Correct Attack Response

Found posted at Little Green Footballs, this poster is so kick-ass. It stands in stark contrast to the mincing, wussified Iraq Surrender Group recommendations. It may be right that Iraq is beyond salvaging, but we should at the very least have tried to win.

Some pretty interesting quotes in this article. Can't wait to see the movie.

‘Rocky Balboa’ takes on Christian theme

By Erin Roach
Baptist Press

Dec 6, 2006

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)--Believe it or not, Sylvester Stallone says the infamous movie character Rocky was meant to reflect the nature of Jesus, and the sixth film in the series, “Rocky Balboa,” scheduled to hit theaters Dec. 22, carries an intentionally Christian theme.

“It’s like he was being chosen, Jesus was over him, and he was going to be the fella that would live through the example of Christ,” Stallone said of Rocky in a conference call with pastors and religious leaders. “He’s very, very forgiving. There’s no bitterness in him. He always turns the other cheek. And it’s like his whole life was about service.”

Stuart Shepard, managing editor of Focus on the Family’s CitizenLink, took part in the teleconference and reported in a Nov. 15 commentary that Stallone considers himself reborn.

“I was raised in a Catholic home, a Christian home, and I went to Catholic schools and I was taught the faith and went as far as I could with it,” Stallone said. “Until one day, you know, I got out in the so-called real world and I was presented with temptation. I kinda like lost my way and made a lot of bad choices.”

Somewhere along the way, Stallone realized his fame was not the most important part of his life. Now he says God can help a person overcome his past.

“The more I go to church,” he said, according to CitizenLink, “and the more I turn myself over to the process of believing in Jesus and listening to His Word and having Him guide my hand, I feel as though the pressure is off me now.”

Stallone, in the conference call, compared the need for church to the need for a physical trainer.

“You need to have the expertise and the guidance of someone else. You cannot train yourself,” he said. “I feel the same way about Christianity and about what the church is: The church is the gym of the soul.”

With that, the culmination of the Rocky film series is another story about redemption. And Stallone said he couldn’t have written it without the personal journey he has endured.

“I needed to actually go through my trials and tribulations,” he said, “before I could be man enough to know how to write that kind of story that ‘Rocky Balboa’ is.”

A taste of another great Yankee blog that should be read regularly: http://www.nomaas.org/

12.08.2006 Ca$h brings back Andy

While mediocre-to-poor pitchers sign multiyear ludicrous deals, Ca$hMoney gets Andy Pettitte on a one-year contract. Amazing.

NoMaas' Brisco County Jr breaks down the deal.

12.08.2006 Will Andy's (ex)boyfriend follow?

From Hugh Hewitt's radio program-a transcript:

Mark Steyn on the ISG report

The Hugh Hewitt Show

12-7-06 at 7:12 PM

HH: What better way to celebrate than with Mark Steyn, author of America Alone, one of the books designed to prevent yet another Pearl Harbor in the future. Mark Steyn, I'm getting to you late. It seems to me most of serious America has already vomited back the ISG report. What say you about the Baker-Hamilton commission?

MS: I think it's a joke. Most of it is platitudinous generalities that any half-informed person could come up with. But when it gets specific, I think it gets us into very dark and dangerous territory indeed, because it basically signs onto the pathologies of our enemies. You know, it basically...Jim Baker and his pals take the view of the Saudi Royal Family, that somehow this needs...nothing can be done without a resolution of the so-called Palestinian question, which I think is just preposterous. This idea that somehow Iraq's future is conditional on things like the Palestinian right to return, I think is not just ludicrous, but very dangerous.

HH: Scott Johnson at Powerline has pointed out to me that this mention of the right of return, endorsement, really, is the first ever in any even semi official American document.

MS: Yes.

HH: And it is typically Palestinian propaganda that not any serious scholar signs onto.

MS: No, and I think that is what is most disgusting about this report, that when you actually look at the language, they frame the issues in the same language that the Arab League does. I'm sorry, but I think that is a disgrace, and these ten so-called wise men are either dupes or something worse.

HH: But I must remark, I am heartened by the fact it was almost instantly rejected, and in very stark terms, by serious people ranging from Victor Davis Hanson to Christopher Hitchens, from Bennett to Kagans, of both Bob and other varieties, Fred. People just saw in it silliness. And that is somewhat heartening, Mark Steyn.

MS: Well, except I am a bit worried that if you simply read your daily newspaper in most American capitals, you know, Washington, New York, Boston, San Francisco, wherever, you would read that this is somehow a bipartisan consensus on Iraq, that this is what the wise elders of our society...I believe, in fact, the San Francisco Chronicle actually use the headline, The Elders Have Spoken, as if we are some primitive tribe in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, and the wise men have consulted the ruins, and pronounced for the rest of us. It's so depressing, this.

HH: Did you watch the Gates hearings this week?

MS: Yes, I did.

HH: And were they depressing as well? Or did you think it was a head fake by Dr. Gates to get confirmed?

MS: I would like to think it was a head fake. You know, a lot of us on the right, when things appear to be rhetorically a little depressing, tell ourselves it's a head fake, that it's rope-a-dope, that it's all these other phrases. But I'm afraid that even if that is the case, I disagree with it. I think we need to be able to actually rhetorically find a language that is honest and forthright, and works with the American people on this issue. And so even if it was an effective head fake, I don't really think that senior figures in the Bush administration should be in the rope-a-dope, head fake business in that way.

HH: Agreed. Agreed. Now I want to go to the silver lining, and I'm working pretty hard here, because Robert Kaplan's coming up next hour. He's working hard to find a silver lining as well. And it may be the unintentional focus the ISG has given to the nature of our enemies, particularly in Iran. A lot of people have paused and said you know what is wrong with this report is that they spoke to no one from Lebanon, that what is wrong with this report is they sealed themselves off from serious people. But what's really wrong is that they just don't get Iran as Ralph Peters will say after the break when we talk with the New York Post columnist. And I think, Mark Steyn, that may be bringing some attention to Iran, that that regime will not want.

MS: Well, I do think...I'm always happy to look for a silver lining, but these days, every silver lining contains several clouds, and that is when you look at their approach to Iran, it is almost beyond parody. It is basically saying that we should mortgage the future of Iraq to our explicit and declared enemies. And the idea of inviting Iran and Syria and other parties onto a support group, in which...I would be in favor, I would be in favor of actual direct negotiations between the United States and Iran, rather than having us all together on a support group that also includes all five permanent members of the Security Council, also includes the European Union, also includes the Secretary-General of the United Nations. I mean, this is basically a recipe for delivering a key, national security of the United States to the same process that has left everybody dead in Darfur. It is a terrible, terrible thing that these ten people have done. I mean, I feel like Oliver Cromwell. Do you remember his famous words to the...

HH: Yes, be gone, you've done enough damage, right?

MS: Yeah, you've sat here too long for any good you might have done. In the name of God, go. That's the way I feel about Lee Hamilton. I'm sick of him chairing commissions. There's 300 million people in this country. Why is it he gets to chair, co-chair the two most important commissions, the 9/11 and the Iraq war one?

HH: Well, that's because you have to be over the age of 65 to sit on a commission. It's the only job in America for which there is not only no age disqualification, but a certain age qualifier. And I do think that there is something to that, Mark Steyn. As I looked at their press conference...did you watch their press conference?

MS: Yes, I did, yeah.

HH: It was horribly decrepit. And I don't mean in a physical sense, but in an intellectual sense. It was worn out.

MS: Absolutely, and you know Allen Simpson? I mean, he would be my favorite uncle if he came around for lunch on Thanksgiving.

HH: Yup.

MS: But during this oh, you know, in my day, Sonny, we didn't have this here internet thing, either, that all the kids are crazy over. I mean, I think this is just unworthy of a serious panel. You know, I've got nothing, I'm not an age discriminationist guy. I just was on the National Review cruise with Bernard Lewis, who's 90, and I followed him up the corridor one day. He was tired of waiting for the steward to deliver his bags, and he strolled off after them himself. I couldn't keep up with the guy. He's vigorous, and he's sharp, and he understands the situation. Allen Simpson is a perfectly pleasant fellow, but he has absolutely no serious contribution to make to this debate.

HH: It's interesting. Not a single...I just heard Bernard Lewis lecture for an hour and a half at Temple Bat Yam in Orange County without sitting down or taking a breath. And you're right. There was not a Bernard Lewis on this panel. There wasn't a general on this panel. Obviously, Chuck Robb had military service. It was almost predestined by Baker to come to the conclusion that Israel was at the bottom of this problem.

MS: Absolutely.

HH: I want to go to the Lebanon irony, or it's really much more of a tragedy. Here they are, they're fighting for their life, and no one is consulted in their government, as the Baker commission goes forward and suggests that we deal with Syria.

MS: No, and that's the worst thing about this, the horrible parochialism. You would have no idea from the composition of this group that this, that they represent a nation seriously engaged with the world. You look at the range of people they took testimony from, you know, people like John Kerry, for example. Sorry, John Kerry is on TV giving speeches all the time. Everyone knows what he thinks about Iraq. I said in my column last week, why not go talk to Goh Chok Tong, the former prime minister of Singapore, who said that the issue here is American credibility. This former prime minister of Singapore understands the situation in a way that these former secretaries of state, and Senators, and Congressmen, and all the rest of them, apparently don't.

HH: Now the President had a sharp exchange with a BBC reporter today, in which he came out swinging in a pretty good press conference with Blair. Do you see him buckling under this assault from the conventional wisdom of the Beltway elite?

MS: He's looking very lonely these days. I'm not impressed with what Tony Blair has been saying in recent weeks about this issue, because Tony Blair has essentially been moving towards a kind of Bakerite view of this thing. I really do not believe there is anything to be gained from sitting down to Iran and Syria. The whole basis of this report proceeds from a false assumption.

HH: Exactly.

MS: That these are people who negotiate in good faith. They don't. They negotiate, in a sense, as part of a racket. They understand it as such. They understand it as a kind of little bit of Vaudeville you go through, that often buys you time to put your men and your missiles and all the other things in place. They're not negotiating in good faith. And the idea...you know, this idiot report talks about Syria and Iran as if negotiating with them is like negotiating with New Zealand and Denmark. it's so preposterous.

HH: There is a report that Khatami, the maximum leader of Iran, is deathly ill at this point, meaning that it's at a moment of great vulnerability for the Iranian regime. Should we be doing just the opposite than cozying up to them right now? They had 2,000 Iranian students in the streets yesterday.

MS: Yes, I think we should. I think the idea that Syria and Iran, having read this report, are now making demands of the United States. Who's the superpower here? If the superpower can't make demands of a basket case state like Syria, and an exhausted revolution like Iran, then it is not a superpower, but it is a fraud. And the trouble with this Baker report is that it tends to confirm that view.

HH: Last 30 seconds, Mark Steyn. Do you expect the Pentagon's report to be serious?

MS: I hope so. Everyone I've spoken to at the Pentagon, even when you disagree with them, actually take a more serious view of this thing. And we should remember that these guys made one trip to Baghdad. They didn't go outside the Green Zone. They took a lot of what we in the journalism trade regard as sort of anecdotal taxi driver evidence. I hope the Pentagon's report is better than that.

HH: Mark Steyn, always a pleasure. www.steynonline.com. Get your Mark Steyn T-shirt, by the way, at the Western Standard. It's linked at www.hughhewitt.com. Mark Steyn as Che Guevara.

From The Corner:
Must Study Harder [Mark Steyn]

Isn’t the main problem with the Iraq Study Group that it’s just majorly lame? Almost anybody could crank out this kind of generalized boilerplate (“We were told by a general/a translator/my taxi driver/my Ukrainian hooker…”), and most of us could do it without a budget of gazillions of dollars and an Annie Leibovitz photo session.

Of course, Syria “should” do this and Iran “should” do that and, if they were Sandra Day O’Connor, I’m sure they would. But they’re not. And the only specific strategic proposal is a linkage between Iraq and a “renewed and sustained commitment” to a “comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace” – which concedes the same ludicrous rationale that the Saudi King Abdullah and all the rest of them make: that one tiny ten-mile sliver of Jews is the reason why millions of Muslims from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Emirates are mired in dictatorships, failed economies and jihadist fever. For the Baker group to endorse this clapped out pan-Arabism is disgusting. An “Arab-Israeli peace”? What does that mean? What exactly is Israel doing to Iraq, or Tunisia, or Qatar, or any other Arabs except those in the “Palestinian territories”? To frame it in those terms is to adopt the pathologies of the enemy. Shame on Baker, Hamilton and all the rest.

As for the insight on page 94 that so impressed Rich, yes, it’s true that the DIA and other analytical agencies don’t have a lot of strength in depth. But why is that? It’s certainly not because the US taxpayer isn’t showering them with dollars. It’s to do with a bureaucratic torpor that has proved almost totally resistant to any attempts to reform it since 9/11. And, while we may well “engage” with Syria and Iran to no effect, and US troops may well put their left foot in and take their right foot out, the one thing you can guarantee won’t be shaken all about is the torpid bureaucracy – of which this stillborn report is yet one more example.

Remembering John Lennon

It was 26 years ago today, in the first year of my employment with Record Bar, that John Lennon was killed. Lennon's first new album in several years, Double Fantasy, had been released a couple of months earlier to generally good reviews. Interviews done in support of the album showed Lennon had lost none of his critical faculties or acerbic wit. The album's songs portrayed a person enjoying a seemingly mundane domestic life-a distinct contrast to the political activist and nightclub reveler of the 70s. While not breaking any new musical ground, Double Fantasy's tight musicianship and professional production wedded to typically introspective Lennon lyrics held out promise for even greater work for Lennon in years to come. Suddenly that promise was gone.

I had to work the morning after his death, a Tuesday. Much of the country had learned of Lennon's killing from Howard Cosell on Monday Night Football. I remember going to work that morning in a somber, reflective mood and arriving at Four Seasons Mall in Greensboro to find people waiting outside our store for us to open. It probably seemed like commercial exploitation to some for us to put racks of the Double Fantasy album (we were still in the days of vinyl) at our front cash register. It wouldn't have mattered where the albums were placed. People came in the store all day long while we played Double Fantasy and Beatle music, looking for something to buy as a remembrance of John. Customers shared their grief and Beatle memories all day long without prompting. As I recall, by the end of the day, we had nothing by Lennon or The Beatles still in stock. And instead of seeming as if we had exploited Lennon's death with prominent merchandising of his latest album, it felt like we had played some small part in helping people to deal with the loss of a loved one. Not a relative to be sure. But for those whose who came of age as fans of The Beatles and their music, it was a loss of someone we grew up with who spoke to us and who we felt we knew well.

Here's hoping his training routine didn't include everything Clemens (you can't spell roid-rage without Roger) was selling.









From the essential Yankee blog WasWatching.com:

What A Difference Two Months Makes

Two months ago, I wrote that the Yankees were short two quality pitchers in their 2007 rotation - and that was why next season was going to be just like 2004, 2005, and 2006.

Since that time, New York has re-signed Mike Mussina, won the rights to sign Kei Igawa, and signed Andy Pettitte. While I was on record before the Moose signing that bringing him back was a mistake, now that Pettitte is here, I think Mussina is a good piece to the Yankees 2007 puzzle.

Let's stay on Pettitte for a minute or two. Since 2000, Andy Pettitte has posted a positive RSAA season every year - with a high of 43 RSAA in 2005 and a low of 4 RSAA in 2004. For the most part, Pettitte been near double-digits RSAA in each of the last seven years.

Only two pitchers in baseball have posted 1+ RSAA seasons for the last seven years in a row: Andy Pettitte and Barry Zito.

In fact, over the last six seasons in a row, only five pitchers have had 1+ RSAA each season: C.C. Sabathia, Roy Oswalt, Roy Halladay, Pettitte and Zito.

Andy Pettitte is a solid, reliable, big league pitcher. He's a true #2 man in the rotation who will win 15-something games for you a year (thereabouts).

By having Pettitte, to now follow Worm Killer Wang in the Yankees rotation, this allows Mussina to be the Yankees #3 man in their 2007 rotation. At this stage in his career, being #3 is the perfect role for Mussina. Therefore, I'm dropping my issue with the decision by the Yankees to re-sign Moose.

Further, this means that Randy Johnson, Carl Pavano, Jeff Karstens, Darrell Rasner and most likely Kei Igawa are available to cover the Yankees last two slots in their rotation.

At the end of the day, I expect Johnson and Igawa to win the final two spots - and they will be backed up by Karstens and Rasner (which is good because these two lefties do carry some question marks in 2007).

Pavano will be traded by April 1, 2007 - unless Johnson's health takes a huge turn for the worse and Pavano really impresses Torre and Cashman between now and March. (I suppose Pavano could be kept if Igawa does not sign - but I would be surprised if Igawa does not join the team.)

Wang, Pettitte, Mussina, Johnson & Igawa give the Yankees a solid rotation. With three lefties, this rotation reminds me of the 1980 Yankees, where:

Pettitte = Ron Guidry
Johnson = Tommy John
Igawa = Tom Underwood
Mussina = Luis Tiant
Wang = Ed Figueroa

Except Wang is much, much, better than Figgy. And, maybe Johnson should be line-up with Underwood and Igawa with John - given the "stuff" that Unit and Igawa have at this stage of their careers.

Is this all too much to digest? Here's a simple thing to noodle:

Compare the Yankees 2006 rotation to how the 2007 one projects. Wang, Mussina and Johnson are constant. However, Andy Pettitte and Kei Igawa replace Jaret Wright and Shawn Chacon/Corey Lidle.

Ladies and Germs, that's an upgrade - and it's a beautiful thing. And, it only took 2 months to happen.

Withdraw to Victory?
by Patrick J. Buchanan - December 8, 2006

"The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating," declares the Iraq Study Group in the lead sentence of its long-awaited report.

It continues on in this grim vein:

"A slide toward chaos could trigger the collapse of Iraq’s government and a humanitarian disaster. … There is no guarantee for success in Iraq. The situation in Baghdad and several provinces is dire. … Pessimism is pervasive. … Violence is increasing in scope, complexity and lethality."

This is the portrait of a nation descending into hell.

Yet the brutal honesty of the Baker-Hamilton commission about the situation in Iraq is accompanied by recommendations that are almost utopian in their unreality.

For, after painting its grim portrait, the commission says that if we faithfully follow its recommendations, "terrorism will be dealt a blow, stability will be enhanced in an important part of the world, and America’s credibility, interests and values will be protected."

What is its principal recommendation? That the United States begin to pull all its forces out of combat and out of Iraq by early 2008, and turn the war over to the Iraqi army and police.

But if 150,000 U.S. Marines and Army troops have failed in four years to defeat al-Qaida, the Sunni insurgency, the Mahdi Army, the sectarian militias and the criminal elements of Iraq, how is the Iraqi army going to succeed?

Are we to believe that rag-tag army is going to win a war the finest army on earth has all but lost?

Is this what they call "realism"?

The report itself describes the Iraqi army, after years of U.S. training, as having made "fitful progress toward becoming a reliable and disciplined fighting force loyal to the national government."

"Units lack leadership. … Units lack equipment. … Units lack personnel. … Units lack logistics and support."

Is this the force U.S. advisers are going to convert in a year into an army of salvation?

Well, not entirely. They will be assisted by the Iraqi police, of whom the report writes: "The state of the Iraqi police is substantially worse than that of the Iraqi army. …

"Iraqi police cannot control crime, and they routinely engage in sectarian violence, including the unnecessary detention, torture and targeted execution of Sunni Arab civilians. The police are organized under the Ministry of the Interior, which is confronted by corruption and militia infiltration and lacks control over police in the provinces."

These are the folks who are going to win the war we could not win, after we depart? Is this not an insult to common sense?

And if the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki fails to "make substantial progress toward the achievement of milestones on national reconciliation, security and governance," declares the commission, "the United States should reduce its political, military or economic support for the Iraqi government."

But if we pull the rug out from under Maliki, and his regime and army collapse, who moves into the vacuum? Would it not likely be Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army of 60,000 fighters, a force far superior to the Mahdi units that U.S forces eviscerated in Najaf?

If America pulls its combat brigades out of Iraq, who will protect the U.S. support troops, civilian contractors, aid workers and diplomats in the Green Zone? Would we not be risking an American Dien Bien Phu?

And what is to prevent disloyal Iraqi army units and sectarian allies from fragging U.S. advisers embedded to train them, after U.S. fighting brigades have gone home?

Throughout the report there appear inherent contradictions.

The situation is "grave and deteriorating" but will get better if we pull our finest fighting forces out. Iraq is "vital to regional and even global stability, and is critical to U.S. interests," but if Maliki malingers, we should pull the rug out from under him. An Iraqi army trained by Americans can win a war that Americans could not.

The Baker-Hamilton commission has told us in brutal frankness that the patient is dying, for which we are grateful. But the commission is, in its own way, as much in denial as George W. Bush. For the surgery it recommends for Iraq looks more like a mercy killing than a miracle cure.

It is a time for truth. The strategic retreat recommended by Baker-Hamilton is not going to win this war, or end it well for the United States — it is going to advance the timetable of our impending defeat.

When U.S. combat forces leave, Iraq is going to be lost to those who ran us out. Our friends there are going to endure what our abandoned friends in Vietnam and Cambodia endured. The forces of Islamic radicalism will be emboldened to take down our remaining allies in the Middle East. Our days as a superpower will be over.

For it is the definition of a superpower that once it commits itself to a war, it does not lose the war.

---

Article printed from Patrick J. Buchanan - Official Website: http://buchanan.org/blog

For those of us who lived through the 80s and were supporters of Ronald Reagan, I'm not sure many realized just how good those days were and what giants were joined in battle to bring about the demise of the Soviet Union. In retrospect, looking at the midgets who attempt to govern now, the Reaganites seem greater than ever.



From The Weekly Standard:

A True American Hero
Jeane Kirkpatrick, 1926-2006.
by Norman Podhoretz

12/18/2006

When I first met Jeane Kirkpatrick in 1972, she was an academic political scientist mainly interested in domestic politics. She was also a Democrat and a close associate of Hubert Humphrey who, both as a senator and as Lyndon John son's vice president, had been identified with the tradition of Cold War liberal ism running from Truman to Kennedy and then enthusiastically embraced by President Johnson himself. But about ten years later, in 1980, she came out in support of Ronald Reagan against Jimmy Carter, and even went on to serve as one of Reagan's advisers dur ing the campaign.

Soon thereafter, and thanks largely to an article entitled "Dictatorships and Double Standards" that she had writ ten for Commentary in November 1979, Reagan appointed her his ambassador to the United Nations. There, follow ing in the footsteps of Daniel Patrick Moynihan (another Democrat sent to the U.N. by a Republican president), she simultaneously scandalized and electrified the world by going on the offensive against the anti-American ism which, then as now, was the default position in the malodorous sinkhole that the U.N. had become. Unlike Moynihan, however, who remained a Democrat, she finally joined the side she was on, becoming in due course a registered Republican. Yet even before she had formally switched parties, she was chosen to speak at the Republican National Convention in 1984, where she stole the show by denouncing the "San Francisco Democrats"--their convention that year had been in San Francisco--who "always blame Amer ica first."

She was, in other words, a neocon servative. And it may be worth noting in the context of all the nonsense that has been written in recent years about neoconservatism--some of it rooted in ignorance, some of it in malice, and most of it in both--that Jeane was not Jewish and that she had never been either a Straussian or a Trotsky ite. What drove her out of the Demo cratic party was precisely the "blame-America-first" syndrome--the sour attitude toward America, and espe cially the barely disguised hostility to American military power--that had come to pervade Democratic attitudes in the late 1960s and that had per sisted into the Carter administration. And what turned her from a devoted supporter of Hubert Humphrey into an even more devoted supporter of Ronald Reagan was Reagan's serene belief in America as a wondrous "city upon a hill" and his correlative deter mination to hasten the day when the "evil empire" would wind up on that very ash heap of history to which the Communists had always so confi dently consigned us.

Jeane Kirkpatrick, then, was a veteran of World War III (or what is more generally known as the Cold War), and I would say of her what the English used to say of those veterans of World War II who had done impor tant and interesting work and had come through unscathed--that she, like they, had had "a good war." And like them, too, she never really found anything afterward that engaged her intellectual energies and her political passions as fully as her own "good war" had done. Back in "civil ian" life after the war had been won, she resumed her academic career, she served on many boards, and as a famous and esteemed public figure, she continued to write and to speak out whenever the spirit moved her (as, for example, in a prescient piece, also written for Commentary, describing "How the PLO Was Legitimized").

But it was never the same, espe cially after the death of her husband in 1995. Evron Kirkpatrick, longtime executive director of the American Political Science Association, had been Jeane's mentor, and throughout the forty years of their marriage he contin ued to be--to invert an old-fashioned term that seems singularly appropri ate here--her helpmeet in all things. His death was an immeasurable loss to her--greater, I suspect, than anyone knew or could tell, thanks to the deep reserve that marked both her character and her personality.

Nor did the outbreak on 9/11 of what I persist in calling World War IV tempt her back into battle. She had serious reservations about the pru dence of the Bush Doctrine, which she evidently saw neither as an analogue of the Truman Doctrine nor as a revival of the Reaganite spirit in foreign pol icy. Even so, she was clearly reluctant to join in the clamor against it, which for all practical purposes meant rele gating herself to the sidelines.

Because, to my great regret, I saw very little of her in what would turn out to be the last five years of her life, I cannot say for certain that she was relieved to be out of the fray this time around, but I would guess that this was indeed the case. If so, she rested on the laurels she had earned in World War III. Having enlisted as a young woman, she went on to perform brilliant ser vice on the ideological front, where she stood up magnificently for this country at a time when it was under a relent lessly vicious assault at home no less than abroad. It was as a hero of that war that she made her mark, and it is as a true American hero that she will be remembered.

She was also, not so incidentally, a great cook and a most loving friend.

Norman Podhoretz is editor-at-large of Commentary and an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Our Unceasing Ambivalence
Why it's so hard to define victory in Iraq.

BY SHELBY STEELE

Friday, December 8, 2006

Possibly the most confounding feature of the Iraq war, from the very opening of hostilities to the present day, has been the American government's utter failure to define what victory would be in this war. "Victory" has been a conjure word for the Bush administration, a Churchillian allusion meant to evoke the heroic perseverance shown in the great wars of the past. But no one in the administration has ever said what victory would actually look like. And, lacking this description, even those of us who have supported the war have seen trouble coming for some time. Without a description of victory, a war has no goal.

Historically victory in foreign war has always meant hegemony: You win, you take over. We not only occupied Germany and Japan militarily after World War II, we also--and without a whit of self doubt--imposed our democratic way of life on them. We took our victory as a moral mandate as well as a military achievement, and felt commanded to morally transform these defeated societies by the terms of our democracy. In this effort we brooked no resistance whatsoever and we achieved great success.

But today, as Nancy Pelosi recently put it, "You can define victory any way you want." And war, she said, was only "a situation to be resolved." If this sort of glibness makes the current war seem a directionless postmodern adventure, it is only because those who call us to war have themselves left the definition of victory wide open. And now, as if to confirm that this is a "relativistic" war meaning everything and nothing, there are at least three national commissions--the White House, the Pentagon and the Baker committee--tasked to create the meaning that will give us a dignified exit. Of course America is now quite beyond any possibility of dignity in this situation save the one option all these commissions have or will likely dismiss: complete military victory.

Why don't we know the meaning of this war and our reasons for fighting it? I think the answer begins in the awkward fact that America is now the world's uncontested superpower. If this fate has its advantages, it also brings an unasked-for degree of dominion in the world. This is essentially a passive dominion that has settled on a rather isolationist nation, yet it makes America into something of a sheriff. Whether the problem is Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq, Iran, North Korea or Darfur, America gets the call. Thus our youth are often asked to go to war more out of international responsibility than national necessity. This is a hard fate for a free and prosperous citizenry to accept--the loss of sons and daughters to a kind of magnanimity. Today our antiwar movement is essentially an argument with this fate, a rejection of superpower responsibility.

And this fear of responsibility is what makes us ambivalent toward the idea of victory. Because victory is hegemonic, it mimics colonialism. A complete American victory in Iraq would put that nation--at least for a time--entirely under American power and sovereignty. We would in fact "own" the society as a colony. In today's international moral climate this would both undermine the legitimacy of our war effort and make an ongoing demand on our blood and treasure. If we are already a good ways down this road, complete victory would only take us further.

Is it any wonder, then, that we have failed to completely win this war? Since World War II, American leaders--left and right--have worked out of an impossible double bind: They cannot afford to win the wars they fight. Thus the postmodern American war in which the world's greatest power deconstructs its own motives for fighting until losing becomes a better option than winning. And yet the end of the Cold War has made these wars between the West and the Third World inevitable. When the world was clearly divided between the free West and the communist East, Third World countries could play the ingénue by offering their alignment to the most generous suitor. At the center of a market in alignment, they could extract financial support and enjoy a sense of importance.

But after the Cold War, these countries suddenly became crones without appeal or leverage in the West. And it was out of this sense of invisibility, this feeling of having fallen out of history, that certain Middle Eastern countries found a way to play the ingénue once again. They would not compete with or seduce the West; they would menace it.

Islamic extremism is an ideology of menace. It empowers those who, but for menace, would languish in the world's disregard. The dark achievement of bin Laden, Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad, names we know only because of their association to menace, is that they have used menace to make their people visible in the world, to bring them back into the scheme of history. And they are greatly loved for this. If their achievements follow from evil rather than from good, this is a small thing. Worse than evil is invisibility.

So, in the Middle East, America has gone to war not against Islam but against menace as a formula for power--menace as the force that brings the First World in toe to the Third, and that makes bargaining between the two inevitable. Whether the issue is an obsession with nuclear weapons or terrorism in London or assaults against Israel, menace is the power that draws the West backwards into engagement with otherwise forgotten parts of the world. Iran cannot produce a digital camera or a Ferrari but, through menace, it can affect the balance of power in the world. We in the West, and especially America, then, are at war with menace--the indulgence of evil for strategic advantage--because today it is the power that most compromises us.

And yet Americans are also at war in the Middle East with our own fate as the world's singular superpower. Our sacrifice is more in proportion to our responsibility as a superpower than to our survival as a nation. We fight menace in Iraq and yet we know that complete victory there will only make us into colonialists, and thus expand our level of responsibility even further. So we fight a little against victory even as we fight for it. At the beginning of this war we delivered the "shock" but not the "awe," and then as the insurgency developed, we made a kind of space for it, almost as if we believed it had a right to fight us. Victory threatens us with the obligations and moral stigma of empire.

Only reluctant superpowers go to war with a commitment to fight until they can escape. So today the talk is of "draw-downs," "redeployments," etc. But all these options are undermined by the fact that we simply have not won the war. We have not achieved hegemony in Iraq, so there is no umbrella of American power under which a new nation might find its own democratic personality, or learn to defend itself. We have failed to give "peace in the streets" to the people we are asking to embrace the moderations of democracy. Without American hegemony, these "draw-downs" and "redeployments" are acts of outrageous moral irresponsibility, because they cede hegemony to the forces of menace--the Sunni insurgency, the Shiite militia, the Islamic extremists, the wolfish ambitions of Iran. It was America's weak application of power that made space for these forces to begin with. To now shrink the American footprint further would likely offer the country up as a killing field and embolden Islamic radicals everywhere.

For every reason, from the humanitarian to the geopolitical to the military, Iraq is a war that America must win in the hegemonic, even colonial, sense. It is a test of our civilization's commitment to the good against the alluring notion of menace-as-power that has gripped so much of the Muslim world. Today America is a danger to the world in its own right, not because we are a powerful bully but because we don't fully accept who we are. We rush to war as a superpower protecting the world from menace, then leave the battle before winning as a show of what, humility? We confuse our enemies, discouraging them one minute and encouraging them the next.

Could it be that our enemies are really paper tigers made formidable by our unceasing ambivalence? And could it be that the greater good is in both the idea and the reality of American victory?

Mr. Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, is the author of "White Guilt" (HarperCollins, 2006).

From DebbieSchlussel.com:
Messages for James "F-CK the Jews" Baker
By Debbie Schlussel

Remember when James Baker, Co-Chairman of the Iraq Study Group (read: Iraq Surrender Group), said, "F-CK the Jews. They didn't vote for us anyway"?

Well, now the new report he and his "study" group issued is the written version of his statement. And he's going further in f--king the Jews by insisting on a regional Mid-East peace conference without Israel. Hello . . . ?

James Baker is right. I, Debbie Schlussel, a Jewish American, never voted for him. Thankfully, he was never on any of my ballots. And, hopefully, he never will be. That said, there is a great response to James A. Baker III on t-shirts, aprons, and even this Christmas tree ornament. Gotta say my favorites are the thong and doggie t-shirt bearing this response to the Iraq Study Group anti-Semitic honcho:

Brilliant analysis here from the former chess champion:
Chessboard Endgame
Obsessed with Iraq, we've lost sight of the rest of the world.
BY GARRY KASPAROV

Saturday, December 2, 2006

For the past few years, the dictators and terrorists have been gaining ground, and with good reason. The deepening catastrophe in Iraq has distracted the world's sole superpower from its true goals, and weakened the U.S. politically as well as militarily. With new congressional leadership threatening to make the same mistake--failing to see Iraq as only one piece of a greater puzzle--it is time to return to the basics of strategic planning.

Thirty years as a chess player ingrained in me the importance of never losing sight of the big picture. Paying too much attention to one area of the chessboard can quickly lead to the collapse of your entire position. America and its allies are so focused on Iraq they are ceding territory all over the map. Even the vague goals of President Bush's ambiguous war on terror have been pushed aside by the crisis in Baghdad.

The U.S. must refocus and recognize the failure of its post-9/11 foreign policy. Pre-emptive strikes and deposing dictators may or may not have been a good plan, but at least it was a plan. However, if you attack Iraq, the potential to go after Iran and Syria must also be on the table. Instead, the U.S. finds itself supervising a civil war while helplessly making concessions elsewhere.

This dire situation is a result of the only thing worse than a failed strategy: the inability to recognize, or to admit, that a strategy has failed. Since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, North Korea has tested a nuclear weapon. Iran is openly boasting of its uranium enrichment program while pouring money into Hezbollah and Hamas. A resurgent Taliban is on the rise in Afghanistan. Nearly off the radar, Somalia is becoming an al Qaeda haven. Worst of all is the answer to the question that ties all of these burning fuses together: No, we are not safer now than we were before.

The seeds for this situation were sown in the one real success the West has had. The attack on the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan went so well that the U.S. and its allies did not appreciate all the reasons for the success. Almost every player on the world stage benefited from the attack on Afghanistan. The rout of the Sunni Taliban delighted Iran. Russia and China have no love for religious extremism near their borders. India was happy to see the U.S. launch a direct attack on Muslim terrorists.

Only Pakistan was put under uncomfortable pressure, although even there, Pervez Musharraf has been able to play both sides well enough to appear to be an essential ally to the West, while terrorists and weapons cross his borders freely. Gen. Musharraf has perfected the formula of holding himself up as the last defense against the extremists in order to gain immunity for his dictatorship. Not only was there a confluence of world opinion aided by sympathy for the U.S. after 9/11, but the proverbial bad guys were undoubtedly bad, and we knew where they were. As subsequent events have shown, effectively bombing terrorists is a rare opportunity.

Learning from our defeats is obvious, but too often we fail to appreciate the reasons for our successes; we take them for granted. The U.S. charged into Iraq without appreciating the far greater difficulty of the postwar task there, and how it would be complicated by the increasingly hostile global opinion of America's military adventures.

America's role as "bad cop" has been a flop on the global stage. Without the American presence in Iraq as a target and scapegoat, Iraqis would be forced to make the hard political decisions they are currently avoiding. We won't know if Iraq can stand on its own until the U.S. forces leave. Meanwhile, South Korea and China refuse to take action on North Korea while accusing the U.S. of provocative behavior. How quickly would their attitudes change if the U.S. pulled its troops out of the Korean Peninsula? Or if Japan--not to mention Taiwan--announced nuclear weapon plans?

From Caracas to Moscow to Pyongyang, everyone follows their own agenda while ignoring President Bush and the U.N. Here in Russia, for example, Vladimir Putin gets Mr. Bush's endorsement for membership to the World Trade Organization while selling advanced air defense missile systems to Iran and imposing sanctions on Georgia, itself a WTO member. WTO membership is not going to benefit ordinary Russians, but it will provide more cover for Mr. Putin and his gang of oligarchs to continue to loot the country and launder the money abroad with no resistance from a distracted, discredited and enfeebled West.

We might not know what works, but we have many fine examples of what doesn't work, and we cannot continue to ignore them. As the world's sole superpower, the U.S. has become a lightening rod. Any intervention causes resentment, and even many traditional allies oppose U.S. plans almost out of hand. America's overly proactive foreign policy has also allowed other nations to avoid responsibility for their own safety, and to avoid making the tough decisions that come with that responsibility.

At the same time, the U.N. has become a perfect example of a broken institution. When leaders are afraid to take real action they go to the U.N., where they know nothing tangible will be achieved. Resolutions are routinely ignored without consequences and, in fact, are openly flouted. Hezbollah proudly waved weapons as the Israeli army left Lebanon, and the kidnapped Israeli soldiers have yet to be released.

So what then, to do? "Mission accomplished" jokes aside, the original goals in Iraq--deposing Saddam Hussein and holding elections--have been achieved. Nation-building was never on the agenda, and it should not be added now. All the allied troops in the world aren't going to stop the Iraqi people from continuing their civil war if this is their choice. As long as Muslim leaders in Iraq and elsewhere are unwilling to confront their own radical elements, outsiders will be spectators in the line of fire.

As for stability, if allied troops leave Iraq: What stability? I won't say things can't get worse--if we've learned anything, it's that things in the Middle East can always get worse; but at least the current deadly dynamic would be changed. And with change there is always hope for improvement. Without change, we are expecting a different result from the same behavior, something once defined as insanity.

Mr. Kasparov, a former world chess champion, is chairman of the United Civil Front in Russia.

Another case of Bush administration incomptetence, and the sacrifice of a good man to the whims of those unworthy to sit in judgement of him.
Real Bully Was Sen. Dodd, Not Bolton
By Robert Novak

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Over lunch in New York two weeks ago, John Bolton told me he was thinking about abandoning his long struggle for confirmation as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and leaving government service. But he asked me to defer writing about his situation. The White House felt anything I wrote would undermine last-ditch efforts at confirmation.

That reflects continuing failure by George W. Bush and his team, six years in power, to perceive the implacable nature of Democratic opposition. The White House was still eager not to offend Sen. Christopher Dodd, the Democrat most determined to block Bolton. Furthermore, Bush aides to the end sought to bring around lame duck Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee to allow Bolton's nomination on the Senate floor during the lame duck session.

All such efforts were futile. Dodd and his colleagues were determined to get outspoken conservative Bolton, and they got him. Chafee kept showing contempt for his nominal party even after the White House saved him from defeat in the primary. The Democratic election victory on Nov. 7 sealed Bolton's fate, ending Republican efforts to find another two years for Bolton even without confirmation.

A senior White House aide told me the president had been "considering" an offer of deputy secretary of state (which requires Senate confirmation) or Cabinet-level counselor (which does not). When he decided last week he wanted out, Bolton had no interest in any alternative post. But neither job was even mentioned to Bolton. After serving four years as an under secretary, Bolton following the 2004 election asked for the deputy secretary's job. The new secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, said no, but offered him the U.N. post.

Dodd's campaign has been relentless and unfair. "He's been a very ineffective bully," Dodd has said in describing Bolton's performance at the United Nations as a recess appointee. In fact, the permanent U.S. staff there regards Bolton as President Bush's most effective U.N. envoy, his record climaxed by achieving a unanimous Security Council vote on the Korean question. Dodd's delight over Bolton's departure is shared at the United Nations by anti-American Third World ambassadors and U.N. bureaucrats.

The continuing Democratic rationale for opposing Bolton is the administration's refusal to turn over intelligence intercepts requested by Bolton as under secretary of state. But the liberal cabal that opposed him for the United Nations also voted against him in 2001 for the under secretary's post. That includes Sen. Joseph Biden, now returned as Foreign Relations Committee chairman. He tends to vote against Republican presidential nominees when there is any opposition.

But Dodd, striking a pose of smiling affability, has been the driving force behind the assault on Bolton. An ardent supporter of normalizing relations with Cuba, Dodd is inexorable in blocking any nominee hostile to Fidel Castro's dictatorship. He kept Otto Reich from getting confirmed as assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs and now has done the same to Bolton.

White House aides were living in an unreal world when they privately blamed Dodd's hostility to Bolton on me and blamed my hostility to Dodd on Bolton. In fact, I was scourging Dodd for his pro-Castro bias long before Bolton became an issue.

The fecklessness at the White House in managing Bolton's nomination is exemplified by the feeling there to the end that Chafee could be brought along. Having poured money into Chafee's Rhode Island Republican primary campaign against a conservative challenger, Bush in private is furious over betrayal by the maverick Republican. Chafee's fellow GOP senators believe that if he were re-elected, he would have permitted Bolton's name to go to the Senate floor. Quirky to the end, Chafee says the Democratic election victory is reason to block Bolton.

"It was a travesty," Republican Sen. Norm Coleman, in describing Bolton's demise, told me. "Bipartisanship is a two-way street." Coleman, who as chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations probed U.N. corruption, believes Bolton "was the best" of Bush's U.N. ambassadors.

Now Coleman loses his chairmanship, and Bolton is gone. No wonder U.N. Deputy Secretary General Mark Malloch Brown, a Briton who brazenly has interfered in U.S. politics, was caught smiling at Turtle Bay this week.

Copyright 2006 Creators Syndicate

From Real Clear Politics:
Captain Obvious to the Rescue
By Robert Tracinski

In my student days back at the University of Chicago, there was a campus comedy troupe modeled on Second City, their more well-known uptown uncle. The U of C group was pretty funny, if in a somewhat bookish way. (Who else does a comedy routine based on Oedipus Rex?) One of their funniest bits was a recurring skit about a superhero named Captain Obvious. In each scene, a character would face a mundane problem, only to be "saved" by the banal and utterly unhelpful advice offered by Captain Obvious. "I've locked my keys in my car. What am I going to do?" "Well then," replies Captain Obvious, "all you have to do is open the door to your car, and then you can get your keys." Each scene ended the same way, with Captain Obvious proclaiming, "No, don't thank me. It's all in a day's work for Captain Obvious.

I've been reminded of this skit many times since, because I frequently hear the same kind of advice being given in Washington. Take, for example, the recommendations offered today, to much fanfare, by the Iraq Study Group.

The problem in Iraq is that we can't withdraw US troops because the Iraqi military is not adequately trained to maintain security on its own? Well then, the ISG tells us, all we need to do is to train the Iraqi military so that they can maintain security on their own, and then we can withdraw our troops.

The problem in Iraq is that the Iraqi government won't approve a crackdown to dismantle the Shiite militias? Well then, all we have to do is to convince the Iraqi government to approve a crackdown to dismantle the Shiite militias.

The problem in Iraq is that Iran and Syria are arming, funding, and encouraging Sunni and Shiite insurgents? Well then, all we have to do is to convince Syria and Iran to stop supporting these insurgents.

The problem in the region is that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict inflames anti-American sentiment? Well then, all we have to do is to convene a conference to negotiate peace in the Middle East.

See how simple that was? It's amazing that no one ever thought of these ideas before the Iraq Study Group came along. But no, don't thank them. It's all in a day's work for Captain Obvious.

Few have recognized the empty banality of the ISG report because they have focused on a few seemingly radical recommendations. But all of these recommendations are conditional on events that are unlikely to happen, as became clear in Thursday's press conference with the members of the commission.

We should withdraw all US combat troops by early 2008, ISG co-chair Lee Hamilton tells us, "subject to unexpected developments on the ground"--such as the fact that the troops will still be needed. Similarly, we will shift troops from fighting the enemy to training the Iraqi military "if the commanders in place determine that's the best way to do it," according to commission member William Perry. Pressed on the subject of whether Iran would be willing to help us in Iraq, co-chair James Baker replies, "In our discussions with them--and the report points this out--we didn't get the feeling that Iran is champing at the bit to come to the table with us to talk about Iraq. And in fact, we say we think they very well might not."

There you have it: a series of recommendations based on conditions that "very well might not" happen.

The whole ISG report is a spectacular punt. It contains a few broad, vague goals for our policy--and a whole range of specific recommendations for actions that are not in the power of the American government to take. It recommends, for example, that the Iraqi government "accelerate assuming responsibility for Iraqi security by increasing the number and quality of Iraqi Army Brigades," that the Iranian government "use its influence over Iraqi Shiite groups to encourage national reconciliation" and that the Syrian government "stem the flow of funding, insurgents, and terrorists in and out of Iraq."

The members of the commission certainly hope that these governments will take those actions. But then again, they very well might not.

What the ISG offers us are mere aspirations, with no serious consideration of the concrete means required to fulfill those aspirations.

We should negotiate with Iran and Syria to convince them to help stabilize Iraq, but then James Baker angrily denies that this would mean caving in and allowing Iran to continue its nuclear weapons program, and he angrily denies that it would mean caving in and allowing Syria to re-conquer Lebanon. In other words, he wants to ask Iran and Syria to help us in Iraq--while ruling out the only concessions that might induce them to do so. At the same time, the ISG also rules out any serious military threat that would force Iran and Syria to abandon their current strategy.

This is the pattern of the whole report: to stipulate the achievement of a result, while denying the actual means that might achieve that result.

When you desire a result without enacting the means for achieving it, that's called a "fantasy"which is ironic, considering that James Baker is a dean of the "realist" school of foreign policy.

For the original Captain Obvious, the final punch-line comes when he rescues a philosopher who is struggling to prove that the world really exists--the one problem Captain Obvious is perfectly equipped to solve. Perhaps someone ought to provide the same service for the "realists" on the Iraq Study Group.

A real change in policy for Iraq wouldn't start and end with a collection of vague aspirations. It would start with a clear-eyed, realistic assessment of the facts that explain the chaos in Iraq--the facts that explain why all of the aspirations stated by the Iraq Study Group have not yet been met.

The basic fact is that the conflict in Iraq, from the very beginning, has been stoked by Syria and Iran. These dictatorial regimes are stoking the conflict because the success of the American mission in Iraq is an obvious threat to their very existence. They can't afford the example of a free nation in the region, nor can they afford the example of a successful exertion of American power on their doorsteps.

That's why all the debate over whether Iraq is in a "civil war" is beside the point. Calling Iraq a "civil war" has the effect of narrowing our focus, making the conflict look like a purely internal fight between Iraqi factions. But the real picture is regional. The civil strife in Iraq is just the instrument of a regional fight for dominance between Iran and the United States.

Recognizing this reality would produce some truly interesting and radical recommendations.

Since Iran and Syria are the most important source of the chaos in Iraq, then we need to topple those regimes. They won't agree to help us, because doing so does not and never will serve their interests. So we have to replace them with governments that do share our interests--or at least, with governments that will stay out of our way.

Then, since the Shiite militias are the leading edge of Iranian influence in Iraq, we have to act to dismantle them now--and not wait for approval from the Iraqi government. We should grasp that the Iraqi government's approval and disapproval on this issue simply doesn't matter, because if we don't take down the militias, there will be no Iraqi government left.

Instead of pointing to the bad results in Iraq and simply declaring that we must achieve better results--which is all that the ISG report really amounts to--we have to identify the real root of the problem: the regimes in Iran and Syria, and the Shiite militias they support. And then we need to dig up that root.

We'll know we're really making progress in talking about Iraq when that recommendation is seen as being as obvious as it really is.
Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of The Intellectual Activist and TIADaily.com.

Great stuff from Lark News:
Jack Chick buys popular comic strips

ONTARIO, Calif. — Jack Chick, author of Christian tracts, made a surprise purchase of some of the world's best-loved comic strips and is spreading the gospel in typical Chick fashion through the Sunday funnies.
Garfield, Ziggy, Blondie and a dozen other strips now belong to the Chick Publishing empire and are filled with hooded apparitions, angels and other menacing fare. Chick's strategy apparently is to combine classic Chick elements with strips' longstanding formulas.
Darla Clark, a newspaper reader from Baton Rouge, says she was surprised to read Sunday's "Blondie" strip in which Dagwood stands before the Throne of God giving account for his laziness and gluttony. It's the first in a series called "Dagwood, This Was Your Life!"
"I found it disturbing and disheartening," she says. "I thought maybe the cartoonist was having a personal crisis."
Syndicates, bracing for negative reaction, are trying to make the best of it.
"The comics still feature classic characters and are a great entertainment value," said a King Features spokesman, noting that readers of Zippy the Pinhead will especially appreciate the new Chick sensibility.
Chick paid $40-50 million for each comic strip's rights.
"Forty million is a lot of money," said Marvin creator Tom Armstrong when asked why he sold the rights to his popular strip. "Chick can carry on the Marvin legacy however he wants. I get early retirement." •

From Opinion Journal:
On a Wing and a Prayer
Grievance theater at Minneapolis International Airport.

BY DEBRA BURLINGAME
Wednesday, December 6, 2006 12:01 a.m.

Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Those are the words that started it all. Six bearded imams are said to have shouted them out while offering evening prayers as they and 141 other passengers waited at the gate for their flight out of Minneapolis International Airport. It was three days before Thanksgiving. Allahu Akbar: God is great.

Initial media reports of the incident did not include the disturbing details about what happened after they boarded US Airways flight 300, but the story quickly went national with provocative headlines: "Six Muslims Ejected from US Air Flight for Praying." Yes, they were praying--but let's be clear about this. The very last human sound on the cockpit voice recorder of United flight 93 before it screamed into the ground at 580 miles per hour is the sound of male voices shouting "Allahu Akbar" in a moment of religious ecstasy.

They, too, were praying. The passengers and crew of flight 93 lost their valiant fight to take back the plane just one hour and 20 minutes after it pushed back from the gate. Until the hijackers stormed the cockpit door, they were just a handful of Middle Eastern-looking men on their way to sunny California. So, yes, let's be exceedingly clear about the whole matter. Some 3,000 men, women and children are dead because the unassuming people on those airplanes did not look at them and see murderers. Or dangerous Arabs. Or fanatical Muslims. They saw a few guys in chinos.

In five years since the 9/11 attacks, U.S. commercial carriers have transported approximately 2.9 billion domestic and international passengers. It is a testament to the flying public, but, most of all, to the flight crews who put those planes into the air and who daily devote themselves to the safety and well-being of their passengers, that they have refused to succumb to ethnic hatred, religious intolerance or irrational fear on those millions of flights. But they have not forgotten the sight of a 200,000-pound aircraft slicing through heavy steel and concrete as easily as a knife through butter. They still remember the voices of men and women in the prime of their lives saying final goodbyes, people who just moments earlier set down their coffee and looked out the window to a beautiful new morning. Today, when travelers and flight crews arrive at the airport, all the overheated rhetoric of the civil rights absolutists, all the empty claims of government career bureaucrats, all the disingenuous promises of the election-focused politicians just fall away. They have families. They have responsibilities. To them, this is not a game or a cause. This is real life.

Given that Islamic terrorists continue their obsession with turning airplanes into weapons of mass destruction, it is nothing short of obscene that these six religious leaders--fresh from attending a conference of the North American Imams Federation, featuring discussions on "Imams and Politics" and "Imams and the Media"--chose to turn that airport into a stage and that airplane into a prop in the service of their need for grievance theater. The reality is, these passengers endured a frightening 3 1/2-hour ordeal, which included a front-to-back sweep of the aircraft with a bomb-sniffing dog, in order to advance the provocative agenda of these imams in, of all the inappropriate places after 9/11, U.S. airports.

"Allahu Akbar" was just the opening act. After boarding, they did not take their assigned seats but dispersed to seats in the first row of first class, in the midcabin exit rows and in the rear--the exact configuration of the 9/11 execution teams. The head of the group, seated closest to the cockpit, and two others asked for a seatbelt extension, kept on board for obese people. A heavy metal buckle at the end of a long strap, it can easily be used as a lethal weapon. The three men rolled them up and placed them on the floor under their seats. And lest this entire incident be written off as simple cultural ignorance, a frightened Arabic-speaking passenger pulled aside a crew member and translated the imams' suspicious conversations, which included angry denunciations of Americans, furious grumblings about U.S. foreign policy, Osama Bin Laden and "killing Saddam."

Predictably, these imams and their attorneys now suggest that another passenger who penned a frantic note of warning and slipped it to a flight attendant was somehow a hysterical Islamophobe. Let us remember that but for their performance at the gate this passenger might never have noticed these men or their behavior on board, much less have the slightest clue as to their religion or political passions. Of course, that was the point of the shouting. According to the police report, yet another alarmed passenger who frequently travels to the Middle East described a conversation with one of the imams. The 31-year-old Egyptian expressed fundamentalist Muslim views, and stated the he would go to whatever measures necessary to obey all the tenets set out in the Koran.

The activist Muslim American Society (MAS) issued a press release within hours of the incident, demanding an apology and announcing a "pray-in" at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C. Standing just a short distance from the Pentagon, where five years ago black plumes of smoke from the crash of American Airlines flight 77 could be seen for miles, the assembled demonstrators complained that African-American Muslims, accustomed to "driving while black," must now cope with the injustice of "flying while Muslim." This brazen two-step is racial politics at its worst; none of the imams are African-American. MAS, which teaches an "Activist Training" program with lessons on "how to talk to the media," must have been thrilled when one cable news outfit, suckered by the rhetoric, compared the imams' conduct to that of civil rights icon Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her bus seat in the face of institutional racism. One wonders what the parents of the three 11-year-olds who died on flight 77--all African-American kids on a National Geographic field trip--would make of this stunning comparison.

Today, MAS Executive Director Mahdi Bray says his organization wants more than an apology. He wants to "hit [US Airways] where it hurts, the pocketbook," and, joined by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), will seek compensation for the imams, civil and federal monetary sanctions, and new, sweeping legislation that will extract even bigger penalties for airlines that engage in "racial and religious profiling." An investigation by the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties is under way. Not incidentally, it is the "fatwa department" of MAS that pushed for segregated taxi lines that would permit Muslim cab drivers at the Minneapolis airport to reject passengers carrying alcohol.

Here's what the flying public needs to know about airplanes and civil rights: Once your foot traverses the entranceway of a commercial airliner, you are no longer in a democracy in which everyone gets a vote and minority rights are affirmatively protected in furtherance of fuzzy, ever-shifting social policy. Ultimately, the responsibility for your personal safety and security rests on the shoulders of one person, the pilot in command. His primary job is to safely transport you and your belongings from one place to another. Period.

This is the doctrine of "captain's authority." It has a longstanding history and a statutory mandate, further strengthened after 9/11, which recognizes that flight crews are our last line of defense between the kernel of a terrorist plot and its lethal execution. The day we tell the captain of a commercial airliner that he cannot remove a problem passenger unless he divines beyond question what is in that passenger's head and heart is the day our commercial aviation system begins to crumble. When a passenger's conduct is so disturbing and disruptive that reasonable, ordinary people fear for their lives, the captain must have the discretionary authority to respond without having to consider equal protection or First Amendment standards about which even trained lawyers with the clarity of hindsight might strongly disagree. The pilot in command can't get it wrong. At 35,000 feet, when multiple events are rapidly unfolding in real time, there is no room for error.

We have a new, inviolate aviation standard after 9/11, which requires that the captain cannot take that airplane up so long as there are any unresolved issues with respect to the security of his airplane. At altitude, the cockpit door is barred and crews are instructed not to open them no matter what is happening in the cabin behind them. This is an extremely challenging situation for the men and women who fly those planes, one that those who write federal aviation regulations and the people who agitate for more restrictions on a captain's authority will never have to face themselves.

Likewise, flight attendants are confined in the back of the plane with upwards of 200 people; they must be the eyes and ears, not just for the pilot but for us all. They are not combat specialists, however, and to compel them to ignore all but the most unambiguous cases of suspicious behavior is to further enable terrorists who act in ways meant to defy easy categorization. As the American Airlines flight attendants who literally jumped on "shoe bomber" Richard Reid demonstrated, cabin crews are sharply attuned to unusual or abnormal behavior and they must not be second-guessed, or hamstrung by misguided notions of political correctness.

Ultimately, the most despicable aspect about the imams' behavior is that when they pierced the normally quiet hum of a passenger waiting area with shouts of "Allahu Akbar"and deliberately engaged in terrorist-associated behavior that was sure to trigger suspicion, they exploited the fear that began with the Sept. 11 attacks. The imams, experienced travelers all, counted on the security system established after 9/11 to kick in, and now they plan not only to benefit financially from the proper operation of that system but to substantially weaken it--with help from the Saudi-endowed attorneys at CAIR.

US Airways is right to stand by its flight crew. It will be both dangerous and disgraceful if the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Transportation and, ultimately, our federal courts allow aviation security measures put in place after 9/11 to be cynically manipulated in the name of civil rights.

Ms. Burlingame, a director of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, is the sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

From The Hill:
Hillary can win but mustn’t
By Dick Morris

Now that Hillary has dropped the coy pretense of indecision that she used to justify her reelection to a Senate seat she no longer wants and has told friends that she plans to run for president, two questions present themselves: Can she win? And what kind of a president would she be?

She definitely can win … and probably will. She is uniquely able to expand the electorate to bring in millions of women, mostly single, who will vote overwhelmingly for a female Democrat. The feminization of poverty, long decried by the left, will finally lead unmarried women to show up at the polling place and vote their short-term economic interest and vindicate their gender bias. In 2000, only 19 million single women voted. By 2004, their turnout rose to 27 million. With Hillary in the race, the single-female vote will probably go up to its proper ratio of the adult population — 33 million votes.

Can white men outvote single women? Despite the intensity with which white men tend to oppose Hillary, they can’t vote twice.

The enthusiasm that will grip many Americans — women in particular — at the cultural implications of a woman president will probably sweep through the primaries and cause many to overlook Hillary’s flaws and dismiss her defects. The generic of a woman candidate will prove so attractive that millions of voters will overcome their objections to the specific person who is running.

Her mastery of the establishment of the Democratic Party, her vast lead among ex-officio delegates — many of whom have received campaign contributions from her coffers — and the celebrity draw of her ex-president husband will prove hard for a mere mortal to overcome.

But should she win? No way!

Those who know both Hillary and Bill well and are willing to speak frankly in public realize the fundamental differences between the two and grasp how his abilities are the counterpoints to her defects.

He is intensely creative, constantly turning issues over in his mind seeking new solutions. She rarely has a new idea but specializes in advocacy — the rote recitation of talking points.

He has an instinctual feel for people and an uncanny ability to read a room and know what everyone in it is thinking. She is obtuse in her understanding of people and ham-handed in her approach.

He cares deeply about being loved. She seeks popularity as a means to the goal of getting elected but otherwise marches to the beat of her inner, liberal drummer.

He distrusts ideology, and his innate perfectionism finds all belief systems flawed. She swallows the ideological line of the guru du jour hook, line and sinker. During the healthcare years, it was Ira Magaziner who pushed her buttons. When she decided to back the Iraq War, it was the generals who paraded before her committee. She is vulnerable to a cultish adoration of the guys with all the answers.

He lets the give and take of politics wash off his back. A critic is a potential convert whom he hopes to charm over to his side. She has a rigidly dichotomized view of friends and enemies, demanding total loyalty and public silence from the former and maintaining a ruthless determination to destroy the latter. She is a Democratic Nixon to those whom she perceives as her enemies.

He is a moderate by instinct, seeking incremental change. She devotedly and deeply believes in a European-style socialism in which government takes much more of our national income and offers a far wider array of services and benefits.

He’ll raise taxes when he has to. She’ll increase them just to redistribute income.

He’s most like Eisenhower, Kennedy and Bush Sr. — feeling his way, acting with caution, and skeptical of all advice. She is more like LBJ, Nixon or Bush Jr. — determined to charge ahead and do what she thinks needs to be done, the torpedoes be damned.

And finally, he knows who he is and, except for his private shortcomings, is not ashamed to let it show. She constantly seeks to reinvent herself and rigidly maintains an almost totally inaccurate image in public of what she is really like in private. He has little discipline. Hers is iron. His caution is innate. Hers is a learned response to what happens when people see who she really is.

He made a very good domestic-policy president. She would be a disaster at home and abroad.

From The Weekly Standard:
From Metternich
to Jim Baker

The high price of restoring the ancien régime.
by Ralph Peters

12/11/2006, Volume 012, Issue 13


THE SUPERANNUATED membership of the Iraq Study Group shepherded by former secretary of state James Baker conjures a line from the film The Sixth Sense: "I see dead people." Two centuries ago, Europeans dreaming of reform and freedom must have felt just as crestfallen as they watched their continent's ghoulish elder statesmen gather for the Congress of Vienna. Both assemblies symbolize a victory for the ancien régime, the bloody-minded refusal to accept that the world has changed profoundly and will continue to change.

If the Baker commission is the K-Mart version of the Congress of Vienna, its influence may prove no less pernicious. Baker is the dean emeritus of a reactionary school of diplomats--inaccurately labeled "realists"--whose support of the shah of Iran, the Saudi royal family, Anwar Sadat, then Hosni Mubarak, and, not least, Saddam Hussein delivered short-term stability that proved illusory in the long run. It was the "realist" elevation of stability above all other strategic factors--echoing Prince Metternich--that gave us not only the radical regime in Iran, but, ultimately, al Qaeda and 9/11.

The leading modern practitioner of this profoundly reactionary approach to international relations was, of course, Henry Kissinger, whose doctoral thesis championed the diplomats and heads of state who redivided Europe into reform-school states after Napoleon's defeat. A classic revisionist, Kissinger ignored the wisdom of 19th century observers who recognized that the oppression sponsored by the Congress of Vienna created only a mockery of peace. The century of Biedermeier sensibilities and Victorian manners was, in fact, punctuated by a long series of failed--and often grisly--revolutions that radicalized those who found the status quo unbearable. The Staats ordnung of the day created the cult of political assassinations that haunts us still. Metternich and his peers induced the social forced labor that gave birth to Marx and all the utopian extremists who came afterward. From the lesser figures, such as Kropotkin or Bakunin, down to Lenin and Hitler, the political distortions of the "orderly" 19th century led to the unprecedented bloodbaths of the 20th century.

The Kissinger school amplified our Cold War support for authoritarian and even dictatorial regimes, deforming the Middle East as Metternich, Talleyrand, Nesselrode, Castlereagh, Wellington, and their lesser contemporaries crippled Europe. For his part, Baker argued--wrongly--that Saddam Hussein should be spared in the wake of Desert Storm; tried to persuade the Soviet Union to remain whole after its comprehensive collapse; and pretended against the increasingly gory evidence that Yugoslavia could be preserved as a unified state. He tolerated Saddam's savage suppression of a Shia revolt we incited, and only grudgingly--and belatedly--acquiesced in our protection of Kurdish refugees.

One of the many tragedies of our experience in Iraq is that the incompetence of the Bush administration's occupation policy has obscured the necessity of igniting change in the Middle East. Removing Saddam Hussein from power was both an intelligent act and a moral one. But the aftermath was so badly botched that many in Washington now long--as did those powdered cynics in Vienna--for the status quo antebellum. They would renew our commitment to Saudi Arabia and other autocracies, while quietly selling out the Lebanese, the Kurds, and the region's moderates in order to get us out of Iraq. We would return to a version of the old order and might gain a brief respite from our troubles in the region. But the greater effects of a renewed stability-über-alles doctrine would play into the recruitment schemes of the most radical Islamist elements in the region, while instigating human rights violations on a breathtaking scale. We would throw away any hope of a better future for a brief timeout today.

Stability at any price isn't the answer. Stability imposed from above empowered Khomeini and bin Laden as surely as it did the 19th century revolutionaries and nihilists who became the 20th century's nationalists, demagogues, and mass murderers. Terror is an inevitable by-product of all grand clampdowns.

The statesmen of the Congress of Vienna sought to turn back history's tide, and their philosophical heirs on the Baker panel are trying to do the same. Democrat or Republican, superficially liberal or conservative, the Iraq Study Group is deeply reactionary. Its recommendations, which will be couched in terms of "sensible" Realpolitik, envision an impossible restoration of a peaceful Middle East that never existed. No matter the politically correct language in which it may be couched, the group's fundamental recommendation will be to return to a foreign policy in which the quest for stability trumps freedom, ignores human rights, frustrates the will of ordinary people, and violates elementary decency. By resisting change, the study group will only make the changes that do come to the Middle East even more explosive and anti-American.

The Middle East problem was difficult enough when the Bush administration stood for a benevolent revolution in possibilities against a range of reactionary enemies, from al Qaeda and Shia militias to various Baathist regimes and the apocalyptic nihilists ruling Iran. For all of the administration's practical ineptitude, its recognition that the Middle East could not continue in its current state was correct. Now we verge on a new clash of civilizations that will oppose our reactionaries to their reactionaries. It is a formula not for stability and peace, but for brutal conflict and spectacular terrorism.

The 19th century was far bloodier within Europe than historical glosses pretend, yet the political order the Congress of Vienna sought to preserve in amber did last, more or less, until 1914, when the inevitable explosion came on a massive scale. But history marches double time today, and any attempt to effect a restoration of rigid, top-down order in the Middle East will fail far more rapidly than did the Concert of Europe. Yesterday's solutions--Jim Baker's solutions--didn't work yesterday. They certainly won't work today.

Since the end of the Cold War, every one of our military engagements has come in response to failing states and flawed borders: Desert Storm, Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq . . . we send our men and women in uniform to defend a world designed in Berlin and Versailles according to the macabre political philosophy of Metternich. The greatest democracy in history has been conned by its own political elite into fighting for the carto graphic legacy of dead czars, kings, kaisers, and emperors.

The Iraq Study Group's members will assure each other of their conscientiousness, while carefully guarding their legacies for future biographers and historians. And the group's recommendations will suggest, in one form or another, a return to the ancien régime.

Of course, the salient difference between the Congress of Vienna and the Iraq Study Group is obvious: The diplomats of the former had just achieved a military victory, while the members of the latter seek to avert a strategic defeat. The freedom of action that the Baker commission might imagine for itself is illusory.

There are no good solutions to Iraq, but some "solutions" are markedly worse than others. Any formula that attempts to extend the lives of dictatorships and oligarchies at the expense of already restive populations will end in disaster--even should it promise us the illusion of a "decent interval."

Ralph Peters is a retired military officer, columnist, and the author of 21 books, including the recent Never Quit the Fight.

From Real Clear Politics:
The Economically Illiterate in Hollywood
By Thomas Sowell

It is not really news that Hollywood is still producing anti-business movies, but there is a certain irony in it nevertheless.

Although these movies tap a certain envy and resentment of corporate wealth, that large corporate wealth comes from far more modest individual amounts of money from about half the population of the United States, which owns stocks and bonds -- either directly or because money paid into pension funds or other financial intermediaries are used to buy stocks and bonds.

The irony is that the average Hollywood star who is making anti-business movies is far wealthier than the average owners of those businesses, who are half the population of the country.

The Los Angeles Times refers to documentary "films" that are "critical of corporate power." But just what does this vague word "power" mean when it comes to businesses?

Wal-Mart is the big bugaboo these days but what "power" does Wal-Mart have? I lived three-quarters of a century without ever setting foot in a Wal-Mart store and there is not a thing they can do about it.

It so happened that this past summer in Page, Arizona, I needed to buy some toiletries, which caused me to go into a nearby Wal-Mart for the first time. Inside, it looked more like a small city than a large store. But the prices were noticeably lower than in most other places. Is that the much-dreaded "power"?

Apparently Wal-Mart does not pay its employees as much as third-party observers would like to see them paid. But obviously it is not paying them less than their work is worth to other employers or they probably would not be working at Wal-Mart. Moreover, third parties who wax indignant are paying them nothing.

One of the morally indignant "films" (more high-toned than "movies") coming out of Hollywood makes the same complaint against Starbucks, depicting poverty-stricken Ethiopian coffee growers providing beans for the big-bucks coffee store chain.

Are the Ethiopian coffee growers worse off now that Starbucks is buying their beans? Supply and demand would suggest otherwise. But moral crusaders seldom have time for economics.

If those who claim to be concerned about the Ethiopians' poverty really are, why is not relieving that poverty just as much something for them to do with their own money as for Starbucks to do using money invested by other people -- including nurses, mechanics, teachers, and others who are paying into pension funds to provide for their own old age?

The tragic fact is that productivity is far lower in poor countries. That is the fundamental reason why they are poor in the first place. You cannot pay American wages to workers whose average productivity is a fraction of that of American workers, without driving up the cost of production to the point where businesses will take their jobs to some other country.

The real comparison is not between what people are paid in Third World countries compared to what people are paid in the United States. The comparison that affects outcomes is what Third World people are paid by multinational corporations compared to what they can earn otherwise. By and large, multinational corporations pay about double the local pay in Third World countries.

Third World workers line up for these jobs and even bribe insiders to get them such jobs. If economically illiterate Hollywood busybodies and other mindless crusaders succeed in establishing more costly pay scales without regard to productivity, that will undoubtedly lead to fewer jobs, just as similar policies do in other countries. There is no free lunch in the Third World, any more than there is elsewhere.

The net result will be people feeling good about themselves in Hollywood, in academia and in the media, while leaving havoc in their wake among the Third World people they claim to care about.

What the Third World needs are more multinational corporations, not less.

As more multinational corporations move into a poorer country, the people there not only get additional economic opportunities, they acquire skills and job experience that raise their productivity and earnings potential, even if that outrages the economically illiterate in Hollywood.

Copyright 2006 Creators Syndicate