Cope dubs them the Hope Brothers, "because they've got two hopes of making it: Bob Hope and no hope".

How wrong, you might wonder, can a man be? Yet it is worth noting that Head On provides a salutary reminder of how uncool U2 once were. Even in the late 1980s, when they had become the world's biggest band, their lethal combination of painful sincerity and pomp and circumstance often drew mocking laughter from critics.

Twenty years on, no one thinks U2 are uncool, largely because of their 1990s volte-face, where they demonstrated a self-awareness previously unknown at their level of fame. They revamped their sound with three albums that - by superstar standards, at least - counted as brave experiments, and developed a new image that recognised their own absurdity and mocked their old earnestness.

It was unprecedented and it didn't last. Their 2000 album All That You Can't Leave Behind marked an artistic u-turn, a return to old-fashioned U2. Its follow-up is aimed squarely at fans who prefer Rattle and Hum to Achtung Baby! and honestly believe that 1996's Pop was a bewildering, alienating piece of envelope-pushing in the tradition of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, rather than a U2 album with some dance beats on it and not enough big choruses.

Virtually everything that once made U2 the kind of band that the Teardrop Explodes or the Pet Shop Boys sniggered at, is back on How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. The lyrics address social issues with brushstrokes so broad, they make undoubted sincerity sound suspiciously like cliché: in those high-powered meetings he has with Blair and Bush, you can only hope Bono comes up with something a bit more convincing than "we need love and peace, lay down your guns". The Edge's trademark guitar sound is filled with portentously echoing harmonics. And one song, Yahweh, features an introduction of pattering drums and distant synthesisers that, were it by anyone else, would be roundly castigated for being a transparent imitation of the introduction to U2's With or Without You.

And yet - as anyone who has been dragged along to a ghastly sports arena protesting that they hate everything U2 stand for, then unaccountably ended up punching the air to Pride, will tell you - there is something undeniable about U2. How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb may be unadventurous and melodramatic, but it is packed with disarming moments. City of Blinding Lights is shameless stuff, building from a howl of feedback through a majestic, booming piano line to a chant-a-long chorus designed to reach the back rows of some ghastly sports arena. But you would have to be pretty churlish to remain unmoved by it, as you would by brash current single Vertigo or the supercharged Motown stomp of All Because of You.

Driven by a ferociously powerful rhythm section, U2 sound pleasingly raw, particularly next to the current wave of stadium rock pretenders, with their good causes and pained expressions and elegiac piano ballads. How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb leaves Keane sounding like Supertramp (not that difficult, as Keane actually do sound like Supertramp) and makes Coldplay - the band most regularly tipped to take on U2's mantle - appear callow and one-dimensional in their approach. You can't imagine them ever coming up with something that roars into life with the swagger of Love and Peace or Else. This, U2 seem to be saying, is how you get them pulling out the lighters in South America and eastern Europe: listen and learn.

But there is more to How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb than the guilty pleasure of well-turned stadium bombast. The chilling thing about 1980s U2 was their pomposity, but the real legacy of Achtung Baby! appears to be self-awareness. Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own affectingly hymns the singer's late father, pulling back from mawkishness. "You're the reason I sing," it offers, before adding, wittily, "You're the reason why opera is in me." Original of the Species, meanwhile, is about as close to clear-eyed warts-and-all self-portrait as you are ever going to get from a multi-millionaire rock superstar. "Some things you shouldn't get too good at, like smiling, crying and celebrity," Bono sings. "Some people got way too much confidence, baby." The 1990s experimentation may have disappointingly vanished, but it seems highly unlikely anyone will laugh at U2 again.

From OrthodoxyToday.org:

Christ, Muhammad, and the Culture of Beheading
By Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr. Th.D.

We have recoiled in horror at the beheadings of innocent civilians by Muslim jihadists in Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Americans Paul M. Johnson and Nicholas Berg and Korean Kim Sun-il were tortuously decapitated by Islamists, who shouted, "God is great!" while performing the gruesome deeds. Not so widely reported was the June 21, 2004 , Taliban beheadings of an Afghan soldier and an Afghan interpreter for the U.S.-led forces in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Before this recent spate of beheadings, we learned of journalist Daniel Pearl's beheading in Pakistan in 2002. The most recent beheading was of Eugene Armstrong. We await news of Kenneth Bigley of Great Britain and Jack Hensley of Marietta, Georgia. As reported on NewsMax.com, the al Jazeera television network has "praised the practice of beheading captives as an effective wartime tactic."

But these are just a few of the more newsworthy examples of a whole host of contemporary Muslim barbarisms. In 1993 crowds of Muslims mutilated the bodies of U.S. soldiers in Somalia. On April 1, 2001, in Fallujah , Iraq, four Americans were ambushed, pounded to death with bricks, dismembered, and set afire while jubilant Iraqis chanted Islamic slogans. Two of their dismembered corpses were hung from a bridge; the other two were dragged behind cars through the city's main street.

On May 11, 2004 , six Israelis were killed in a bomb attack in Gaza . The news media filmed Palestinians dancing in the streets and playing with the men's body parts, displaying the severed head of one of them, which was kicked up and down the street in play.

In the West Bank in the summer of 2000, two Israelis were captured in Ramallah, then torn limb from limb while their internal organs were pulled out and their eyes gouged out. The bodies were then thrown from the second floor of a police station to a cheering crowd that set the corpses on fire then dragged them around the city.

How could such inhuman practices be committed by devout Muslims in the name of Allah? How could they even be condoned--much less applauded--by a large segment of the Islamic world? And how could the incredible destruction of life on September 11, 2001 , in New York and Washington be cheered on the streets of almost every major Muslim city throughout the world?

Asking such questions betrays both the questioner's own religious faith and his historical naivete. Our revulsion is a reflex of our Christian worldview; our surprise is the proof of our Islamic ignorance. To understand both our abhorrence at and the Islamic acceptance of such actions will require us to look back to the founders of these two leading world religions to see how they were set in motion.

Christ Our Example

True, faithful, obedient Christianity is committed to the high calling to follow Christ. The Lord urges His would-be disciples: "[F]ollow Me" (Mt. 16:24 ; 19:21). He commands that we should follow His humble example (illustrated by footwashing) so that we "should do as I have done to you" (Jn. 13:15). The earliest disciples in the apostolic era were called "Christians" (Ac. 11:26), which is a compound of christos ("Christ") and anthropos ("man"); thus, they were "Christ's men," followers and emulators of Christ. They were called the people of "the way" (Ac. 9:2; 18:25 ; 19:9, 23; 24:14, 22) because they followed the life and teaching of Christ. The Lord instructs His followers: "If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (Jn. 8:31:32). He teaches: "My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me" (Jn. 10:27). But what sorts of things characterize the life and the teachings of Christ that we should follow as true disciples?

A key theme in Jesus' teaching is His command: "[W]hatever you want men to do to you, do also to them" (Mt. 7:12). Certainly this does not include beheadings.

In Matthew 5:44 He commanded: "[L]ove your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you." He was so insistent upon this that He taught us: "[W]hoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also" (Mt. 5:39). These directives cannot lead to a culture of beheading and dismemberment.

Christ was so far from urging His followers to fight that He rebuked Peter who sought to prevent Him from being taken away to be tried by the Romans: "Put your sword in its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword" (Mt. 26:52). Even when faced with the cruel death of the cross, He told Pilate: "My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, My servants would fight, so that I should not be delivered to the Jews; but now My kingdom is not from here" (Jn. 18:36).

When we look at the life of Christ, then, we find that He never lifted a sword in resistance to anyone. Nor did He ever urge His followers to attack others. He even went without resistance to be crucified by the Roman judicial apparatus. And His earliest followers were likewise ill-treated, while not lifting up the sword against their oppressors (1 Pet. 2:12 :17). Now it certainly is true that Christians in later history from time to time took up arms in the "service of Christ." But they did so against the express teaching and example of Christ. Hence, one element of our perplexity at the Islamic atrocities derives from the fact that the founder of our faith teaches us otherwise -- in both word and deed. The faithful follower of Christ could never commit such horrible deeds while being faithful to Christ.

But it is not so with Islam.

Muhammad Their Example

In Islam, the prophet Muhammad is the greatest example for the faithful to follow. He is the model of dedication to God par excellence; in fact, he is deemed the perfect example of submission to Allah. Hence, even deriding this perfect one is blasphemous, as witness the case of Salman Rushdie, who was put under a death sentence for belittling the prophet. Now then, what can we learn from the example and the teachings of the "perfect" founder of Islam? Do his life and teachings discourage the horrible conduct we see engaged, tolerated, and cheered by so many Muslims today?

The Qu'ran (which embodies Muhammad's "revelations" from God) certainly does not harmonize with Christ's peaceable teachings. In the Qu'ran we read: "Those of the believers who stay at home, other than the disabled, are not equal to those who strive in the path of God with their goods and their persons. God has placed those who struggle with their goods and their persons on a higher level than those who stay at home. God has promised reward to all who believe but He distinguishes those who fight, above those who stay at home, with a mighty reward" (Sura 4:95; cp. 8:72; 9:41 , 81, 88; 46:9).

In Sura 9:5 we read: "But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem." At verse 29 the devout Muslim is directed to "fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the Religion of truth, from among the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizyah with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued."

And these teachings of Muhammad himself arose from his own lifestyle. His early caravan raids to finance his new religion, and later wars against the inhabitants of Medina and other cities to promote it, give meaning to his religion of "Islam," which means "submission."

Unlike Christianity, "In Islam, the struggle of good and evil acquired, from the start, political and even military dimensions. Muhammad, it will be recalled, was not only a prophet and a teacher, like the founders of other religions; he was also a ruler and a soldier. Hence his struggle involved a state and its armed forces."1 Thus, "Muhammad triumphed during his lifetime, and died a sovereign and a conqueror."2 We must understand that "from the lifetime of its Founder, and therefore in its sacred scriptures, Islam is associated in the minds and memories of Muslims with the exercise of political and military power."3

To make matters worse, Sunni Islam is the largest Islamic sect, encompassing 85% of Muslims in the world. "Sunni" is based on the "sunna," "the pathway of the prophet" Muhammad (to which all Muslims are committed, whether formally Sunnis or not).4 "Muslims have the duty of da'wa, calling, summoning people to submit to Allah and to follow the sunna, the pathway trodden first by Muhammad."5

But what is the example, the way, the path of the prophet? He not only engaged in caravan raids early in his career as a prophet and in war later, but he himself was involved in the massacre of the Qurayza Jews wherein he "had trenches dug, and the men were led out in batches and beheaded."6 Ibn Ishaq's ancient, authoritative Life of Muhammad records this event: "There were 600 or 700 in all, though some put the figure as high as 800 or 900."7

How could the recent beheadings and dismemberments of a few "pagans" alarm the devout Muslim today? His "perfect" prophet beheaded upwards of 900 in one setting! We are alarmed because we are Christians. As Rudyard Kipling wrote of the Islamic problem: "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet" (The Ballad of East and West, 1889). The roots of East and West in the founders of their respective religions provide a stark demonstration of the cultural and moral differences separating us.

We can be thankful that not all Muslims accept this sort of behavior. Ironically though, we applaud them for their religious inconsistency. They are out of step with the example of their model prophet, their scriptures, their worldview, and their history. When Christians have engaged in atrocities, they were denying their Great Prophet (Christ), breaking their scriptures (Christ's teaching), and breaching their worldview and their founding history.

Appendix

Secularists complain against such negative comparisons between Christianity and Islam. They invariably point to the Christian Crusades as evidence of our own failure. However, internationally renowned Islam authority Bernard Lewis responds: "The Crusade is a late development in Christian history and, in a sense, marks a radical departure from basic Christian values as expressed in the Gospels .... In the long struggle between Islam and Christendom, the Crusade was late, limited, and of relatively brief duration. Jihad is present from the beginning of Islamic history--in scripture, in the life of the Prophet, and in the actions of his companions and immediate successors. It has continued throughout Islamic history and retains its appeal to the present day."8

Riddell and Cotterell agree, and contrast Islamic jihad with the Christian Crusades: "First, the Christian call for holy war was made by a human pope ... and as such was subject to challenge by later theologians. The Muslim call to jihad, however, is cemented within the Qur'an for all time. Second, the doctrine of holy war has now largely fallen into disuse in Christian circles, whereas jihad as a military concept is still widely practiced by some Muslim groups."9

We could also point out that the Crusades were defensive maneuvers against cruel, unprovoked Muslim conquests of Christian lands and that they were eventually not only forsaken but apologized for by Christianity. Such is not the case with Islamic jihad.

Notes

1. Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror ( New York : Modern, 2003), 26.
2. Lewis, 10.
3. Lewis, 21.
4. Peter G. Riddell and Peter Cotterell, Islam in Context: Past, Present, and Future ( Grand Rapids : Baker Academic, 2003), 208.
5. Riddell and Cotterell, 118.
6. Riddell and Cotterell, 30.
7. Cited in Riddell and Cotterell, 30.
8. Lewis, 37.
9. Riddell and Cotterell.

Dr. Gentry is the author of thirteen books and a contributor to eight others, from publishers such as Zondervan, Baker, Kregel, P & R, and American Vision. He is the editor of a new title from Ross House Books: Thine Is the kingdom: A Summary of the Postmillennial Hope. He has spoken at conferences and on radio across the nation and runs a website for Reformed educational materials: www.kennethgentry.com

Read this article on the American Vision website.