Ah, the tolerant French
This speaks for itself.

by Donald Sensing, 4/30/2004 04:02:00 PM. Permalink |

My take on the Nightline controversy
As I am sure you know by now, ABC News' show Nightline with Ted Koppel will consist tonight of nothing but Koppel reading the names of the 725 Americans who have died in Iraq since the beginning of the Iraq campaign in March of last year.

The fur is flying over the reading for a few different reasons:

Koppel said that reading the names on Memorial Day would be more appropriate, "But we felt that the impact would actually be greater on a day when the entire nation is not focused on war dead." Yeah, right.

Ratings sweeps begin tonight but end before Memorial Day. Might that have had something to do with not reading the names on Memorial Day? Not according to Nightline's executive producer, Leroy Sievers, who plows new ground for a national news-show producer by being, apparently, the only one in the history of broadcasting who doesn't know when the sweeps start. As WaPo writer Lisa de Moraes (same link) asked,

Who'd have thought that the only people in broadcast TV with no awareness of ratings sweeps periods all work at ABC News? I mean, what are the odds, really?

The Sinclair Broadcasting Group, controlling several dozen television stations (not all of them ABC affiliates) directed its stations not to carry the Nightline show, declaring that Nightline's purpose in reading the names was overtly political, intended to leads viewers into opposing the war.

"We find it offensive that Ted Koppel is trivializing the deaths of so many men and women. This is not a one-year anniversary of the war, or Memorial Day. This is 'sweeps week,' and he intends to use a news platform for a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq," said Sinclair Vice President Mark Hyman yesterday.

As other commentati have noted, Nightline seems awfully selective in reading only the names of the service members dead in Iraq, but omitting names of those killed in Afghanistan or for that matter, the names of the military killed on 9/11/01 at the Pentagon.

I think that context is everything. Is it mere coincidence that the reading of the names comes on the eve of the anniversary of President Bush landing on the deck if USS Abraham Lincoln? I think not. Bush's opponents have politicized that event every chance they have gotten.

Reading the names of the dead without explaining why they died does them no service. Koppel might as well simply read their serial numbers.

Nightline's web page about tonight's show does provide some context of the deaths. Examples:

Pfc. Marquis A. Whitaker, 20, of Columbus, Ga., died in Scania, Iraq, after falling from a bridge. His vehicle was hit from behind by a civilian truck and left hanging off the side of the bridge. Whitaker attempted to climb out of the vehicle but fell.

Staff Sgt. Abraham D. Penamedina, 32, of Los Angeles, Calif., died in Baghdad, Iraq, when his patrol came under sniper fire.

Will Koppel read these circumstances tonight? I don't know; the site doesn't say. The show will broadcast photos of the fallen while Koppel reads their names. Note that the list includes, as it should, the names of those dead from accident, illness and I assume suicide as well as those KIA.

I am of two minds about this show. On the one hand, I think that the Sinclair Group's concerns about anti-administration grandstanding are justified, especially since the dead of Afghanistan are excluded. Senator John McCain strenuously disagrees. The producers' claim they are unaware of when sweeps start is nothing but a baldfaced lie that gives just cause to doubt the rest of their disclaimers of intention.

I learned long ago not to expect depth reporting from television. images are everything to TV, all else supports the picture. If there were no photos of the dead available for Koppel, I am confident there would not have been snowball's chance in perdition of this show being done.

But the proof will be in the actual presentation itself. It can be done right and it can be done wrong, both subjective outcomes, of course. I'll try to tune in at least for the first segment.

Update: Blackfive has some cogent comments.

Another note: not much more blogging for me today; other duties call.

by Donald Sensing, 4/30/2004 03:36:00 PM. Permalink |

More on taking Pfc. Chance Phelps home
I posted the link Tuesday to the first-person account of Marine Lt. Col. named Strobl (no first name given) who was the escort officer for transportation of Pfc. Phelp's remain back to his hometown.

I emailed the story's link to a Marine major I know who lives nearby. Turns out he knows Lt. Col. Strobl well; they are both Marine artillery officers and therefore clearly a cut above all the rest. Small world, small Corps.

BTW, there are now 45 days and a wakeup until my eldest son steps on the yellow footprints at Parris Island. Semper fi!

by Donald Sensing, 4/29/2004 08:42:00 PM. Permalink |

Chickenhawk, shmickenhawk
James Joyner decisively refutes the chickenhawk argument, most recently raised by the doddering Senator Frank Lautenberg on the Senate floor.

by Donald Sensing, 4/29/2004 08:31:00 PM. Permalink |

The source of Islamic jihad
Bill V. emailed the URL of a site called Tell the Children the Truth, which purports to show that the very root figure of modern jihadism is on Amin al-Husseini, b. 1893. Inspired by participating in the Turks' genocide of 1.5 million Aremnian Christians, al-Husseini returned to Palestine, bringing the "lessons of genocide and the vision of leading a Pan-Islamic empire, where Jews and Christians are not acceptable."

He gained a political base in 1921, when the British, as protectors of post-Ottoman Palestine, appointed him grand mufti of Jerusalem.

The site also claims that al-Husseini talked Adolf Hitler out of merely deporting the Jews in favor of exterminating them.

It's fascinating reading, but I have no idea whether its history is reliable. Maybe you do.

by Donald Sensing, 4/29/2004 08:19:00 PM. Permalink |

Sanctifying Hell
The Beacon blog has a compelling photo-essay about Marines in Fallujah. Some shots from an LA Times piece of Marines being baptized almost on the battlefield itself are featured.

The Marines built a small baptismal fount from MRE crates into the middle of which they placed a large plastic sheet, then poured water.

Also pix of a small memorial the baptized Marines put together for fallen friends.

After a fierce firefight in which one Marines was killed and 15 wounded, four Marines went to the chaplain.

"I've been talking to God a lot during the last two firefights," said Lance Cpl. Chris Hankins, 19, of Kansas City, Mo. "I decided to start my life over and make it better."

To give the occasion even greater significance, the Marines chose to have Wednesday's baptism in the courtyard of a bullet-riddled school that they used in their fight with insurgents.

Two Marines died and several were injured in the same courtyard when a mortar round landed among their group April 12. ...

The fight Monday, in which insurgents hurled grenades and fired rockets and machine guns at the Marines, left many of the young men of Echo Company shaken and emotionally drained.

Protestant and Roman Catholic services held in the Marine encampment hours after the battle drew heavy attendance. On Wednesday, little of the initial pain was evident.

Capt. Douglas Zembiec, commander of Echo Company, said he had tried to console his Marines while reminding them that they have to continue to do their jobs, including launching a possible assault on insurgent strongholds in the center of Fallouja.

"There's no room for self-pity out here," he said. "It will get you killed faster than the enemy." ...

Insurgents are holed up in houses a few hundred yards away, their weapons aimed at the school, hoping to kill Marines with a well-timed shot.

Still, the four Marines thought that the courtyard was the ideal spot to make a public profession of their religious belief.

"What better place to do this than here, in the middle of hell," Fuller said.

Read the whole thing.

by Donald Sensing, 4/29/2004 05:05:00 PM. Permalink |

Ralph Peters sings Bill Hobbs' song
Back on April 21, Bill Hobbs blogged the question, Where is Iraq's Wyatt Earp? He was responding to the incineration of 16 Iraqi schoolchildren by terrorists.

Today Ralph Peters writes in the NY Post that Iraq "needs a Wyatt Earp." Once again, blogdom gets there first conceptually.

by Donald Sensing, 4/29/2004 04:13:00 PM. Permalink |

Islamofascist targeting criteria
I posted two days ago about Muslims in Europe Euro-Muslims calling for jihad there. One of the Muslim clerics concerned, Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad of London, calls his group, "al Qaeda Europe." Saying attacks there are inevitable, he explained their targeting rationale:

"We don't make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents. Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value. It has no sanctity."

I would hope that from this rhetoric that the appeasers of the Western Left would learn a very fundamental lesson: they and the most hardcore American neocon are alike lumpen infidel to the Islamofascists. Liberal, conservative, progressive, reactionary, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Jew, agnostic, Mets fan or Yankees, businessman, farmer, whatever: Islamofascists have one label for us all: "infidel enemy."

After taking heat from some reader for publishing explicit photos of the burnt corpses of the four American contract employees murdered then hung from a Fallujah bridge on March 31, Phil Lucas, executive editor of the Panama City New Herald, published his reply:

Look at your spouse and children. Look at your self in the mirror. Then look at the pictures from the paper last Thursday. You better look at them. Those are the people out to kill you.

Who do you think will win? You? Or them? Think you can take your ball and go home and they will leave you alone? Read a little history. Start with last week, last month, last year, and every other year back for half a century. Then go back a thousand years. Nobody hides from this fight.

Like it or not, that's the way it was and that's the way it is.

But many Americans don't get it.

That's why we published those pictures.

If they jarred you off the sofa, if they offended you, if they scared your children and sent you into a rage at mass murderers or heartless editors, then I say, it's a start.

The fact that so many people remain in denial simply astounds me.

Update: People like this writer, whom Andrew Sullivan gave his "Susan Sontag" award.

by Donald Sensing, 4/28/2004 10:07:00 PM. Permalink |

And they don't even offer you a beer
Reid Stott, blogmeister of Photodude, and I were classmates or nearly so at Wake Forest University back in the 70s. He pithily and insightfully compares selecting a fraternity to join with deciding on a candidate to vote for.

by Donald Sensing, 4/28/2004 09:33:00 PM. Permalink |

Thailand: Muslim uprising leaves more than 100 dead
There are no clear links to al Qaeda in today's Muslim uprising in Thailand that resulted in more than 100 Muslim terrorists being killed by police and the army.

Police said they shot and killed 107 Islamic fighters - including 32 inside the mosque - after repelling near simultaneous attacks by hundreds of militants.

The violence began when the militants, mostly teenagers, stormed about 15 police stations and government buildings in three provinces.

Most of the attackers were armed only with machetes, but at least some of those killed in the mosque had guns and knew how to use them, said army chief Gen. Chayasith Shinawatra.

So much for mosques being off limits to violence. Muslims in Thailand have long complained of oppression by the central government of the mostly-Buddhist country.

by Donald Sensing, 4/28/2004 09:20:00 PM. Permalink |

The president's quagmire
Victor Davis Hanson has the transcript from a hammering the president took from the press over the misbegotten war. Pretty harsh stuff.

by Donald Sensing, 4/28/2004 08:14:00 PM. Permalink |

Cosmopolitans, imperialists and nationalists in America
Daniel Pipes explains how these three paradigms shape the way their adherents assess the Iraq war and its aftermath. Citing Samuel Huntingdon, Pipes writes of the three world views thus:

Cosmopolitan : America “welcomes the world, its ideas, its goods, and, most importantly, its people.” In this vision, the country strives to become multiethnic, multiracial, and multicultural. The United Nations and other international organizations increasingly influence American life. Diversity is an end in itself; national identity declines in importance. In brief, the world reshapes America.

Imperial : America reshapes the world. This impulse is fueled by a belief in “the supremacy of American power and the universality of American values.” America’s unique military, economic, and cultural might bestows on it the responsibility to confront evil and to order the world. Other peoples are assumed basically to share the same values as Americans; Americans should help them attain those values. America is less a nation than “the dominant component of a supranational empire.”

National : “America is different” and its people recognize and accept what distinguishes them from others. That difference results in large part from the country’s religious commitment and its Anglo-Protestant culture. The nationalist outlook preserves and enhances those qualities that have defined America from its inception. As for people who are not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, they “become Americans by adopting its Anglo-Protestant culture and political values.”

Huntington sums up this triad of choices: “America becomes the world. The world becomes America. America remains America.”

Like Pipes, I tend to have one foot in the imperialist camp and one in the nationalist.

by Donald Sensing, 4/28/2004 08:02:00 PM. Permalink |

Salami slicing Fallujah
In the mere nine days since I posted a piece on the negative trends of battle attrition in Iraq, things have changed. I said that the then-present tactics being used against insurgents in the city could not be sustained because the odds were not in our favor.

"The question, though," I said, "is how long are we and the insurgents both willing to fight like this? Who will give up first?" Meaning not who will surrender to the other side, but who will change tactics to gain a decisive advantage. The question is answered. We did.

Time was always mostly, though not entirely, on our side. If the so-called ceasefire for negotiations had dragged on and on, it would have decidedly worked to our disadvantage. War, as has been endlessly repeated by commentati (including me), is a contest of wills. But not merely that. It is primarily a contest of power. What events of the last couple of days show is that the insurgents don't have the power to match their will. We do. And this week we are proving it.

In Najaf this week American soldiers killed more than 60 insurgents in a single firefight without losing one of their own. In Fallujah this week we don't know how many insurgents have been killed by American defensive actions ("aggressively defending ourselves," said one Marine officer) but the number must be in the many dozens, at least.

A Marine captain told a TV interviewer that the actions so far by no means constitute the long-awaited and much media-ballyhooed "offensive action."

"We've been playing patty-cake so far," said the captain. "When we go on the offensive, the whole world will see."

Over this month American forces have steadily closed the cordon within the city, reducing the terrain available to the enemy slice by slice. President Bush told the media today that in large areas of the city, life has returned pretty much to normal. More and more Fallujan civilians are reported to be escaping from the rebel areas, meaning that the civilians have seen the writing on the wall and no longer wish to hitch to a weak horse, or the insurgents no longer can stop them. Or both.

What we seem to be doing in steadily forcing the enemy to concentrate themselves into a smaller and smaller area. Not only does this liberate more civilians, it makes future targeting and intelligence gathering much simpler.

Some commentati have said that our self-imposed pause allowed the enemy to fortify their chosen redoubt within the city. No doubt. But it won't matter. The patty-cake of Marines getting into street gun battles with insurgents will not continue. The insurgents' modern Alamo will be futile. Imagine if Santa Ana had possessed a few F-15s, Cobra helicopters and Abrams tanks in 1836.

In the last two days we have destroyed more than one major ordnance warehouse used by the insurgents. I am very confident their location was revealed by defectors or civilian escapees. The loss of the munitions hurts the insurgents a lot. Unfortunately for them, ammo storage cannot be dispersed because too many fighters need to be resupplied. Except for what the insurgents can carry, plus a small at-hand store, the reserve munitions must be stored centrally. It seems they have lost a lot of ammo - good news for us, bad for them. They are not being resupplied. We are.

In the spring of 1864, the Union army under Gen. Ulysses S. Grant found itself stymied in maneuver in Virginia. In response to criticism and pointed inquiries from Washington that different tactics were called for, Grant responded in a despatch from Spotsylvania Court House on May 11, 1864, "I purpose to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer."

That is really the position we are in at Fallujah now, except that American power is today much more overwhelming against our enemies than Grant's power was to Lee's. And of course, we don't have all summer. We have until June 30, the date when the Iraqis regain sovereignty. We can't leave this mess for them to clean up.

And we won't. The end game at Fallujah is fast approaching.

by Donald Sensing, 4/28/2004 07:47:00 PM. Permalink |

Journalism at its best
. . . is found in about everything that Omaha World-Herald editorialist Geitner Simmons writes. The latest example? This piece on the changing nature of WTO protectionism. Seems the WTO has made a prelim ruling against cotton US cotton subsidies that could have major domestic and international ramifications - here because it could depress midwestern property values and employment pictures, and abroad because of the precedent the ruling sets. It seems that everybody is dirty when it comes to ag subsidies and tariff protectionism, including both Europe and third-world countries. Geitner ties the two realms together most elegantly.

As I have said before, Geitner's blog is one of the undersung jewels of the b'sphere.

by Donald Sensing, 4/28/2004 06:55:00 PM. Permalink |

"The Jittery Fifty"
Armed Liberal responds thoughtfully and carefully to an open letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair by former British ambassadors, high commissioners, governors and senior international officials who "have watched with deepening concern the policies which you have followed on the Arab-Israel problem and Iraq, in close co-operation with the United States."

by Donald Sensing, 4/28/2004 02:51:00 PM. Permalink |

How to choose a digital camera
Digital Photography blog now has a buyer's guide online on buying a digital camera. I posted my own essay on this topic last November, but the pro's post is better and more up to date.

by Donald Sensing, 4/28/2004 02:35:00 PM. Permalink |

Taking Chance Home
A Marine lieutenant colonel tells of escorting home the remains of an Iraq KIA, Pfc. Chance Phelps.

At the restaurant, the table had a flier announcing Chance’s service. Dubois High School gym; two o’ clock. It also said that the family would be accepting donations so that they could buy flak vests to send to troops in Iraq.

Read the whole thing, really.

by Donald Sensing, 4/27/2004 10:18:00 PM. Permalink |

Resenting the Crusades
"Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state and feckless appeaser who helped get us into this mess, said last week Muslims still resent the Crusades. Well, Madam Albright, if Westerners were not such a forgiving people, we might resent them too."

by Donald Sensing, 4/27/2004 09:55:00 PM. Permalink |

I wish I was a poet
Like Vanderleun.

by Donald Sensing, 4/27/2004 09:51:00 PM. Permalink |

Primers on Just War theory
I just discovered a site called The Just Cause that has a compendium of readings upholding the centuries-old Western traditions and theology of just war. I haven't read it very much yet, but it seems very good to me so far.

by Donald Sensing, 4/27/2004 05:26:00 PM. Permalink |

United Methodist Women supports unrestricted abortion
The United Methodist Women is an official body of the United Methodist Church. Last autumn the Board of Directors of the UM Women’s Division voted to donate $5,000 to co-sponsor the "March for Women's Lives" in Washington, D.C. Observed the Good News renewal movement of the church,

United Methodism opposes birth control abortions, the March for Women’s Lives does not. United Methodism opposes gender selection abortions, the March for Women’s Lives does not. United Methodism opposes partial birth abortions, the March for Women’s Lives does not.

Despite United Methodism's opposition to the vast majority of abortions being performed in the United States, the Women’s Division has chosen to drag our denomination into a narrow, rancorous, and divisive political agenda. It would be fair to say that local UMW units are not raising money to send to New York in order to support this kind of activity.

No, they are not, I assure you. I am a member of United Methodist Women, btw; all pastors of the denomination are automatically members.

by Donald Sensing, 4/27/2004 05:16:00 PM. Permalink |

News of the weird - the really weird

Grandma gives birth to own grandchildren

Twins were delivered yesterday at Vanderbilt University Medical Center by 53-year-old Barbara Brennan, who served as a surrogate mother for her daughter, Lynne Bevins, and son-in-law Phil Bevins of Knoxville.

Woman marries herself

WASHINGTON, March 12 (UPI) -- For Jennifer Hoes, a Dutch student, May 28 will be a doubly exciting day. She'll turn 30, and she'll be a blushing bride -- plus her own groom. In the Trouwzaal, or wedding room, of the City Hall of Haarlem in the Netherlands, Jennifer will marry herself.

Bedecked in a wedding gown studded with 200 perfect latex copies of her own nipples, Jennifer will appear before Ruud Grondel, Haarlem's registrar, and promise to "love, respect and honor" herself in good times and in bad, according to Dutch and German newspaper reports. ...

To be sure, Jennifer's auto-marriage will be a secular event. But, rest assured, it won't be long before some churches and synagogues will give such unions their blessing. To paraphrase Malcolm Muggeridge, there is no cause mad enough not to enlist the services of demented clergymen strumming their guitars.

But not all:

Seen from the monotheistic perspective, Jennifer's "marriage" is the quintessence of idolatry; it is a bow before what Christopher Hershman, a pastor and psychologist in Allentown, Pa., calls the "postmodern Trinity": Me, Myself and I.

I am trying to think of some snappy comment, but folks, I just can't.

by Donald Sensing, 4/27/2004 05:03:00 PM. Permalink |

The Church of Wal-Mart lingerie
Michael Williams cites Florida lay minister Doug Giles, who observes,

Have you ever asked yourself, “Self … why do churches today look more like the lingerie department at Wal-Mart, than a battalion of men poised to plunder the powers of darkness?” Why do men avoid going to church, and what can be done about it? ...

- Enough with the Precious Moments prints and figurines - okay? How about decking out the sanctuary with serious transcendent art work that stops us in our tracks, rather than ubiquitous prints of fat baby angels who look like they’ve got a good buzz going from too much Mountain Dew and children’s aspirin?

- Lose the Church’s “I’m in therapy for ever” feel. Yes, yes, we’re all a work in progress but the co-dependant, extended womb the Church has wrongfully created has allowed congregants to not get a life because of some difficult doo-doo in their lives. Sure life’s hard, little Sally, and the sooner, we celebrate the struggle the quicker we will draw men back to our houses of worship.

As they say, read the whole thing. And I invite you to take a look at my own relevant essay, "The metrosexual Jesus - Would you trust your eternity to this guy? Neither would I.

by Donald Sensing, 4/27/2004 08:34:00 AM. Permalink |

The progression of violence
Hearken back to October 2001. The American air campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan began Oct. 7. By November, the media were a-twitter with warnings that military action in the country had to stop for the Muslim holy season of Ramadan. Reported ABC News,

There is growing concern that attacks by non-Muslim states could aggravate simmering anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world. Pakistan, in particular, has been struggling to contain a tide of sympathy for the Taliban, which has portrayed the U.S. attack as a war against Islam.

"It's an issue in practical terms, it's a period of heightened spirituality, and of course people's sensibilities are more acute at those times, so it could have consequences if it is still going on at that time," says Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the New Jersey-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

The consequences, of course, turned out that the Taliban lost much sooner than they would have if we had halted the attacks. To be fair to ABC, its story also quoted another CAIR spokesman thus,

"For Muslims, it is a non-issue. It is a holy month, but Muslims traditionally have fought during Ramadan," says Nihad Awad, executive director of CAIR.

Even so, American and British senior officials went on the record as taking the idea of a Ramadan pause seriously, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, for example. The concern, you see, was for the sensitivities of the fabled "Arab street."

Such concerns have gone a-glimmering two and a half years later. Reporting on yesterday's fierce firefight in Fallujah between US Marines and insurgents, CNN reported,

Also, there was a mosque ... here; it had a minaret 50 to 60 feet high. Marine commanders say they were taking sniper fire from that minaret.

That minaret has now been leveled by U.S. military ordnance, missiles and mortars. There's nothing left at all of that minaret. ...

It is only the West that has sensitivities about shooting up mosques or other houses of worship. Western sensitivities are only skin deep. Churches were routinely destroyed by all sides in Europe in World War II. See, for example director John Huston's classic documentary of the war, "The Battle of San Pietro." The film shows the blasted shell of a church with an ironic voice-over, "Note the interesting treatment of the chancel." The chancel had been treated with high explosive.

But the exclusion of houses of worship from combat has no history in Islam. While it is certainly true that few Muslims would wish their mosques to be riddled with gunfire or bombed, the paradigm that mosques or churches or synagogues are off limits to battle purely because of their status as worship houses is not present.

In April 2002 many dozens of Palestinian gunmen invaded the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem to escape Israeli soldiers. Most of the Western press immediately trumpeted that they were seeking sanctuary in accordance with the ancient tradition that no one can be arrested in a church. Which is to say, we were told that they wanted the protection of the Church corporate, not merely shelter afforded by its walls. A fair number of my pastoral colleagues were quite sure of this in my conversations with them. (The Vatican, always eager to oppose Israel, naturally took the side of the invaders.) In fact, the gunmen sought to turn the church into their fortress.

Remember also that more than once last year (link, link) that terrorists have fought Saudi police in the city of Mecca itself, the entire city being sacred to Muslims, not just a mosque therein.

International law of war holds that houses of worship are off limits both to attack and to militarization. That is, all belligerent forces are obliged to take positive measures to ensure their actions do not damage the sites. It is equally prohibited for any force, including the side that owns the site, to militarize a protected site. Using it as a sniper post does that. By treaty, militarization of a protected site removes its protection and it may be attacked by the other side with legal impunity.

The natural progression of war is toward greater and greater violence. Two and one-half years ago we were worrying at the national-command level about dropping bombs during Ramadan. Today a local commander on the ground in Fallujah flattens part of a mosque without a moment's hesitation.

Endnote: Some may observe that the concept of sanctuary is indeed found in ancient Near East tradition, citing 1 Kings 1:50-53 as proof. A pretender to Solomon's throne, Adonijah, fled from Solomon by entering the tent of the Lord (a proto-Temple) and grasping the altar. Solomon bargained with him, but the event ended with Solomon's soldiers arresting Adonijah at the altar.

Adonijah's ally, a general named Joab, later fled to grasp the altar as well. After refusing to surrender to Solomon, Solomon ordered him slain on the spot. So Joab was killed by the sword as he grasped the altar.

These passages certainly do not support the idea that immunity from arrest or attack in a religious sanctuary has biblical warrant.

by Donald Sensing, 4/27/2004 08:09:00 AM. Permalink |

The lighter side

Casanova has nothing to worry about:




A little too diverse, maybe?




If the plaintiff is very patient, he'll get it all back




A match made in heaven




A good home for, oh, an hour!




Oh, and we really miss her, too!



by Donald Sensing, 4/27/2004 07:03:00 AM. Permalink |

Euro-Muslims call for jihad
Some immigrant Muslims in Britain and the continent are calling for its Islamization and a jihad to make it so.

They are mostly young men, urged on by a few firebrand clerics such as Abu Hamza or Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammad, both of whom call for holy war against Prime Minister Blair and British society generally.

"All Muslims of the West will be obliged," [Mohammed] said, to "become his sword" in a new battle. Europeans take heed, he added, saying, "It is foolish to fight people who want death - that is what they are looking for."

But the older Muslim generation is less than entranced.

"I think these kids are being brainwashed by a few radical clerics," said Akhbar Dad Khan, another elder of the Central Mosque. He wants them prosecuted or deported. "We should be able to control this negativity," he said.

Only a small percentage of the young men enthralled by the jihadist preaching will accept being recruited into the cells that law-enforcement agencies know are being formed, and fewer still will actually become active. But terrorism doesn't take many. British investigators arrested nine Pakistani-Britons in late March and confiscated more than a half-ton of bomb materials.

by Donald Sensing, 4/26/2004 01:34:00 PM. Permalink |

Tennessee cops to carry hunting rifles

Not an "assault weapon" says Tennessee Highway Patrol:



From a local radio (AM 1510) news spot just now: The Tennessee Highway Patrol has procured a number of Bushmaster 5.56mm rifles. The THP spokesman in the sound bite was at pains to point out these are semi-automatic firearms, "just like the pistols we carry on our hip," and that the Bushmasters are basically no different from a hunting rifle. "These are not assault weapons," he declared.

So there you have it. The Tennessee Highway Patrol is arming itself with hunting rifles.

by Donald Sensing, 4/26/2004 01:09:00 PM. Permalink |

The right to kill the next generation
Michael Williams has an interesting insight: almost all the women activists demonstrating in the nation's capital for abortion on demand are well past child-bearing age. He gives several examples, then,

Where are the young women pushing for the right to kill their babies? The abortion lobby/industry is a movement made up of old women who don't represent the future of America. Surveys indicate that abortion is losing acceptance among women as the bitter boomers die off and are replaced by younger, saner generations of women.

My eyebrows arched when I read what marcher Carole Mehlman, 68, said.

"I just had to be here to fight for the next generation and the generation after that," she said. "We cannot let them take over our bodies, our health care, our lives."

Think that through. She says is is fighting for the next generation and the cause she is fighting for is the unhindered right to kill the next generation.

by Donald Sensing, 4/26/2004 12:54:00 PM. Permalink |

Old folks and cars
I spent several hours today helping my parent buy a new car. They had been looking for a few months, but not very hard. With the weather turning warm and the golf course calling my dad, the need for a second car became more pressing.

They finally settled this afternoon on a 2004 Toyota Camry XLE with leather, JBL sound, moonroof and side-curtain airbags. Nice car. But that's not the point.

The point is the experience made me wonder why auto makers don't do better research on what senior citizens really need in a car. Seniors generally have more money than any other demographic, and will spend it on a car that meets their needs.

Yesterday when my mom was at the dealer (I wasn't there) she happened to see a Toyota Matrix in the showroom. This car is almost identical with the Pontiac Vibe, btw, which should tell you who its market demographic is.

My mom sat inside and loved it. Why? Not the looks or the rather off-putting dash, but the fact the because it sits higher than a sedan, it was easy to get in and out. All she had to do to get in was pivot, sit down, pivot and to get out reverse it.

When people reach their mid-seventies, like my parents, they often find that formerly simple tasks such as getting in and out of a car are no longer so simple. A typical sedan's seating is too low to be comfortably negotiated, especially getting out.

But that's only one aspect of their needs. They also tend to need power-adjustable seats, a mere convenience for folks my age but a real necessity for them. Manipulating small knobs or reaching for underseat levers can be a challenge for the elderly. Likewise they need power locks and windows, easy-to-reach controls that are easy to handle, excellent outward visibility, and easy-to-read gages. Non-gripping fabric or better yet, leather, are desirable because it doesn't hinder them moving their legs getting in and out.

All of these things are available on many cars or SUVs mid-size and bigger. But most post-retirement-age men and especially women (who outnumber the men) also need vehicles that are easy to park. Especially do they want to see the corners of the vehicle and be able to maneuver it handily in crowded parking lots. Anything bigger than the midsize SUV Toyota Highlander is just too big. And the Highlander is often too high - if the problem with sedans is that senior have to climb down too much to get it, they have to climb up too much for midsize and larger SUVs.

I have not found a single small SUV that had all these features, even as options. That category is "youth market" and the imperative there is sporty panache and relatively low cost. But let me tell you, automakers, I think if you sold a vehicle of comparable type with the all convenience features seniors need, you'd make a lot of the old folks very happy. Just a thought.

by Donald Sensing, 4/24/2004 07:43:00 PM. Permalink |

Eli Manning, meet Pat Tillman
Timing, they say, is everything, Eli. You ain't got it.

Number one NFL draft pick Eli Manning threw a hissy fit over the prospect of being drafted by the league's taildrager, the San Diego Chargers. He even threatened to sit out next season if the Chargers insisted on drafting him instead of trading him away.

John Elway pulled this stunt in 1983 rather than go play for the Baltimore Colts. The Colts stood fast and Elway played minor-league baseball for a year, then was traded to the Denver Broncos.

The difference between Elway in 1983 and Manning in 2004?

Former Arizona Cardinals starter Pat Tillman, an Army Ranger sergeant, killed in action three days ago in Afghanistan.

Talk about a poor sense of timing. Manning couldn't time a three-minute egg. The contrast between the two football stars is stark. Manning was petulant, nearly juvenile, sniveling over which team will pay him millions of dollars to throw an air-filled bladder. With publicity carefully engineered by dad Archie, Eli has revealed himself as nothing but a self-centered, spoiled brat.

Eli Manning, please remember Pat Tillman. Tillman who walked away from millions to enlist as a private in the US Army, refused publicity and interviews, served in combat in Iraq and again in the 'Stan, where he died defending your freedom to play football unmolested by Islamofascist terrorists, who want to kill you as surely as you breathe.

It's not a shining day for the Manning legacy. But I don't think they realize it or would care if they did.

by Donald Sensing, 4/24/2004 06:24:00 PM. Permalink |

Kerry's Navy fitness reports, revisited
Doug Dryden, a former Navy officer, emailed me about John Kerry's fitness reports of his naval service that he posted online earlier this week:

The records are unremarkable & show a typical naval officer of that age & grade (other than the references to his yachting ability & refinement). I was an approximate contemporary of his rank & time, & my FITREPs read much the same.

The recommendation for accelerated promotion to Lieutenant (j.g.) is somewhat of a joke. It is equivalent to promotion from Second Lieutenant to First Lieutenant in the Army or Marines (note: reference to him having been a First Lieutenant aboard the USS Gridley refers to his billet, not his rank), & is a practical impossibility. Such recommendations were rather widespread precisely because they were impossible - it was sort of a kiss on the cheek from the CO.

I am curious, though, about his serving only four months in-country, & the severity of his wounds for the Purple Heart. I do not dispute that he fulfilled the technical requirements for the awards, but if your earlier story is valid about his first award, & it is true that he lost no time as a result of his wounds, it does call to question an abuse of the system in relation to others who had more clearly distinguished wounds.

As a comparison, I remember a time as a junior officer when I was cross-assigned to an Army unit which was a true field unit. After several months of duty with my contemporaries in fatigues (now called BDUs), we had to clean up & wear our class A uniforms with ribbons for the visit of some VIP & his horse-holders, allowing us to see each other for the first time with our qualifications. I did a triple-take when I noticed that one of my cohorts, whom I respected greatly due to his obvious skill & modesty, was wearing a Purple Heart with three bronze oak leaf clusters.

"Frank," I said, "you were wounded FOUR times?"

He replied, "Well, actually seven, but three don't really count."

My lesson with him & others I admired was that the real heroes don't talk about themselves & their exploits. They have earned the confidence that comes with knowing that they are content with themselves & their accomplishments, & they didn't have to tell anyone to pump themselves up. It's the quiet ones who are the pros, not the ones freshly graduated from one of our snake-eating schools who have to eat glass & preen.

In contrast, Kerry can't seem to shut up about it. It's as if he's exploiting his honour, in contrast to others who may have paid a dearer price. It bothers me that he has to make almost constant reference to his service in Viet Nam - a more mature man wouldn't feel the need.

I'm also more concerned that he's pumping up his fellow veterans after declaring practically all of them to be guilty of war crimes & atrocities. If he thinks he can appeal to me as a veteran, he can forget it.

So there you have another perspective to mine that I won't elaboate on. As I pointed out in my post, I was an Army officer, not Navy, my time on active duty came years later. So I would trust Doug's evaluation of the records more than mine. I should have caught the part about early promotion from ensign to Lt. j.g., though, as Doug is quite right. There is no such thing as early promotion to any rank below major (Navy: Lieutenant Commander), so a "kiss on the cheek" is about all that really is.

by Donald Sensing, 4/24/2004 04:24:00 PM. Permalink |

"... a dangerous idiot who only thinks in black and white."
David Kaspar says that a German reporter "has reached the ultimate climax of biased reporting." And he's right.

by Donald Sensing, 4/23/2004 12:56:00 PM. Permalink |

Arrivals of KIA at Dover
Yesterday one of the major news stories was the publication hundreds of photos on The Memory Hole showing the arrival of coffins at Dover AFB, Del. Thye coffins, of course, contained the remains of American troops who died overseas. (Memory Hole's server is apparently overwhelmed and offline for now.)

The stuff really hit the fan. Years ago media coverage of arrivals of KIA was de rigeur and used by presidents from Carter through Bush 41 to garner public support for brief wars or actions. The arrivals were media events more than anything else. But the military put on a show for the media: full honor guards and cordon, muffled drums, flag-draped coffins, flags flying, etc.

In August 1990, eight months after then last such event, Saddam Hussein rolled into Kuwait and Bush 41 began actions that culminated in the Gulf War. I was stationed at the Pentagon at the time; preliminary casualty estimates of American KIA ranged up to four thousand. We thought that the Iraqi army would fight us at least as hard as they had fought the Iranians in the 1980s. The defensive positions the Iraqis had built along the border were good and would have been tough to crack had they been well defended (they weren't).

Not long before we launched offensive action in January 1991, the word came down that arrival ceremonies would not be conducted. I imagine the reason was because of the high casualty estimates. Not only would the images of returning dead be potentially overwhelming; the logistic burden at Dover AFB itself would have been immense. The base simply could not have afforded to halt other air traffic while ceremonies were held and covered by the media. There were also other commitments for the joint-service unit of honor guards - they are busy year round for other missions.

No one I knew in the military was sorry to see the ceremonies stopped. Dover is merely a stop along the way of the service member's last trip.

The photos released to Memory Hole were not shots of normal arrivals. They are photos of a real arrival, yes, but the photographer was sent to document the training of an honor guard. The Air Force still has the requirement to conduct honor arrival ceremonies on order, so it used this particular plane of coffins to train new airmen and rehearse procedures.

But routine arrivals don't look like that. Blogger Sgt Stryker, who in real life is a ground crew chief of Air Force cargo planes, explained last December what non-ceremonial arrivals are really like. Joe Gandelman has a thoughtful discussion, too.

by Donald Sensing, 4/23/2004 11:06:00 AM. Permalink |

NFL linebacker turned soldier - KIA in Afghanistan

Arkhangel posts that

... former Arizona Cardinals linebacker Pat Tillman, who joined the 75th Ranger Regiment after 9/11, has been killed in action in Afghanistan. For all our concern about Iraq, Afghanistan has truly become the forgotten front.

So why the attention? Well, because Tillman could have chosen to keep making millions in the NFL, but instead, he chose to give that up and serve a higher cause than himself. And now he's paid the ultimate price. Godspeed, man, and may angels sing thee to thy rest.

Tillman was in his fourth year of NFL play when he " shucked it all and joined his brother, Kevin, in setting out to become an Army Ranger" [link]."

"Pat has very deep and true convictions," Cardinals coach Dave McGinnis said at the time. "He's a deep thinker, and believe me, this was something he thought out."

Tillman made no public statement. He wasn't in this for the publicity. But you didn't need to dig too deeply to find an explanation for his actions. Friends said that the 9/11 terrorist attacks had affected him deeply. Cardinals defensive coordinator Larry Marmie, after a conversation with his former player, said Tillman felt he needed to "pay something back" for the comfortable life he had been afforded.

A true patriot, may he rest in peace.

Update: ESPN has reposted its April 2003 article on Tillman's decision to enlist.

by Donald Sensing, 4/23/2004 10:25:00 AM. Permalink |

"Waffles"
Heh! (HT: Justin at Right Side Redux).

by Donald Sensing, 4/22/2004 06:35:00 PM. Permalink |

The draft hypocrites
Conscription as social engineering

Joe Gandelman and other commentators seem to think that a revived draft will somehow compel America's young people to resist the government.

So if it is reinstituted there is a real chance that military issues will meet much more resistance than they do now among youth. The reason: to some, having the option to serve and having to serve determine a political stance -- because personal stakes become higher.

Let me point out - again! - that unless the Congress mandates a larger military, a draft has no point. A draft without a larger Army means that you tell someone who wants to join that s/he cannot in order to induct someone who does not want to serve. Is that the American way? I think not.

There is not a scintilla of evidence that the Congress, for all its rhetoric about needing more troops in Iraq (Sen. McCain today, for example) has the slightest interest in expanding the military enough to make the draft remotely useful to the defense department.

Again, the impetus behind the liberals' (mostly) call for a draft is not national security or military effectiveness. It is social engineering. Kos, for example, wants the draft so that "the burdens of our Democracy [will] be shared by all." I'd like Kos to post how many of his social peer group he has urged to enlist.

But another objective is at play, too: to increase the control of the federal government by making everyone serve the government as part of universal service. "1984," anyone?

No deferments, everyone gets two years of national service and most of them can rebuild the national parks and clean up the inner cities. There are plenty of things that need doing. Only volunteers would enter the military to satisfy national service or any other dangerous job function.

Yeah, let's clean up the national parks with forced labor. Heck, forced labor worked at Dachau; it'll work in Detroit, too. It's amazing that draft proponents complain about low-paid volunteer soldiers (same link) but want to use equally low-paid draftees for "public services."

I'll take conscription proponents' "social-benefit" arguments seriously when the age-eligible ones enlist or, if not age eligible, actively encourage eligible members of their peer groups to enlist. If such a dramatic change is so desirable, lead the way. Otherwise, simple hypocrisy.

Update: Please see my comprehensive posting on the draft. This post is a followup.

Jeff Jarvis attended a press conference with Donald Rumsfeld today and writes what Rummy had to say about the draft. Hint: he's agin' it.

by Donald Sensing, 4/22/2004 05:56:00 PM. Permalink |

How many did Kerry kill?
The BoGlo has a story about the reports (via Glenn) that does not seem terribly balanced to me. Writer Michael Kranish pushes a couple of issues a little too hard. One is the question, again, of how worthy was the wound for which Kerry received his first Purple Heart . Says the Globe:

The Kerry campaign has declined to respond to a question about whether Kerry believed he was hit by enemy fire, and Kerry has been quoted as saying he didn't know where the shrapnel came from.

Set aside the mild controversy over whether this wound was in fact a wound worthy of the P.H. What Kranish is implying, even if accidentally, is that the source of the shrapnel matters. It doesn't. Whether a wound is caused by an enemy's weapon or the boat's bosun's weapon, if it happens during battle it earns the Purple Heart.

For that matter, the injury doesn't have to be caused by a weapon at all. In the Gulf War there was a tank crew shooting up an Iraqi train - a little too closely, as it turned out. A train car full of ammunition exploded, engulfing the tank in the blast and flames, setting the engine compartment afire. The crew abandoned the tank, but in the hurry one of the crewmen smashed his head on one of the dozens of protuberances tanks have sticking out here and there. It gashed his head open. He got a Purple Heart.

The other nit I pick with the Globe's story is over its treatment of a report that credited Kerry with killing 20 enemy. Kranish allows that Kerry himself has never made that claim. The rater concerned, Joseph Streuli, told the Globe he doesn't remember the event.

This is a non-story any way we cut it. Kerry never claimed it and the officer who reported it today disavows knowledge. Were there really 20 enemy killed? With all the importance connected to body counts in those days, and the concomitant exaggerations thereof, it's a wonder the report didn't say he killed 200.

by Donald Sensing, 4/22/2004 03:44:00 PM. Permalink |

Kerry's Navy evaluations by superior officers
For those who may not know, every armed service has a formal program of written evaluations of its officers. Each officer is evaluated by his/her immediate supervisor or commander and also by that person's supervisor. Sometimes there are three evaluators instead of two, but not often.

Variously referred to at "fitness reports" or "efficiency reports," these evaluations are the life or death of an officer's career. Over time, reports become "inflated" - more and more officers get evaluated as the best there are. Call it an amplified "Lake Wobegon effect" for personnel systems: every officer is not merely above average, they are all in the top 10 percent. So the service changes the report format and starts over.

Presidential candidate John Kerry's fitness reports are now online. I was in the Army, not the Navy, so I cannot speak to the naval "culture" of its evaluations. Each service's officers become inculcated with how to write reports certain way - what buzz words are good or bad, what writing style is best, etc. Kerry's reports are also more than 30 years old, and even within the Navy, the evaluation styles and language have changed since they were written. So a Navy officer from their day will no doubt read them differently than I do.

That all said, Kerry's fitness reports strike me as very impressive. One rater wrote explicitly that he should be promoted early, not the sort of compliment senior officers hand out facilely, in the narrative part, at least. While I can't read them and say that he was obviously destined for flag rank had he made a naval career, it does seem pretty clear that he certainly would not have been left behind, either. They are very good reports, the way I read them.

Whether they clearly distinguish him from his peers I can't say because I don't know what kind of inflationary pressures the Navy's fitness reporting was going through at the time. My guess is that these reports did set Kerry a cut above.

The report-inflation problem can be very vexing. By the time a reporting system has been in place a few years, about 75 percent of the reports will read almost identically in terms of praise language of the officer being evaluated. For most of my Army career, the report form had blocks to be checked marked, "promote ahead of peers," "promote with peers," "do not promote" and "other." Pretty quickly it became well understood that any report checked, "promote with peers," was going to be the officer's death knell. So easily 90-percent plus of the reports were marked promote early.

But, as one general officer explained to me, for a rating officer to state in his narrative portion to promote someone early was rare and carried weight only if the rater himself had been promoted early. That may give you some idea of the complexities of writing and reading the reports.

by Donald Sensing, 4/22/2004 02:55:00 PM. Permalink |

Al Qaeda bomber surrenders in Yemen
An al Qaeda operative involved in 2000's attack on USS Cole decided that the 72 virgins will have to wait for him a few years longer. He gave up this week.

by Donald Sensing, 4/22/2004 07:19:00 AM. Permalink |

Three Purple Hearts and not a day of duty lost?
That's what John Kerry's released war records show.

The Navy awarded Mr. Kerry three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star and a Bronze Star in just four months of commanding a gunboat along rivers in Vietnam. It's an extraordinary record, say many veterans, and one that raises questions on its face.

For example, those military records do not show Mr. Kerry ever missing a day of duty for injuries, there is conflict between some of the accounts and Mr. Kerry's presidential campaign still refuses to release some records. ...

Though the campaign released more than 120 pages of Navy records yesterday, Mr. Kerry still refused to release medical records that more thoroughly describe the injuries.

I posted historical and background information about the Purple Heart medal earlier this month.

by Donald Sensing, 4/22/2004 07:00:00 AM. Permalink |

Major terrorist attack foiled in England
Potentially thousands could have been killed, say Brit police

The Sun reported yesterday,

A SUICIDE bomb plot to kill thousands of soccer fans at Saturday’s Manchester United-Liverpool match was dramatically foiled yesterday.

Armed cops seized ten terror suspects in dawn raids.

Intelligence chiefs believe al-Qaeda fanatics planned to blow themselves up amid 67,000 unsuspecting supporters. A source said: “The target was Old Trafford.”

The Islamic fanatics planned to sit all around the ground to cause maximum carnage.

They had already bought the tickets for various positions in the stadium, cops revealed last night.

But armed cops foiled the horrific plot - which could have killed thousands watching Manchester United’s home game against Liverpool on Saturday - in a series of dawn raids yesterday. ...

A police source said: “The plot involved several individual bombers in separate parts of the stadium.

“If successful, any such attack would have caused absolute carnage. Thousands of people could have been killed.”

The planned attack would have had an instant global impact as the game is being televised worldwide.

There was no information released as to the amount of explosives the terrorists would have used. HT: Kim du Toit

Update: More info here; police are officially mum on the details above.

by Donald Sensing, 4/21/2004 10:10:00 PM. Permalink |

A bad idea is a bad idea
Reviving the draft - back again

Early last year, US Rep. Charlie Rangel introduced legislation to revive conscription. It never made it out of committee. Neither did similar legislation introduced by three Republican members.

Now US Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Vietnam War draftee, wants to restart the draft, too, though he admits that it won't happen this year or even next. But he says that the military manpower requirements for the outyears seem too high to reply purely on volunteerism to man the armed forces. (If so, then why is he proposing that draftees have the choice of entering either the military or another federal service than the armed forces?)

I have been writing for almost two years that the military, especially the Army, is too small and needs to be expanded. If a majority of Congress' members agree, then all they have to do is legislate an increase, fund it and direct the services to step up their recruiting efforts. Recruiting among all the armed forces is going very well. In 2002 the Army, for example, met its annual recruiting goal after 46 weeks. 2003 was on goal also and 106 percent of the reenlistment goal was met that year by the Army. 2004 is on track.

Don't forget that the Cold War military was hundreds of thousands larger, and after 1973 wholly volunteer. The first years of the all-vol force were less than stellar, but the last 23 years have been excellent.

There is no reasonable doubt that if Congress authorized the military to expand, the numbers needed could be recruited. I am sure that Congress knows it. Besides, James Joyner explains and cites why the real potential recruiting and retention problems will be in the Reserve and Guard (collectively, the "Reserve Component"). And as James explains, the solution to that problem is mostly restructuring, partly financial - but not conscription.

So, remembering the adage that "the issue isn't really the issue," what are the real reasons some pols want to restart conscription?

For Rangel it is simply that the Army is too black and not enough white people are being killed in battle, proportionately to blacks. Also, he said he hoped a draft or a lot of talk about the draft would harm President Bush's administration. Here are the sub-ideas I think are at work.

1. National service is good for you.
Both Rangel's and Hagel's respective plans provide for draftees to select and alternative service to the military. This fact tells me that national security is not the real point (and Rangel, to give him credit, never claimed it is).

Underlying this idea is a now-pervasive notion that American kids today have it too soft. They don't have a sense of mission, purpose or commitment to classic American ideals: public mindedness, sacrifice for the greater good, civic participation.

I see no evidence offered to back this claim up, even from those who make it (for example, this guy). Even if true - which I do not accept - just how did eliminating the draft in 1973 cause the problem, and how will its renewal solve it?

The heart of this argument is that today's kids are problems who have to be solved - for their own good. By the government, of course.

This argument is nothing but the secular equivalent of posting the Ten Commandments in public schools, a totem to make the proponents think they are doing something substantive when they aren't.

The problems with today's kids, if problems there are, don't spring from too little government intervention in their lives. Before we impress them into involuntary servitude, a hard look at our social and local institutions is in order, especially our churches, schools and families.

2. Service today makes leaders tomorrow

Over the years many commentators have remarked that fewer and fewer members of Congress or of government in general have military experience. But this fact, as a basis for renewing the draft, is irrelevant. There's no evidence at all that draftee privates make better members of Congress - or university presidents or cabinet secretaries or Wall Street bankers many years later.

Draftee-level service is not training for national-level leadership. The kind of education and knowledge needed at the national-policy level for the uses of the military either to preserve the nation or advance its goals is not the kind that will ever be learned by draftees or short-term volunteers. In the military education system, noncommissioned officers really never get training oriented toward national policy, at least not in any significant degree, and officers get none until Command and General Staff College - and then only concerning the structure of the national military establishment. Theory education, the philosophy of American way of war, pondering what a military is for in America and studies of the limits and uses of military power do not come until the War College and later schools. But only career officers attend those schools, and not all of them.

Veterans' records are decidedly mixed. Veterans who actually served in combat are not necessarily better or wiser civilian controllers of the military later in life. Former Republican Senator Bob Dole and Democrat Senator Daniel Inouye are both WW II combat veterans with distinguished service. Maybe their wisdom about military affairs was enhanced by their service, but we really have no way to know. Many non-vets have proved pretty smart, too. Abe Lincoln is often offered as a foremost example, since he had six weeks of active duty, total, and spent almost all of it sitting in a tent in bivouac.

President Lyndon Johnson: can you say, "quagmire?" He was a WW II Navy veteran.

Robert McNamara: Johnson's secretary of defense was an Air Force veteran. He was the architect of America's agonies is Vietnam.

Jimmy Carter: US Naval Academy graduate, Navy officer, and architect of the disastrous Agreed Framework with North Korea in 1994, which haunts us today. The "hollow Army" also came to being during his terms as president.

Woodrow Wilson: No military experience, but during his term the United States decisively defeated Imperial German forces; it was the peace afterward that Wilson mismanaged.

Harry S Truman: An Army artillery officer and combat veteran during WW I, he saw WW II to a successful conclusion. The Marshall Plan saved western Europe under his administration, but he also let conventional forces degenerate pitifully. He mismanaged the Korean War at great cost to American blood and treasure.

John F. Kennedy: A WW II Navy combat vet, Kennedy well handled the Cuban Missile Crisis but also started America's long tragic slide into Vietnam.

Ronald Reagan: Made training films in WW II, no other military experience. Materially ensured the defeat of Soviet forces in Afghanistan, masterminded the downfall of the USSR.

Overall, the national-security record of veterans in office is mixed at best, and so is that of non-vets. It's no basis for starting the draft.

A draft would achieve low density results a great expense. Even if I grant that a term as a private in the Army by draftees would have a beneficial effect on national policy years down the line - and I do not think so - the number of men actually drafted would be a small percentage of those eligible, and the number of men who would rise to national leadership would be much smaller still. We could wind up spending literally billions of dollars in increased costs to garner a single draftee turned Senator. Does that make sense?

The US Census data for 2000 show that there are approximately 7,900,000 men aged 18-21 inclusive, the prime years for a draft. This number will stay fairly stable for at least a decade. Drafting a half-million men per year (I'll not address whether women should be drafted) takes only 6.3 percent of the eligibles. Of that 500,000 men, a significant number will not successfully complete their term; even in the all-volunteer force, perhaps one-fourth to one-third do not. Draftees may be expected to have a higher failure rate, call it 40 percent, charitably. That 40 percent presumably would not offer a national-class benefit later in life.

Of the remaining 300,000 men, how many would later rise to national-level leadership? No one can say. Some would, of course, but the presumption that their influence would be very great is not founded on anything, really, but the example of WW II vets - of which there were 16 million, all who served within a four-year span. I say that the experiences and contributions of that generation are historically unique: the Great Depression shaped their character as much as the war (Marine Okinawa veteran William Manchester made this point in Goodbye Darkness) and after the war the G.I. Bill shaped it at least as much also. To expect that their model would hold true today is more imagination than well grounded conclusion.

All these new troops would have to be paid, trained, housed, equipped, transported and fed. Many of them would be married; more than half the enlisted force is married now. Family-support costs would skyrocket. In the Army alone, the present basing infrastructure won't support such an expansion. The present unit structure won't support it. To reactivate old units whose colors are now furled would take years because those units would be useless without vehicles, ammunition, weapons and countless thousands of items of other equipment. The Air Force and Navy have similar problems concerning ships, aircraft and bases.

None of that can be manufactured quickly, unless substantial sectors of the civilian economy are converted to war manufacture as was done in World War II. You can bet that no proponent of the draft envisions that! A draft's startup costs alone would be astronomical and the annual recurring costs would be exorbitant also - all for the unreasonable expectation that the armed forces would be better off or would in later years make better national leaders.

Many of these costs, of course, would have to be incurred with any kind of expansion, draftee or not. But I don't hear anyone on the talking head circuit addressing this side of the issue.

What about combat effectiveness? The average age of enlisted soldiers today is about 26, maybe a little higher. This means that the average Joe has several years of service under his belt. The experience such long service brings is priceless. All volunteers, they chose the service. But draftees won't choose the service by definition. The personnel turnover at the junior-enlisted grades will be immense. Combat effectiveness will be harmed.

My solution? Restructure first, reassess and then expand the services using volunteers if expansion is needed.

by Donald Sensing, 4/21/2004 09:48:00 PM. Permalink |

Al Qaeda kills 17 Iraqi schoolchildren
A bomb attack in Basra, in the British zone, killed 17 schoolchildren and 51 other people. The city's mayor blamed the attack on al Qaeda. The children burned to death in their schoolbus. AP has posted video.

Update: Bill Hobbs wants to know where is Iraq's Wyatt Earp?

by Donald Sensing, 4/21/2004 05:12:00 PM. Permalink |

Yeah, the smile's nice, but has he had his rabies shots?




Hey, I'll spend $999,000, but not a darn million!




Every pastor should use this guy to comfort the family!




Stupid crooks, part gazillion



by Donald Sensing, 4/20/2004 09:46:00 PM. Permalink |

Humanitarian update
From the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR):

Sudan: Pray for Peace
In the impoverished and embattled savannah borderlands between Sudan and Chad, 750,000 persons have fled from their burning, looted villages, Reuters reported this week. Aid agencies, including UMCOR, are providing blankets, seeds and tools to people camping in the open air or in public buildings. Please pray for peace in this troubled region.

Liberia: Fighters Disarm
Fighters from rebel groups in Liberia began turning in guns this week. A Reuters report says that about 40,000 people are expected to disarm in the next weeks. Disarmament--and the reintegration into society that will follow--are essential to ending the cycle of violence. Liberia's 14-year war has left more than 200,000 people dead. UMCOR will operate a new demobilization camp for ex-combatants, a term for fighting forces and the people who accompanied them, such as cooks and messengers. UMCOR will administer health screening and provide activities that will prepare participants for next steps in their return to their communities.

Mexico: Widespread Flooding Affects Piedras Negras Area
Texas United Methodists are responding to needs in Mexico for water, diapers, formula and other supplies following severe storms that put Piedras Negras under water earlier this month and killed 36 people. Heavy rains and floodwaters damaged homes and jeopardized young residents of an orphanage in the border town. UMCOR has sent a grant to the eastern conference of Iglesia Metodista de Mexico to support clean-up efforts. New Resources: "Multiplying Hope" and "A Place Where You Can Serve"

UMCOR provides emergency relief in many areas of the world. To find out more about UMCOR's ministries please visit the website: http://gbgm-umc.org/umcor/ . You can donate to any project by placing a contribution in the offering plate at a local United Methodist church; by sending a check to UMCOR, 475 Riverside Dr., Room 330, New York, NY 10115; or by calling 1-800-554-8583, where credit card donations are accepted.

And, please pray for those who are hungry, displaced, sick or in poverty because of these and other natural and human-made disasters, and for the workers who minister to them.

by Donald Sensing, 4/20/2004 08:57:00 PM. Permalink |

KIA
I received this email from the office of the Tennessee Conference of the United Methodist Church this afternoon:

Sgt. Jonathan Hartman, US Army - 1st Armored Brigade, has been killed in Iraq. He is the nephew of Ray & Elaine Hartman. Ray is on staff at Shelbyville First UMC (Murfreesboro District) and is a candidate for ministry.

I do not know the Hartmans, but I'll send appropriate sympathies.

The son of a couple who are very close friends of ours is a Marine infantry corporal. He is due home shortly on leave before heading to Afghanistan to join the hunt for bin Laden. His mother's dad was a Tarawa Marine.

My eldest son reports to Parris Island for boot camp on June 14. He will be a tank crewman. The war is getting closer and closer.

by Donald Sensing, 4/20/2004 08:47:00 PM. Permalink |

How do I scorn thee? Let me count the ways.
I hardly know where to begin heaping ridicule on a story in this morning's Tennessean newspaper, "How do [lottery] players select numbers?" This is the paper's lead story for today - center column, color photos, above the fold on 1A. Get the lead of the lead story:

The love may be gone, but Elsa Childers thinks her five ex-husbands may help her get rich some day.

She enlists them every time she chooses numbers for Powerball tickets. So far, they've been pretty good to her with out-of-state lottery wins.

''I use all the dates of my divorces and their birthdays,'' said Childers, a gas station cashier who lives in Nashville. ''I've just always done it.''

She was one of thousands of people buying tickets yesterday, the first day Powerball tickets were sold in Tennessee.

Now you know why heaping ridicule on news media for mathematic and scientific illiteracy has become so easy, and so necessary. So far, Elsa claimed to the credulous reporter, choosing numbers based on dates associated with her ex-husbands has "been pretty good to her" in lotteries elsewhere.

Perhaps the reporters might have asked her just what "pretty good" meant when she is still a gas station attendant? Don't misunderstand: Elsa's job is honorable work. I do not scoff at it. I do scoff at this completely non-news story. I'd let it pass if it appeared on page 14C. But this story is the most important one the paper has today, as this PDF rendering of the front page confirms.

There's no there there.

But no, I am not clueless about what is really going on here. The point of this feature isn't to inform the public about picking lottery numbers - wholly contentless subject. It is to sell papers to superstitious gamblers. When I was part of a group attempting to halt Tennessee's slide into lottery legalization, my research revealed that gamblers - yes, the lottery is gambling - are always looking for a "system" to beat the odds. Based on my years of living in lottery-ridden Virginia, I predicted then that a lottery here would turn the news media into lottery pimps. I was right.

So a story about how other gamblers pick their numbers? Maybe I'll learn something, thinks a gambler, and s/he buys the paper. The issue is that newspapers get killed on lottery coverage by TV and radio. Tonight's winning numbers will be broadcast at 10 p.m. on every TV news show, but won't appear in the paper until tomorrow morning.

So the paper has to lure readers another way. Junk journalism is how.

Update: Chris emails, "Are there really people who would dispute that" the lottery is gambling? Well, yes, there are. Lots of them. Gamblers are not only superstitious, they are usually deep in denial. And the lottery, note well, never promotes itself as gambling. No, indeed: it is an "education" lottery or "entertainment." I know many people who have played the lottery regularly and tell me sincerely that they are not gambling. It's "just for fun."

by Donald Sensing, 4/20/2004 08:20:00 PM. Permalink |

"... the preachers weren't teaching the golden rule today."
from a Chaplain serving in Iraq

This email was sent to a member of my church, who forwarded it to me. It was written on April 9, Good Friday. No commentary from me; it stands on its own.

Hot and sunny on Good Friday...quiet in Fallujah and Ar Ramadi. The Coalition has announced a pause in offensive operations. Humanitarian aid is being searched and then allowed into the city of Fallujah. Defensive operations continue 24/7.it is all war, all the time.

The bad guys are regrouping. So are the Marines. The brawl will begin again...probably tonight. All intel points to the bad guys redistributing ammo, enlisting kids in the fight and moving for new cover. Convoys are limited..danger of ambush is high. Life in Blue Diamond continues, with an edge.

Imagine a place the size of Lakeland Shores with 5 times the population. One asphalt street, two dirt roads. Due to the siege..no sanitation service for three day..that includes pumping satellites...We are on the edge of the town..we see the minirets of the city and we hear the Immams sermons as they rail against us....good thing few here understand Arabic cause I can tell you the preachers weren't teaching the golden rule today. Morale, sky high...extra intensity..friends are on the line. the senior NCO's and officers here, feel the pull the most. They have served with or trained everyone on the line..The Corps is a small community. This is very personal.


If a person can do something to help the outcome of the fight..they'll find a way..it's that kind of day..all for one, one for all. I divide the day; Holy Week service planning, convoy prayers, and COC intercessory prayers.

First, I go to the DIV Chaplain office to meet with the command Chaplain, Chaplain Divine..the fighting Irishman. What a man. RC Christians...be proud..you've got a great priest here. He spares nothing to get to his Marines. He loves Marines and he loves God. He waded into Ar Ramadi during the fire fight, three days ago...to provide ministry at the aid station...came back weary but satisfied he was where he was needed. He's on the road, to all the FOB's ministering to Marines. I had the privilege of praying for him, this morning. If he goes down the morale in this Division would take a huge hit. They love him.

Second, I work to coordinate Good Friday, Easter Sunrise and Protestant Easter Service. Having services in a war zone is a little different.

A)we have to worry about getting large numbers of people in one place. One mortar round into the right place and you could kill alot of marines.

B)organists are in sort supply and we don't have an organ. Music?

C)We are going to worship and it will be well attended...we need Easter..because we live in the valley of the shadow of death..we need the resurrection.

Third, twice a day I go to the 'Cave'..the combat operations center..which is housed in a former palace..poorly lit and the hub of fighting the battle...

I stand in the corner and pray for each person/position and those they represent. I don't know many of them, but God does. I pray for wisdom, strength, mercy, endurance and God's presence for each warrior all those they serve or represent. I cover the Cave and the battle field as I look at live imagery projected on the wall.

I don't know how the marines do it..but the COC is loaded with strack looking Marines. The senior NCO's all look like NFL lineman. The junior officers look like marathon runners and the mid-grade officers look like NFL halfbacks...the senior officers are lean, tanned and serious..deadly serious.

The place exudes the warrior spirit. If you are a civilian I can't explain it and won't apologize for it. If you are a veteran you don't need to have it explained..the warrior spirit. These Marines are in a street fight. They don't have the word 'lose' in their vocabulary.

They've been bloodied and their anger is up. The intensity in the COC is contagious. This is a tribe of warriors. They exist to close with and destroy the enemy. They have their tribal mores, rituals and rites. Their enemy has desecrated members of the tribe and taunted the marines. They've asked for a fight. The marines are in full pursuit and absolutely determined to annihilate their foe.

I'm sure that sounds harsh to politically correct ears and those for whom this type of violence is anachronistic. It does not sound foreign here...it is status quo. We are in a violent land, with an evil element and they are having violence visited upon them. There is no room here for half measures.

This is a test of wills...one side will prevail. That is clearly understood and never discussed..it is obvious. We aren't playing paintball..we are at war.

Fourth, Convoy prayers...convoys go out of here regularly. I hunt them down.. pass out a small card with a convoy prayer on it and then gather whoever wants to pray and we pray. The number of prayers is going up,hourly, as the ambushes continue.

Here's how intense it has become..today's standard preconvoy brief now includes the following: "If you drive into the kill zone..two options..drive through and on, or reverse and drive out. Do not stop. If you are blocked into the kill zone..displace from the vehicle, find cover, fix the target, engage, manuever and destroy the hostileforces. Target selection..rules have changed... avoid civilians, if possible. Hostile forces are now using civilians as shields. We are not interested in losing more Marines. If you can avoid putting civilians in your line of fire, avoid it. If not, fire to take out the hostile forces."

Implication? Chilling...we've entered a new dimension. We are fighting an enemy who respects no laws of humanity, knows no rules of land warfare and gives no quarter. How do we fight, without becoming barbarians ourselves? Fifth, ministry of presence..in a place this small..I walk from shop to shop and just say, 'hi'..can't tell you the number of times someone says..."Hey, chappy..it's great to have you here." Something about seeing a chaplainis calming to folks this close to the fight.

Good Friday in Ar Ramadi..while you're having lunch I'll lead the evening Good Friday service. We will remember our Savior who willingly laid down His life that we mightlive..and we'll be thinking about young Marines and soldiers who are willingly putting their lives on the line so Iraqis can be free...no greater love hath a man than to lay down his life for his brother...

Good Friday to you,
John

Let us keep all our troops in prayer, and pray for the chaplains, too.

by Donald Sensing, 4/20/2004 11:59:00 AM. Permalink |

More on the problems of intelligence analysis
In reference to my post on this topic, Jeff emailed,

I spent 10 years as a USAF SIGINT Analyst and the *vast* majority of the intelligence we collected was ambiguous. The reason being because, when two entities talk about a subject they're both familiar with, they don't reiterate the entire plan during every conversation.

'A' and 'B' convey only enough information to cover the new subject, and 'C' (you listening in) have to work to figure out what they're talking about.

You don't get something like, "Boris, this is Natasha, here's the complete plan to infiltrate America and blow up Disney World..." Instead, you get something like, "Boris, can you confirm the itinerary
of our guests and how many rooms they'll need?"

You're getting snippets of information and you never know how many conversations you missed. You're trying to piece together a coherent conversation and you don't even know what the conversation's about!

Couple that with having to decide if the conversation you're listening to is important in the first place and you may divert your resources elsewhere as Boris and Natasha sound like a boring couple who may or may not be visiting Florida.

It's only after Disney World blows up that a lot of the intelligence you've collected begins to make sense. You end up trying to explain to some commission who's armed with 20/20 hindsight why you missed something that seems so obvious.

Intelligence is *not* a science, it's an art. Oh, and your successes will seldom be acknowledged but your failures will enter the history books.

Coded, rather than encrypted, communications are the worst to figure out. Most lay people use "code" to refer to encryption.

When the Japanese Imperial high command radioed Admiral Nagumo in December 1941 that final approval was given for the attack on Pearl Harbor, they sent the code,"Climb Mount Nitaka." The example that Jeff gives above - "confirm the itinerary" - is a code. Codes generally substitute whole meanings for whole meanings. They are extremely difficult to break because codes are only used once. After all, how many times did Nagumo need to be told to attack Pearl Harbor?

In World War 2 the FBI intercepted a telegram from a sender under investigation as a possible hostile agent. It said simply, "Father is dead." Suspicious, the FBI had Western Union send it on with a change: "Father is deceased." Before long the reply came back, "Is Father dead or deceased?" - a dead giveaway. But with modern communications such an opportunity would be rare today.

A well-known unbreakable code that anyone can use is the book code, used by American officers during the Revolutionary War. They are very simple. Sender and receiver each have the same edition of a certain book. The sender finds the words therein he wants to use and encodes them according to the page number, line number and line position. For example, 0941511 - page 94, line 15, word 11 - is the location for the word, "immediately." And so forth.

Numerical information, such as map coordinates, can be completely safely sent using one-time pads. OTPs can also be used to send alphabetic information, but not quite as easily. I used them when I was stationed in Germany to send position information over German telephone lines. A OTP is a series of randomly chosen digits, such as ones you can generate here. This page explains the technique well.

OTPs are used widely by governments to send classified information to their foreign embassies. Hard copies of the random strings are delivered through diplomatic pouch. The reason they are called "one-time" pads is that in olden days the numbers were printed on stacked sheets of paper. Once the page is used, it is destroyed. Nowadays, of course, the process is computerized.

by Donald Sensing, 4/19/2004 07:18:00 PM. Permalink |

Attrition
I think it was James Fallows who wrote in his book National Defense of a German battery commander captured in Italy during World War II. During interrogation he was asked how he came to be taken prisoner.

"It was like this," he replied. "My battery of 88 millimeter guns was on a hilltop, and your army sent a column of tanks up the hill to attack my battery. So we fired at the tanks. Every time we fired, we knocked out a tank. Then your army sent another column of tanks up the hill. We fired again and knocked out the tanks. You sent more tanks. Eventually we ran out of ammunition, but you didn't run out of tanks."

The reports of the fighting in Iraq made me think of that story. The analogy is not exact of course, or even nearly so. And the casualty ratios between the Iraqi insurgents and American forces is heavily against the enemy. But in attrition warfare the key factor is not who is suffering the greatest losses. It is who can least afford to suffer them.

In response to critics of his losses in battle, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant said before continuing south through Virginia in 1864 that he could lose twice as many men as Lee and still win.

If only one percent of the Iraqi population is willing either to take up arms against us or actively support those who do, then we are facing a force, however poorly organized and equipped, of just under a quarter-million. As best as I can tell (figures are not exact), we are killing between 6-8 Iraqis for every soldier or Marine we lose. By the time we take out 240,000, we will lose between 30-40 thousand dead.

It won't happen, of course. The question, though, is how long are we and the insurgents both willing to fight like this? Who will give up first?

I have in the past said that comparisons of the Iraq war with Vietnam are inapt. I still say so, but retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni says there is one apt comparison: we wanted a free, democratic Vietnam more than the Vietnamese did, and such it is with Iraq:

"In the end, the Iraqis themselves have to want to rebuild their country more than we do," Zinni said. "But I don't see that right now. I see us doing everything.

"I spent two years in Vietnam, and I've seen this movie before," he said. "They have to be willing to do more or else it is never going to work."

Today CPA chief Paul Brememr was quoted as saying that Iraqis who do not want their country to slide into chaos should speak up more forcefully against the insurgents.

Last week I heard a radio interview of Tom Rose, the publisher of the Jerusalem Post newspaper. He commented that one difference between Israel and the United States is that Israel does tactics extremely well but has no real concept of strategy. With the US it's the other way round: brilliant strategy, lousy tactics.

In the American Civil War, the North had to achieve positive victory over the South in order to prevail. But for the South to win, all it had to do was stymie the North. Such it is in Iraq. The insurgencies do not have to achieve victory over us to win. They just have to prevent us from winning. For them, a draw counts as victory, for us a draw is defeat.

If we continue to fight the way we are fighting, we will lose. Despite having surrounded Najaf with 2,500 soldiers and the despite the Marines' tactical successes in Fallujah and elsewhere, we do not seem to be holding the initiative. We are fighting our Shia and Baathist enemies not on our terms, but theirs.

Death takes the jihadis out of battle permanently, but it is not death they fear. We cannot fight them by only military means and prevail. I hope that the CPA has some other tactics.

by Donald Sensing, 4/19/2004 05:09:00 PM. Permalink |

Page parking
Here is stuff I want to write about, and maybe some year will get the time to.

-- Qaeda may be ploting to destabilise Jordan

-- Jordan Says It Thwarted Terrorist Threat

-- Insurgents Display New Sophistication

-- Death Lurks in the Groves On the Road Toward Najaf

-- "Will the Opposition Lead?" by Paul Berman, in the NYT

by Donald Sensing, 4/16/2004 09:16:00 PM. Permalink |

The Algonquin al-Gonquin Indians were Muslims
That's what a textbook used in the United States for five years says. But Indian protests have caused the passage to be removed from future editions. HT: Allah is in the House

by Donald Sensing, 4/16/2004 01:14:00 PM. Permalink |

The horror!
This morning as I was cleaning the roasting chamber of my truly excellent Zach and Dani's home coffee roaster, it slipped from my hand and fell a short but fatal distance to the counter top. The glass broke, putting me out of roasting - and I needed to roast today to have coffee tomorrow!

A call to the business got a replacement roaster sent to me gratis, in appreciation of the roasters that some readers have bought, based on my strong recommendation. But until it gets here I will be in coffee purgatory. The horror!

BTW, if you want to know the advantages - in flavor and financial - of roasting your own beans at home, I wrote all about it, along with some roasting tips.

There is an enormous variety of wonderful coffee that is cheaply available unroasted. But in your local grocery store almost all the coffee is South American and most of that Brazilian, which is grade B stuff. Even in a specialty coffee shop, you find only a few more kinds.

Roast at home and you'll enjoy dozens of varieties if you wish. My fave so far is Papua New Guinea, close behind is a 50-50 blend of Sumatra Mandheling and Tanzania Peaberry. Try it, and you'll never go back! Just click here and tell 'em I sent you!

by Donald Sensing, 4/16/2004 01:02:00 PM. Permalink |

Crush the one, allay the other
As I listen to the president and the prime minister speak, I am thinking of the rebellions in Iraq. I lean this way:

Crush the Baathists, centered in Fallujah, which makes our self-imposed halt to offensive operations mystifying. The insurgents there are almost wholly former regime members and soldiers, probably Republican Guard troops. I wrote in March 2002, before Baghdad was taken, that the most likely thing the Iraqi military would do would be to melt away. For the most part they did. But they didn't go away altogether. We are fighting the hardcore Baathist staff and supporters now because we didn't get to fight them a year ago. (There was some sharp fighting taking Baghdad, but not involving near the number the enemy troops it could have.)

Negotiate with the Shia rebels centered in Najaf, but not to conclude an agreement that legitimizes their rebellion against a central, civil rule. That is what we have been trying to do recently, but without success:

Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand Shia cleric, has today poured scorn on any compromise deal with US forces in his first public appearance for two weeks.
The radical cleric, who is wanted by US-led coalition for murder, said that any compromise aimed at diffusing a potentially explosive confrontation “will not work”.

He also said he would not disband his al-Mahdi Army militia, a central demand of the US-led coalition.

Which does not bode well for the near term. One of the limiting factors of our options is that we have 2,500 troops and their logisitics tail tied up around Najaf, and we need those troops to do other things than just sit there. So I am not sure we can wait very long before we force a conclusion. Not only that, the enemy clearly intends to throw Baghdad into insurgency warfare as well. So while I hope for a negotiated settlement with the Shia gang - and a gang it really is - I don't think there will be one, certainly without more fighting.

by Donald Sensing, 4/16/2004 11:32:00 AM. Permalink |

The source of Southern speech
If you want to take a break from war and politics for a few pleasurable moments, then click on over to Geitner Simmons' essay on "The Purest English Speech," a exploration of the sources of Southern vocabulary from England, Ireland and Scotland. Geitner exposes along the way some of the ridiculous stereotyping done of Southern speech. Not a new complaint, of course, as Geitner cites from an 1897 monograph:

Quite a large crop of so-called Southern plays, or at least plays in which Southerners have figured, has of late been introduced on the stage, and the supposititious Southerner is as absurd a creation as the wit of ignorance ever devised. The Southern girl is usually an underbred little provincial, whose chief characteristic is to say "reckon" and "real," with strong emphasis, in every other sentence. And the Southern gentleman is a sloven whose linen has never known starch; who clips the endings of his words; says "Sah" at the end of every sentence, and never uses an "r" except in the last syllable of "nig---."

With a slouched hat, a slovenly dress, a plentiful supply of "sahs," and a slurred speech ... he is equipped for the stage. And yet it is not unkindly meant: only patronizingly, which is worse. That Thackeray, Matthew Arnold, Lawrence, and other visitors whose English passes current, declared after a visit to America that they found the purest English speech spoken in Virginia, goes for nothing.

Geitner's site is one the blogosphere's best-kept secrets - his hits average less than 150 per day, but should be many multiples more.

by Donald Sensing, 4/16/2004 11:04:00 AM. Permalink |

Everything you always wanted to know about Joe Katzman
Joe is the ringmaster of the first-class and first-rate team blog, "Winds of Change." If you don't read it daily, you should! Joe has been one of my best blog buddies for a long time. Norm Geras has an excellent interview with Joe I recommend.

by Donald Sensing, 4/16/2004 10:58:00 AM. Permalink |

Americans warned to leave Saudi Arabia
The US State Department today ordered "family members and non-emergency employees of the U.S. Embassy and Consulates" to leave Saudi Arabia because of security concerns.

The U.S. Government has received recent and credible information indicating that extremists are planning further attacks against U.S. and Western interests. The Department of State has therefore ordered the departure of family members and non-emergency personnel from the U.S. Embassy and Consulates in Saudi Arabia. American citizens in Saudi Arabia should remain vigilant, particularly in public places associated with the Western community.

Terrorists have attacked residential housing compounds in the Riyadh area in 2003. Credible information indicates that terrorists continue to target residential compounds in Saudi Arabia, particularly in the Riyadh area, but also compounds throughout the country.

Private citizens are "strongly urged" to leave the country.

Using lethal violence to get Americans out of Saudi Arabia is al Qaeda's primary war aim.

by Donald Sensing, 4/15/2004 07:48:00 PM. Permalink |

Murdered Italian hostage died defiantly
AlphaPatriot reports,

A defiant Fabrizio Quattrocchi, the Italian hostage that was slain by terrorists in Iraq, met his fate bravely:

"When the murderers were pointing a pistol at him, this man tried to take off his hood and shouted: 'Now I'm going to show you how an Italian dies'. And they killed him," Frattini said.

"He died a hero."

He also observes that the real reason al-Jazeerah television declined to show the videotape of the murdser, made by the terrorists, not because it was "too gruesome," as al-Jazeerah claimed, but because it would enrage Western viewers against the killers and display the bravery of the infidel who met his death so bravely.

by Donald Sensing, 4/15/2004 07:25:00 PM. Permalink |

The myth of secret documents
Craig Henry has it right, quoting Robin Winks book, Cloak and Gown:

On any important subject, there is no single document or even group of documents that contain "the secret." No spy could know enough to spot such a document if it existed, and no vacuum cleaner approach to espionage, even should it gather up two or three documents of the highest importance, would lead without all the analytical skills of the humanists to any valid conclusions.

There are two levels at least to assessing what even a known enemy is up to. One is the raw information that is gathered and gleaned from various sources. All of this information must be evaluated as to both probable accuracy and reliability as well as relevance. Once the raw information has been "massaged," it and other information are analyzed and linked to form actual intelligence.

"Intelligence" as the military and intelligence services use the word does not mean simply a collection of facts. Intelligence is really knowledge, not mere information. Intelligence conclusions attempt to discern meaning and probabilities from the masses of raw information that are gathered all the time.

Think of the process as putting together an enormous jigsaw puzzle with innumerable, small, irregular pieces. Better yet, putting together many different puzzles when all puzzles use some of the pieces of the other puzzles. Sometimes patterns seem clear, often not. You know you do not have all the pieces for any of the puzzles; in fact, you do not know how many pieces of any puzzle you do have, nor how many pieces any puzzle is supposed to have. Not only that, but you don't know how many puzzles there are.

What that means is that very often when you examine a piece, the puzzle it belongs to will not be self-evident. Often it will. But remember, every day a man walks in with a big box full of pieces and dumps them.

What Wink is getting at is that not only does one piece not reveal the whole "secret," very often not even a substantially completed puzzle yields it, either, because the puzzles themselves are interlinked. Each puzzle is in a way just a piece of a mega-puzzle.

All analogies break down at some point and of course this one does, too. Intelligence analysis is not really as disorganized as this analogy implies. But it may illustrate what SecDef Donald Rumsfeld was getting at when he told the media in February 2002,

... as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

That is the problem: when do you know that a new puzzle is supposed to be there? Remember, real or potential enemies want to misdirect your attention: they are always throwing spurious pieces your way. Deception is a high art form for both regular and irregular forces. If the enemy can make you start working on a puzzle about him that does not actually exist, then your position is made relatively much weaker. Just ask the Nazi high command, which was taken in hook, line and sinker by possibly the greatest deception in military history - "the man who never was."

So the idea that some information in mid-2001 that al Qaeda was interested in hijacking airplanes meant - what? There was at that time no real way to know, especially since information about plane hijackings might have been a plant by al Qaeda to divert our attention from what they were really up to.

by Donald Sensing, 4/15/2004 03:11:00 PM. Permalink |

All charges dropped against Chaplain Yee
Last September, the Army announced the arrest of Chaplain (Capt.) James Yee, a West Point grad who became a Muslim after his initial active-duty tour and who re-entered the Army as a Muslim chaplain. He was then assigned to Guantanamo to minister to Muslim captives there.

Yee was charged with sedition, aiding the enemy, spying, espionage and failure to obey a general order, among others. In January, all those charges were dropped and there remained only charges of mishandling classified information, adultery and keeping pornography on his government computer. For the adultery and porn charges he was offered non-judicial punishment under Article 15, UCMJ, in lieu opf court-martial, which he accepted. He was punished with a letter of reprimand. This punishment was later set aside by Maj. Gen. Geofrey Miller.

Now all other charges are gone:

The commander of the U.S. military's Southern Command Wednesday dismissed all charges against Muslim chaplain Capt. James Yee.

This case is not the brightest star in the sky of the Army's jurisprudence.

by Donald Sensing, 4/15/2004 02:37:00 PM. Permalink |

I gotta get me one of these!
This is cooler than a tennis court!

by Donald Sensing, 4/15/2004 02:23:00 PM. Permalink |

Good news! Bin Laden offers truce to Europe
Offer means we are winning, and bin Laden knows it
Major update appended

A tape claiming to have been made by al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden has offered a truce to European countries if they withdraw their countries from Muslim countries, the truce to begin when they do so.

While it is clear that the offer is an attempt to split the Western powers and isolate America, it seems clear to me as well that it signifies bin Laden (if it is he) understands the weakness of his own position. As I wrote in 2002,

Entering negotiation with infidels only admits of weakness; if one is stronger, one simply prevails. Therefore negotiation is done only when there is no alternative, and then only to bide time for resumption of the struggle later.

This offer is cause for great encouragement for us.

Update: Bill Quick also makes this case, quoting this article thus :

It was Mohammed himself who laid the foundation for Islam to build a history of making peace with an enemy in order to attack at a later, more opportune time. In 628, Mohammed made a "peace treaty" with the Quraish tribe in Mecca in order for Moslems to worship at the Ka'abah. Two years later, when he had gained more followers and was considerably stronger, he abrogated the treaty and attacked the Quraish people, slaughtering every male among them. This agreement between Mohammed and the infidels of Mecca is known as the "Truce of Hudaybiyyah." "This truce became a model and a precedent in Islamic law for all agreements with infidels: never permanent, never lasting more than 10 years (with the possibility of another 10 years extension, no more). Islam is not permitted to stop its war against non-Moslem for more than this period."

We might also note that Iraqi Shia firebrand Muqtada al-Sadr did not offer to negotiate a peace until American infantry surrounded his city in force.

However, one reads and learns. Israpundit posted an interview with a leading Muslim cleric of Italy, Shaykh Prof. Abdul Hadi Palazzi. Citing "Christian Attitudes towards the State of Israel," by Prof. Paul Charles Merkley, Shaykh Palazzi is asked to respond to Merkley's assertion that

"Islam forbids that there should ever be peace for Muslims so long as any part of Allah's world withholds submission. Reconciliation between dar-al-Islam and any part of dar-al-harb is not envisioned for the moment. A state of truce is permitted, so long as it is modelled on the ...Treaty of Khudaibiya".

Palazzi responded (in excerpt) thus:

... the idea that "A state of truce is permitted, so long as it is modelled on the ... Treaty of Hudaibiya" is baseless. The treaty of Hudaybiyyah was temporary since it was a treaty between idol-worshippers and Muslims, and cleaning Arabia from idolatry was a basic duty of Islam. After that, no jurist objected to the circumstance that a Muslim state like the Ottoman Empire ratified permanent peace treaties with countries where Muslims were not persecuted, or that the Ottoman Sultan - who was also the Caliph - exchanged ambassadors with States in peace with the Islamic State.

This is a long interview and very much well worth the time to read it. I wonder, though, that even if Palazzi's analysis is historically correct, is it what is understood by Islamofascists waging terror war? Or are they using Merkley's model - he had to derive it from something in Islamic history because the Quran passages referring to the treaty are extremely opaque, especially to a non-Muslim reader like me.

Islamic Voice explains the treaty thus:

Treaty of Hudaybiyyah. By constantly waging war against the Muslims, the Quraish [with whom the treaty was made - DS ] tribe had made Muslims and non-Muslims into two separate parties eternally at loggerheads with one another. Both sides were spending all their time preparing for war. In this Treaty, the Prophet accepts all demands of the Quraish in return for a ten-year truce. The terms of the Treaty were so one-sided that many Muslims considered it a humilation, but in reality it paved the way for what the Quran called a ?clear victory.?

The "clear victory," however, was a military one. Again, it seems that the lessons, if any, that Islamofascists draw from the treaty are unclear. In any event, feigning peace while preparing for war is hardly a Muslim innovation.

by Donald Sensing, 4/15/2004 08:14:00 AM. Permalink |

Don't we wish!


by Donald Sensing, 4/15/2004 07:28:00 AM. Permalink |

Decadence
Another look at, Why do they fight us?

Asia Times asked Syed Munawar Hasan, the central general secretary of the Jamaat-I-Islami party in Pakistan, whether there "is any chance of reconciliation and dialogue between" the West and the Muslim world. Munawar replied,

"There is none. The basic concepts of both civilizations are in total contrast with each other. When I say this I do not address Western civilization as Christianity. I speak of a man-made system completely devoid of divine guidance. Our concepts of God, human beings, the universe, are totally in contrast with the concepts of the Western world. We cannot segregate human lives into private and public, our lives are ruled by divine guidance, not by man-made rules based on his own prejudices and specific mindset characterized by its own dilemmas and shortcomings. Our concept of the universe is not materialistic, and the result of an 'accident'. Instead, it was a very well thought out process envisaged by the creator of the universe with a plan. So these basic concepts have made the difference between ours and Western approaches."

There are many points of contention and conflict between Arab Islam and the West, but the chief religious contention is not really between Islamic Arabs and Christian or Jewish Westerners, but between Islamic Arabs and scientific-materialist Westerners.

Because of the supremacy of the sciences in western thought, western culture has become caught in a cycle of ever-increasing changes. Western societies contend with an exponentially increasing pace of cultural changes. However, the pace and kinds of changes that we adapt to (with greater or lesser difficulty, to be sure) are exactly the changes that fundamentalist Arab Muslims correctly believe would destroy basic structures of their society which they believe are the divinely-commanded.

In their view, certain concretized social structures, especially the status and role of women, are absolutely essential, springing from and required by the command of Allah, as revealed in the Quran. Without those structures, a society is wholly corrupted. We see them as hopeless religious fanatics; they see us as irredeemably godless and degenerate.

In Islam, the social structure is understood to be ordained by Allah. That this structure is nowhere displayed in the Muslim world means only that compromises have been made, but the goal of faithful Muslims everywhere is always a society that is fully dar al Islam, the world of submission to Allah.

This basic tenet of Islam means that the concept of democracy - the "people ruling" - has no natural place in Islam. Democracy in Muslim countries is literally alien to the religion.Last October, the prime minister of Malaysia, Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad, gave the opening address at the 10th Session of the Islamic Summit Conference. In delineating the problems facing Islamic countries today, he said, among others things,

... we also accepted the western democratic system. This also divided us because of the political parties and groups that we form, some of which claim Islam for themselves, reject the Islam of other parties and refuse to accept the results of the practice of democracy if they fail to gain power for themselves. They resort to violence, thus destabilising and weakening Muslim countries.

The rift between the concepts of the ideal society of Western and Islamic thought is enormous. Like an earthquake fault, the pressures and friction were not wholly visible for decades, but they exploded violently. As many others and I have said for a couple of years now, the contest between "the West and the rest," in Roger Scruton's term, will endure for a long time to come. It does not necessarily have to continue as a violent contest, but sadly, probably will in varying degrees.

by Donald Sensing, 4/15/2004 07:26:00 AM. Permalink |

"A slow-motion Saigon"
Military blogger Arkhangel says that things are worse in Iraq than we know, but not for the reasons the media keep harping. Having spent a year in country recently, he delineates the problems:

Too few troops on the ground. Iraq is the size of California and it is preposterous to think we could occupy, stabilize and civilize a territory that size with a mere 130K

The main problem is that a force of only 130K cannot multi-task (my word, not his). It can either fights the insurgency and nip new ones in the bud or it can secure the borders with Iran and Syria, but it can't do both.

If those two countries are directly involved - there are very compelling reasons to believe they are, virtually none to believe they aren't - then our situation becomes much worse.

Because that means that, no matter what we do, the insurgents have a lifeline, and unless we cut that lifeline, they can continue resisting. It's bad enough that Iraq is, in many ways, an ammo dump; it's even worse if that ammo dump is continually replenished both by materiel and people. It wouldn't take many to put our forces to an intolerable stress. I happen to think that we're slowly approaching that point, and one of the reasons we haven't attempted to take the cities by force is due to the number of casualties we would likely sustain in house-to-house fighting, which in turn would degrade our capabilities, especially if we were unable to fill the holes quickly enough.

He also says,

... our tactics in subduing places like Najaf, Kut, Baqubah, and, most importantly, Fallujah are losing us Iraqi hearts and minds, not winning them. I emphasize Fallujah because that benighted city has now become a symbol to the entire Arab world, nearly on the level of Gaza or the West Bank.

But, at any rate, if we're going to quell the Iraqi insurgency, then we have three options, based on Mao's definition of the guerrilla being a fish in the sea of the people:

1. Remove the fish from the sea : Hard to do, especially if you can't tell one fish from the other. And we can't; we don't speak the language, we don't practice the religion, and we don't share the culture. And our ostensible allies aren't cooperating--the ICDC and the Iraqi Police are cooperating with the insurgents.

2. Drain the sea : Um, yeah, right. We're not going to do that, despite what Andy Sullivan's Marine correspondent may say. The collateral damage is far, far too great, and it's not what our military does. We don't turn urban areas teeming with civilians, like Fallujah, into free-fire areas, even if the civilians aren't friendly, so to speak. We just don't do it--the Law of War, which we adhere to, forbids it.

3. Make the sea inhospitable : I think that's our best--really, our only option. Flood the Iraqi zone, especially Fallujah, with money instead of troops. Take the billions that we're funneling to outfits like Bechtel and Halliburton, and instead give it to Iraqis. Remove the troops from Fallujah and send in Iraqis with money, to fund any and all projects that the residents might have in mind. Our soft power is far stronger than our hard power.

But I don't think that last option will be considered, for a variety of reasons, mostly dealing with our domestic politics. So more of our troops will die, more Iraqis will die, and the prospects of a stable Iraqi society will grow ever dimmer.

And while we will win the war militarily, we'll lose it politically. And, in time, our will to continue will be sapped, and we will withdraw in ignominy.

A slow-motion Saigon--that's all this is.

I am far from sure I agree with this analysis, but it should be considered.

by Donald Sensing, 4/15/2004 07:25:00 AM. Permalink |

No civil war this weekend
Heh!

by Donald Sensing, 4/14/2004 09:20:00 PM. Permalink |

Questions about Kerry's Purple Heart medal
The Boston Globe reports some controversy over the worthiness of the wound which brought then- Navy Lt. John Kerry his first of three Purple Hearts.

"He had a little scratch on his forearm, and he was holding a piece of shrapnel," recalled Kerry's commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Grant Hibbard. "People in the office were saying, `I don't think we got any fire,' and there is a guy holding a little piece of shrapnel in his palm."

I won't discuss the merits, if any, of this controversy. That Kerry saw serious combat can't be denied and I sure won't denigrate that. I use the story only as a springboard for discussion of what kind of wounds make the wounded one eligible for award of the Purple Heart.

The PH is one of the most prestigious awards in armed services have. It is the ultimate "been there" medal. The PH was personally founded by George Washington during the Revolutionary War; he called it the Badge of Military Merit and awarded it to three soldiers for "sigularly meritorious" actions, not wounds. Washington's original design of the medal is still used, except that now the medal includes a profile of Washington's head.

The medal was not awarded after the Revolutionary War. In fact, it lapsed completely and was not revived until 1932. In the meantime, the services had devised other medals for heroism. Upon its reinstatement, the Army (which initially alone had the medal) directed the conditions of the award thus:

"A wound which necessitates treatment by a medical officer and which is received in action with an enemy, may in the judgment of the commander authorized to make the award be construed as resulting from a singularly meritorious act of essential service."

Note that an injury that requires only first aid, even if resulting from enemy action, does not qualify for the medal.

Successive presidents have by executive order expanded who may receive the award. Truman directed it be awarded to members of armed services other than the Army. Kennedy included any American civilian "while serving under competent authority in any capacity with an armed force," Reagan extended eligibility to include wounds from terrorist attack. It is also awarded to those killed rather than wounded.

Note also that the injury does not have to be a bleeding wound, nor does it have to be proximately caused by enemy fire. Example: a Marine convoy comes under fire. A Marine jumps from his truck to seek cover, and in so doing breaks his leg. Purple Heart? Yes.

Another example: a WW 2 bomber crewman is severely burned by a faulty signal flare that ignites inside the aircraft when he is loading it into the chamber to fire it to signal other planes. To save the plane, he picks up the burning flare and takes it to a hatch and throws it out. Purple Heart? Yes, and in this case (a real one) also the Medal of Honor.

Purple Hearts have often been awarded in hospitals because that's where combat-wounded troops go to be treated by doctors. In those cases, the hospital commander assumes command of the soldier and authorized the award. If a doctor thinks that the wound could be self-inflicted, the award is held up until members of the soldier's unit can verify, or not, the wound.

What is sort of curious about the award's prestige is that it is the only combat award that does not require the recipient actually to do anything to receive it. It is a passive decoration, awarded for that which happens to you, not for what you made happen, and in fact for that which you'd rather didn't happen at all.

by Donald Sensing, 4/14/2004 05:41:00 PM. Permalink |

Saddam should be tried ASAP
Austin Bay says that even in captivity, Saddam Hussein ironically remains a unifying figure in Iraq.

So perhaps it is time to put Saddam on trial, sooner instead of later.

Saddam in the dock - in an Iraqi court, not an international forum - pinpoints the central source of poison, and begins the process of reconciling cure.

Saddam's trial would open up common wounds, reminding the Iraqi people of the hell they shared and have escaped. Mass murder of Shias, the destruction of mosques in Najaf, chemical weapons used on Kurds, for that matter, chemical weapons used on Iranians - public trial addresses these crimes and their lingering effects.

Other subjects of common interest would receive a global airing, such as the United Nations' thoroughly corrupted Oil For Food program. ...

Last December, I wrote for the United Methodist News Service that Justice for Saddam must include full account of crimes.

Rendering a judicial verdict against Saddam is not the most important goal because his murderous guilt cannot be rationally questioned. In even the fairest trial possible, "guilty" is the foregone conclusion, at least for his major offenses. Any other verdict would mock justice rather than uphold it.

The real value of a judicial proceeding against Saddam is to render a fair, accurate, public accounting of the terror of his regime.

Fully exposing Saddam's deeds to the Iraqi people and the world is the point. Enabling the Iraqi people to face their horrors so they may grow out of them is the point. Discovering the truth of Saddam's ties to nations and international agencies that propped him up is the point. ...

Only by learning the full truth, vetted to judicial standard, can Iraqis have a real hope of transcending Saddam.

There is an old saying, "Justice delayed is justice denied." Austin has a good point: Iraq needs to get beyond Saddam, and the sooner they do it, the better.

by Donald Sensing, 4/14/2004 04:48:00 PM. Permalink |

What is "supporting the troops"?
There is a certain meme among many members of the Left to "support the troops" while working to destroy what the troops have accomplished. But supporting the troops has another curious twist, that the troops are hapless victims.

Take Andy Rooney , for example (or as Henny Youngman would say, "Take Andy Rooney - please!"). It seems that to Andy, supporting the troops means to denigrate their sacrifices and professionalism and to bestow on them not the mantle of heroism, but of victimhood.

Above all, it means to bring them home from the war and keep them out of combat. After all, says Andy, that all they really want. Note to Andy: all soldiers in every war want to go home.

Oh, let's cut the stuff: to Andy and the most of the rest of the Left, "supporting the troops" doesn't really mean keeping them out of combat. It means to keep them out of combat that the Left doesn't approve of. Liberation of Iraq: bad. Killing Somalis or bombing Serbs: good. The Left is not anti-war, it simply opposes wars that seem to serve America's interests.

No one on the Left, certainly not Andy Rooney, has demanded yet that the troops be brought home from Bosnia because, after all, coming home is what the troops want to do.

Supporting the troops by bringing them home is a mantra that started during the Vietnam war. As I recall, it was Kerry's old outfit, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, that actually began the idea. "Support the troops! Bring them home!" was written on more than a few protest banners back in the 1960s.

The troops should be brought home, of course, when their mission is accomplished.

But dumping the troops into the victim hole and then attempting to undermine what they are doing hurts, not helps, the troops.

If the Left is too willing to sacrifice the troops for causes not very related to actual national security, then the Right needs be cautioned about being too quick to resort to military force. Supporting the troops means not sending them to fight unnecessary wars, but it also means fighting only absolutely necessary wars.

It is no support of the troops to send them into just war then stop short of victory.

by Donald Sensing, 4/14/2004 01:30:00 PM. Permalink |

Kerry on Iraq is Bush on Iraq
John Kerry has "A Strategy for Iraq" in today's WaPo. His main points don't sound a lot different from what President Bush is saying in his press conference as I write this. Kerry says we have to work closer with the UN and with NATO in stabilizing Iraq and legitimating its new government. That's what Bush just said, too.

Update: How many reporters have now risen to try to get Bush to admit he made a mistake somewhere, somehow? I've lost count.

Update 2: Jeff Jarvis noted it, too.

Just amazing that the reporters keep harping on wanting Bush to say that he made a "mistake" or "failed" or should "apologize."
Jeesh, do they think this is Oprah and they're all Dr. Phil?

And he has a great idea, too, regarding the "bozo role" he said the press played perfectly:

If I were the Pres' press secretary, I'd invite a few bloggers to the Pres conference and make sure the Pres called on them. These people, as citizens, would represent the citizens and their questions better than the detached, obvious, quagmiring reporters in the room. The press would hate it. But how could they complain, really, about citizens coming to the White House to question power? Isn't that what reporters are supposed to do? Not challenge power. Not disdain power. Question power.

This is a really good idea.

by Donald Sensing, 4/13/2004 07:44:00 PM. Permalink |

South Pole has "time tunnel"
Hey guys! Wish you had kissed that pretty girl on the one date you had with her, back in high school, before she moved to Albuquerque?

Well, you can! Just go to the South Pole and jump into the "spinning gray fog in the sky" there! HT: C. Bear

by Donald Sensing, 4/13/2004 07:36:00 PM. Permalink |

What went wrong - four essays
Msmordin emails me that these essays about the Sept. 11 attacks are worth the read. I'm parking their URLs here until I get a chance to read them. See what you think.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_4_why_the_fbi.html

http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_2_what_we_dont_know.html

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=11704013_1

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/mccarthy200404130845.asp

by Donald Sensing, 4/13/2004 07:19:00 PM. Permalink |

Racism at Daily Kos
The Daily Kos, having previously shown his contempt for the four American contract guards killed, burned and mutilated in Fallujah, now offers a blatantly racist post. Imagine that, a left-wing racist.

Under the headline, "Uncle Tom Powell Stumps for Massah Bush," poster Soj at Kos' site posted a photo of Secretary of State Colin Powell, Kos captioned it thus: "Yes suh! Yes suh! Right away suh!" Kos referred to Powell several more times as "Uncle Tom Powell."

Not content to attack Powell's performance or policies, which would be fair game, Soj plays a race card and insults Powell because of his race! This ad hominem is blatant racism, pure and simple. And that makes her racist. As for Kos himself - well, you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. That the post remains, or remains unexpurgated, says something about Kos' own racism sensitivity, and it's not good.

How would you react if a conservative blogger called, say, Jesse Jackson, "uppity, who doesn't know his place"? That's not really different from what Kos is saying.

The real problem is that leftists know what and how black men and women are supposed to think because it is the Left that actually has a plantation mentality.

And one of Soj's allied commenters takes his ball and runs with it, posting this image. I would image source it, but it's just too offensive. A few other commenters, to be fair, assailed Soj's racism.

And racism it is. Not that this will offend or worry the Left.

I wonder whether Soj or Kos want to have Donald Rumsfeld shot, like the St. Petersburg Democratic Club says it does in this ad? (Hat tip: Ryan Boots.

Update: I missed at first the fact that it was not Kos' own post, but another writer's, and have amended this post accordingly. However, at her own site, Soj seems rather pleased at the controversy among the commenters and responds,

Anyway, I apologize to anyone if they felt the term "Uncle Tom" was offensive. My primary goal was to raise awareness of the incredible efforts Powell has put forth in promoting the Bush and neocon agenda. ...

Note that she doesn't restract her racism or apologize for her overtly racist language. She just regrets if you or I felt it was racist. It's our problem, not hers, doncha see?

Update: American Digest has a lot more to say, all of it right on target.

by Donald Sensing, 4/13/2004 05:23:00 PM. Permalink |

Andy Rooney is completely around the bend
I pointed out in February that Andy Rooney's "creative light went out a long time ago, and now he's become a snide, snarky and indeed, mean old man." Now it's time for him to be fired, for a piece so inexcusable that I have difficulty moderating my language.

Rooney wrote about the troops in Iraq, and drags out the hoary argument that young people joined the Army as an employer of last resort.

During the last few years, when millions of jobs disappeared, many young people, desperate for some income, enlisted in the Army. About 40 percent of our soldiers in Iraq enlisted in the National Guard or the Army Reserve to pick up some extra money and never thought they'd be called on to fight. They want to come home.

The possibility that men and women enlisted in the Guard or Reserve because they wanted to serve their country is outside Rooney's ken of understanding. And there's a lot more wrong with this piece.

But Gary Gagliardi has thoroughly fisked Rooney line by line so I don't have to.

Most of the reporting from Iraq is about death and destruction. [Gary] Because the press refuses to report all the good things happening in that country. We don't learn much about what our soldiers in Iraq are thinking or doing. [Gary] Because the press doesn't like the kind of positive things they say. There's no Ernie Pyle to tell us, and, if there were, the military would make it difficult or impossible for him to let us know. [Gary] There are literally dozens of soldiers blogging their reactions to the war on every day in real time. The problem for Rooney is that these soldiers aren't saying the negative things that Rooney wants to hear, so Rooney can't hear them. His only explanation is that the Army won't let them talk. Of course, Ernie Pyle was a friend of the soldier, who saw the nobility in what they did, which is something that Andy Rooney can't imagine either. ...

We must support our soldiers in Iraq because it's our fault they're risking their lives there. However, we should not bestow the mantle of heroism on all of them for simply being where we sent them. Most are victims, not heroes. In Rooney's reality, heroes are victims, but liberals have been turning victims into heroes for years. Does this mean that because soldiers are now victims, they are really heroes in a liberals eyes? I am confused.

Gary, you aren't half as confused as Andy Rooney.

by Donald Sensing, 4/13/2004 04:54:00 PM. Permalink |

US withdrawal from Korean DMZ no big deal
The announcement has been made that the United States will withdraw from the Korean DMZ. The US has occupied the DMZ without a break since the Korean War’s ceasefire in 1953.

Over the decades, the portion of the DMZ supervised by Americans has shrunk. By the time I served on the DMZ in 1978, the American sector was only about two kilometers by four.

The combined US-South Korean battalion that staffs "Freedom Village" near Panmunjon will remain unchanged. But the US Army will cease to man its last guard post, Ouelette (ooh-LET), named after an American officer murdered by North Korea in the DMZ in 1976).

The guard post was manned with only about a platoon of infantry and has been for many years a symbolic presence emphasizing America's determination to defend South Korea's freedom. But with the South Korean army larger than America's by about 40-50 thousand troops, the symbolism has little meaning any more. Furthermore, the United States has announced last year that it will reposition its combat forces further south in the peninsula, making it clear that the first defense against North Korean invasion rests on South Korean forces, not American.

The United States keeps the 2d US Infantry Division (Mechanized) in South Korea.

Militarily, the vacation of GP Ouelette means nothing. The symbolism of the withdrawal speaks more to South Korea than North Korea. We are making it clear to South Korea that it must take primary responsibility for its security. I would not be surprised to read within a year that the US is withdrawing a combat brigade from the country. We sure could use it elsewhere.

I wrote about serving at Firebase Four-Papa-One, Korean DMZ, 1978 and when I visited North Korea.

by Donald Sensing, 4/13/2004 02:00:00 PM. Permalink |

Headlines break
Grabbed from Jay Leno's Monday night feature, "Headlines."

Because it was a quagmire -




Mirrors never lie -




Florida gets ready for November -



by Donald Sensing, 4/13/2004 08:56:00 AM. Permalink |

Making them angrier
From David Warren's column on Fallujah:

In its recent experience in Iraq and elsewhere, the U.S. is finding what the Israelis have long since not wanted to know. Michael Oren is an Israeli veteran, and the brilliant author of the definitive history of the Six Day War. When I had coffee with him, recently, he said: "If you strike back, you will encourage terrorism. And if you don't strike back, you will encourage terrorism."

You let them walk over you, or you fight. It's true that fighting makes them even angrier, but it helps to wipe them out.

by Donald Sensing, 4/12/2004 10:09:00 PM. Permalink |

"We are in grave danger."
The most important struggle is for the soul of the West

Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair explains "Why we must never abandon this historic struggle in Iraq." As with everything the PM writes about foreign affairs, just read the whole thing. But this part says a lot. Speaking of the terrorists and fedayeen fighters, Blair writes,

They know it is a historic struggle. They know their victory would do far more than defeat America or Britain. It would defeat civilisation and democracy everywhere. They know it, but do we? The truth is, faced with this struggle, on which our own fate hangs, a significant part of Western opinion is sitting back, if not half-hoping we fail, certainly replete with schadenfreude at the difficulty we find.

The question we must face squarely in America and Europe is this: Is democracy, the rule of the people, to be preferred over tyranny and despotism?

It is incredible that we even have to ask the question. Yet as Blair says, the answer is no longer self-evident in the Western mind. It was only 59 years ago that Europe's bloodiest, most horrific fight against totalitarianism was won. Nazism was defeated and almost immediately Europe and America began a longer struggle against Soviet communism.

By no means was the Cold War non-violent. The peoples if Easter Europe and the Soviet Union itself suffered great violence at the hands of their tyrants. Proxy wars around the globe killed untold numbers.

Throughout it all the will of Europeans and Americans didn't waver. There were some movements against the Western powers, but almost all of which were either sponsored or co-opted by Soviet agencies. But both liberal and conservative parties stood fast for decades.

Does it seem that with West's will collapsed along with its Soviet enemy? No, not completely, not even mostly (one hopes!) but yes, significantly. This is what Blair recognizes. British philosopher Roger Scruton explains:

The ruling problem of Western societies today, then, is this: the experience of membership required by the Enlightenment idea of the citizen is dwindling, and a "culture of repudiation" is coming in its place. Young people gain nothing from this culture save bewilderment and the loss of any sense of identity.

This culture of repudiation has found its common voice in "political correctness," says Scruton, an umbrella term for an ideological zeal whose energy "is directed against the West, and its message is 'down with us.'"

While exhorting us to be as "inclusive" as we can, to discriminate neither in thought, word, nor deed against ethnic, sexual, or behavioral minorities, political correctness encourages the denigration of what is felt to be most especially ours. ... the purpose is not to include the Other but to condemn Ourselves. The gentle advocacy of inclusion masks the far-from-gentle desire to exclude the old excluder: in other words to repudiate the cultural inheritance that defines us as something distinct from the rest. ...

A single theme runs through the humanities as they are regularly taught in American and European universities: the illegitimacy of Western civilization, and the artificial nature of the distinctions on which it has been based. Western civilization is simply the record of ... oppressive process[es], and the principal purpose of studying it is to deconstruct its claim to our membership.

I also again recommend reading "The Ideological War Within the West, by John Fonte, with his explication of "transnational progressivism," a "universal and modern worldview that challenges both the liberal democratic nation-state in general and the American regime in particular."

Transnational progressives have been altering the definition of "democracy" from that of a system of majority rule among equal citizens to one of power sharing among ethnic groups composed of both citizens and non-citizens. James Banks, one of American education's leading textbook writers, noted in 1994 that "to create an authentic democratic Unum with moral authority and perceived legitimacy, the pluribus (diverse peoples) must negotiate and share power." Hence, American democracy is not authentic; real democracy will come when the different "peoples" that live within America "share power" as groups.

By these lights, the extreme, radical fundamentalist Islamists who bomb and kill are simply another victimized group with a grievance who must be accorded the same weighty, compassionate understanding as any other petitioners. They are not to be opposed, certainly not fought, but to be understood and invited into dialog and power sharing. That they really want to kill us because we are Other - infidel - to them is only our misperception based on misunderstanding and poor communication.

Prime Minister Blair understands all this, and the stakes as well:

But one thing is for sure: [the Islamists] have faith in our weakness just as they have faith in their own religious fanaticism. And the weaker we are, the more they will come after us.

It is not easy to persuade people of all this; to say that terrorism and unstable states with WMD are just two sides of the same coin; to tell people what they don't want to hear; that, in a world in which we in the West enjoy all the pleasures, profound and trivial, of modern existence, we are in grave danger.

There is a battle we have to fight, a struggle we have to win and it is happening now in Iraq.

"We are in grave danger." Paste that sentence on your bedroom mirror and read it every day.

by Donald Sensing, 4/12/2004 09:42:00 PM. Permalink |

Dueling theories
Two adjacent posts at Outside the Beltway:

Brits Condemn US Tactics
The Telegraph: US tactics condemned by British officers

Senior British commanders have condemned American military tactics in Iraq as heavy-handed and disproportionate.

No Negotiations
Ralph Peters argues that it is now time to “drop the hammer” in Iraq to show that we’re serious.

Our president must make no mistake: Any “settlement,” any halt short of the annihilation of the killers who want to destroy the future of Iraq, will be read throughout that troubled country and the greater Islamic world as a resounding victory for the terrorists.

I tend to side with James, though, who wrote, "U.S. restraint in its retalliation against a vicious coalition of insurgents and terrrorists has been remarkable."

by Donald Sensing, 4/12/2004 05:17:00 PM. Permalink |

Soviet gunners shot at UFOs
The old Soviet Union had its own UFO program - shoot them down. And they tried.

by Donald Sensing, 4/12/2004 05:04:00 PM. Permalink |

A hard death to take
From yesterday's Tennessean:

Don Steven McMahan, 31, of Nashville, was on a plane ready for takeoff from an Iraqi airport at the end of his deployment, his family said. But new orders came, and the plane turned around.

McMahan was killed Friday afternoon when the convoy carrying his redeployed division back into action came under fire.

McMahan was a staff sergeant based in Germany, where he left behind a widow and three children.

by Donald Sensing, 4/12/2004 04:59:00 PM. Permalink |

Easter
Luke 24:1-12
24 But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. 2 They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3 but when they went in, they did not find the body. 4 While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. 5 The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. 6 Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, 7 that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” 8 Then they remembered his words, 9 and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. 10 Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. 11 But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. 12 But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.


I spent six months in Honduras in 1989. Then as now, the best hotel in the capital city of Tegucigalpa was the Hotel Maya. While in transit I stayed there three or four times. The first time at breakfast a colleague idly inquired how my evening had passed.

"Fine," I replied, "but this morning I was in for a surprise. I turned on the water to take a shower and almost froze to death when I stepped in. It seems the hot and cold knobs were reversed."

My colleague burst into laughter. "They weren't backward!" he exclaimed. "You just didn't remember where you are. The knob marked H is for helado, cold, and the knob marked C is for caliente, hot. What did you expect, that your shower spoke English?"

What do we expect? Before World War Two Winston Churchill was a guest at a upper-crust dinner and much to his own surprise just before dessert his mouth opened as if on its own accord and a tremendous belch emerged before Churchill could do anything about it. The woman next to him was scandalized. She gaped at him in astonishment and then scolded him, "Sir Winston, what a dreadful sound!"

Winston cocked one eyebrow at her and replied cooly, "Madam, what sound did you expect, Big Ben's chimes?"

Luke and the other Gospels tell of women going to Jesus' tomb the day after Passover to find ... what? What were they expecting? They were expecting the common-sense thing: a closed tomb, inside of which would be the cold, lifeless body of their executed friend, Jesus of Nazareth.

What they found instead was the tomb open and empty. Luke says they were perplexed about that, an understatement for sure. Then two men in dazzling clothes appeared to them, angels who admonished them for coming to the tomb.

The women had come to the tomb that morning to finish the job of anointing Jesus' body for burial. They had started this undertaking task Friday when Pilate had permitted Jesus' lifeless body to be taken down from the cross. But darkness and the beginning of the Sabbath had interrupted their task, so Jesus was buried incompletely prepared for eternal entombment.

The women's return Sunday morning was from their love of Jesus and their devotion to him. They were going to perform for Jesus a final kindness which they knew that Jesus, being dead, could never even recognize, much less repay.

And the angels verbally slapped them for it. “Why do you look for the living among the dead?" the angels asked. "He is not here, but has risen." He told you that he would rise on the third day, and yet here you are, where Jesus no longer is. Didn't you believe him?

Then they remembered what Jesus had said, and they hurried back to tell the disciples, who scoffed. An idle tale, the men thought. Peter decided to check it out, however. He ran to the tomb and saw Jesus' burial cloths lying there. He found the sight quite amazing.

After two thousand years of the telling, the Easter morning stories of the Gospels have lost a lot of their edge. They don't change from year to year, and even though the four Gospels telling vary in minor details, we know the general outline well enough: Jesus was buried on Friday, the male disciples holed up, probably from fear of being arrested like Jesus had been. Jesus' female disciples went to the cemetery Sunday morning. They discovered Jesus' tomb was open and empty, and encountered two or more supernatural beings who insisted that Jesus was risen. One of these beings was the risen Christ himself, whom the women didn't recognize at first. The women went to tell the men, who didn't believe them, but Peter and probably John also ran to the tomb. They discovered that Jesus body was not there but his grave-wrappings were.

This story is as familiar to church people as any story we know. I wonder whether it has lost its power because of that fact. Each Gospel telling of that first Easter day add certain embellishments, too. Mark's account is rather sparse, but the other Gospels add more and more detail until by the time we're through we have a virtual parade of folks and supernatural beings practically huddled near the tomb - Roman soldiers, Temple representatives, the women, panting disciples, angels. I almost expect the Marine band to be along any minute. And somewhere in there, almost lost in the crowd, we catch a fleeting glimpse of Jesus, risen from the dead, and everyone uncomprehending of what it means, including the women who saw him and the two men who believe he is risen because they saw the evidence his resurrection left behind.

And it happened way over yonder, in Israel, way back when.

What is Easter for in 2004?

Frank Gulley was the professor of Methodist studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School until his retirement a few years ago. He taught a class on the Methodist understanding of weddings, funerals and other services of special occasion. One thing he said about funerals has stuck with me: "If Christian faith has nothing to say at graveside, then it really has nothing to say at all."

There is a certain resistance we moderns have to such observations. It seems too ... particular. We love to hear grand sweeping sermons and we preachers love to preach them. Easter: a day for cosmic wisdom and soaring rhetoric! Frankly, I am deeply fearful that many or most of you here today expect to hear me preach that way. Where, you may be asking, does all our religiousity fit into things like the war on terror and the bitter combat in Iraq, the presidential campaign or the health of the world economy?

That's how we duck the real issue. Because before Easter is about anything cosmic in general, it is about each of us in particular. And more particularly, it is about our deaths. An Easter sermon really is a funeral sermon.

We treat the subject with the Scarlett O'Hara approach: "I can't think about that today. I'll think about that tomorrow." We are a lot like writer William Saroyan. Near death in 1981, he telephoned the Associated Press to make a final observation: "Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?"

You are going to die. I am going to die. Every person we love will die. Now what? That's what Easter is about first of all.

William Nelson was a Union general in the Civil War. He was a fighter, a hard charger, involved in major battles in the western theater. Nelson was in the lobby of a Louisville hotel one day in 1862, between campaigns. Another Union General, ironically named Jefferson Davis, approached. Davis had a serious grudge against Nelson. Nelson was about to enter the room of General Don Carlos Buell. Davis shot him in the chest with a revolver. Nelson fell. As men went to his aid, he gasped out, "Send for a clergyman; I wish to be baptized."

His wound completely changed his priorities. Battle plans, war reports, the next promotion - all instantly relegated to the file marked, "doesn't matter" With only minutes left before he entered eternity, the one thing he cared about was eternity. He wanted to be baptized. A half hour later he was dead.

If you knew for a fact that thirty minutes from now you would fall over dead, and nothing could be done about it, what would you worry about until then? Isn't that the wrong question? Life itself is a terminal condition. We all are already terminal. We are already going to die and nothing can be done about it. The question is, what are we doing about it now?

Sarah Winchester's husband was the famous firearm inventor and manufacturer. After he died in 1918, she moved to San Jose, California. Because of her grief and her long time interest in spiritism, Sarah sought out a medium to contact her dead husband. The medium told her, "As long as you keep building your home, you will never face death."

Sarah believed the spiritist, so she bought an unfinished 17-room mansion and started to expand it. The project was futile. She died at the age of 85, having spent more than five million dollars on the mansion at a time when workmen earned less than a dollar a day. Today it is a tourist attraction of 150 rooms, 13 bathrooms, 2,000 doors, 47 fireplaces, and 10,000 windows. And Mrs. Winchester had bought enough additional materials to continue building for another 80 years.

The house is still exists. Mrs. Winchester does not. We can't work our way out of death. There is no escape from dying, but here is the Good News: there is an escape from death. Before Easter says anything else, it says that.

Donald Grey Barnhouse wrote,

I was driving with my children to my wife's funeral where I was to preach the sermon. As we came into one small town there was in front of us a truck stopped before a red light. It was the biggest truck I ever saw in my life, and the sun was shining on it at just the right angle that took its shadow and spread it across the snow on the field beside it. As the shadow covered that field, I said to my children, "Look at that truck, and look at its shadow. If you had to be run over, which would you rather be run over by? Would you rather be run over by the truck or by the shadow?" My youngest child said, "The shadow couldn't hurt anybody." "That's right," I continued, "and death is a truck, but the shadow is all that ever touches the Christian. The truck ran over our Lord Jesus. Only the shadow ran over your mother."

The apostle Paul wrote, "If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ."

The Resurrection means that the worst thing that happens to us is not the last thing that happens to us. Christ’s resurrection reveals that we do not die, “period”; we die, “comma.” On Easter God turns pain to power; God transforms tragedy to triumph and pushes through crucifixion to resurrection.

If Christian faith is about nothing but the here and now, then Paul admits it isn't worth the time we spend on it. That is why the cross and the empty tomb stand at the center of our relationship with God and one another. On Good Friday's cross is where the Advent proclamation, that Jesus was “God with us,” was made completely true, for Jesus died as we do. Easter's empty tomb beckons us to trust in a gracious God who provides throughout both our life and our death.

Yet our deepest horror is not death itself, said philosopher John Locke. It “perpetual perishing” - the fact that nothing lasts. Everything we are and all we love fade alike into nothingness. As Ecclesiastes mourns, “The dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even the memory of them is forgotten” (Eccl 9:5b). The destruction of even the memory of the past is perpetual perishing.

The Reverend Mark Roberts explained our dilemma this way.

Throughout our lives we rely on all sorts of things. We begin life fully dependent on our parents. Along the way we trust teachers, doctors, lawyers, pilots, engineers, spouses, presidents, police officers, friends, pastors, and, of course, ourselves.

And yet one day we truly realize that all those will also perish. So while their good for us may be real, it is very temporary. He continues,

We can’t save ourselves. We can’t make eternal life happen. We can’t defeat death. We can’t earn our redemption. So ... we put our lives into the hands of God. Yet we do so with a peculiar confidence. We know that ... God’s hands are not only strong, but vulnerable. They’re not only healing, but wounded. The hands of Jesus, pierced on the cross, are the very hands of God. Into these hands we can trust ourselves completely, knowing that they’ll always be there to catch us, both in life and in death.

The apostle Paul was under no illusions about the facts of human life. He observed in Romans that human beings "are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.” But Paul denied that human destiny is to disappear into nothingness. No matter what happens in our lives, Paul knew one thing is certain: “Neither death, nor life, . . . nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

So what is the cosmic wisdom of Easter, really? Only this: the Creator of the cosmos, the sustainer of the cosmos, the redeemer of the cosmos - the God of the universe - loves you. He loved you and me so much that he gave his only son to put on our mortal body and suffer our mortal fate to restore us to God.

What did you expect your God to do?

Christ has died. Christ is risen! "If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord," say the Scriptures, "and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." Anyone who believes in him will never perish, but have eternal life. Thanks be to God.

by Donald Sensing, 4/11/2004 05:19:00 AM. Permalink |

Go, Miss Tennessee!
Power Line says she is a favorite for Miss USA. Well, yeah. The fair lass representing my state is Stephanie Culbertson:



The pageant is Monday night.


by Donald Sensing, 4/10/2004 10:26:00 PM. Permalink |

The infamous PDB is public
Here is the text of the now-famous PDB - Presidential Daily Briefing - that 9/11 Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste bloviated about on April 8, when National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice testified. This text is from FoxNews; CNN also has a link, but it didn't work for me.

Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Ladin since 1997' has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Ladin implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."

After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Ladin told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a [deleted text] service. An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an [deleted text] service at the same time that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative's access to the US to mount a terrorist strike.

The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of Bin Ladin's first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US. Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that Bin Ladin lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaydah was planning his own US attack.

Ressam says Bin Ladin was aware of the Los Angeles operation.

Although Bin Ladin has not succeeded, his attacks against the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks. Bin Ladin associates surveilled our Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997.

Al-Qa'ida members — including some who are US citizens — have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. Two al-Qa'ida members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our Embassies in East Africa were US citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1990s.

A clandestine source said in 1998 that a Bin Ladin cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [deleted text] service in 1998 saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Shaykh" 'Umar' Abd aI-Rahman and other US-held extremists.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.

Not much there, is there? It is baffling that Ben-Veniste made such a big issue out of the memo two days ago. He had already seen the memo and knew it had nothing about the 9/11 attacks. I can only surmise that he was sure the White House would never release it.

Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis takes the same position about Commissioner Bob Kerrey that I did. Says Jeff, "He's making a mockery of a process that has become a mockery."

by Donald Sensing, 4/10/2004 10:03:00 PM. Permalink |

Iraq update
A couple of screen grabs from a few moments ago:



An Army Abrams tank moves through Baghdad




An American fuel convoy burns after being attacked west of Baghdad


In related news, Belmont Club makes a convincing case that in Iraq today we are now fighting an entirely new enemy. Who is behind the insurgencies there? Syria and Hezbollah, and he explains why the evidence points to them. Read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, Iraqi blogger Zeyad says that

The Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani issued a fatwa late Wednesday to "resolve the latest developments in Iraq in a peaceful manner" in order to prevent anarchy and bloodshed. "We condemn the behaviour of occupation forces in dealing with the current events, and we also condemn any trespass against public and private property, or any other conduct that may disrupt security and obstruct Iraqis from their jobs in serving the people". Sistani also called upon political parties to work together in an effective manner to put an end to the "tragedy".

I predict Sustani's fatwa will have practically no effect on the fighting because there are so many foreign fighters in Iraq now and because al Sadr has allied himself with them too deeply to stop now. Zeyad also says he has very reliable information that al-Sadr's militia is being paid in American dollars, the source of which is Iran. BeaconBlog has more to say about the Iranian connection, too.

by Donald Sensing, 4/10/2004 12:22:00 PM. Permalink |

Fallujah will look better than this
Chuck at the blog, "You big mouth, you," bets that when the battle of Fallujah is over, the city will look a lot better from the Marines' fighting than these cities did when their battles ended.

by Donald Sensing, 4/09/2004 03:05:00 PM. Permalink |

Murderer turns self in after watching Passion of the Christ
Tim Chavez reports,

''Detectives say the death of a 19-year-old woman originally ruled a suicide has turned into a murder case after a repentant man who'd watched The Passion of the Christ confessed to killing her because she was carrying his child.

''Fort Bend County (Texas) Sheriff's Detective Mike Kubricht said today that investigators thought Ashley Nicole Wilson had hanged herself in January. Earlier this month, however, 21-year-old Dan R. Leach of Rosenberg turned himself in after watching Mel Gibson's controversial movie … and Leach decided to seek redemption, Kubricht said.''

The movie has evoked other such confessions, including of European neo-Nazis.

by Donald Sensing, 4/09/2004 11:41:00 AM. Permalink |

Some read recommendations
It has been too long since I did this. Technorati tracks which blogs are linked to which. As I write this, Technorati says there are "573 Inbound Sources, 733 Inbound Links to One Hand Clapping." I am very gtrateful for every link and consider it a high compliment whenever someone links to me.

So I ask you, kind readers, to go to this page and spend some time looking over the sites listed there. Most have only a few links, hence fewer readers than me, but all are participating in what Jeff Jarvis called " citizen journalism." So look them over.

by Donald Sensing, 4/09/2004 10:08:00 AM. Permalink |

A question for Ted Kennedy
"Ted Kennedy, this is your brother speaking. Are you going to listen?"

by Donald Sensing, 4/09/2004 10:06:00 AM. Permalink |

A year ago
Some scenes I grabbed from news coverage a year ago



A year ago today Baghdad fell to US Army and Marine forces. The Marines drove into Firdos Square, near the hotel where all foreign journalists were staying. Crowds of Baghdadis swarmed into the square to greet them.

The crowd tried to pull down a statue of Saddam, but lacked the tools. Marines draped an American flag on the statue of Saddam, chained it to an armored vehicle and pulled it down. The crowd then tore it apart.

Elsewhere, Baghdadis celebrated unrestrained, including the women. Some hailed President Bush. Iraqis in the north poured into the streets, too. Some Iraqis crafted an American flag and waved it for the cameras. Even surrendering Iraqi soldiers gave the thumbs up the their defeat.

by Donald Sensing, 4/09/2004 08:51:00 AM. Permalink |

Iraqi mass graves: a survivor's story
American Digest has this bone-chilling account of an Iraqi named Ali, who managed to escape, wounded, from a mass execution in Saddam's Iraq. He was apprehended, blindfolded and bound, and held in a large assembly hall.

Ali was placed near the door and could see [through his thin blindfold] outside. At about 4:30 p.m., the military men built a large ring of tires about 20 feet wide and set it on fire. Next to the fire were large buses, and the soldiers began escorting people from the hall to the buses. At this time, people were also being carried out of the hall and thrown into the fire. Ali believes that because the military was in a hurry to execute them and not everyone would fit on the buses, they decided to burn some people alive. After about 30 minutes of witnessing this, he was escorted from the hall and loaded onto a bus.

At approximately 6 p.m., they were taken on a short drive to a swampy area behind the brick factory. It was dark and he saw headlights in front of the buses. He believes the lights were headlights from the Land Cruisers driven by

Saddam’s men. He could hear shots but not voices. Ali was paralyzed with fear. Everyone in the bus was blindfolded. After about 15 minutes, the bus in front of his drove away and the headlights were directly on his bus. They pulled seven to 10 people off the bus. Shots rang out. Ali’s group was the next to be pulled from the bus. In his group was a blind man, three brothers, a woman, and her five year old son. The group was led to the front of the bus where the headlights were directly on them.

They were pushed to the ground and then were pulled up one at a time to be executed.

Ali's two brothers were murdered in other roundups. Ali remained in hiding for 12 years. No doubt Hans Blix would think that Ali was better off then than now.

by Donald Sensing, 4/08/2004 05:11:00 PM. Permalink |

On the lighter side
Here is the M1911A1 mailbox. HT: Geitner Simmons.

by Donald Sensing, 4/08/2004 04:47:00 PM. Permalink |

Kerrey vs. Kerrey
That's hypocrite-in-chief Bob Kerrey, not John Kerry

Chalk hypocrisy up to 9/11 Commissioner and former senator Bob Kerrey. In the WSJ today, Kerrey wrote,

Today's appearance of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice will test the commission's resilience to the partisan pressures which threaten to collapse the goodwill needed to achieve consensus. Among the most dangerous forces is the tendency in politics to become personal and question motives instead of confronting the substance of the argument made by any individual. If we yield to this tendency, all hope for an honest and constructive report is lost. We will most certainly fail.

Then, during of Rice's testimony, Kerrey harshly spoke thus:

... as somebody who supported the war in Iraq, I'm not going to get the national security adviser 30 feet away from me very often over the next 90 days, and I've got to tell you, I believe a number of things. ...

I'm terribly worried that the military tactics in Iraq are going to do a number of things, and they're all bad. One is... I think we're going to end up with civil war if we continue down the military operation strategies that we have in place. I say that sincerely as someone that supported the war in the first place.

Let me say, secondly, that I don't know how it could be otherwise, given the way that we're able to see these military operations, even the restrictions that are imposed upon the press, that this doesn't provide an opportunity for Al Qaida to have increasing success at recruiting people to attack the United States.

It worries me. And I wanted to make that declaration. You needn't comment on it, but as I said, I'm not going to have an opportunity to talk to you this closely.

And I wanted to tell you that I think the military operations are dangerously off track. And it's largely a U.S. Army -- 125,000 out of 145,000 -- largely a Christian army in a Muslim nation. So I take that on board for what it's worth.

This speech was delivered in a highly prosecutorial tone. As a correspondent wrote Glenn Reynolds,

My respect for Bob Kerrey has evaporated. I felt like Kerrey was an honorable guy, seemed to be honest during his shot at the nomination way back when, medal of honor winner, all that. But today, he proved himself just another partisan jackass, seeking to score points for his party rather than getting to the bottom of how we let 9-11 happen.

I say Kerrey is a hypocrite because on the one hand he wrote in the WSJ about shunning partisanship, and the same day launched a completely unjustified partisan attack against the Bush administration on a topic having nothing whatever to do with the 9/11 Commission's charter.

The 9/11 Commission's objective is to answer the following question: How--at the end of a summer of high terrorist threat--did 19 men with a few hundred thousand dollars manage to utterly defeat every single defensive mechanism we had in place that September morning and murder 3,000 innocents on American soil? ...

Who said that? Bob Kerrey, that's who, in the WSJ piece. Yet he opened his time this morning with a speech having nothing - nothing - to do with the commission's objective, as explained by Kerrey himself. I say his speech was unjustified because it was irrelevant to his duty as a commissioner, not because Bush's management of the Iraq war is off limits to political discussion. It's just off limits to this commission. The commission has no authority under law (remember delegated powers and all that?) even to bring up the Iraq war.

Fox News just announced that in Rice's appearance this morning, the commissioners spoke 60 percent of the words, Rice 40 percent. Fox's legal analyst, Andrew Napolitano, said that Rice should have accounted for 90 percent of the text.

The foremost concern of the members of the 9/11 Commission is not September 2001, it is November 2004. Their own self image falls close behind. This commission is a travesty, an example of the worst American politics has to offer.

And don't even get me started on Commissioner Richard Ben Veniste.

Update: Yeah, this sadly about sums it up.

by Donald Sensing, 4/08/2004 04:29:00 PM. Permalink |

"Principals meetings"
They're not all they are cracked up to be

One of the things 9/11 Commission member Timothy Roemer grilled Condi Rice about today was that the Bush administration should have had more "principals meetings" about the terrorist threat (transcript). "Principals meetings" mean that the agency or department heads themselves attend the meeting.

I don't understand, given the big threat, why the big principals don't get together. The principals meet 33 times in seven months, on Iraq, on the Middle East, on missile defense, China, on Russia. Not once do the principals ever sit down -- you, in your job description as the national security advisor, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the president of the United States -- and meet solely on terrorism to discuss in the spring and the summer, when these threats are coming in, when you've known since the transition that Al Qaida cells are in the United States, when, as the PDB said on August, bin Laden determined to attack the United States.

Why don't the principals at that point say, "Let's all talk about this, let's get the biggest people together in our government and discuss what this threat is and try to get our bureaucracies responding to it"?

The next commissioner, James R. Thompson, rebutted Roemer's implicit accusation of malfeasance on the part of the Bush administration.

: With all due respect to the principals, Cabinet officers of the president of the United States, Senate confirmed, the notion that when principals gather the heavens open and the truth pours forth is, to borrow the phrase of one of my fellow commissioners, a little bit of hooey, I think.

Isn't it a fact that when principals gather in principals meetings they bring their staffs with them? Don't they line the walls? Don't they talk to each other? Doesn't the staff speak up?

RICE: Well, actually when you have principals meetings they really sometimes are to tell -- for the principals to say what their staffs have said -- have told them to say.

I attended more than a few principals meetings during my federal service, both as the principal (not at seat-of-government level, of course) and as a staffer attending with my principal (these were at the Pentagon, up to the secretary level).

Thompson has it more right than Roemer. Principals meetings are not only fairly rare, they should be rare. To be effective, a principal has to delegate almost everything to the staff. I recall reading that Clinton held principals meetings a lot. That's a sure sign that he didn't know what he wanted to do and wasn't communicating his desires well, either.

My experience is that when such meetings occur, the staff spends an incredible amount of time and energy preparing the principal for the meeting. The boss has got to have the latest and best information when he goes. When these meetings are frequent, to say nothing of daily, two adverse consequences result:

Their daily routine revolves around putting together packets of information for the principal when it should revolve around doing the staff work needed for the agency to accomplish its mission. This makes them into glorified clerks.

They therefore start to assess information and their own subordinates' assignments not according to its significance to the agency's actual mission, but in relation to how well or not they fit into the boss' briefing packet. This is not a way to maintain focus, it is a sure-fire way to lose it.

It's not for nothing that staffers tend to call such meetings "dog and pony shows."

The principals become very frustrated at this routine also. If the principals' own boss (say, the president) is meeting with them every day or very frequently, he starts issuing daily taskings to the principals. That is micromanagement and it is always ineffective. The principals justifiably wonder whether their job is just to relay instructions from the president to their own staffs.

If all the principal is doing is briefing the president on current status matters, then the principal is mal-employed then, too. That's what staff are for.

Commissioner Thompson is right and Roemer is wrong. Principals meetings are no guarantee of effectiveness and can actually mitigate against it. The real key is continuous inter-staff communications.

by Donald Sensing, 4/08/2004 03:41:00 PM. Permalink |

Insurgents hold Japanese hostages
The terrorists fighting American forces in Fallujah released a videotape today showing three Japanese civilians they captured. The terrorists included a demand for Japan to withdr4aw all its troops (all are non-combat troops) from Iraq, else these civilians will be "burned alive." Japan's government quickly rejected the demand.

Japan sent 800 troops to Iraq in February. Most are engineers; all are participating in humaniitarian missions. (Story)

by Donald Sensing, 4/08/2004 03:24:00 PM. Permalink |

9/11 Commission is a farce
Condoleeza Rice's appearance before the 9/11 Commission is the only testimony I have been able to hear. But the sheer ineptitude of the commission's members is shocking. These people do not have a clue what they are doing. The idea that this is a non-partisan inquiry is unsustainable. Members of both parties are more interested in making speeches than anything else.

Not that Rice is doing very well, either - lots of tapdancing on her part. But this process is pathetic. Statesmanship is called for, and I can't name a single member who seems to have a clue what it is.

This whole thing was obviously designed as a PR circus for the commissioners. There is no reason at all for any testimony to be televised or even to be public at all until after the commission issues its report.

This is not an inquiry. It is an inquisition, and every member is playing to the camera. They are trying to serve themselves, not their country.

by Donald Sensing, 4/08/2004 10:09:00 AM. Permalink |

Some headlines
I was going to write a post around each of these links, but simply don't have the time. So here they are sans commentary.

Terrorists shift focus to Europe

A primer of "Intelligent Design" and why it is not creationism in disguise. Very informative.

A University of Kent professor explains why the Left's protests are so ineffective: their "movement" is really all about them, not the putative issue. Read and compare to Lee Harris' explanation of "fantasy ideology." It's a light bulb moment.

Iraqi Christians are evangelizing their countrymen.

Austin Bay has good insights into the insurgencies in the Sunni Triangle.

The war in Iraq is "Not A Diversion," it has "advanced the campaign against bin Ladenism," by Reuel Marc Gerecht. Read also my related October essay, "The Big Picture."

by Donald Sensing, 4/08/2004 08:39:00 AM. Permalink |

Battle blogging
A female soldier in Iraq describes what it was like being surrounded by the enemy for almost 24 hours, under near-constant fire. She concludes that "The Alamo is Over-rated as a Tourist Attraction." It's really too engrossing to excerpt, but here's a taste:

I have never been so scared in my life. Scared doesn’t cover it: terrified doesn’t, either. I'd never known it was possible to be terrified and be totally calm. I’d look around, seeing the trails of weapons, seeing the F-16s overhead---they never dropped bombs, they just flew around------and then look down and see the chameleons running in the grass. And then you’d hear the thump of another mortar round, but you don’t really hear those---you feel them, somehow. They’re loud enough to make you flinch, and these were all close----I saw one land in front of me at about three thirty AM, no more than fifty meters away.

My captain didn’t know I heard him say what he just said. “Honestly, last night, I think every one of us thought that was it, that we weren’t going to make it back. It was that bad.”

We faced a force of four to five hundred rebels, with mortars, RPGs and various handheld weapons. There were four US soldiers---myself and the other people in my team----about twenty Ukrainian soldiers, and thirty or so scared British and Aussie expats, including the British governor. ...

Read the whole thing. She makes a wry observation:

If I were 11 Bravo, I’d have earned my combat infantrymen’s badge, except of course the fact that I’m a woman means I don’t get stuff like that.

This is no new complaint. In World War 2 Bill Mauldin drew a cartoon of a bedraggled, battle weary medic, clothes torn, unshaven, exhausted, standing in front of a spotless, well-rested battalion personnel clerk. The clerk is saying, "The reason you don't get combat points is because you don't fight."

by Donald Sensing, 4/08/2004 08:13:00 AM. Permalink |

Bunching up?
Someone emailed Geitner Simmons, who masterfully blogs Regions of Mind, asking whether the Marines in this photo, in combat near Fallujah, are too bunched up for tactical safety. (The photo is on a BBC story's web page.) Geitner emailed me asking what I thought.

When I was in the Army we were taught that under tactical conditions to keep at least five meters between soldiers. Keeping distance makes it much less likely that a grenade or mortar round will cause many casualties. If a gunner opens fire, only one or maybe three men will get hit before the others take cover or scatter.

It does not appear that these Marines are keeping that kind of separation, but I also point out that the shot is, of course, static and we don't know how they are moving. Also, we can't really tell how much space there is between the Marines. So I am reluctant to cluck-cluck at them from thousands of miles away. Generally, troops in combat learn to spread out pretty quickly. It makes them a less attractive target for the enemy to engage, especially knowing the grief the Marines will give back in fierce fire.

by Donald Sensing, 4/07/2004 04:31:00 PM. Permalink |

Three things that fall from the sky
Bird poop, rain and paratroopers.

by Donald Sensing, 4/07/2004 03:20:00 PM. Permalink |

Gun crime in Britain
For those interested in this topic (and who isn't?), The Guardian has an ongoing summary and link page of firearm crimes in Britain.

by Donald Sensing, 4/07/2004 03:16:00 PM. Permalink |

Chemical attack planned for London
The largest British counter-terror operation ever on Britain's own soil occurred March 30. The operation netted eight suspects, British citizens of Pakistani descent. Now we learn that the terrorists were up to something especially nasty: chemical warfare.

British authorities believe terror suspects arrested last week were planning to make a bomb that would include a highly toxic, easily obtained chemical called osmium tetroxide, ABCNEWS has learned. ...

"It's a nasty piece of work," said Dave Siegrist, a bioterrorism expert at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in Arlington, Va. "It irritates the eyes, lungs, nose and throat. It leads to an asthma-like death, what we call a 'dry-land drowning.' "

Scientists say if, for example, the bomb used in the 1993 World Trade Center attack had produced such fumes, they would have wiped out the first police and rescue workers on the scene.

Except for the tragic attack against Madrid's trains last month, al Qaeda has been unsuccessful in mounting attacks in Europe or North America. But it's obviously not for lack of trying.

by Donald Sensing, 4/07/2004 09:01:00 AM. Permalink |

What the Left is doing in Iraq
Blackfive says,

I am not trying to say that Fallujah or Samarra are problem-free, but that the left-wing is trying to turn Iraq into Vietnam more than the Iraqis are ...

He concludes this after quoting at some length a letter to the Houston Chronicle by one Joe Roche, a soldier serving in Iraq with the U.S. Army's 16th Combat Engineer Battalion. In civilian life he is an adjunct fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research. Says Roche,

... The reality is we are accomplishing a tremendous amount here, and the Iraqi people are not only benefitting greatly, but are enthusiastically supportive.

My job is mostly to be the driver of my platoon's lead Humvee. I see the missions our Army is performing, and I interact closely with the Iraqi people. Because of this, I know how successful and important our work is.

My battalion carries out dozens of missions all over the city — missions that are improving people's lives. We have restored schools and universities, hospitals, power plants and water systems. We have engineered new infrastructure projects and much more. We have also brought security and order to many of Baghdad's worst areas — areas once afflicted with chaos and brutality. ...

Our mission is vital. We are transforming a once very sick society into a hopeful place. Dozens of newspapers and the concepts of freedom of religious worship and expression are flowering. So, too, are educational improvements.

This is the work of the U.S. military. Our progress is amazing. Many people who knew only repression and terror now have hope in their heart and prosperity in their grasp. Every day the Iraqi people stream into the streets to cheer and wave at us as we drive by. When I'm on a foot patrol, walking among a crowd, countless people thank us — repeatedly. ...

The various terrorist enemies we are facing in Iraq are really aiming at you back in the United States. This is a test of will for our country. We soldiers of yours are doing great and scoring victories in confronting the evil terrorists.

The reality is one of an ever-increasing defeat of the enemies we face. Our enemies are therefore more desperate. They are striking out more viciously and indiscriminately. I realize this is causing Americans stress, and I assure you it causes us stress, too.

... Iraqis today are embracing freedom and the birth of democracy. With this comes hope for the future.

Yes, there are terrorists who wish to strike these things down, but this is a test of will we must win. We can do this, as long as Americans at home keep faith with the soldiers in this war. We are Americans, after all. We can and must win this test. That is all it is.

I wonder whether Hans Blix would be interested in this report. Nah.

Blackfive observes, "Because Joe Roche works for a conservative think tank, his words will probably be ignored by the main stream media." Yeah, seems so. But remember, "that the left-wing is trying to turn Iraq into Vietnam more than the Iraqis are."

by Donald Sensing, 4/07/2004 08:26:00 AM. Permalink |

Basra isn't Waco
And that, says Mark Steyn, along with the fact that Paul Bremer isn't Janet Reno, is why coalition forces didn't crash in to massacre the goons took who over a police station there.

The British authorities took the decision to police Basra in their traditional, hands-off colonial style, and the Americans to the north eventually decided to do likewise. You can disagree with that decision, but that’s the policy. That means that when some jerks take over a cop shop the coalition doesn’t bomb ‘em out, reducing the neighborhood to rubble and filling the streets with corpses. This isn’t Waco and Paul Bremer isn’t Janet Reno. Sadr’s goons were quickly evicted from the police stations in Sadr City ...

But if Hans Blix had his way, "filling the streets with corpses" is what we would do.

by Donald Sensing, 4/07/2004 08:25:00 AM. Permalink |

Passion of Christ now in top 10 ever
I heard a news item yesterday that Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ has displaced Forrest Gump as the number 10 movie for all-time, domestic box office gross.

Worldwide, the movie has grossed more than a half-billion dollars, including $100 million outside North America.

But is there a cloud around this silver lining? The Pew Research Center reports that blaming Jews for Christ's death is increasing.

A growing minority of Americans believe that Jews were responsible for Christ's death. Roughly a quarter of the public (26%) now expresses that view. This represents a modest but statistically significant increase in the number holding this opinion when compared with a 1997 survey by ABC News which found 19% feeling this way. But a solid majority of Americans both then and now (60%) continue to say that Jews were not responsible for the death of Christ.

I don't call an increase of seven percent "modest." Either politician would be delighted with a seven percent shift away from his opponent, or toward him.

... A relatively large proportion of people who have seen the movie (36%) feel Jews were responsible for Christ's death. However, this is also the case among people who plan to see the movie (29%), suggesting people who are drawn to this movie may be predisposed to this opinion more than others. By comparison, just 17% of those who have no plans to see the movie believe that Jews were responsible for Christ's death.

About one-in-five Americans (19%) say they have already seen "The Passion of the Christ," while many more (49%) say they intend to see it. ...

Like any opinion survey of sound method, this survey has a lot of layers, so if you're interested, read the whole report.

by Donald Sensing, 4/07/2004 08:23:00 AM. Permalink |

Casualty reports "greatly exaggerated"
Retired Marine Lt. Col. Ollie North, a correspondent for Fox News on the ground with the Marines in Fallujah, just said that the reports of Marines total casualties are "greatly exaggerated," in reference to reports of dozens of Marine wounded. But he said the report of a dozen KIA was accurate, within one or two.

He also said that what is really going on in Fallujah is gang warfare between Iraqi gangs who are united only in their opposition to America, but who each want to be the top mafiosi of the city. They are thugs and gangsters, literally, just as Iraqi blogger Hamorabi said.

by Donald Sensing, 4/06/2004 10:00:00 PM. Permalink |

The Hans Blix plan for America to rule Iraq
According to former head UN weapons inspector, Sweden's Hans Blix, the United States should take the following measures to improve the lot of Iraqis:

We should send troops into Fallujah and Ramadi to take any man, woman or child even suspected of resistance and simply shoot them in the street.

If a married man is an insurgent or criminal against us, we should rape his wife in front of his eyes, then behead his children while he watches. Then shoot him in front of his wife.

For hard case resisters, we should take them and their whole families prisoner, pile them on trucks and drive them into the desert, machine gun them, then bury them en masse in trenches - several hundred thousand if need be.

The sons of Paul Bremer should join their father in Baghdad where they will be given their own secret police forces. They must be given free reign to use any means necessary, including abduction, rape, torture and murder, to establish their own personal baronies of power.

We should take personal control of Iraqi oil sales and use part of the profits to pay off foreign officials to condone our brutality.

With other oil profits we should embark on grandiose building projects for our own use. The costs will deny ordinary Iraqi people adequate diets, medicines and a substantial quality of life, but so what? Special medical care and provisions will be made for our elites, but denied to others.

There are several villages in the Sunni Triangle that we'd do well to drop nerve gas on.

We should expel UN-sponsored agencies and other NGOs, even the humanitarian ones.

Any cleric who disputes with us gets gunned down on the street or "disappeared."

We should totally ignore demands or resolutions made by the United Nations.

We should stop restoration of the southern marshes, turning them back into the wasteland that Saddam did, an expel the Marsh Arabs who live there, like he did.

We should impose draconian taxes on Iraqis, including taxes on vehicles, marriage licenses, water, electricity and every other exchange transaction that Iraqis make in daily life.

In case drought strikes Iraq, we should ration irrigation water to farmers but use all we want ourselves, including for recreation.

Of course the morally empty Hans Blix would concur with all those measures, and others equally repressive. What other conclusion can we draw from his assertion today to a Danish newspaper that the Iraqis were better off under Saddam Hussein than they are under the Americans today.

"What's positive is that Saddam and his bloody regime is gone, but when figuring out the score, the negatives weigh more," the former chief U.N. weapons inspector was quoted as saying in the daily newspaper Jyllands Posten.

Considerettes, whence the link, responds, "What is this guy thinking? He's used up his final reserve of credibility at this point. Sic transit Blix."

Here is the Clinton administration's report on "Saddam Hussein's Iraq." This is what Blix says was better for the Iraqis than American liberation.

Now, no doubt Blix would respond that of course he does not mean that the Iraqis were better off under Saddam because he was a murderous, ruthless dictator, but because there was civil peace and no factional fighting - "order," in other words.

But there was civil peace only because Saddam was a ruthless mass murderer. Iraq's peace before American liberation was literally the peace of the grave - 300,000-plus massacred - and of exile, almost four million. I challenge Blix or any of his ideological allies to name a single way in which the Iraqis were better off under Saddam that did not rest upon the fact that Saddam's boot pressed upon Iraq's throat.

Blix's home country, Sweden, is of course one of the most homogeneous nations in the world. Blix has no experience in even being a member of a multi-ethnic, multiply diverse society, much less any experience governing such a society. Sweden is also a finalist for the prize of the most paternalistic - hence coercive and regulated - nations in Europe.

by Donald Sensing, 4/06/2004 07:28:00 PM. Permalink |

Bloggers commended for exposing anti-Semitism
Speaking of things related to anti-Judaism/anti-Semitism, Alifa Saadya of Jerusalem has published a scholarly paper at Hebrew University there commending a number of bloggers for exposing anti-Judaism. Ecumeniblog reports,

Alifa Saadya has an interesting article, "Antisemitism Watch among the Bloggers," in Antisemitism International 2003, "an annual research journal of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism" at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

She notes that while lots of people interested in "antisemitism and the internet" have focused on hate sites,

Largely ignored has been the rapidly-expanding internet world of weblogs (blogs) and bloggers, some of whom have shown a steady interest in Jewish topics, antisemitism, and anti-Zionism, pointing out its occurrence in the mainstream media and at events such as the antiwar demonstrations organized by ANSWER before the American and Allied invasion of Iraq.

Blogs and bloggers she mentions (in order of appearance): Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan, Kathy Shaidle, Bill Cork (the article is illustrated by a screenshot of this blog), LGF, James Lileks, Donald Sensing, Secular Islam, and Winds of Change.

She concludes by observing at the Sassoon Center's 2003 conference many people wondered what can be done about antisemitism and anti-Zionism; many people responded by saying that we just need to point it out when we see it.

Dedicated and serious writers of the new medium of weblogging deserve our thanks for their continuous efforts to do just that.

Well, I am honored to have made this list. Anti-Judaism is a cancer that must be eliminated wherever found. BTW, Alifa wrote a guest post for my blog on a Jewish perspective on forgiveness.

by Donald Sensing, 4/06/2004 04:23:00 PM. Permalink |

Fierce fighting in Iraq
Ramadi, west of Fallujah at the southwest corner of the Sunni triangle, is reported to be the scene of very heavy fighting between American forces and armed insurgents. American casualties are said to include a "significant" number of killed in action.

Block by block fighting is also reported by US Marines in Fallujah, although the Marines are said now to have pulled back to permit fierce air attack by Air Force AC-130 aircraft. It is just after midnight there as I post this.



A machine gunner at the ready




Fedayeen, location unknown




US Marine tanks in Fallujah

The Command Post has a running Iraq upate.

Update: DOD reports that 11 Marines have been killed in action in Fallujah Ramadi and 20 wounded.

by Donald Sensing, 4/06/2004 04:05:00 PM. Permalink |

The EU is covering up anti-Jewish acts
The great majority of anti-Jewish crimes committed in Europe are done by young, extranational Muslims. But the European Union suppress the truth about the acts and tries to shift the blame to white Europeans. Why? George Miller, writing from London, has the answer:

Perhaps an explanation can be found in the EU's struggle to dominate the nation states of Europe. Nationalism is the only force capable of arresting the development of the European Super State. To the European ideologues, European nationalism is a bigger threat than is militant Islam. By tarring European nationalism with the brush of racism and xenophobia, the EU is able to present further steps to political union in Europe as the antidote to such racist poison. After all, the EU's raison d'etre is to prevent nationalism from ever re-emerging and causing another European war.

Put even more charitably, the EU may have suppressed the truth about the violence because it was inconvenient to its bureaucratic outlook and culture.

There's more. Read the whole thing.

by Donald Sensing, 4/06/2004 03:43:00 PM. Permalink |

The will to suffer
Lawrence Kaplan explains why America's will to accept casualties in war starts at the top.

But the message that America means to stay the course must be repeated, day in and day out, in televised addresses and on the stump, and much more vocally than it has been thus far. To do anything less, to advertise America's fears as if they were virtues, not only emboldens the likes of Osama bin Laden and Iraqi terrorists -- it drains America's will to resist them.

The run to run away by the Spanish after the Madrid train bombings has only emboldened al Qaeda to attack Spain more mercilessly. The terror war is not something we can simply opt out of.

by Donald Sensing, 4/06/2004 09:01:00 AM. Permalink |

Real new stories
I lifted these from Jay Leno's Headlines feature last night.



Yeah, this is manly, all right. This story proves that metrosexuality is becoming more and more mainstream. Coming soon: the decline and fall of the American male; he hasn't got far to go.



You'd think a divine dream team would have done better.

by Donald Sensing, 4/06/2004 08:50:00 AM. Permalink |

Mob and hangings
The real question is not why some Fallujans committed the atrocities. It is why we no longer commit them ourselves.

Mark Bowden, writing in OpinionJournal, describes the shocking visuals:

The bodies of the dead dangle overhead, twisted and grotesque, while the living frolic beneath them, posing for the camera. The joy and laughter on the faces of the celebrants is unmistakably genuine. These are people exulting in hate, glorying in their own cruelty.

It was taken on Aug. 7, 1930, and it shows the bodies of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, two black men falsely accused of rape who were beaten, tortured, mutilated and then strung up by a mob in Marion, Indiana. The picture is remarkably similar to the ones we saw last week from Fallujah, or those we saw nearly 11 years ago from Mogadishu. Mobs reduce human nature to its lowest common denominator, whether American, Iraqi or Somali. They are savage and ugly, but they are not irrational.

The rest of his piece deals with what the recent atrocities in Fallujah were meant to symbolize, both to the Americans and to the other Iraqis.

But the photo he cites is a famous one in certain studies of American history. It is probably the most famous lynching photo ever taken. This online posting of it is cropped left and right, an uncropped but less clear posting shows there was a large crowd there. (Caution: graphic images)

The Musarium has an online photo album of American lynching photos that were taken of victims killed from California to Minnesota and elsewhere, including the South (very graphic). Many of the victims were burned as well as lynched; one photo is of a black man soaked in coal oil, hoisted, then set afire. In 1919 there was serious race-based riots in more than 25 American cities. Racial tensions were high in Omaha, Neb., which had recently experienced a large influx of black people. William Brown died from the deep fear and mistrust of whites there when whites rioted.

Brown had been accused of molesting a white girl. When police arrested him on September 28, a mob quickly formed which ignored orders from authorities that they disperse. When Mayor Edward P. Smith appeared to plead for calm, he was kidnapped by the mob, hung to a trolley pole, and nearly killed before police were able to cut him down.

The rampaging mob set the courthouse prison on fire and seized Brown. He was hung from a lamppost, mutilated, and his body riddled with bullets, then burned. Four other people were killed and fifty wounded before troops were able to restore order.

The photo of Brown's burning body, surrounded by celebrating spectators and killers, is for me the most shocking and repulsive in the collection.

Lynchings in America were not the province of any particular state or region. Black men were no more liable to be lynched in the old South than any other place. Women were rarely lynched, but there are photos of a dead black woman named Laura Nelson, lynched May 25, 1911 in Okemah, Oklahoma. The text accompanying this photo, says,

District Judge Caruthers convened a grand jury in June 1911 to investigate the lynching of the Negro woman and her son. In his instructions to the jury, he said, "The people of the state have said by recently adopted constitutional provision that the race to which the unfortunate victims belonged should in large measure be divorced from participation in our political contests, because of their known racial inferiority and their dependent credulity, which very characteristic made them the mere tool of the designing and cunning. It is well known that I heartily concur in this constitutional provision of the people's will. The more then does the duty devolve upon us of a superior race and of greater intelligence to protect this weaker race from unjustifiable and lawless attacks."

Nelson's lynching was unusual not for its cruelty, but because it was so well documented photographically, almost certainly because the victim was a woman. She and her son, L.W., age 14, were lynched from a bridge over the Canadian River near Okemah. They were hanged about 20 feet apart. L.W. was accused of murdering a deputy investigating them for theft. The boy's father confessed to the theft and was remanded to custody elsewhere. Laura confessed to the shooting to save her son. She and LW were locked up in the jail. The lynch mob entered, "overpowered" the lone guard and took mother and son to the bridge and lynched them.

Lynch photography was a distinct form for about 30 years or so. Often the photos were made into postcards and became collectors items. One of the photos at Musarium is a photo of a framed picture of the Shipp and Smith lynching, made more macabre because a lock of one of the victim's hair is framed under the glass next to the picture.

Not all the victims were black. There are photos of whites hanged as well. In the Old West vigilantes took matter and rope into their own hands to punish ordinary, but serious, crimes. One photo is of Italian immigrants, murdered for now-unknown reasons, but it's hard to doubt that their ethnicity wasn't behind it.

What struck me is that so many of the perpetrators and spectators in the photos are obviously posing for the camera. Frequently you see scenes of the men (and often women) present standing underneath the hanging corpse, gazing somberly at the victim. Yet there are some shots that give away a different game, where the camera snapped candid scenes of a party atmosphere. The crowds sometimes included women and boys and girls.

Most of the photos depict killings in isolated locales such as the countryside or a woods. Not this series, though. It is of the lynching of a black man named Will James in Cairo, Ill., in 1909. James was accused of murdering Miss Anne Pelley. Townspeople murdered James on the city's Commercial Avenue beneath electric lights. I'd guess from the photo there are several thousand spectators there.

The rope from which James was hung broke before he died. His body was then "riddled with bullets," dragged by rope for a mile to the alleged scene of the crime, and burned in the presence of ten thousand spectators. According to the New York Times, five hundred "women were in the crowd and some helped to hang the negro and to drag the body."

After James was burned, his half-burned head was mounted on a pole and put on display in Candee Park.

As atrocious as the mob in Fallujah was, we'd best recognize that the line between civilization and mob is thin. If honest, we must admit that the mutilation of the security guards' bodies there and the public spectacle made of them was not very different from literally decades of such deeds done here in America by Christian people.

To ask why some Fallujans committed the atrocity is to ask the wrong question. Better to ask of ourselves why we no longer do, for it is our restraint from such cruelty for several decades that is historically unusual. Mob lynchings here did not instantly cease, but they did cease fairly suddenly. What suppressed the mob in America? That's one thing of many we need to teach Iraq.

Update: My friend Geitner Simmons, who blogs Regions of the Mind, is a writer for the Omaha World_Herald newspaper. He emailed me thus: "The Omaha World-Herald won a Pulitzer for editorial writing for an editorial written to response to the 1919 riot at the county courthouse. Henry Fonda was a boy at the time, and, as I recall, he watched part of the riot from his father's downtown office. Fonda (who was living in a house two blocks west of where I now live) cited the riot as one factor that pushed him toward political liberalism."

Geitner writes the best "reading" blogs there is. By "reading blog" I mean that Geitner doesn't post news flashes on his site; he is one of the "thinkers" rather than "linkers" in the blogosphere. Go there and spend some time.

by Donald Sensing, 4/05/2004 07:14:00 PM. Permalink |

Rebellion
Fox News reports that insurgents in Basra have taken over the governor's residence there.

by Donald Sensing, 4/05/2004 06:05:00 PM. Permalink |

"an ignorant mentally retarded weird adolescent"

That is how Iraqi blogger Hammorabi describes firebrand Iraqi Shia cleric Muqtada Al Sadr, who has incited his followers (numbering in the thousands) to revolt against the Americans and the Iraqi Governing Council. the IGC issued an arrest warrant for Al Sadr a long time ago. It has never been enforced. Now, however,

U.S. administrators in Iraq declared a radical Shiite cleric an "outlaw" Monday and announced a warrant for his arrest, heightening a confrontation after battles between his supporters and coalition troops killed at least 52 Iraqis and nine coalition troops, including eight Americans.

American officials would not say when they would move to arrest Muqtada al-Sadr, who is holed up in the main mosque in Kufa, south of Baghdad, guarded by armed supporters.

Hammorabi continues,

There are two kinds of supporters for MS. Those who are close to him and they are opportunistic no different from the security of SH [Saddam Hussein - DS]. The other largest group are those who may get some benefits or possessed by his black turban!

MS money comes mostly from Iran and from the successor of his father Kadhem AL Hairi in Iran and may be other groups. Very recently an important officer from the Iranian Intelligence services defected from Iran and mentioned that the Iranian Intelligent Security had established many secret bases inside Iraq. How many bases of these support or linked to MS?

MS may have a connection to the assassination of Majeed Khoei and may be others. His arrest by Iraqi police not coalition forces and put him into an Iraqi court should have been done before allowing him to organise groups of somehow trained people for at least demonstrations and outlaws. What is happening is some thing bigger than a one adolescent man. It is a push may be by outside forces. Not to forget the Arab media which inflate MS as a leader like their own inflated leaders? MS is nothing but a manic possessed man.

The best solution now is one thing only which is for Mr Ali Sistani [a Shia grand ayatollah, the ranking Shia cleric in Iraq- DS] to issue a FATWA right now to ask for calm and to consider any unrest not acceptable. Such Fatwa will do the magic that no other forces could do it. Let be pressure from Iraqi GC and CPA on this man to get the Fatwa.

Sistani has called for calm, but has not issued a fatwa for it. A fatwa is an official religious ruling by a Muslim authority who has the public standing to issue one. Ayatollahs are Shia clerics with no equivalent office in Sunni Islam. Hammorabi also says that al Jazeera TV is inflaming the situation there. Finally he recommends turning the domestic order mission of the cities over to the Iraqi police and pulling coalition forces outside the cities. "Then let the Iraqi Police and forces and justice do the job against the outlawed."

Update: Iraqi blogger Zeyad says that a coup is underway by al Sadr's thugs and that significant areas of Baghdad are under al Sadr's control. He reports heavy fighting near his own neighborhood and that Shia insurgents are being battled by Sunni hardliners. He also asks, "Where is Shitstani? And why is he keeping silent about this?" Then he gives voice to a shocking cry of despair:

I have to admit that until now I have never longed for the days of Saddam, but now I'm not so sure. If we need a person like Saddam to keep those rabid dogs at bay then be it. Put Saddam back in power and after he fills a couple hundred more mass graves with those criminals they can start wailing and crying again for liberation. What a laugh we will have then. Then they can shove their filthy Hawza and marji'iya up somewhere else. I am so dissapointed in Iraqis and I hate myself for thinking this way. We are not worth your trouble, take back your billions of dollars and give us Saddam again. We truly 'deserve' leaders like Saddam.

Not a good sign.

Update: Glenn Reynolds has a lot more, including cites that show al Asadr has probably overplayed his hand.

by Donald Sensing, 4/05/2004 04:59:00 PM. Permalink |

There are two NCAA basketball tournaments
The women's games have been just as good as the men's.

I'll not spend too much time protesting and lamenting that Duke's men's basketball team was robbed blind the other night in its one-point loss to UConn. There were two clear fouls against Duke in the closing seconds of the game that the blind guys in striped shirts didn't whistle - the uncalled foul against JJ Reddick, as he went for a go-ahead layup with a few seconds remaining, was so blatant that UConn couldn't have been more obvious if they had beat him with an axe handle. No call.

But as I explained to my son later, you never hear Duke's Coach K whine and moan that the refs cost him the game because his philosophy is simple. The score should never be so close that missed or unjustified calls push the other team to win.

Having gotten that off my chest, I will say that I hope Georgia Tech stomps UConn into the woodwork tonight.

I also point out that if you haven't been watching the women's NCAA tournament you're missing basketball that by no means takes a back seat to the men's game in pacing, skill and excitement. The final-four game of Tennessee against LSU last night was a heart-stopper with the score tied 50-50 at only six seconds left after UT guard Tasha Butts missed a shot. The ball went out of bounds, off Tennessee. LSU brought the ball inbounds under UT's net, with neither side having a T/O remaining.

LSU standout Temeka Johnson received the inbound pass and immediately UT triple-teamed her. With nowhere to turn and unable to dribble again, Johnson traveled (uncalled) trying to get free and attempted to throw the ball to a teammate. But UT center Ashley Robinson tapped the ball just as Johnson threw it. Tennessee forward Shyra Ely grabbed it and threw it to UT's LaToya Davis, near the basket. Davis made an unopposed layup with the clock at 1.2 seconds.

Game over. The inbound pass and three-quarter court heave by LSU had no chance.

Tennessee's coach, Pat Summit, has now coached 101 NCAA tournament games. She said afterward that the last three were the toughest. All three ended with UT winning by two, all decided within the last few seconds of regulation.

The women's final game pits the Lady Vols Tuesday night against (hiss!) UConn's women. (Just try to imagine where my loyalties lie.) If you want to see great basketball, tune into the women's NCAA final as well as tonight's match.

by Donald Sensing, 4/05/2004 04:27:00 PM. Permalink |

Operation Operation Vigilant Resolve no blitzkrieg

US Marines closed off the Iraqi city of Fallujah last night in preparation for moves into the city to destroy the Baathist resistance movement there. Some reports say that the first American movements have already begun.

Fallujah did not see fighting during Operation Iraq Freedom a year ago, which toppled Saddam's regime and emplaced the United States as the occupying power of Iraq. The Marines' operation in Fallujah will not be a lightning operation.

A military spokesman said the Fallujah operation would move steadily, perhaps spanning several days, and might not involve taking the center of the city.

"Our concern is precise. We want to get the guys we are after. We don't want to go in there with guns blazing," said Lt. James Vanzant (search), 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force from Camp Pendleton, Calif.

Nor should it be a fast move, at least, not speedy simply for speed's sake. It's main purposes must be twofold: (1) identify and neutralize active enemies of American forces and the upcoming free Iraqi government and (2) protect non-inimical Fallujans from attack by Baathists and convince them that their future is secure on the free Iraqi side.


by Donald Sensing, 4/05/2004 02:37:00 PM. Permalink |

4th Rebuilding Iraq Expo
The fourth "Rebuilding Iraq Expo" will be held in Arbil, Iraq, beginning April 26. The previous three were held in Washington, DC. Mosul, of course, is in the Kurdish part of the country and has been under American protection since 1991.

by Donald Sensing, 4/05/2004 02:08:00 PM. Permalink |

Palm Sunday
Luke 19:29-40

29 When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the disciples, 30 saying, “Go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it here. 31 If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ just say this, ‘The Lord needs it.’ ”

32 So those who were sent departed and found it as he had told them. 33 As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, “Why are you untying the colt?” 34 They said, “The Lord needs it.” 35 Then they brought it to Jesus; and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. 36 As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road. 37 As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, 38 saying, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!”

39 Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” 40 He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

In May 1963, when I was seven years old, President John F. Kennedy came to Nashville. He passed in a motorcade down Broad Street to West End Avenue, en route to Vanderbilt University, where he gave a speech. My father took my older brother and me to see the president pass by. There was an enormous crowd lining the street. A presidential visit was a bigger deal for a city's people then than now. Since Kennedy's death in Dallas a few months after he came here, the president's security trumps everything and the motorcade whizzes along its route headlong. The president's car is armored and he can hardly be seen inside it.

But in Nashville Kennedy rode in a Lincoln convertible, probably the same one he was assassinated in a few months later. I remember he was half-standing and waving as he went by - waving directly at me and calling out, "Don, it's great to see you! Come visit Jackie and me this summer!" Nashville was solidly a Kennedy city that day.

There is a long history of grand-entry parades. The ancients even had a special word for them: parousia, meaning, "the arriving." Whenever a king or regional governor entered a city, the people turned out for parousia. Sometimes the parousia were triumphal occasions as the king returned victorious from war. The people came to see the spoils he brought with him and the prisoners chained behind him.

But any entrance could be the occasion for a parousia. When Pontius Pilate entered Jerusalem a few days before Jesus did, there was almost certainly a parousia for him. The Jews hated Pilate but were compelled to turn out to pretend otherwise and greet him as their overlord, the legate of Caesar. Not only did a parousia gratify Pilate's ego, it reinforced to the people that he was their political master.

But the people who greeted Jesus with a parousia when he entered Jerusalem did so willingly, joyfully in fact. They lay their cloaks on the road in front of him, a sign of highest respect and honor. Waving palm branches was a symbol of Judean nationalism. By riding in on a colt (Matthew says a young donkey), Jesus was fulfilling the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9, which said, "Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey." The prophetic fulfillment of Jesus coming to Jerusalem as a prophesied king would not have been lost upon the people, and certainly not on the Jewish high council.

As a member of the line of King David, Jesus had a rightful claim to the throne of Judea. The throne was occupied by Herod Antipas, a Roman vassal and not even really Jewish. The people despised Herod almost as much as Pilate. They wanted to be free of him as well as of the Romans.

The Jews wanted a Jewish King with a legitimate claim to the throne who would rule justly. They thought that Jesus was their man. His works of mercy and compassion were well known, as was the amazing power with which Jesus did them. Luke says that "the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen." No doubt the people joined in.

David Taylor wrote, "They had seen the mighty works of this man Jesus. They were witness to Him restoring sight to the blind. They saw the evidence of Him healing the lame. They saw Him feed the multitude with a little boy’s lunch, and had leftovers to spare. They heard about Him raising Lazarus from the dead. They listened to Him teach with authority. Surely, with power and authority like that, Jesus was without a doubt the one who would set them free. So, Jesus came to Jerusalem, and the crowds began to cheer."

Such acclaim would probably not have happened at any time of the year other than when Jesus made this entry. It was the time of Passover, a holy day dripping with memories and symbolism of liberation. In Passover the Jews celebrated the liberation of their ancestors from chattel slavery in Egypt. If Jesus was to proclaim himself a political Messiah, that was the time. Tens of thousands of Jews had come to Jerusalem from the rest of the country to make sacrifices. Religious and nationalist fervor ran very high. Had Jesus claimed the throne the news would have spread throughout all Judea within one or two days. Jesus was doubtless quite aware of all of this.

The city's residents were pretty much his for commanding. Yet within just a few days, many of the same people who spread their coats before him and waved palm branches would muster in Pilate's courtyard, calling for Jesus' death at Roman hands and assuring Pilate, "We have no king but Caesar."

What turned them against Jesus so quickly? I am guessing the reason was that Jesus accepted their acclaim and then ignored it. He did not make a play for political power and even went out of his way, apparently, to insult the religious practices of the Temple.

Sometime between his parousia and the middle of the week, the crowd stopped cheering Jesus. He wasn't the man they thought he was. There are few things more fickle than the adoration of crowds. What happened to their acclaim?

Their acclaim was actually given in error. Jesus was certainly worthy of praise, but not for the reasons the crowd gave it. They hailed him as king, and so he was, but they did not realize that his kingdom was not of the worldly kind. The reign of Jesus would not be built on grasping power, violent conflict and domination, but on love of God and neighbor.

By misunderstanding Jesus' purpose, the people were unable to accept Jesus' terms. He had explained them clearly enough in his preaching: pray for your enemies, the Romans for example, and do good to those who persecute you - the Romans for example, or social oppressors such as wealthy overlords. Jesus had been clear that the benefit package of being his disciple was pretty thin. Not for self-exaltation would someone follow him, but out of self denial. "Take up your cross," he said, "and follow me." (I might add, though, that the retirement plan is literally out of this world!)

Jesus offered the people peace, but not peace resulting from conflict. His terms were for peace within conflict. "In this world you will have trouble," he had preached, "by take heart: I have overcome the world." These were not the terms of peace the people wanted. But Jesus had never promised they were.

Of all the people in Jerusalem, including his the disciples, Jesus alone was of clear mind about the purpose of his visit. Je would not be dissuaded therefrom. When he didn't follow the script the people had in mind, their cheering stopped and then their support. They seemed to have felt betrayed by Jesus because his purpose and theirs were not the same.

The bad news is that Christ is not a crutch we can use to prop up the way we want to be or the plans we make for ourselves. We are too often too quick to ignore crucial aspects of the revelation given in Christ because they don't comport with our preconceptions or, let's be frank, our sinful desires. Yet following Christ means accepting the whole package. Unless we accept all of him, we are really just giving fleeting praise and empty cheers. And Jesus ignores them just as much as he ignored the wants of the crowd two thousand years ago.

The Good News is that Jesus does ignore our hopes and dreams for ungodly things. The Good News is that Jesus calls us not to stand on the roadside and cheer, but to walk with him on his way. We are not to be spectators, but cooperators. So let us praise Christ, yes, but let us also join the parade and go with him, not stand and watch him pass by.

Dave Trowbridge has some other thoughts about the beginning of Passion Week.

by Donald Sensing, 4/04/2004 07:03:00 AM. Permalink |

Arab Muslims respond to The Passion of the Christ
Dave Gudeman posted and commented on an email he received from a Christian in Qatar about the reaction there to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. His correspondeent saw the movie surrounded by Muslim Qataris.

The Muslims sitting around us were being moved - gasping, crying and reacting with disgust to the brutality that Jesus faced.Now - if you have heard anything about why the Arab Muslims would want to see the film, you know that it is because they 'heard' it was anti-Jewish and since they hate the Jews, they want to see it. How interesting that God is using this film to communicate the Gospel and the very opposite spirit that might be motivating them to go and see it. The message to LOVE YOUR ENEMIES, and Jesus praying for them to be forgiven while on the Cross would hit the Muslim theatre-goer in a powerful way.
...
Muslims are going to see this film because of their hatred and in the end, the message they will hear is to LOVE. Is it not just like God to do something like that? They mean it for evil, and God means it for good!!
...
The killing of Palestinian Hamas leader, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin happened the morning after the film was released. The Arab response has been a whole new wave of hatred for the Jews, which was illustrated in a large public demonstration/march yesterday. Again, God's timing is so amazing. At a time when the urge for Muslims to hate has been renewed, the Lord has brought THE PASSION telling them - NO, LOVE YOUR ENEMIES! Forgive them! The contrast is staggering.

Dave observes,

... there is reason to hope that this will have a positive effect on Muslims. If nothing else, it will make some of them curious about Christianity, and therefore about alternatives to the hate-filled religious teaching many of them have had to live with. Now that they have the internet, the only thing keeping those people in their insular world is lack of curiosity, so if we can make them curious then a large part of the war has been won. In addition, this film may help to break some of the harmful stereotypes that Muslims have for Christians and Jews. They will see that there is more to Christians than the Crusades and the US Marines. And surely someone is going to have to notice that Jesus was a Jew and that he forgave the people who crucified him.

I think there is enormous cause for hope here. And if the film has positive effects in the Muslim world, a great deal of the credit will have to go to the Jewish groups that protested its release. This would be a double irony: the film gains popularity because they opposed it, and they benefit from the increased popularity. I hope that in twenty years we will be having great arguments about what was the more powerful influence leading to the great modernization and pacification of the Middle East: the liberation of Iraq or the release of The Passion of the Christ.

A really intriguing thought. But after all, "the pen is mightier than the sword." The war on terror is not chiefly a war of arms but of ideas. And it is only Western foolishness to think that Christianity has no place in our arsenal of ideas. Not that Christanity is actually Western, but if Christianity is to have any resurgence in Araby in any significant way, it will have to come from Christians outside the Middle East.

However, I would demur with Dave and his Christian correspondent in thinking that the love and forgiveness of the Jewish Jesus will have a salutary effect on modern Muslims feeling more kindly toward modern Jews. Muslims say that Jesus was not a Jew, he was Muslim.

Likewise with many other significant Jewish figures: Abraham, for example: proto-Hebrew, no, Muslim yes.

In fact, Islam recognizes Jesus as a great Muslim prophet, the greatest Muslim prophet after Muhammed, I recall. Many Muslims believe that Jesus will return to judge humanity under the authority of Allah. Jesus is the only prophet to whom Muslims ascribe the working of miracles.

No Muslim believes that Jesus rose from the dead, of course. In fact, Muslims generally believe that Jesus did not really die on the cross. He was crucified, yes, but only in his body. Allah transfigured his soul directly into Paradise in reward for his faithfulness. As Submission.org explains it,

Jesus' soul was raised, i.e., he was put to death prior to the arrest and crucifixion of his body. Thus, his persecutors arrested, tortured, and crucified an empty body - Jesus was already gone to the world of souls (3:55, 4:157).

They plotted and schemed, but so did God, and God is the best schemer. Thus, God said, ``O Jesus, I am putting you to death, and raising you to Me; I will save you from the disbelievers.''
[ Quran 3:54-55 ]

They claimed that they killed the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, the messenger of God! In fact, they never killed him; they never crucified him; they were led to believe that they did. [ Quran 4:157 ]

Now how, if at all, this understanding of Jesus will affect the disposition of the Muslim viewrs of The Passion toward Jews I cannot say. But I am skeptical that The Passion is a harbinger of Muslims favoralky reconsidering Jesus specifically or Christianity generally, to say nothing of alleviating their hatred of the Jews.

At very best, The Passion might plant a seed, but without further nurture it is unlikely to blossom. But let us pray nonetheless.

by Donald Sensing, 4/03/2004 09:25:00 PM. Permalink |

Freedom - is it "game over" in America?
Kevin at Smallest Minority takes a look at a recent court decision - a ruling he agrees with - and finds cause for despair.

So what's my problem with it? It reinforces my belief that judicial review - the "willingness to periodically re-examine the law" is a forlorn hope. It illustrates that bad precedent will live on, and be expanded, and that nothing short of a judicial miracle will be required to overturn what prior courts have decreed, so long as judges use their power to constitutionalize their personal preferences. ...

Almost from the day of ratification of the Constitution until today, the legal encroachment on our Constitutional rights, aided and abetted by the Judicial Branch generally under the guise of "public safety," has continued almost unabated. Prohibition. Communism. Vietnam War protesters. The War on Drugs. And now the War on Terror. And it's accelerated. To fight prostitution, cities confiscate the cars of men soliciting sex, sell them and keep the proceeds. Cities misuse eminent domain to take the property of their citizens so that businesses that will generate high tax revenues can build on it. Police are allowed to seize cash and property from people suspected to be involved in the drug trade, and keep it - even if the people they take it from are never charged, much less convicted. It's up to the victim of the seizure to prove the property isn't related to drug trafficking. The examples are nearly endless.

Tonight Kevin emailed me a long letter that cites my December post on why the Bush administration is killing our rights (not that a Gore administration wouldn't have). The same day I posted that, Kevin wrote, Francis Porretto observed of the Supreme Court's decision upholding the Campaign Finance Reform Act wrote:

So long as speech was protected, Americans could claim with some justice that we were in some sense free. If Tuesday's Supreme Court decision prevails, we will not be able to call ourselves even partly free. We will be a people in chains. Chains forged to protect incumbents from having their records in office publicized in the press as they stand for election. Chains forged to increase the power of the Old Media, granting their journalists and editors the last word on political campaigns. Chains forged by (and for) men to whom "the people" are not only not sovereign, but are a force to be fastened down and made to do as they're told by those who know better.

He quotes Antonin Scalia:

It is literally true that the U.S. Supreme Court has entirely liberated itself from the text of the Constitution.

We are free at last, free at last. There is no respect in which we are chained or bound by the text of the Constitution. All it takes is five hands.

I cited Scalia a bit myself in my post, "Alice in Wonderland judges," in which I made many of the same points Kevin makes, namely that the entire federal judiciary system has become corrupted because judges have appointed themselves as final arbiters of the Constitution. Yet the Founders never intended for any one branch of the federal government to be the final or ultimate arbiter and envisioned, in fact, that the judiciary should be the weakest of the three branches. Kevin concludes,

I have come to the same conclusion you did in your December 12 piece - that we are 'the last generation of the minimally truly free.' My epiphany came when I read that 9th Circuit decision, because until then I still believed that the judicial branch of the government could, if the justices were honorable and honest, still save us from our folly and return us to the intent of the Constitution even after I read Justice Scalia's quote. My "nauseating near-conviction" wasn't "near" anymore. ...

So here's my question: Believing what we believe, is it moral for us to let it happen without standing up and pledging our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to fight it? I have grandchildren. What do I owe them?

So, good readers, any answers for Kevin? For me?

by Donald Sensing, 4/03/2004 08:44:00 PM. Permalink |

Is NATO "allies" or "all lies?"
Steven Den Beste wants to know.

by Donald Sensing, 4/02/2004 05:00:00 PM. Permalink |

"Your retention, please"
Mudville Gazette reports the good news about the Army's re-enlistment rates: they're sky high.

Blogger Greyhawk links to Kos' post expressing anger at the under-reported deaths of the five soldiers killed on March 31, the same day that the four American, private security guards were murdered, set afire and hung from a bridge in Fallujah. Kos says that the four murdered guards were simply mercenaries, there for the money (he says up to $30,000 per month), while in Iraq,

.... our men and women in uniform are there under orders, trying to make the best of an impossible situation. The war is not their fault, and I will always defend their honor and bravery to the end of my days. But the mercenary is a whole different deal. They willingly enter a war zone, and do so because of the paycheck. They're not there for humanitarian reasons (I doubt they'd donate half their paycheck to the Red Cross or whatever). They're there because the money is [expletive] good. They answer to no one except their CEO. They are dangerous, hence international efforts (however fruitless they may be) to ban their use.

I once looked up how "mercenary" is defined in the Conventions, but I don't remember now. When I get arowntuit I'll look it up again. (HT: Joanne Perry).

by Donald Sensing, 4/02/2004 04:55:00 PM. Permalink |

ABC News gets Jesus (mostly) right
So says professor of Christian hstory Robert Wilken in today's OpinionJournal, reviewing the Peter Jennings special, "Jesus and Paul," to be broadcast this Monday night.

by Donald Sensing, 4/02/2004 01:34:00 PM. Permalink |

Audrey Seiler's abduction a hoax - gee, what a coincidence!
Thje talking heads are already analyzing what was inside Audrey Seiler's head when she hoaxed the police into investigating her (phony) abduction at knifepoint. What secret psychosis does she have? Why the cry for attention? Oh, the poor woman!

Well, maybe. But folks, look at the calendar! Yesterday was . . .

by Donald Sensing, 4/02/2004 01:22:00 PM. Permalink |

Want hits? Try nekkid wimmin.
Bill Hobbs emails,

It's one of those things that happens in the blogosphere, I guess.

I checked my referrer logs yesterday and found your site has sent me the second-most traffic of any site so far in April - about 420 visitors since midnight April 1. The number one referred to my site so far this month isn't Instapundit - it's a blog where the blogger finds sexual innuendo in every story, and also posts pictures of women unburdened by clothing. Apparently, that site liked my piece about horizontal drilling for Alaska oil. I've gotten almost 1,000 visits from them. Apparently the shortcut to big blog numbers is nekkid wimmin. Whodathunkit?

But I'd rather have the traffic from your blog any day. I just hope some of the folks that came my way from the other blog scrolled down to read this:

http://billhobbs.com/hobbsonline/003571.html

Actually, I think that the only category of web site that outnumbers sex sites is religious sites.

by Donald Sensing, 4/02/2004 01:17:00 PM. Permalink |

On the lighter side
Yesterday, being April Fools Day and all, Sweet Darling Daughter, 10, tried to rope me in by saying she had seen as ad in the newspaper that a local gun shop was advertising free shotguns. (In case you didn't know, I am an avid trapshooter.)

Okay, not a bad try. But it doesn't hold a candle to Burger King's left-handed Whopper.

Here is a list and of the 100 greatest hoaxes (not cons or scams) of all time).

by Donald Sensing, 4/02/2004 12:49:00 PM. Permalink |

Empire of Liberty a worthy read
Tom Donelson is an astute journalist and author who writes cogent, insightful essays about domestic and world events. His book, Economics 101 and Other Thoughts, is a wide-ranging look at some basic principles of economics, but also a fone purview of international politics, focusing on the Middle East and southern Asia.

Now Tom has published Empire of Liberty, a collection of essays about trends and figures that have shaped the today's world. The major section, about socio-political history and trends, is whence the book's name. Tom discusses "Europe at the Crossroads," "Russia, China, and Europe," "Africa" and Iraq after the war.

Other essays in other sections include biographical sketches, "Thoughts on God" (which includes an essay on why Islam is not the religion of the rest of the 21st century), and "Conservatism Revisited."

Other than religion, my primary interest remain foreign affairs and military history. Here is an excerpt from "Changes for the Future:"

The 21st century will be one of constant conflicts, as conflicts will multiply throughout the world. There is a counterrevolution against the rise of Western values and Democratic institutions. ... We are entering a period of cultural clashes as Western ideals extend throughout the world. ... Such clashes will be bloody and not conducted by the rules of the Geneva Convention. For peace and our vision of a just society to succeed, we will have to win a major war against the new forces of terror. The End of History can only be accomplished when we win the war on terrorism.

I assume Tom borrowed the term, "End of History," from Francis Fukuyama's book of the same name, in which Fukuyama claimed,

What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

I am either more pessimistic or more realistic than Tom. I don't believe we will ever reach the End of History as Fukuyama discussed it. I take a more sanguine view that, as Thomas Jefferson said, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Freedom is not the natural human condition. There are political conditions and human institutions that form its foundation, and these require constant nurture to stay vibrant.

But I digress. As with all Tom's work, reading Empire of Liberty is a good way to spend aan evening. So I recommend it to you. It is available on Amazon.com or from Tom's web site.

by Donald Sensing, 4/02/2004 12:18:00 PM. Permalink |

My Blogads policy
Why I have decided to accept political ads

Until today I had rejected Blogads that were political in nature. I have not endorsed any candidate for any office and still do not. I have refused to join Blogs for Bush, for example and have never run or linked to anything that site carries. I also got a similar invitation from the Democratic party's site, but declined it as well.

Today, however, I accepted a Blogad for Bush Meetups. There are two reasons. First, I admit up front I want the fee: running this site is not inexpensive and I want to convert it to Movable Type as soon as possible. I don't have the skills to do it myself, so I'll have to pay for it. I just bought a new, much more capable computer as well. So, yes, the commercial motive is there.

The other reason is that politics is what is happening now. I believe in the Jeffersonian ideal of vigorous public participation in the political process. Blogads has proved to be an effective means of disseminating information. If there is an ad submitted by a Democratic sponsor I'll consider it as well. I won't reject ads of either party simply because they are political, as I used to do.

I'll consider each ad, political or not, on a case-by-case basis. To submit an ad, simply click here.

BTW, if you would like to make a donation to help speed my transition to Movable Type - and a faster-loading site - please donate either by PayPal or Amazon, using the links at the top left column. Thank you!

by Donald Sensing, 4/02/2004 09:39:00 AM. Permalink |

Fallujah's gathering storm
Some of us bloggers have been talking about a response or reprisals to the atrocities in Fallujah two days ago, Based on cable news reports this morning, I am thinking that the Amewrican actions will go far beyond. I can't pin down anything specific. I note the tone of determination of Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmit of the military's directorate of operations in Baghdad.

Last night I wrote that we would likely awaken here in the US this morning to see the Marines entering the city on TV. It hasn't happened. Why the delay? There are several possible reasons, but my gut feeling is that one of the chief ones in that the Marines are stockpiling supplies, ammo and equipment. Assault units are carrying our detailed rehearsals. The storm they are gathering outside Falluhjah is no raid. I think it will be a campaign. The action coming soon will decisively break the Baathist's back and end in their true defeat.

Update: Strategy Page says,

Any Iraqi civilian with a gun will be quickly killed. The most likely plan is to assemble a force of Iraqi police to go in with the marines and quickly interrogate the people of Fallujah and try and find the gunmen before marine bullets do. The police will also spread the word that the marines will keep fighting, and killings Iraqis, until the Iraqi police are told where the killers are and can arrest the bad guys.

Well, this would qualify as a decidedly military action, as opposed to a purely police action. And it certainly is coercive. After all, as Clausewitz explained, the purpose of military force is to compel, not merely persuade the enemy to do your will. Some dead enders will choose death over surrender, and the Marines will quickly oblige. But I hope and pray that the Fallujans will realize quickly that the end game has arrived, and that they will submit rather than fight. (HT: James Joyner)


by Donald Sensing, 4/02/2004 08:03:00 AM. Permalink |

Reprisals reprise
Steven Den Beste writes a typically thoughtful, thorough and fairly brief look at the terrorists' motivations and the right American response regarding the atrocities in Fallujah. Basically, he says that the point of the brutality of the event was to provoke an American response in kind - not that we would burn bodies, hang them from the lampposts and then drag them through the streets, but that we would come with guns blazing and indiscriminately attack the city, or at least the section where the murders occurred.

But the goal of this attack is to inspire American fury. What they hope is that the Americans will be blinded by hatred and will do something extremely stupid: to punish the Sunnis collectively for the actions of the terrorist group.

Such a reprisal would convince the fence-sitting Sunnis of Fallujah that they, and Sunnis generally, have no hope for the future from Americans or the coming Iraqi government, leading them to join the "resistance." OTOH, a weak response would convince them that we cannot prevail against them, and that would persuade them to join the resistance.

"That's why there must be a response but why it has to be very carefully crafted," says Steven.

Now, I go through all this because Steven read my own post, just below, and said that I missed the point. I think Steven's concept is correct but I don't think that what he wrote really contradicts what I wrote. I do give Steven credit for a much more elegant exposition, though.

Probably what he focused on was this section of my post:

I therefore reject any notion of "proportional response" to the murders and desecration of the bodies. I hope that Brig. Gen. Kimmit does not imply by "overwhelming" a overwhelming show of force, but an overwhelming use of force.

Let me expand that thinking a little more. By proportional response, what I had in mind was a response limited in scope and time, especially something resembling a police action rather than a distinctly military action.

Overwhelming "show" of force means the Marines show up and maintain security while the action groups do their thing. And that will happen, no matter what else the Marines do, but what I think should happen is that the Marines lock down that section of the city and exercise near-total control over the Fallujans - their goings and comings, their markets, their gathering places. Implement a total and early curfew, for example. This control must be exercised coercively - by force - though not necessarily by deadly force. (I have no doubt that the Marines will use deadly force if necessary, of course.)

IMO, a high level of coercion should be maintained for a long time, several days at least. Business as usual for the Fallujans must not be allowed to continue. The fence sitters need to have time fully to intellectually and emotionally integrate the idea that they really are at our mercy, but we were merciful. They have to understand that we had the capability to destroy them, but did not. They have to be under American domination long enough to decide which side of the fence they will choose.

The hardcore Baathists must be identified and removed along with their active supporters. I imagine some will choose to go down fighting. Some Fallujans who are fence sitting now will opt for resistance no matter what we do. They must be taken quickly. Their peers must understand that there is no future in siding with America's enemies.

An overwhelming use of force does not mean a overwhelming use of deadly force. It does mean that we must compel our will. We must punish those who opoose us and reward those who side with us. The trick is applying enough pain to the fence sitters to get them to make a choice, but not so much pain they make the wrong choice.

I think that the Marines will move in so that we will awaken to learn of it tomorrow morning. I don't know just what their plan and tactics will be. There may not be enough boots on the ground to exercise the kind of control I described above.

BTW, I think that Peggy Noonan had a pretty good idea: "blow up the bridge" the Americans' charred bodies were hung from. Let its twisted abutments serve as an enduring reminder that such atrocities must not be repeated.

Update: Brian Dunn recommends very harsh, but not inherently deadly, measures.

by Donald Sensing, 4/01/2004 09:45:00 PM. Permalink |

Responding to Fallujah
This morning Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmit of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq said that the American response to yesterday’s outrage in Fallujah will be "precise" and "overwhelming."

I am not going to be so bold as to advise the CPA exactly what to do. I do think that the response must be very soon and it must make it very clear to the people of Fallujah that they find the consequences of such murder and atrocities are completely unacceptable.

I therefore reject any notion of "proportional response" to the murders and desecration of the bodies. I hope that Brig. Gen. Kimmit does not imply by "overwhelming" a overwhelming show of force, but an overwhelming use of force.

No, I do not mean that the Marines should go in with guns blazing. But our response must be painful to those who committed these atrocities. The ones who committed the murders must be captured, tried and when found guilty they must be harshly punished. Execution might not be the worst judgment, though. Spending the rest of their lives by the Caribbean Sea might have a greater effect on the city than execution. After all, martyr wannabes expect to be killed one way or another, but permanent exile and imprisonment fits nowhere in the scheme. Their families and sympathizers have no psychological cubbyhole to place it.

I would be okay if we conducted mass arrests and removed the arrested people to distant imprisonment, incommunicado, while the investigation continued. Other retaliatory measures, such as destroying the homes of the guilty, have probably been considered by the CPA. I could argue such measures either way.

I think that legitimate Iraqi authorities should play a significant, but not major, role in the responding to the crimes. The United States is still the occupying power and the offenses were committed against us specifically, not the Iraqi Governing Council. Therefore, it must be clear to Fallujah that the response comes principally from the US, but with legitimate Iraqi support.

One case of overwhelming response, though, won't win this city over. Fanaticism can withstand a lot of pain, as the Israelis well know. Our response must be one that serves our interests and not merely hurts the Fallujans. The Baathist dead enders in Fallujah must be shown to be losers who cannot divert the progress of Iraq toward democratic autonomy.

In 1991's Battle of Mogadishu, dead American soldiers were dragged through the streets by a mob. It is worth noting that Osama bin Laden told interviewers in the mid-1990s that he was convinced the Americans could not stomach such combat and treatment of their dead, and that they would quit the fight rather than risk more deaths and atrocities.

Al Qaeda does not seem to be implicated in the Fallujah atrocities, but I wonder whether the Baathist thugs who did the deeds were thinking the same thing.

We must remember that we are winning the struggle in Iraq, and that perseverance and success there are crucial to future peace – not only for Iraq, but America as well. Now is no time to weaken our will. Such events shock, but not really surprise. While they should make our military and political leaders in Iraq reexamine tactics and strategy, our objectives are sound. We must stay the course. It is impossible for us to be defeated unless we decide to quit.

Update: I respond to Steven Den Beste's post about this issue here.

by Donald Sensing, 4/01/2004 02:18:00 PM. Permalink |

More lessons from the 9/11 hearings
Austin Bay discusses national will and presidential leadership.

by Donald Sensing, 4/01/2004 08:33:00 AM. Permalink |

Bring home the troops?
A year ago today, I wrote that we should bring the troops home. Today I am not so sure. It bothers me still, but I can't say I wholly agree with my year-old position.

by Donald Sensing, 4/01/2004 07:44:00 AM. Permalink |

ANWR oil drilling will begin
Alaska's governor announced that the state will open certain areas of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration. Under fedewral law, the state has unilateral authoroty to do so under certain conditions. Bill Hobbs has details and revealing photos.

I say, It's about time.

by Donald Sensing, 4/01/2004 07:38:00 AM. Permalink |