Brokaw gets it wrong to Allawi
James Joyner reports on NBC News' anchor Tom Brokaw's interview with new Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, "who still believes that Saddam was connected to al-Qaida." Quoting MSNBC:

Brokaw: I know that you and others like you are grateful for the liberation of Iraq. But can’t you understand why many Americans feel that so many young men and women have died here for purposes other than protecting the United States?

Allawi: We know that this is an extension to what has happened in New York. And — the war have been taken out to Iraq by the same terrorists. Saddam was a potential friend and partner and natural ally of terrorism.

Brokaw: Prime minister, I’m surprised that you would make the connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq. The 9/11 commission in America says there is no evidence of a collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein and those terrorists of al-Qaida.

Allawi: No. I believe very strongly that Saddam had relations with al-Qaida. And these relations started in Sudan. ...

Lay aside the breathtaking arrogance of an American newsreader trying to tell a head of state what he should think about one of the most important issues facing the prime minister's country. The fact is that Brokaw was flat wrong about what the 9/11 Commission said.

Bill Hobbs has the story that Brokaw missed:

Perhaps they should have more carefully read Staff Statement #15, Overview of the Enemy, especially this brief section from page 3:

With al Qaeda as its foundation, Bin Ladin sought to build a broader Islamic army that also included terrorist groups from Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Oman, Tunisia, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Somalia and Eritrea. Not all groups from these states agreed to join, but at least one from each did. With a multinational council intended to promote common gooals, coordinate targeting and authorize asset sharing for terrorist operations, this Islamic force represented a new level of collaboration among diverse terrorist groups.

The prospect of future coordination, asset-sharing and collaboration between al Qaeda and a weapons-of-mass-destruction-producing/Islamist terrorism-supporting/America-hating Saddam Hussein resulting in an attack on America more horrifying and deadly than 9/11 was the underlying reason - the "grave and gathering danger" - that President Bush stressed as the reason we must remove Saddam from power.

He was right. And 9/11 Commission Staff Statement #15 makes that very clear.

Further deponent sayeth not.

Update: I wrote about media bias yesterday and last month discussed basic issue for news media regarding the terror war, in which I said, and stand by, "Which outcome do you want? It is not possible to pretend neutrality here, for the power of the media to frame the public's debate is too great to claim you are merely being "fair and balanced." There literally is no neutral ground here, no "God's eye view" of events, and hence no possibility of not taking sides."

Update: Actually, the Commission's statement is not quite so clear. I posted a brief look at connections between al Qaeda, Saddam and Ansar al-Islam as a follow-up piece. Ansar al-Islam was an al Qaeda affiliate or actual member group operating in northern Iraq, principally against the free Kurds under allied protection after 1991's Gulf War.

by Donald Sensing, 6/30/2004 03:02:32 PM. Permalink |   

Al Qaeda overestimated Spain
Agence France Presse reports that al Qaeda attacked Spain in March because it believed Spain was the "weakest link" in the Iraq coalition. Even so, al Qaeda thought it would take two or three terror strikes against Spain to force its withdrawal from Iraq.

"We consider that the Spanish government cannot suffer more than two to three strikes before pulling out (of Iraq) under pressure from its own people," said the document obtained Wednesday by AFP from Raido France International's regional office in Beirut.

"If these (Spanish) forces remain after the strikes, the victory of the socialist party would be near-guaranteed and the pullout of Spanish forces from Iraq would be on its agenda," said the document, distributed ahead of the March 11 attacks in Madrid.

In fact, Spain did elect a socialist party candidate as prime minster, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, shortly after al Qaeda's strike against Madrid's rail system March 11 killed almost 200 people. Zapatero ordered all Spanish troops out of Iraq in May, to be effective when their planned tour ended in June.

by Donald Sensing, 6/30/2004 02:47:43 PM. Permalink |   

Pat Buchanan: Saddam was our ally against terrorism
Pat Buchanan makes noise without wisdom.

Pat needs to heed the adage, "It's better for others to think you a fool than to open your mouth and prove it." Because prove it he does with his latest screed, claiming that the Iraq war and occupation were losing campaigns in the war on terror. Incredibly, PB says that Saddam was better for America in office than out:

Consider what has happened as a result of our war on Iraq. An enemy of Islamic fundamentalism, Saddam, has been removed. His secular Baath Party is gone. A vacuum has opened up in Iraq that the Islamists and their allies may one day fill. ...

What can Buchanan mean except that the United States would have been more secure, not less, with Saddam still in power, that somehow the US and Saddam were working independently toward the same end, defeating Islamofascism? If he does not mean that, what does he mean?

This is one of many errors PB makes. Saddam was never an "enemy" of Islamic fundamentalism, he just wasn't a philosophical ally. But it's so well documented now that Saddam and al Qaeda were cooperating on many levels that only willful blindness by PB can account for his omission.

Buchanan's piece is simply one of the most glaringly uninformed I have read on the topic. If Pat Buchanan is a strategist then I'm a research physicist.

PB bemoans the "destabilization of the Saudi monarchy through terror," except that reporting from Saudi Arabia shows the Saudi people are more repulsed, not less, by al Qaeda because of the terrorism al Qaeda has committed this year in the kingdom. A true strategist, James Dunnigan, wrote June 29,

Recent surveys have shown support for bin Laden and al Qaeda shrink dramatically in Saudi Arabia (from 96 percent in late 2001, to less than a quarter of that currently.) It's easy to admire terrorists from a distance, rather more difficult when they are terrorizing you.

As for destabilizing the monarchy, I've seen no evidence thereof.

"Rulers in Arab countries have been forced to distance themselves from the Americans if they wish to retain the support of their people."

And this is different from pre-Iraq War in what way? Note that PB thinks Arab "governments" have the support of the people. Does PB know that except for Iraq, every Arab country's "government" ranges from outright dictatorship (i.e., Syria) to hard authoritarianism (Egypt)? Even relatively pro-West Jordan is an inherited monarchy with a secret police; the people have no say in who rules them or how.

I recall that not long before the US-UK armies invaded Iraq, Saddam got 99.9 percent of the vote in a national "election." I guess Buchanan thinks Saddam had the support of the people, too.

"Western tourists are staying away from the Middle East, Western investment is on hold, and Western workers have begun to depart Saudi Arabia and Iraq."

Is this a bad thing? PB apparently thinks so, but he doesn't explain why. I think its real significance is less than self evident.

"There exists today a hatred of Americans never equaled in the region," Egyptian President Mubarak told Le Monde. "In the beginning, some people thought the Americans were helping them. There was no hatred toward Americans. After what happened in Iraq, there is an unprecedented hatred, and the Americans know it."

Hmm, President-for-life Mubarak, whom PB also characterized as America's "longtime friend," who receives billions annually in American aid, says there is hatred of Americans in the region. Says it to a French magazine. One thing is certain, there is certainly hatred of America by the corrupt rulers of the region, definitely including Hosni Mubarak. Why? Because the success of democracy in Iraq will germinate the seeds of democracy in, say, Egypt.

For Hosni Mubarak to claim there is hatred of Americans in the Arab world for bringing democracy to Iraq is like Al Capone saying there is hatred in Chicago of Elliot Ness for jailing gangsters.

President Bush finds it hard to believe the best recruiting tool al-Qaida and the Iraqi insurgents have is the presence on Iraqi soil of the U.S. soldiers he sent to "liberate" Iraq.

Uh, Pat, that's not a bug, it's a feature. As I wrote last October,

... the ongoing guerilla war in Iraq, is not a sign of failure in the anti-terror war, but of success. It forces al Qaeda and its allies to fight us there - and better there than again in New York or Washington or elsewhere on American soil.

Hence, the short-term objectives of the Iraq campaign: topple Saddam, then force al Qaeda et. al. to show themselves in Iraq. Then kill them. The enemy's infiltratration of foreign jihadis into Iraq also presents intelligence opportunities that can be exploited to determine who is directing al Qaeda, from where and by what means.

This is called the flypaper strategy, which Austin Bay also explained very well.

As James Dunnigan said, "Iraq is rapidly becoming al Qaeda's graveyard." Buchanan has more foolishness, but at bottom he is a hardcore isolationist ("... the United States needs to ... Remove our imperial presence. Cease to intervene in their internal affairs.") who is profoundly ignorant of the threat America faces from the combination of al Qaeda and its state allies, mainly Iran, Syria and, though proxy, North Korea. We might decide to leave the rest of the world alone, but it is manifestly clear that our Islamofascist enemies will not leave us alone.

In fact, Iraq offered an advantageous confluence of events and circumstances in fighting terrorism that no other Islamic country offered. Toppling Saddam was a key element in fighting al Qaeda. It placed American military forces on the ground in the center of the very key terrain of the entire Middle East. Retired Army officer William Hamilton wrote yesterday in USA Today of "the Heartland Theory put forth in 1904 by Sir Halford John Mackinder, one of the great military strategists of the 20th century."

Here's how the Heartland Theory would apply to Iraq: Get a globe and put your finger on Iraq. Notice how your finger is resting right in the middle, the "heartland," of the Middle East, halfway between Egypt and Pakistan. ...

The essential element in the Heartland Theory is simply "being there." Properly applied, being there means Iraqi oil revenue cannot go to al-Qaeda. Being there means the Iraqis can choose whatever government they want, as long as it does not support terrorism. Being there means interdicting the radical Islamists' lines of communication that run across the Middle East from Cairo to Islamabad, Pakistan.

If Mackinder's theory is correct, our mere presence there will have a major impact on how we fight, and whether we succeed, in the ongoing war on terrorism. ...

Iraq is strategically important both for its geographic location and its oil reserves. The casus belli against Saddam’s government was clear and unambiguous. The Iraqi people had suffered under Saddam so severely that they were willing even to accept American invasion and occupation as a preferable alternative to continuing their status quo, provided that their sovereignty was returned fairly soon. This was done this week.

Not least, of all the Arab countries, none is more amenable to democratization than Iraq, which has been organized as a secular (though totalitarian) state for decades. Of all countries that could be a pathfinder for Arabic democracy, Iraq is the foremost candidate.

The truly long-term objective in toppling Saddam and democratizing Iraq is what forms the fundamental rationale for doing so. That rationale is to attempt (there are no guarantees) to inculcate far-reaching reforms within Arab societies themselves that will depress the causes of radical, violent Islamism. This task shall take a generation, at least; President Bush has said on multiple occasions that the fight against terror will occupy more presidencies than his own.

President Bush made this case explicitly in his 6 Nov. 2003 speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, in which he said, "The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution." But I don't expect Pat Buchanan to consider such goals. He just doesn't have the mind for it.

by Donald Sensing, 6/30/2004 11:36:12 AM. Permalink |   

Iraq sovereignty helps depress oil prices
Oil prices are at their lowest in two months. Once more than $40 per barrel, prices are now in the $35 range, with London’s Brent crude at $33.11.

What people, especially cold-eyed business people, invest their money in is a near-certain indicator of what they think the future will hold.

LIke other commodities, oil is traded in futures contracts. Companies put bids in today, and lock prices, for deliveries weeks away. If they think that, say, October's prices will be higher, they buy contract and hold them. If they think that prices will be lower than what they have already bought for that time's delivery, they sell the contracts and buy lower-priced ones.

MSNBC reports,

Monday’s earlier-than-expected handover of Iraqi sovereignty had prompted selling, which continued on Tuesday.

There were other factors that have lowered prices, such as higher OPEC output and renewed production from Norway after a strike there. But,

"The early handover is reducing fears of terrorist disruptions to oil supplies - fears that had added at least several dollars to prices," David Thurtell, a commodity strategist with the Commonweath Bank of Australia, told Reuters.

But Robert Ebel, director of the energy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said,that "speculators appear to have used the handover as a reason to hedge their bets, just in case the security situation in Iraq does improve."

Hedging? Well, yeah. But the fact is that the world oil market took the news as a good thing and reacted accordingly.

by Donald Sensing, 6/29/2004 08:04:53 PM. Permalink |   

"It's our fault."
I briefly posted blogger Jeff Jarvis's appearance on CNN last Friday night. Jeff joined host Aaron Brown and commentator Jeff Greenfield in critiquing Michael Moore's demogogue movie, Fahrenheit 9/11. (He sliced it up pretty well.)

Jeff was a mainline media figure long before he started blogging, whose media notches include creating Entertainment Weekly and Sunday editor of the New York Daily News.

Having read Jeff's work since I began blogging almost 2½ years ago, I know that Jeff is a man of integrity with a self-critical, analytical mind. I have not always agreed with his stance on certain issues, such as firearms rights, but his voice is one that should be taken seriously, for he is a serious, sober man.

That's why his post today, "Extremism," while brief is also powerful. He starts by citing an email he received after the CNN segment, which said in part, "I am much more afraid of Bush, Ashcroft, and the rest, then [sic] I am of any terrorists."

Says Jeff,

Now that is truly frightening. This man -- a guy named Robert who lives in Moscow, ID (supply your own irony) -- truly believes that his enemies are his fellow citizens and his President, not the terrorists who murdered 3,000 of my neighbors before my eyes. ...

It's our fault -- in media and politics -- when we paint America as a nation divided and it's as if we want it to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is why I have such a problem with Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11: It seeks to divide.

It demonizes. And it picks the wrong demons. It's us vs. them, but the them is us.

I hated it when the right wing demonized Bill Clinton. So, you know what? That pretty much makes me honor-bound to hate it when the left wing demonizes George Bush. For I do not believe that the half of America that elected the one is evil while the half that elected the other is angelic.

I can't stand Michael Moore for looking at America as inspiration for leftist invective just as I can't stand Rush Limbaugh for looking at America and spewing his right-wing rants.

I hate it when my colleagues in media talk about how we all hate each other when I see absolutely no reporting that backs that up; I can't stand being turned into a one-dimensional fool by my own business.

Am I going to light a candle and ask, "Can't we all get along?" No. The issue isn't us. The issue is how we are portrayed by politicians, political activists, and media. They're wrong about America.

Wrong? Yes, not only about America but Iraq as well. This piece by US Marine Eric Johnson sheds much light on media bias, this time by the Washington Post. Johnson names Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the paper's Baghdad bureau chief, as a man who would be comical if the stakes were not so high.

Before major combat operations were over [last year], Chandrasekaran was already quoting Iraqis proclaiming the American operation a failure. Reading his dispatches from April 2003, you can already see his meta-narrative take shape: basically, that the Americans are clumsy fools who don’t know what they’re doing, and Iraqis hate them. This meta-narrative informs his coverage and the coverage of the reporters he supervises, who rotate in and out of Iraq.

Another example - the transfer of sovereignty back to Iraq yesterday, two days before the scheduled date, somehow reminded MSNBC's Keith Olbermann of the near-panicked helicopter evacuation of the US embassy in Saigon as North Vietnamese tanks and soldiers closed in. Speaking to guest Robin Wright, a WaPo reporter, Olbermann said,

Tapping into your story in the "Post" today, does anybody fear that in Iraq, where symbolism is so important, or throughout the Middle East where it‘s so important, that the nature of the handover today, just the behind the doors kind of thing, I mean, immediate exit of Ambassador Bremer today, might look a little bit like the helicopters taking out—off out of Vietnam in 1975. Would there be Iraqi democrats or Iraqi insurgents who might see it that way?

Wright rejected the comparison, but the piece Olbermann referred to was an analysis piece published Monday called, "Iraq Occupation Erodes Bush Doctrine." Judge for yourself whether it is a balanced account of the subject. I think not, but as the piece points out,

The administration would not make a senior official or spokesman available for quotation by name to support its policy. But top administration officials insist the Iraq experience has not invalidated Bush doctrine, and they contend its basic principles will endure beyond the Bush presidency.

So at least some of the "anti" slant in the piece may be from a hole the administration left unfilled. As I have said before, this administration's public communications expertise doesn't impress.

Even so, the accusation of bias is not one the media can duck by pointing out, however accurately, that the administration communicates poorly. As Eric Johnson described from first-hand experience, on-the-scene reporting is so badly done that the kindest accusation one can make is journalistic incompetence.

[WaPo reporter] Chandrasekaran showed up in the city of Al Kut last April, talked to a few of our officers, and toured the city for a few hours. He then got back into his air-conditioned car and drove back to Baghdad to write about the local unrest.

"The Untouchable 'Mayor' of Kut," his article's headline blared the next day. It described a local, Iranian-backed troublemaker named Abbas Fadhil, who was squatting in the provincial government headquarters. He had gathered a mob of people with nothing better to do, told them to camp out in the headquarters compound, and there they sat, defying the Marines of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade.

Except that Fadhil "controlled" a single neighborhood and the Marines knew that the entire rest of the city were contemptuous of him. No matter, the story's conclusion had already been written and facts that could have been easily obtained could not be allowed to stand in the way.

The there was the infamous report by the Daily Telegraph's correspondent Toby Harnden:

... I was accosted by an American magazine journalist of serious accomplishment and impeccable liberal credentials.

She had been disturbed by my argument that Iraqis were better off than they had been under Saddam and I was now - there was no choice about this - going to have to justify my bizarre and dangerous views. I’ll spare you most of the details because you know the script - no WMD, no 'mminent threat'(though the point was to deal with Saddam before such a threat could emerge), a diversion from the hunt for bin Laden, enraging the Arab world. Etcetera.

But then she came to the point. Not only had she 'known' the Iraq war would fail but she considered it essential that it did so because this would ensure that the 'evil' George W. Bush would no longer be running her country. Her editors back on the East Coast were giggling, she said, over what a disaster Iraq had turned out to be. 'Lots of us talk about how awful it would be if this worked out.' Startled by her candour, I asked whether thousands more dead Iraqis would be a good thing.

She nodded and mumbled something about Bush needing to go. By this logic, I ventured, another September 11 on, say, September 11 would be perfect for pushing up John Kerry's poll numbers. 'Well, that’s different - that would be Americans,' she said, haltingly. 'I guess I’m a bit of an isolationist.' That’s one way of putting it.

But not just Iraq policy gets the slant. Mickey Kaus reports today,

Soxblog notes that a month ago, the CBS poll had Kerry up by 8 in a head to head with Bush (and up 6 with Nader in the race). This month, the NYT/CBS poll showed Kerry's lead had dropped to a single point in the head-to-head, and Bush was actually winning by a point with Nader included. Kerry dropped seven points in a month. [emphasis original ] So what do the Times' Nagourney and Elder lead their story with?

Bush's Rating Falls to Its Lowest Point, New Survey Finds

You don't find out until paragraph 11 that the candidates are essentially tied, and only in the 13th graf do Nagourney and Elder slip in the previous months poll results - without pointing out to readers the decline in Kerry's lead. ...

Now it is true that many media outlets and their reporters are trying to get the facts straight, ensure their news reporting is straightforward, and keep personal views out of the stories. The problem is that they are badly overwhelmed by the majors, which don't. As Fred Barnes once observed, "The media can't tell you what to think, but it can tell you what to think about." Hence, what stories the major media choose to cover, to what extent and in what way shapes the debate for the rest, and then for you and me. And it's not shaping up too well.

by Donald Sensing, 6/29/2004 07:51:23 PM. Permalink |   

No more Nigerian millions for me!
Thank goodness I no longer have to keep sending Obimbi Mutambo, widow of the recently-deceased minister of fraudulent solicitations of Nigeria, my bank account numbers.

Despite sending more than $10,000 as earnest money to Ms. Mutambo or her London attorney, I've never received a dime of Minister Mutambo's fortune.

But I have great hopes in the United States Army! Via email,

Dear Sir,

I am Captain Kobe smith of the United States of America combatant Squad, Assigned to carry out operation in Iraq. During our course of carrying out search for the Saddam and his aids, we observed some consignments loaded in a hidden zone.

We were then curious to know the contents, fortunately, it was United Staes Of America Dollars,being kept by Saddam Children. As a matter of fact, I cannot ascertain the amount in each of then.

Nevertheless, we had to report to our Command Head Quater, as it is the rules in the United States Army.

But before then, I and some of my colleagues smuggled some boxes out for our personal used. We did that without the intention of our superior Officers, knowningfully well that if the should know, we MUST be charged for Conspiracy and Stealing.

Presently, we have shipped the boxes out of Iraq, looking for a trusted person who will Assist us to Claim it and Invest on our behalf. We do not care the type of business you may invest in, all we care for is making sure that at the end of our assignment in Iraq, we shall get our money.

SHARING: We are ready to share 50% for us, 40% for you and 10% for any expensive that may occur.

We ask that this Proposal must be kept secret due to its nature.

If you are intersted kindly get back to me through my email address:[deleted]

If you can't trust one of our men in uniform, even if he doesn't know how to put a coherent sentence together, who can you trust?

by Donald Sensing, 6/29/2004 05:33:24 PM. Permalink |   

Government money redux
I explained yesterday that the government has no money of its own. What does Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), think?

Headlining an appearance with other Democratic women senators on behalf of Sen. Barbara Boxer, who is up for re-election this year, Hillary Clinton told several hundred supporters – some of whom had ponied up as much as $10,000 to attend – to expect to lose some of the tax cuts passed by President Bush if Democrats win the White House and control of Congress.

"Many of you are well enough off that ... the tax cuts may have helped you," Sen. Clinton said. "We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."

There is no report on the volume of applause the senator received from her wealthy audience.

by Donald Sensing, 6/29/2004 05:24:33 PM. Permalink |   

Let freedom ring reign!
Has anyone else noticed the quotation error in the now-famous note that Condoleeza Rice handed to President Bush yesterday?



Bush wrote on it, as you see, "Let freedom reign!" That certainly makes sense, since "reign" means "have dominion." And who can argue with that?

That may well be exactly what Bush meant to say and write, but I have the nagging feeling that it may instead be another case of Bush-mangled syntax, another "Bushism," as it were.

For the remark is a near-exact homonym for the ending of the last line of "America (My Country 'Tis of Thee)."

My country,' tis of thee,
sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing;
land where my fathers died,
land of the pilgrims' pride,
from every mountainside let freedom ring!

(Emphasis added, of course.) The president's remark works fine as written, but I dunno, I think he was trying to quote the hymn and just missed it.

by Donald Sensing, 6/29/2004 02:31:42 PM. Permalink |   

Demosthenes' advice
Across many centuries comes the voice of Demosthenes, one of the leading figures of ancient Athens. He has some advice that still makes one think. Here and here.

by Donald Sensing, 6/28/2004 04:51:57 PM. Permalink |   

The most desired car in America
The Toyota Prius is almost certainly the car most desired in the country. I don't mean by the number of units sold, which remain low compared to Honda Accords or the Toyota Camry, but the willingness of buyers to wait months to accept delivery, and then pay profit premiums to the dealer for the privilege.

My next-door neighbor, John Schmitz, sells Toyotas in Nashville. He told me that when Hertz dumped its Prius fleet to the used-car auction market, they sold at auction for $30,000 or more, many thousands above the MSRP of a new one.

Unlike many Toyota dealers, John's doesn't charge additional profit. While they won't discount the list price, you won't get stuck with extra charges, either; the car you order will be the car you get. Be advised, there is a wait list of a few months.

by Donald Sensing, 6/28/2004 11:32:06 AM. Permalink |   

Iraqis get sovereignty early
-- Was preempting terrorists the reason?
-- Zarqawi reported, then denied, captured

The United States has returned sovereignty to Iraq two days before scheduled.

The transfer of sovereignty in Iraq became official during a small ceremony in Baghdad Monday. The interim prime minister of the country promised to fight terrorism and called on all Iraqis to help defend the country against foreign militants who are attacking foreigners and the country's infrastructure. The 14-month occupation of Iraq officially came to an end during a low-key, hastily-arranged ceremony in Baghdad Monday morning.

My guess is that threat analysis of terrorists acts planned for June 30 led both the US and the Iraqi Governing Council, led by interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, to do the turnover now and preempt the jihadis.

American reporters said this morning that they received very little advance notice of the event, and did not actually learn what they were being called to attend until it happened.

Speaking of terrorists, rumors circulated furiously in Iraq and the Middle East today that Iraqi security services had captured Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the al Qaeda leader in Iraq and the man reputed to have personally beheaded Nick Berg.

However, US Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmit in Baghdad said the reports are untrue. The area where Zarqawi was reported captured is under domain of Polish military forces.

by Donald Sensing, 6/28/2004 11:09:23 AM. Permalink |   

Europeans: Niger was selling uranium to Iraq
A short recap: President Bush claimed in his 2003 State of the Union Address that British intelligence had determined that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium ore, called yellowcake, from an African nation. Although Bush did not say the nation was Niger, everyone reasonably assumed that's what he means because Niger was the nation the Brits had fingered. (But Congo has uranium resources, too.)

To bolster the case, the administration claimed that Nigerian documents it had obtained proved its case. However, the documents were shown by the International Atomic Energy Agency to be forgeries.

But,

European intelligence officers have now revealed that three years before the fake documents became public, human and electronic intelligence sources from a number of countries picked up repeated discussion of an illicit trade in uranium from Niger. One of the customers discussed by the traders was Iraq.

These intelligence officials now say the forged documents appear to have been part of a “scam”, and the actual intelligence showing discussion of uranium supply has been ignored.

Also,

European intelligence officials have for the first time confirmed that information provided by human intelligence sources during an operation mounted in Europe and Africa produced sufficient evidence for them to believe that Niger was the centre of a clandestine international trade in uranium.

There's more.

The Belgravia Dispatch has a lot more.

by Donald Sensing, 6/28/2004 10:38:48 AM. Permalink |   

The fundamental rule of the American system
"The power to tax is the power to destroy." I don't know who said it first, but it's a dictum worth repeating. So is Steven Den Beste's admonition, "The job of bureacrats is to regulate, and left to themselves they will regulate everything they can."

Freedom-loving people need to understand that these two dicta are closely related. The way the government regulates is through taxation. Over-regulation always means over-taxation. Over-taxation always leads to over-regulation.

But I think the fundamental rule of the American system, as our Founders understood it, is this: "The government has no money of its own."

And now, James Lileks:

A minor political note, if you’re interested in such things. The other day a young girl came to the door to solicit my support for her presidential candidate. I asked her why I should vote for this man. She was very nice and earnest, but if you got her off the talking points she was utterly unprepared to argue anything, because she didn’t know what she was talking about. She had bullet points, and she believed that any reasonable person would see the importance of these issues and naturally fall in line. But she could not support any of her assertions. Her final selling point: Kerry would roll back the tax cuts.

Then came the Parable of the Stairs, of course. My tiresome, shopworn, oft-told tale, a piece of unsupportable meaningless anecdotal drivel about how I turned my tax cut into a nice staircase that replaced a crumbling eyesore, hired a few people and injected money far and wide - from the guys who demolished the old stairs, the guys who built the new one, the family firm that sold the stone, the other firm that rented the Bobcats, the entrepreneur who fabricated the railings in his garage, and the guy who did the landscaping. Also the company that sold him the plants. And the light fixtures. It’s called economic activity. What’s more, home improvements added to the value of this pile, which mean that my assessment would increase, bumping up my property taxes. To say nothing of the general beautification of the neighborhood. Next year, if my taxes didn’t shoot up, I had another project planned. Raise my taxes, and it won’t happen – I won’t hire anyone, and they won’t hire anyone, rent anything, buy anything. You see?

“Well, it’s a philosophical difference,” she sniffed. She had pegged me as a form of life last seen clilcking the leash off a dog at Abu Ghraib. “I think the money should have gone straight to those people instead of trickling down.” Those last two words were said with an edge.

“But then I wouldn’t have hired them,” I said. “I wouldn’t have new steps. And they wouldn’t have done anything to get the money.”

“Well, what did you do?” she snapped.

“What do you mean?”

“Why should the government have given you the money in the first place?”

“They didn’t give it to me. They just took less of my money.”

That was the last straw. Now she was angry. And the truth came out:

“Well, why is it your money? I think it should be their money.”

Then she left.

And walked down the stairs. I let her go without charging a toll. It’s the philanthropist in me.

When the government itself becomes populated by people who think your money should be their money, then tyranny is right around the corner.

by Donald Sensing, 6/28/2004 10:20:11 AM. Permalink |   

Marine sergeants
As my eldest will step on the yellow footprints at Parris Island, SC, one month from today, I thought this on-scene insight into Marine sergeants would be appropriate:

On this particular mission, try and imagine the Sergeant's thinking as he has just spent hours/days in preparation for the operation, stressing to his Marines the sensitive nature of what they are going to do and all the do's and don'ts on objective. Once he finally gets his Marines on the objective, he is non-stop positioning and repositioning the men, keeping civilians at arms length, watching the detainees and coordinating his tasks under the search, knowing that one small mistake could get someone killed or will at least be fodder for the insurgents continued message of fear and hate.

It is about 110 degrees outside, he has had about 3 hours sleep the night prior and he is wearing about 75 pounds of body armor, weapons and ammunition. By the way, he is listening to at least one radio constantly and is controlling around 10-15 guys while coordinating with his adjacent squad leaders and platoon commander.

As all of this is going on, he watches weapons and propaganda being taken from the mosque and maintains his and his Marines' humanity toward the detainees and local civilians. He stays on the objective as long as it takes in the hot sun, treats the Iraqis fairly and firmly while he constantly moves among his Marines and checks their position and ensuring that they are watching their sector. He waits for an RPG to come whistling in or an automatic weapons to open up on his Marines at any time. He is also thinking with every tick of the clock, some guy may be out there right now digging in an IED on his exfil route or laying in an ambush so even as he leaves the target, his Marines remain at significant risk. They are not "safe" until they get back to their patrol base. Even there, mortars can be expected around their position daily.

The mission lasts for hours. He gets all of his Marines back safely where he is responsible for checking to make sure everyone is healthy, all gear and weapons are accounted for and everyone is cleaning their weapons while the squad is debriefed. Once the debrief is complete and the weapons and equipment is cleaned he might get a chance to sit down in the shade for an hour or so until he goes over to the platoon command post and gets his order for that night's patrol. From that point on, it is back to work. You rarely will catch this guy saying anything negative (when he does so, he is careful to do it to his peers or maybe the Staff Sergeant or Lieutenant but not in front of his Marines). He is 23-27 years old and has been a Marine for about 5-10 years.

Does an old dogface artilleryman have the right humbly to say Semper Fi? Perhaps not, but I do anyway.

hat tip: You Big Mouth, You

by Donald Sensing, 6/26/2004 10:40:55 PM. Permalink |   

Heh!
Who'd a-thunk it?

by Donald Sensing, 6/26/2004 10:37:28 PM. Permalink |   

Who said it, and when?
One:

"Al Qaeda also forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezbollah for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States. In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq."

Also, an former administration official,

... testified that "bin Laden had been living [at the Sudan plant], that he had, in fact, money that he had put into this military industrial corporation, that the owner of the plant had traveled to Baghdad to meet with the father of the VX program."

The same official also said,

... that if the plant had been allowed to produce VX that was used to kill thousands of Americans, people would have asked him, " 'You had a manager that went to Baghdad; you had Osama bin Laden, who had funded, at least the corporation, and you had traces of [VX precursor] and you did what? And you did nothing?'"

Who said these things? These guys.

Hat tip: Mark Rose.

by Donald Sensing, 6/26/2004 10:06:32 PM. Permalink |   

More Iraqi WMDs found
You may recall that less than six weeks ago, terrorists in Iraq used an Iraqi artillery projectile filled with sarin nerve agent as part of a roadside bomb against American troops (see here and here.)

The Washinton Times reported yesterday, "CIA inspectors have discovered
a dozen chemical-filled bombs."

Insurgents in Iraq are seeking chemical arms and expertise left over from the regime of Saddam Hussein for possible use against U.S. and allied troops, an intelligence official in Iraq said yesterday.

Charles Deulfer, the head of the CIA weapons inspection team, also said in a television interview that weapons searchers so far have found as many as a dozen chemical-filled bombs.

"What we are finding is that there are some networks that are seeking to tap into ... this expertise, and try to use it against the United States," Mr. Deulfer told Fox News Channel's Brit Hume. "And we are very concerned about that. That is a problem."

Mr. Deulfer said that investigations into arms laboratories in Iraq and interviews with former Iraqi arms specialists revealed that "former experts in the WMD program are being recruited by anticoalition groups."

Nope, no prohibited weapons programs by Saddam there. Nothing to see here, just move along.

In related news, World Net Daily reports, "Sources report mustard gas
inside Baghdad's Green Zone." Citing Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, "an online, subscription intelligence news service from the creator of WorldNetDaily.com," the site says that an attack using mustard gas has been made inside Baghdad's Green Zone.

Few details are available, including any casualties associated with the attack using mustard gas.

The sources say the munitions were old, but still potentially lethal.

The report does not say how it was determined mustard gas was used, so this report should be listed as unconfirmed for now.

The Green Zone is (supposed to be) the most secure area in the whole country, where the Coalition Provisional Authority makes its headquarters.

hat tip for both stories: Tom Holsinger, via email

by Donald Sensing, 6/26/2004 09:42:33 PM. Permalink |   

Speechless
I am, that is, not AlGore, who sees a Nazi SA behind every tree.

But parents, please, for pity's sake, don't let your children ever see this.

by Donald Sensing, 6/25/2004 10:22:08 PM. Permalink |   

The winner is the least screwed up
Back in the height of the Cold War I served three years in Germany in 155mm and 8-inch artillery units. Across the Inner German Border, separating West and East Germany, lay the huge and feared Group of Soviet Forces, Germany. In terms of numbers, we were soundly outnumbered and outgunned, but the Sovskies never invaded and eventually became tame Russkies who went home.

Why did they never invade? I pondered the question for years before I got the answer.

One of the things I learned about the Soviet military was that it was riven with corruption from top to bottom. Across the rank and file, its officers and soldiers were simply not very good, not highly competent except for a narrow range of skills defined by unit function and ranks.

The really good Soviet officers wrote (their journals reached the West) that Soviet military exeercises in Europe were chracterized by massive foulups and snafus.

Yet the prevailing opinion of many of us junior officers (I was a captain then) and NCOs was that the US Army was not exactly a paragon of organization effectiveness or efficiency. For example, I was present when an American brigadier general said that the combat medical evacuation and treatment system in Europe was simply broken.

Any soldier, NCO or officer who took part in REFORGER exercises can recount the screwups that seemed to be woven throughout.

So I concluded that the reason NATO and the Soviets each took no action to start war was that the generals on both sides were fearful that the other side could not possibly be as screwed up as their own side.

Back in the States, I explained this theory to a goodly number of senior officers over time, and they all laughed, but none said no.

In wartime, not screwing up is often just as important as doing things right. Which brings me to Brian Dunn's exposition of the fundamental screwups of our terrorist enemies in Iraq:

I think the main reason for our success is that the Islamists with their foreign jihadis have screwed things up for the Baathists. That is, if the insurgents (or regime remnants or whatever you want to call them) had been able to target Americans and our allies without other complications, the vast majority of Iraqis might have decided to sit out the war as neutrals and just watch passively to see who will win. Absent a really ruthless American campaign, we would never win if we fought enemies in a sea of apathy that slowly turned against us as the violence continued.

But the jihadis were never able to control the tempo or character of the ensuing battles, except perhaps very early.

This civil war strategy of the Islamists was always going to be a loser for the Baathists. A Sunni-Shia war might have been fine when the Sunnis controlled all the instruments of state power, but in a fight in which the Shias have the numbers and the state, this cannot work. At best, this path could inflame the oil-free Sunni heartland in revolt but this would not gain the entire country back for the Baathists. The Baathists could only win it all back if the Shias joined them against America as a common enemy, as some thought was happening in April at the start of the twin Fallujah and Sadr revolts.

For all the mistakes we have made, our enemy may have made the most critical of them all.

As Wretchard observes, Zarqawi's "control of Iraq has slipped forever beyond his grasp."

by Donald Sensing, 6/25/2004 08:44:27 PM. Permalink |   

Media training
I've been heavily multitasking today, and not with computer matters.

Jeff Jarvis will be on CNN tonight at 10 p.m. EDT, being interviewed about Michael Moore's latest travesty, Fahrenheit 9/11. Jeff saw the film and reviewed it here. Hint: he didn't like it, which is the understatement of the year.
Update: In an all-too-brief segment, Jeff appeared thus -->

Good on yer, Jeff!

Speaking of being interviewed, an Irish interviewer kept interrupting President Bush during a taping to be shown later in the auld country. In the 11-minute interview, the reporter interrupted five times.

"Let me finish. Let me finish. May I finish?" Bush said early in his interview with Radio and Television Ireland Thursday, according to a transcript released Friday.

Has the prez never had media training? Okay, he is the president and should be granted a certain level of courtesy that you might not grant a county alderman, but still, that just isn't how you handle interruptions. Here's how (I used to teach this stuff):

You, answering question 1: "And so that decision led to a reconstitution of nixworthy optional developments, which made the board of directors adjourn for lunch at the beach. This was notwithstanding the fact that the Dow Jones average had been arrested only the night before ..."

Reporter: "But what about the left-threaded kanootin valve?"

You smile briefly and say: "We can come back to that, but I was explaining that with Dow Jones having to make bail, the practice at Carnegie Hall for the LA Lakers was postponed until the thirty-third of last month. ..."

Reporter: "Isn't it true that the wamplepopper can't succeed without the correct kanootin valve?"

You: "However, with the Lakers cancelling their session at Carnegie, the inflation rate was called to testify before the Senate Prawnwhumping Oversight Committee" (and so forth).

The point is that when being interviewed to remember it is your interview, not the reporter's. You make the points you want to make. Don't let him/her control the topics or the agenda.

Another interviewing anecdote: I served in the Pentagon in the Army's Office of the Chief of Public Affairs when the old USSR went away and much more vigorous military-to-military contacts between the Russian Federation (now gone, too) and the USA were being done.

My boss, Col. Rick Kiernan, was part of a team that attempted to introduce American concepts of public affairs to the Russian army. There were other teams doing other subjects, of course. But the Russian army, no longer the Soviet army, was faced with having to found an actual media-relations office that responded to public and media inquiries, rather than just hand out the Party's latest swill.

In the class on handling media relations for high rankers, a Russian officer asked how much per hour to charge a reporter for interviewing a general - did the rate go up as the rank went up?

Col. Kiernan explained that the idea was to make sure the army's accurate information was put before the public through the media, so they should be eager to arrange interviews for generals and marshals, not charge reporters to conduct them.

Light bulb moment, yes? Alas, the next question: "Oh, then we should pay the reporters to interview our generals! That way they will have to print what we tell them to."

As Rick said to me later, "It occurred to me that there was some really basic work that had to be done."

by Donald Sensing, 6/25/2004 08:40:02 PM. Permalink |   

Cheney dissembles
By now you probably all know that Vice President Dick Cheney was reported to have used an extremely vulgar word at Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, you know, the one rhyming with "luck."

Just now, FoxNews broadcast a Neil Cavuto interview of the veep. Cavuto asked Cheny bluntly whether he had used the word.

Cheney: "Oh, that's no the kind of language I ordinarily use."

Cavuto: "But did you use it?"

Cheney: "That's not the kind of language I usually use."

Does Cheney wonder why critics say he misled Americans on Iraq? Cripes, Dick, say yes or no.

IMO, for an elected oficial to answer Neil's question in that way is the functional equivalent of lying.

This issue will blow over quickly, there being no real importance to it, but it'd be quicker if honesty was out there. I note that Leahy has apparently been pretty quiet about it, so it will only stay alive as long as Cheney keeps ducking it.

But it'll be gone in a few days in any event, but Cheney should have answered the question and been quit of it.

by Donald Sensing, 6/25/2004 06:46:56 PM. Permalink |   

Some good points
What's at stake in Iraq today

Fareed Zakaria:

But, since we are listing mistakes, the biggest one many opponents of the war are making is to claim that Iraq is a total distraction from the war on terrorism. In fact, Iraq is central to that conflict. I don't mean this in the deceptive and dishonest sense that many in the Bush administration have claimed. There is no connection between Saddam's regime and the terrorists of September 11. But there is a deep connection between his regime and the terrorism of September 11. The root causes of Islamic terrorism lie in the dysfunctional politics of the Middle East, where failure and repression have produced fundamentalism and violence. Political Islam grew in stature as a mystical alternative to the wretched reality--secular dictatorships--that have dominated the Arab world. A new Iraq provides an opportunity to break this perverse cycle. The country is unlikely to become a liberal democracy any time soon. But it might turn out to be a pluralistic state that gives minorities limited protections, allows for some political participation, and has a reasonably open society. That would be a revolution in the Arab world.

Sen. Joe Lieberman:

In the end, the war on terrorism will be won not just with swords, but with ploughshares as well, in the form of economic opportunity and political freedom.

The outcome of the battle in Iraq will have ramifications that extend far beyond that country's borders. If democracy does not prevail in Iraq, it would embolden the terrorists and vindicate Osama bin Laden's offensive allegation that "we have seen in the last decade the decline of the American government and the weakness of the American soldier…"

Instability would spread throughout the Middle East. Iraq would become a new base of operations for Al Qaeda and new impetus for Osama bin Laden's drive to replace the Saudi royal family and build a larger Islamic empire around it.

I wrote last October,

The truly long-term objective in toppling Saddam and democratizing Iraq is what forms the fundamental rationale for doing so. That rationale is to attempt (there are no guarantees) to inculcate far-reaching reforms within Arab societies themselves that will depress the causes of radical, violent Islamism. This task shall take a generation, at least; President Bush has said on multiple occasions that the fight against terror will occupy more presidencies than his own. I wrote in October 2001,

It will take a new kind of national commitment. It will cost a fortune. It will require new kinds of armies, armies not of soldiers but of engineers, agriculturalists, financiers, administrators and educators.

It will take decades and there are no guarantees. But the alternative is to fight culture and religious wars generation after generation.

I stand by that, and am glad to see that prominent voices are echoing it.

by Donald Sensing, 6/24/2004 04:57:40 PM. Permalink |   

Another side of Islam
Muslim voices are denouncing Islamofascism, there just need to be more

One of the fiercest and ablest Muslim critics of radicalized Islam is Egyptian scholar Tarek Heggy. A Western-educated man who ran an international oil company and taught in Muslim universities, Heggy is an unsparing critic of Egypt's culture and government, as well as radicalized Islam. His website is http://www.heggy.org/, which features PDF excerpts of his most important works.

In analyzing violent Islam, Heggy's voice is more important than most because there are two main strains of radicalized Islam in Arab lands. One of them is Wahhabism, the state religion of oil-rich Saudi Arabia and the other is Egyptian, the Muslim Brotherhood.

Wahhabism is a hard-reactionary sect of Sunni Islam that would have remained an obscure, bedouin strain if not for Saudi Arabia's petrodollars. While Wahhabism is not terroristic in and of itself (except in its draconian enforcement of Islamic sharia law in its own domain), it's hardcore adherence to an extremely strict interpretation of Islamic teachings makes it an ideal religion of Islamofascist terrorists.

The Muslim Brotherhood, on the other hand, was founded in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna, a 22-year-old elementary school teacher, as an Islamic revivalist movement. began as a religious reformist movement that pretty quickly turned outlaw. By the beginning of its third decade, it had become terrorist inside Egypt not long after and was outlawed. The Egyptian government legalized the Brotherhood again in 1948, but only as a religious organization; it was banned again in 1954 because it insisted that Egypt be governed under sharia Islamic law. The brotherhood attempted to assasinate Nasser four times and four of its members assassinated Anwar Sadat in 1981.

The importance of the Muslim Brotherhood is that it was in a real way the founding organization of 20th-century Arab terrorism. Its theology is close to Wahhabism and Hamas is a direct descendant of it.

In his "Essays on Contemporary Egypt Problems (Causes and Remedies)" (PDF), Heggy spends a chapter on religious extremism in Egypt. Heggy says the religious extremism in Egypt "stems from three sources" (see page 52 of the linked essay).

The first is the harsh treatment meted out to the Islamic trend in Egypt by Nasser’s regime. Ever since the disputes between the regime and the Moslem Brotherhood erupted into serious conflict, the regime resorted to force and torture against the movement. This happened in 1954 and again in 1965 when the confrontation was even more acute. Certainly
the methods used by Nasser against the Islamic currents, whose members were persecuted, imprisoned, exiled and tortured, created generations of extremists among those who had suffered at his hands as well as from their progeny. Had they not been crushed by Nasser, the Moslem Brothers would most likely not have produced elements as extremist, as reactionary and as insular as the
militant Islamic groups we see today.

In Egypt ... the many years of repressive dictatorship generated a climate of extremism where it had never previously existed.

The second source of extremism in Egypt today is the prevailing socioeconomic situation. Poverty, the decline in living standards, the appearance of a very wealthy minority noted for its conspicuous
consumption, the harrowing problems of daily life and the social anarchy they create, and a breakdown in society's system of values - the cornerstone on which the system is built - combine to create the perfect climate for extremism and the spread of totalitarian tendencies, whether towards the left into Marxist groups or towards the right into sectarianism and religious dogmatism.

... Economic crises generate feelings of deep frustration, especially among the young, who despair of obtaining their legitimate right to a decent life. The lack of access to such basic necessities as a home, food and clothes - and education - make them susceptible to hardliners who claim that society is corrupt and doomed and that it should be destroyed to make room for a better society. ...

The third source can be attributed to external factors. Egypt is in the eye of a storm of radicalism blowing from every direction in the Middle East, especially from Iran and Lebanon, and the contagion is helped along with foreign funding and incitement. ... The only proper cure is a combination of real democracy (as opposed to window dressing) and firm action by eminent religious figures who should use their moral authority to contain the problem, not fan the flames of
extremism as so many do.

Heggy is a true insider of Arab culture and history. Let us hope that he and other like-minded reformers gain much greater influence quickly. A Memri summary of his main themes is highly encouraging reading.

Another intellectual ally is Kuwaiti author Ahmad Al-Baghdadi , who made the radical claim (for its place) that the West has been the preservator of Arab history, and who says that the educational inabilities of Arab students is shocking.

"In short, we are talking to the ignoramus graduates of religious educational institutions or Arab universities that are devoid of learning - those [graduates] who cover up their ignorance by accusing Orientalism of conspiring against Islam or distorting its image. [We are telling these ignoramuses] that had it not been for the efforts of a group of Orientalists in religious, literary, and historical studies, we would never have known much of the heritage in which we take pride - and without making any effort to discover it. Nay, it has come to us readymade, on a silver platter, thanks to the efforts of those Orientalists. We don't have to look far for an example. ...

"The problem of the Arabs is that they suffer from a compounded ignorance - namely, they are ignorant of their own ignorance.

Whether such voices will be enough to turn the tide of the steady Arab decline remains to be seen, but one thing is sure: such voices are far too few as of now.

by Donald Sensing, 6/24/2004 04:32:51 PM. Permalink |   

The Iran conundrum
Canadian journalist David Warren spells out the horns of our dilemma with Iran succinctly and clearly.

Once armed with nukes, and even without actually using them, Iran's ability to project power throughout the region - both diplomatically and through Hezbollah - is much enhanced. The mullahs' chance of surviving domestic challenges to their power will be likewise enhanced. Saddam's domestic power came from the common belief that he was armed with hideous weapons.

To sum up, the West is in no position to act boldly against the ayatollahs. But they, for their part, are now acting boldly against us.

He has more details. Folks, this is a real bad problem.

by Donald Sensing, 6/23/2004 08:15:44 PM. Permalink |   

NEW! PDA-friendly version of One Hand Clapping!
I have inaugurated as a test a text-only (still HTML format) version of this blog that I think should be PDA-friendly.

I'd appreciate it of some readers would see whether it works. Please leave a comment here, don't email me about it!

I am also adding a link thereto in the masthead above.

The URL is http://www.donaldsensing.com/pda/ohcpda.html

BTW, a post's permalinks on the text site is different than its permalink on this site's. Glenn Reynolds does not use permalinks at all on his PDA version. Are they necessary on it?

by Donald Sensing, 6/23/2004 04:36:03 PM. Permalink |   

Beheadings no longer shocking enough?
Not as much attention by the media on this week's beheading of South Korean Kim Sun-Il as on Nick Berg's or Paul Johnson's murders. Partly the reason is that Kim was not an American, but might it also be that we are getting jaded about Islamofascist brutality?

Joe Gandelman thinks the terrorists will start looking for new kinds of victims.

They will likely raise the bar of barbarity to get publicity and continue to shock with the same impact. So far the victims have been males in their 30s and 40s. Will they choose a woman -- or a child? Or a group?

It's a chilling thought, but there may be a Muslim backlash against the beheadings.

Prominent Saudi cleric Sheikh Saleh bin Abdullah al-Humaid, in a sermon at Muslim Friday prayers in Mecca's Grand Mosque, reportedly denounced hostage-taking and murder as grave sins under Islam.

"Killing a soul without justification is one of the gravest sins under Islam, it is as bad as polytheism," the cleric said. "Whoever kills any person under our protection will not go to heaven. The blood of people under our protection is forbidden ... they are on par with Muslims," he added.

Well, it's a start, let's hope.

by Donald Sensing, 6/23/2004 02:58:27 PM. Permalink |   

Bush caves on Int'l Criminal Court
Did the Bush administration flop over dead or did it simply yield to the inevitable? Take your pick, the effect is the same. The US has dropped attempts to convince the United Nations to extend an exemption from prosecution by the International Criminal Court of American troops overseas.

Deputy U.S. Ambassador James Cunningham emerged from a closed-door Security Council meeting to say he was withdrawing a request for a continued U.S. exemption at the International Criminal Court.

"We believe our draft and its predecessors fairly meet the concerns of all. Not all council members agree, however, and the United States has decided not to proceed further with consideration and action on the draft at this time in order to avoid a prolonged and divisive debate."

The U.S. request for immunity for its peacekeepers had been adopted by large margins the past two years. But this time Council members said attitudes had shifted because of international outrage at the abuse of detainees at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

The UN's exemption of American troops from ICC prosecution dates from 2002 and will expire in one week.

This move does not signify the acceptance by the US of the existence of the ICC. The Clinton administration signed the treaty founding the court, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, in December 31, 2000, after claiming that its most serious flaws had been worked out since the treaty was introduced in Rome in 1998, where it had been signed by 120 countries.

At the time, President Clinton said that America's signature would give us the sway to influence the remaining defects, but that no president shlould send the treaty to the Senate for ratification until the remaining flaws had been resolved.

President Bush informed the UN in May 2002 that the US will never become party to the treaty, and that the December 2000 signature therefore placed no legal obligations on the US regarding the treaty.

However, the ICC treaty was ratified by enough UN-member states that it was chartered, and under long-accepted standards of international diplomacy the US and other non-signatories are automatically subject to it under certain conditions. The court was founded on July 1, 2002.

Since May 2002, the Bush administration has been negotiating treaties with individual states that they will not be party to any American service member or civilian being tried by the ICC. Despite the defeat in the UNSC today, I certainly expect that effort to continue.

Without a new UNSC exemption, the US has made veiled and not-so-veiled threats

... to shut down all UN operations, one by one, as each mandate expires.

Meaning peacekeeping operations for which the US is by far the largest bill payer. Whatever the realpolitik involved, W. needs to belly up to the bar and make sure his presumed base support knows the fight against the ICC will continue. Writes Gene Rider, via email:

BBC has just announced that the U.S. has agreed to submit our armed forces to the International Court of Criminal Justice. If this is true, I wash my hands of GWB et al and hope and trust that the Rupublicans are soundly defeated in Nov 2004.

I don't think that Bush "agreed to submit," I think he determined this fight was a loser, so cut the losses and try again later. But this White House is terrible at public communications, so Gene, don't hold your breath.

by Donald Sensing, 6/23/2004 02:08:11 PM. Permalink |   

The war of ultimates
Religious war is back in full force

There have been several, though not a lot, of causes of war in history. Some theorists have said that all wars' causes really devolve down to the one and same cause, "population pressure" in the words of Robert Heinlein or "resource intensification and depletion" in the work of anthropologist Marvin Harris, which is another way of saying the same thing.

But these theories do not account for the influence of religion or ideology in militarizing a society to the point that it launches aggressive war upon its neighbors. For example even if we allow that population pressure reached critical mass for the ancient, pre-empire Romans, it does not explain why they decided to manage the crisis through military expansion rather than increased trade or other peaceful arrangements.

Populations, not just individuals, are prone to delusions of grandeur. Whatever made the Romans set off toward empire, the time came when empire was its own justification. Conquest "for the glory of Rome" was reason enough. Ideologies are always self-justifying. For all its achievements in engineering and law, the Roman empire was cruel and harshly oppressive.

Germany had been bled white by the Great War (as had France and England), and had suffered enormous deaths from the postwar influenza epidemic that took more lives than the war, worldwide. But those human losses didn't stop Hitlerism from taking root and growing into the nihilistic monstrosity that shook the world.

Religion is not immune, of course, to the dangers of sliding into ideological absolutism. Before the end of the Roman empire, the Church had become a heavy political player in its own right, culminating the right of the Pope to crown Charlemagne as emperor, a right that continued until Napoleon snatched the crown from the Pope's hands and placed it on his head himself.

With the crowns of Europe and the seat of Peter in a mutually back-scratching relationship (most of the time), a strange religious-political symbiosis developed that finally enabled Pope Urban to command them to conquer the Holy Land from Muslim rule in the name of Christ. That Europe had been fighting the Islamic empire for a few hundred years, in varying intensity, made the command much easier to obey. But it did turn a rather conventional series of wars about territory into a Holy War all around.

Territorial disputes can be permanently resolved. "54-40 or fight!" never became a war cry because Britain considered the land concerned - a border dispute in the American northwest - was not worth fighting for. Now the matter has been relegated to history, never to rise again.

But religious and ideological conflicts (RICs) exist not on the earth, but in the mind. What is at stake is not fishing rights or trade routes or minerals or arable land, but the warring parties' fundamental understanding of reality and their place in it. Although mundane concerns are never entirely absent from RICs, they really form the opportunity for conflict rather than the underlying cause. The cause is absolutism that allows for no competitors.

I think the American Civil War fits into that category. It's a little too facile to say that had the North and South known in early 1861 that warring over their respective, irreconcilable ideologies would take hundreds of thousands of lives, that they would have found another way to resolve them. I'm not so sure they would have or could have. As Lincoln said, the country could not continue to exist half slave and half free. No compromise was possible any longer. They had all been tried.

The war on terror is a war of ultimates, too, although I don't think that many people of the West realize it. Our al Qaeda enemies certainly do. Al Qaeda, however, is more extreme than post-Roman Western history is generally familiar with (Nazism being a notable exception) because Islam is the most complete merger of politics and religion the world has seen since its inception, certainly more complete than, say, bushido Japan.

An historical, basic tenet of Islam, not just radicalized Islam, is that all human affairs of any kind must be under divine control, mediated through sharia. The present, clear separation of religion and politics that the West took centuries to develop is formally absent from Islam, the radical variety or not. Fortunately, most Islamic societies have honored this total integration only in the breach. But al Qaeda et. al. say that the return of Islamic societies to the rule of strict sharia law is a non-negotiable goal. (It can be argued, I think, that no such "return" is possible for the simple reason it never really existed as al Qaeda thinks. Islamic societies are really post-Muhammed, and they immediately began adjusting the tenets to cultural and political realities, all the while claiming they were the True Faithful.)

Islam, not just the radicalized version, teaches that Allah's control over events of the world and human life is total and complete. Pretty much the extent of human free will is either to rebel against Allah or to submit. Yet even rebellion is, somehow, under the controlling purview of Allah. Everything that happens, without exception, is the preordained will of Allah.

Osama bin Laden bombed two American embassies in Africa killing mostly Muslim Africans by the hundreds. The Quran prohibits murder, and especially forbids Muslims from killing other Muslims. An ABC reporter subsequently managed to interview bin Laden and asked him whether he was responsible for the deaths of the other Muslims. No, replied OBL, I am a tool of Allah, and whatever I do is determined to happen by Allah. Those people would have died at that time in any event, because it was Allah's will that they die.

In Islam, Allah holds all the power marbles. Humanity has no true self will or self power.

Bin Laden's sort of self-justifying extremism is not the mainstream of Islam, but neither is it as far removed as we might imagine. Fatalism is a characteristic of Islam. There is no human freedom. Human liberty, especially as Americans think of it, is literally a foreign concept to Islam, especially Arab Islam.

We say that the defining idea of American liberty is "self evident:" Human beings "are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." This claim has no natural fit with Islam. The idea that humans, created by the power of Allah, could inherently possess unalienable rights of their own, which no authority may remove, would require Islam to surrender the idea that Allah enjoys meticulous control over all affairs of nature and humankind. But this notion is lethally dangerous to the defining idea of Islam itself: that Allah has all the power.

Liberty as we conceive it is at the heart of the conflict. For Muslims, the most desirable state of human society is not one that is free, in the Western sense, but one that is submissive to Allah, according to the dictates of Quran. This state of society is dar al Islam, the world of peace. Anything else is the dar al harb, the "world of war." Societies, peoples or nations are either at war with Allah or at peace (through submission) to Allah.

This concept of submission is the matter of ultimate concern to Islam generally and is enormously amplified by radicalized Islamists such as Osama bin Laden and his allies. Hand in hand with this ultimate concern are what we would think of as territorial, political, legal and social concerns, namely the ejection of non-Muslims from Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries, the imposition of strict rule of all-encompassing sharia over every facet of human affairs, and, longer term, the restoration of the lands of the old Caliphate to Muslim dominion.

In their view, no sacrifice is too great to achieve those ends, and no violence is unjustified.

I don't think we have reached the point yet of widespread American understanding that the war is one of ultimates for us as well.

Dennis Mullin, who traveled widely in the Islamic world for 10 years as a foreign correspondent for U.S. News and World Report and other publications, wrote in the WaPo last year that "The present war is really a crusade" fought by Islam against the West- and non-Western non-Muslims.

The al Qaeda leader, in the "Letter to the American People" published last November and attributed to him, [made] very clear that bin Laden's ultimate goal is to undermine Western civilization in its totality, which strongly implies that even if Israel didn't exist, he would still be pursuing what is really, as reluctant as we are to say it, a religious crusade in the true historical sense.

Throughout history, disruption of the social and political order of the day has been a regular occurrence. But this is a different kind of fight, one with long roots in the past and one that will last long into the future. In the letter, bin Laden purportedly said, "it is to this religion that we call you," implying the need for a global theological upheaval. ...

Lest there be any doubt that what is going on now is a real crusade, and not just a protest against American hegemony, it is important to note that al Qaeda and other Muslim forces are now or have been engaged in conflicts not just against the West proper, but against Hindus in Kashmir and increasingly in other parts of India, as well as against Orthodox Russians in Chechnya. Moreover, the Muslim Uighurs are fighting the mostly Buddhist Chinese; and Muslims are doing battle in Indonesia and the Philippines. Hundreds were recently killed in Muslim-Christian violence in Nigeria over a beauty pageant (ironically won by a Turk, after it was moved to London). Muslim extremist cells are operating in scores of countries, and their cross-border cooperation in training and financing gives credence to the assumption that the driving force is not strictly localized grievances (witness Kenya, Bali) as much as a clarion call to a worldwide transnational Islamic revival. ...

Absent a true reformation within Islam itself (which seems increasingly unlikely), the frustration over the present and the dreams of past glory of the 7th century are manifested by a destructive effort to bring the rest of the world down to Islam's current level.

Our enemies wish us lethal harm, have present means to inflict it and are developing means to deliver mass destruction to our shores. There is a large, well-funded terrorist organization, active in many nations, possessed of men who will die to achieve their aims, which has already claimed the right to kill four million Americans. Sept. 11, 2001 proved that they have the will to do so. If Iran's mullahs or North Korea are not actual allies already, they will be, especially if we give them or their successors years and years to do so. The campaign against terrorism is foundationally a contest of wills - and dare I say it, a spiritual struggle.

The real issue is whether the Western Civilization shall prevail against the last vestige of medievalism; whether the rule of men who behead their prisoners, enslave their women and deny the rights of self-determination to their own people, shall kill us and displace us, to whom the individual and individual rights are sacred and whose laws require respect for freedom of conscience, freedom of religion and whose traditions preserve freedom from fear and cruelty. In the long history of civilization, this task is to be done now.

by Donald Sensing, 6/23/2004 09:44:31 AM. Permalink |   

Nope, not here!
This post is not about Paul Johnson, Paris Hilton, Clay Aiken, Britney Spears, President Ronald Reagan, KaZaA, Nick Berg, Neopets, Severina Vuckovic or Harry Potter.

Although all these persons do have one thing in common. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

by Donald Sensing, 6/22/2004 01:37:08 PM. Permalink |   

US to Saudis: "You're on your own"??
The World Tribune reports, "U.S. threatens to abandon Saudis and their oil" (link may be perishable).

The United States has sent a tough message to Saudi Arabia that did not rule out abandoning of the kingdom's oil sector. ...

U.S. officials said despite its assurances, the Saudi government has not carried out a comprehensive upgrade in efforts to protect U.S. nationals in the kingdom. They said many Saudi-owned companies have failed to take significant steps to protect their facilities and Americans from Al Qaida attacks.

On June 20, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Sen. Richard Lugar ... said that unless Saudi Arabia provides better protection to Americans "they're in deep trouble with regard to the oil business."

Interesting, to say the least.

by Donald Sensing, 6/22/2004 01:32:03 PM. Permalink |   

Iran getting nukes
The question for us is when - soon, much later, or never?

No perfect answers to this very tough problem. Brian Dunn has some thoughts. Other good stuff on his site, too.

by Donald Sensing, 6/22/2004 12:59:02 PM. Permalink |   

Terrorists murder South Korean
Kim Sun-Il,the South Korean worker kidnaped by terrorists June 17 in Fallujah, has been murdered and beheaded, according to news reports (CNN's here).

by Donald Sensing, 6/22/2004 12:52:43 PM. Permalink |   

Charitable giving rises
And Bill Hobbs blames the Bush tax cuts.

by Donald Sensing, 6/22/2004 08:02:37 AM. Permalink |   

"Main Page" link fixed
Two kind readers emailed to let me know that the "Main Page" link in the masthead at the top of the page actually took readers to that month's archives post listing. It's fixed now, thank you!

by Donald Sensing, 6/22/2004 07:58:31 AM. Permalink |   

Down for the count
Old School liberal writer Christopher Hitchens, late of The Nation and now of Vanity Fair, delivers a long and ferocious fisking of Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11. Of one of the film's segments:

I don't think Al Jazeera would, on a bad day, have transmitted anything so utterly propagandistic.

Hitchens carves Moore like a Ginsu chef. Near the end, noting that Moore had very selectively and elliptically quoted George Orwell, Hitch says,

Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person analysis of a hypothetical, endless, and contrived war between three superpowers. The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (...) is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the United States, the Taliban, and the Baath Party and that the war against jihad is about nothing. If Moore had studied a bit more, or at all, he could have read Orwell really saying, and in his own voice, the following:

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States …

And that's just from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism in May 1945. A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It's also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history.

Hat tip: Joe Gandelman, who adds that Michael Moore DVDs are probably not a good gift idea for Hitchens.

by Donald Sensing, 6/22/2004 07:32:35 AM. Permalink |   

Coincidence? Just wondering
As you probably know, today the Iranians seized three Royal Navy patrol boats with eight crewmen.

Iran seized three small British Royal Navy boats and arrested all eight sailors on board today, Iran's Foreign Ministry announced, saying that the boats had entered Iranian waters without permission.

This follows awfully close on the heels of George W. Bush sucking up to the United Nations regarding Iraq. Did the Iranians perceive it as a sign of weakness, a bending of our will?

Just a thought. . .

Update: Iran now says it will prosecute the British sailors on charges of "illegally entering Iran's waters."

by Donald Sensing, 6/21/2004 09:22:23 PM. Permalink |   

Someone sounds like a "broken record"
Second verse, same as the first? Sgt. Stryker says that no one should be dancing to this old song, because we've heard it too many times before.

Remember Sadr? He was the guy that we wanted dead or alive. We were going to "bring him to justice." In which jail cell does Sadr sit? Where is his grave? Two months of fighting and a few dead American soldiers later, he now stands poised to become an "influential political player" in the new government.

Is anyone in the White House thinking about this? Nope. I gotta go with Stryker on this one.

Update: fixed the link (it was to the wrong post). Thanks to Scott Forbes for letting me know!

by Donald Sensing, 6/21/2004 09:03:43 PM. Permalink |   

Expanding the military
That's what John Kerry says he wants to do. Army officer Andrew Olmsted discusses the implications.

by Donald Sensing, 6/21/2004 08:50:52 PM. Permalink |   

Alas!
I was outbid.

by Donald Sensing, 6/21/2004 08:45:55 PM. Permalink |   

Religious war
Vanderleun lays out what should be obvious to thinking Americans.

Due to the nature of the enemy, the First Terrorist War will be fought here and there and everywhere. It does not matter when or where the second serious strike on the American homeland takes place, it only matters that on the day after this country will be at war far beyond the current level of conflict.

There's more.

by Donald Sensing, 6/21/2004 08:41:40 PM. Permalink |   

Michigan Supreme Court strikes blow
This time in favor of firearm dealers.

by Donald Sensing, 6/21/2004 08:35:46 PM. Permalink |   

Suadi Arabia, the day after tomorow
James Joyner has a good roundup of what's next for the kingdom.

It is not at all clear that the Saudi royals can buck the imams and survive, and making war on al Qaeda without alienating the imams is a neat trick indeed.

The problem is further compounded by the fact that the Wahabbist clerics are literally co-rulers of the country with the royals. The clerics are junior partners with well-defined governmental jurisdiction, but they are very influential religiously (of course) and very powerful politically.

James also has an interesting post, with picture!, of the new Combat Digital Assistant, a militarized PDA. Junior officers are enthusiastic about it. "This is the Nintendo generation at war."

by Donald Sensing, 6/21/2004 08:12:16 PM. Permalink |   

Not the first civilian astronaut
Mike Melvill, the courageous pilot of SpaceShipOne's space flight today, has been characterized by some of the media as "the first civilian astronaut."

Nope. That honor belongs to Neil Armstrong, who walked on the moon as a civilian member of NASA and who had earlier piloted Gemini 8, also as a civilian. He had been a Navy fighter pilot in the Korean War, but when he joined NASA he was a civilian.

But the SpaceShipOne is the first privately-funded (your tax dollars not at work) spacecraft, and let us hope far from the last.

Bloger Rand Simberg, who has true expertise in space matters, was at the launch and wrote it all up.

by Donald Sensing, 6/21/2004 03:16:22 PM. Permalink |   

Shooting sports growing greatly
FoxNews has a story about the explosive (heh!) growth of shooting sports in the US these days. Shooting sports grew by 25 percent last year, making them near the top in expansion of participation growth.

I have had a section of shooting sport links near the bottom left column of my site almost since I began bloging. I like trapshooting, a shotgun sport. I use a Beretta AL-391 Parallel Target gun:



But I think I would like a Winchester Select Energy Trap over-and-under model.



May I tactfully point out that the tip jars are in the upper left?

by Donald Sensing, 6/18/2004 10:24:40 PM. Permalink |   

Does anyone doubt we must win this war?
And does anyone still doubt that we really are at war?

Kidnaped American civilian Paul Johnson, Jr., held as hostage by al Qaeda terrorists in Saudi Arabia, was murdered (not executed, murdered!) by having his head hacked off either today or yesterday.

The terrorists gave photos to Arab media of Johnson's head resting atop his corpse. Caution, these photos are sickening (link may be perishable). But don't avert your eyes. This is what these adherents of the so-called religion of peace are doing.

Johnson was the third American slain by this brutal method. Reporter Daniel Pearl was murdered in Pakistan in 2002 by al Qaeda and freelance contractor Nicholas Berg was beheaded in Iraq earlier this year.

I've said it before (in a different context) and I'll say it again: There are only four basic possible outcomes of this war:

1. Over time, the United States engenders deep-rooted reformist impulses in the Islamic lands, leading their societies away from the self- and other-destructive patterns they now exhibit. It is almost certainly too much to ask that the societies become principally democratic as we conceive democracy (at least not for a very long time), but we can (and must) work to help them remit radical Islamofascism from their religious and political cultures so that terrorism does not flourish.

2. The Islamofascists achieve their goals of Islamicization of the entire Middle East, the ejection of all non-Muslims from Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Persian Gulf, the destruction of Israel, and the deaths of countless numbers of Americans.

3. Absent achieving the goals stated just above, al Qaeda successfully unleashes a mass-destructive, mass-casualty attack against the United States and total war erupts between the US and several Islamic countries.

4. None of the above happen, so the conflict sputters along for decades more with no real changes: we send our troops into combat intermittently, suffer non-catastrophic attacks intermittently, and neither side possesses all of the will, the means and the opportunity to achieve decisive victory. The war becomes the Forever War.

The process of liberalizing Arab societies will take many years, decades in fact, or wqhole generations. But from the standpoint of our security all that has to happen is for certain Islamic societies to become convinced of one thing is the short term and one in the long term. In the short term, they need to realize that America's will and capabilities to survive and prevail are greater than their will to destroy us or support those who wish to. They have to see that terrorism is a loser's game.

In the longer term, the Arab ummah, the masses, must enjoy the fruits of liberalized political structures that support human flourishing. That is, they have to live better, more freely, more educated, more informed and more well off each year than the year before.

If that occurs, the entire raison d'etre for Islamic terrorism will wither, for Islamofascism holds that the plight of the ummah - poverty and political repression - is due to Western influences that must be purged for true Islam to be realized.

The conundrum of our task is that our long-term objectives are exactly those which Islamofascists say will ruin true Muslim society. Every success we gain, in Iraq or elsewhere when the time comes, will be fought tooth and nail by our enemies. But early this year, the high-ranking al Qaeda operative in Iraq, Abu Zarqawi, wrote to his superiors that democracy is "suffocation" for recruiting Iraqis to fight against Americans.

What this means is that the status quo ante bellum cannot be allowed to be reestablished. It was, after all, the womb of the war. The present status quo cannot be maintained either, for it is merely significantly, not decisively, better than before. We must remain focused on the long-term goals and vary our short-term tactics and strategies as we need to in order to obtain them.

A terrible danger is that we could someday be well underway to achieving our long-term objectives and still get struck by a catastrophic attack inside the US. Just yesterday, the head of Britain's MI5 said,

... the war against terror would not be won quickly, and cautioned that it was "only a matter of time" before a "crude" nuclear, biological or chemical attack.

Eliza Manningham-Buller, making her first public comments on the terrorist threat, spelled out a grim reality that there was an inexhaustible supply of potential terrorists being groomed by extremists to attack the West.

She said: "The supply of potential terrorists among extreme elements is unlikely to diminish. Breaking the link between terrorism and religious ideology is difficult."

Which brings me back to my original questions: Does anyone doubt we must win this war? And does anyone still doubt that we really are at war?

by Donald Sensing, 6/18/2004 10:19:19 PM. Permalink |   

Calling Milwaukee Methodists
If there are any Milwaukee United Methodists reading, please leave a comment on where a new Milwaukee resident can find a UM church that is "believing, but thinking." One of my other readers would like to know.

by Donald Sensing, 6/18/2004 07:05:28 PM. Permalink |   

More on Stepford Wives and the missed point
Paul Stancil emails in response to my earlier post about The Stepford Wives:

Based upon my personal experience as a father of two young children and husband of a law professor wife, I think Suzanne is one full cycle behind. In my experience, the stay-at-home moms are currently attacking working mothers, not the other way around. Whether this is a Battle of the Bulge-like counteroffensive or a preemptive strike, I'm not sure. But limiting myself to the "upper middle class, don't HAVE to work but WANT to work" set, the reality is far more complex than Suzanne makes it out to be.

After many years in Texas (my great grandfather planted numerous Methodist churches throughout the state), we recently moved to Milwaukee, and have ptiched our tent in a suburb plucked straight from Norman Rockwell. Because it's decidedly upper middle class but also decidedly traditional, there is a good bit of tension between the stay-at-homes (my wife calls them The Ladies Who Lunch) and the career women (who knows what they call my wife). The current front line seems to be the local PTA, which is utterly controlled by TLWL. Our daughter just finished kindergarten, and there were literally dozens of "special events" and "helper opportunities" every month. Two art helpers per week. Two gym helpers per week. At least one classroom event every month, more during the holidays (and every day's a holiday of some sort, it seems). We're talking an order of magnitude more stuff than when I was in grade school 25 years ago. My daughter was made to feel somehow substandard on the (very rare) occasions when one of us could not make an event. There are many more examples, but that's not really the point of this email.

Instead, I want to focus on two things ¯ the complexity of the stay-at-home/working mom equilibrium and the persistent myth of the "traditional" family.

On the former, it seems to me that a truly free society will inevitably produce this sort of tension, and that the tension CLEARLY goes both directions. On balance, I'm willing to accept it as a consequence of our liberty, but no amount of moralizing or scientific explanation is going to get rid of it. Within the upper-middle class socioeconomic stratum, I think it would be a rare woman who felt no internal conflict when making the "to work or not to work" decision. Those on either side who deny internal conflict are either lying, or are religious zealots for their particular position, in my experience. My wife wrestled with it for months before our first child was born, for months afterward, and then again periodically until, oh, probably last night sometime. Other friends who have made the opposite decision (many of my former female colleagues in law practice) have struggled with the decision as well.

On balance, it is a fantastic thing that our society increasingly tells women they can do anything, and accomplish anything they set their minds to. We are a freer, more productive society than any other in recorded history (at least since the Garden), and our rough gender equality is a big part of the explanation. But when smart, talented women run into their own God-given biology, they are going to have a hard time reconciling the two. This is in some ways a consequence of our modern society (more on that below). Regardles, it's the rare stay-at-home mom who doesn't feel even the slightest twinge that she should be doing something "more" with her talents and abilities, and it's similarly unusual for a working mom to have no qualms about being away from her children during working hours.

At root, the ongoing "war" is caused by insecurity on BOTH sides. As a father observing this somewhat objectively, it's really pretty obvious. Although there is a grain of true commitment to the stereotypical arguments ("women who stay at home are rejecting the rightful place of women in society;" "women who work are rejecting the best interests of their children"), there's also an awful lot of rationalization going on. Workers feel inferior because they worry that they really are being selfish at their children's expense. Stay-at-homes envy the perceived "freedom," power and influence of the workers, and wonder what they got that Harvard degree for in the first place. At the end of the day, there's plenty of blame to go around, and I see no way to solve the problem without radically redefining women's rights in a way that most thinking people would find disgusting.

Finally, a few words on the myth of the traditional American family. I'm not saying that the tradtional nuclear family isn't best. It is. And I'm not saying that the "dad works, mom stays home" model is without benefits. I think a reasonable argument exists that the 1950s stereotype is a very good way to raise a family. But it's pretty darned mypoic for folks to invoke Tradition in defense of this arrangement when it's been "traditional" for well less than a century of the thousands of years of recorded human history. [Note: I don't think you do this]. I'm not saying there hasn't been some consistent division of labor between the sexes throughout history. But the historical continuity of the "women's sphere/men's sphere" model is less impressive than many suggest. Of course, only relatively modern, non-subsistence economies allow for the development of the "traditional" model, and the traditional model itself probably exists at least in part to compensate for the unnatural (and underdiscussed) impact of the absence of the father who spends his days away at the office. I'm sure there is some counterargument based on men with spears going on multiday hunting trips, but I'd be willing to bet that fathers in antiquity saw their children more during the course of an ordinary week than high-powered execudads do today.

Food for thought, anyway.

And good food for thought it is, too!

by Donald Sensing, 6/18/2004 07:01:39 PM. Permalink |   

Car shopping
Other Hand Clapping and I are considering buying a third car for Second Hand Clapping to use. We, mainly my wife, spend a lot of time driving the kids' taxi shuttle. Even though our son drives, if he takes one of our cars it still means we are planning our schedules around his transportation needs, at least to some degree.

So I've been looking for a third car lately, but this is itself a frustrating thing. I will not consider a car (meaning four-door, midsize sedan) that lacks air bags and antilock brakes (ABS), but don't want to spend a lot of money, either. These requirements tend to limit choices.

ABS and airbags didn't both become standard or popular options on lower-priced new cars until just a few years ago. Reasonably late-model cars that have both ALB and bags tend either to have been driven pretty hard or are still out of my price range, often both.

That has led me to look at older examples of premium brands such as Mercedes or Volvo and the highline Japanese makes. Their safety ratings are excellent, but they come with their own issues, too. My price range is under $10,000, hopefully well under. After all, the car only has to last two years. But Euro or high class Japanese models within this range have well over 100,000 miles, usually closer to 150,000. Or more.

That means they are in high-maintenance territory, and maintenance costs for a BMW, Mercedes or Volvo are breathtaking. Repair costs are coma inducing. I know. We bought a new BMW 528e (American model) in Germany in 1985 and brought it home the next year. We were stunned at the costs of routine maintenance, which was not overly expensive in Germany. We also owned a German-model Mercedes 280S over there, and the maintenance costs were quite reasonable.

MSN has a good auto site with user reviews, which verify what I've said. Even so, I did bid on eBay Motors on this Mercedes E320, for which I am the high bidder as I write, but I won't stick with it very long, I think.

Of course, the fact that this purchase is entirely optional doesn't simplify the matter because it tends to raise my standards. I just won't have a lot of patience with a third car that niggles me to death with maintenance or repair costs. That drives me away from the Euro makes toward the Japanese makes. But the same Catch 22 applies for them as for American makes - the ones in my price range lack the safety features I require, and the Lexus, Infiniti and Acura dealers shun carrying used models in those brands for much under $20,000. I did drive a 1996 Lexus LS400 late today with 85,000 miles and in near-showroom condition. Beautiful car, great value, but it'll cost me $17,000 out the door.

BTW, a dealer's profit margin on a used car is much greater than on a new one, in both absolute and percentage terms. So there is a lot more room for haggling.

by Donald Sensing, 6/17/2004 10:06:51 PM. Permalink |   

Stepford Wives and husbands' fantasies
The original and the remake miss the point of what husbands want, and wives, too

The original 1975 version of Stepford Wives imagined a fictional northeastern town where the men had a secret: one by one, they were replacing their uppity, argumentive, frigid, human wives with dull, brainless, compliant sex goddesses who never said no and never argued.

Katherine Ross, who was a hot number in moviedom back then, played Joanna Eberhart, the heroine who uncovered the plot and tried to warn her friends. Alas, too late, they'd just been replaced, notably Tina Louise, playing Charmaine Wimperis, a tennis addict who had steadfastly refused to let her husband dig up the court and put in a pool.

Actually, most guys went to see the movie because of Tina, not Katherine. She's the one in the middle.

I have not seen the current remake of the movie (and have no plans to), but in it, Nicole Kidman plays Joanna. Unlike 1975's Joanna, who was a housewife like every other Stepford wife, Nicole-Joanna is a high-powered career woman. She's a recently-failed producer of network reality shows, a nice twist, I suppose, since the premise of the Stepford plot is how Stepford husbands replace reality with - dare I say it? - wives that look an awful lot like Hollywood actresses.

Suzanne West says that the battle among the sexes today isn't between men and women anymore. I might add that one reason is that most husbands these days whose wives work outside the home adjusted long ago and - again, dare I say it? - like the benefits of the money their wives make. It is, after all, what paid for the new home entertainment center and what floats the note for the Lexus.

No, the real battle among the sexes is between career wives and houswives, says Suzanne. The number of the latter rise every year.

The new version should have depicted career women as the authors of the robots, assigned to replace the new generation of women who are turning their backs on work beyond the hearth. The career women have declared war on stay-at-home mommies with the vengeance that the Stepford husbands applied to stereotyping their wives a quarter of a century ago. It's not clear whether the career women are driven by defensiveness or a fear that they're missing one of life's great experiences - raising their children.

Frankly, I am not sure what Suzanne is getting at (the rest of her piece is a bit unclear, shall we say), but the producers of both the '75 and '04 versions really miss the point.

In the '75 movie, the overriding theme was that husbands' fantasy is to be married to sex goddesses who are always available, always willing and most of all, always highly admiring and complimentary of their husband's, uh, prowess. Second, the robot wives never got personally sloppy (hey, they always looked like movie actresses!) and never argued with their patriarch.

Stepford was a Taliban village without the burkas or the religion.

But that's not what husbands want, American husbands, anyway. No, to be true to the real-life fantasy of both men and the career women of the movie, what the Stepford androidesses would be is Michelin chefs, child-care experts, personal secretaries and shuttle drivers for the wives' convenience, and a butler for the husband. Or maybe scratch the butler; most men aren't natural slave drivers, which may explain why the harshest overseers in slave societies and matriarchies have always been the women.

But wait, back to Suzanne! She recounts authoress Caitlin Flanagan, who,

... enraged career women with a 12,000-word polemic in the Atlantic Monthly called "How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement," accusing career women of making it on the backs of their nannies. Her critics were further enraged when they learned that she has a nanny herself, to help with twin sons. She sticks to her point nonetheless: "When a mother works, something is lost."

For the non-New York working set, substitute maids for nannies, and you get the picture. I think what husbands today really long for is a less frenetic life with a wife who's a closer friend.

Just a few thoughts.

by Donald Sensing, 6/17/2004 07:46:53 PM. Permalink |   

Out of town again today
I'll be out of town again today. Although the Annual Conference will likely end early today, I don't know how early. The Other Hands Clapping are leaving for N.C. tomorrow for sevral days, so I'm spending time with them tonight.

See you tomorrow!

by Donald Sensing, 6/16/2004 06:35:38 AM. Permalink |   

Blogging in the mainline news
Michael Silence, writing for the Knoxville (Tenn.) News-Journal, explores the simmering controversy over the findings of the Blogads reader survey. Yours truly is quoted. And Time magazine has a long and balanced article about blogging.

by Donald Sensing, 6/14/2004 02:37:09 PM. Permalink |   

Happy Birthday US Army

I would be remiss if I didn't point out that today is the 229th birthday of the United States Army, my professional alma mater.

Some of my longtime readers may recall that today was also the date that my eldest son was supposed to report to Parris Island, SC, to begin US Marine boot camp.

His reporting date was changed last month to July 26; it seems the Marines decided they wanted him to compete for the national C++ programming championship in mid-July at the Future Business Leaders of America's national convention in Denver in Mid-July.

Stephen won the state title in late April. As I understand it, the competition is a long and progressively more dificult test.

Anyway, he told his recruiting sergeant (didn't ask for a change of reporting date, just let him know) who told the Nashville Recruiting District commander, who arranged for a changed date.

In the meantime Stephen is doing PT with the Marines every day and running C++ programs.

by Donald Sensing, 6/14/2004 01:51:51 PM. Permalink |   

Annual Conference week
This is the week of the Annual Conference (convention) of the Tennessee Conference of the UMC. For the past few years, the Conference was held 15-20 minutes drive from my home, but this year it is an hour or so.

I am not there today because I have a funeral service to conduct later this afternoon, for which I am using the day to prepare, but will be there all day Tuesday and Wednesday.

Maybe online tonight with something, but otherwise, see you Thursday!

by Donald Sensing, 6/14/2004 01:43:46 PM. Permalink |   

The virtue of naming evil
Michael Novak, Feb. 7, 2002, in the WSJ:

Nearly 20 years ago, President Reagan caused a firestorm (one of many) when he called the Soviet Union an "evil empire." "Manicheanism," snorted expatriate Americans in Paris and London, distancing themselves from a lowbrow president. "Incendiary!" worried the diplomatic set. Tony Dolan, White House speechwriter extraordinaire of those days, used to say that every office that reviewed President Reagan's speech before he gave it--State Department, National Security Council, etc.--struck out the offending phrase; the president kept writing it back in. The president knew just what he was doing. No one else seemed to. ...

Some years afterwards, in fact, U.S. arms negotiators, reminiscing over the bad old days with their now-no-longer Soviet counterparts at a happy dinner, were interrupted by a fist slamming down upon the table. "You know what caused the downfall of the Soviet Union? You know what did it?" demanded a senior general, a little flush with vodka.

Some racked their brains with thoughts of missile defense, perpetual shortages of everything from soap to vodka, the U.S. military buildup. The general banged his fist again. "That [expleteive] speech about the evil empire! That's what did it!" The general was standing now, and to the questioning eyes of one American he added: "It was an evil empire. It was."

Joe Klein in Time Magazine last week:

In fact, I didn't understand how truly monumental, and morally important, Reagan's anticommunist vision was until I visited the Soviet Union in 1987. My first night there, I was escorted to the Bolshoi Ballet by two minders from the U.S.-Canada Institute. The Russians were thrilled that I had figured out the Cyrillic alphabet and was able to read the program. The young woman on my left rewarded me with a smile—a rare public act in that terrifying regime—and a whispered encouragement: reform was coming. Glasnost and perestroika, she assured me, were real. The minder on my left, a chunky young man, then nudged me with his elbow. "Ronald Reagan. Evil empire," he whispered with dramatic intensity, and shot a glance down to his lap where he had hidden two enthusiastic thumbs up. "Yes!"

As Napoleon said, in war the moral is to the physical as three is to one.

by Donald Sensing, 6/13/2004 08:00:47 PM. Permalink |   

Linkagery

Frank Warner has three interesting bits of trivia about the "evil empire" speech.

Mark D. Roberts weighs in On the Meaning of a Symbol: The Los Angeles Cross Controversy."

Right Side Redux has photos and sounds of the hours he waited in a seven-mile line to pass by Ronald Reagan's casket in the nation's Capitol.

Michael Williams has some thoughts about "Abortion and Race."

David Schuler reflects on Reagan's ceremonies and says, "I'm not entirely comfortable with The Battle Hymn but that means that I get it."

Some interesting reading at Joe Gandelman's blog, just scroll.

Peaktalk is blogging again, and has some cogent thoughts about "Europe in a nutshell, plus other good stuff.

Josh Foust has some thoughts about The State of Modern Christianity.

Frosty Wooldridge, a teacher and author who has bicycled 100,000 miles on six continents to see overpopulation up close and ugly, asks, "What Will Happen if We Never Stop Immigration? "

by Donald Sensing, 6/13/2004 06:49:32 PM. Permalink |   

UN inspectors say Iraq WMDs were hidden
The World Tribune:

The United Nations has determined that Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction components as well as medium-range ballistic missiles before, during and after the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003.

The UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission briefed the Security Council on new findings that could help trace the whereabouts of Saddam's missile and WMD program.

The briefing contained satellite photographs that demonstrated the speed with which Saddam dismantled his missile and WMD sites before and during the war. Council members were shown photographs of a ballistic missile site outside Baghdad in May 2003, and then saw a satellite image of the same location in February 2004, in which facilities had disappeared.

UNMOVIC acting executive chairman Demetrius Perricos told the council on June 9 that "the only controls at the borders are for the weight of the scrap metal, and to check whether there are any explosive or radioactive materials within the scrap," Middle East Newsline reported.

"It's being exported," Perricos said after the briefing. "It's being traded out. And there is a large variety of scrap metal from very new to very old, and slowly, it seems the country is depleted of metal."

"The removal of these materials from Iraq raises concerns with regard to proliferation risks," Perricos told the council. Perricos also reported that inspectors found Iraqi WMD and missile components shipped abroad that still contained UN inspection tags.

He said the Iraqi facilities were dismantled and sent both to Europe and around the Middle East. at the rate of about 1,000 tons of metal a month. Destionations included Jordan, the Netherlands and Turkey.

There's more.

by Donald Sensing, 6/12/2004 09:24:16 PM. Permalink |   

How to fire artillery salutes
Ceremonial artillery is a precise endeavor

I think that at every arrival and departure points of Ronald Reagan's remains during his funeral week there was a 21-gun salute fired by either Army or Marine gunners.


The salute battery of the Military District of Washington at the ready outside the Capitol on Friday. The guns are M101, 105mm towed howitzers of World War II vintage.

When I was a battery commander in 3d Armored Division in Germany, my battery was the division's salute battery. We did a number of salutes for V Corps Headquarters, so we might have been the salute battery for the whole corps, too.

My battalion was equipped with M109A3, self-propelled, 155mm howitzers:


Not suitable for firing ceremonial salutes!

Because salutes fire blank rounds (duh!) separate loading ammunition - the propellant and the projectile are separate - cannot be used. With no projectile, all firing bags of propellant in the M109-series guns would do is shoot a mass of flame out the muzzle. Not only is this dangerous to everyone around, it endangers the crew and wreaks havoc on the interior of the barrel.

Salute rounds are really a kind of firework - brass cannisters with a special charge inside designed to make a loud noise, a bright flash and produce lots of white smoke (tactical artillery ammunition is practically flashless and smokeless).


This salute was fired as President Reagan's casket left the Capitol for the National Cathedral

In Germany, my battery was assigned four 75mm pack howitzers to fire salutes. These date from 1927. Pack artillery, designed to be broken down and carried on muleback, was first used by the US Army in the 1830s. In WW II the 75mm pack was used by Army mountain and airborne units and Marines. It was towed by a jeep.



These guns haven't been manufactured in decades, so getting spare parts for them was always a challenge! My mechanics were very creative in keeping them ready.

Accurate counting is everything in firing salutes properly. Different persons being honored take different numbers of rounds fired. Heads of state get 21 rounds, lesser lights get fewer, according to a protocol worked out over about 200 years. We never fired 21 rounds, but we did fire 19 on one occasion. I don't remember who was being honored.

Of course, salute firing was an extra duty for my battery. We always had to perform our regular mission. Although my battery was the salute battery, manning the four pack howitzers required only a fraction of the soldiers under my command:

On each gun:

– a chief of section who was overall responsible for the gun and his gun's firing.

– a gunner, whose job was the fire the cannon by pulling the lanyard, which released the firing pin to set off the round. This was his only duty once the salute began.

– a number one cannoneer, who job was to load each round into the cannon's breech. He also had no other duties when the firing began.

Other personnel:

– a chief of battery, a staff sergeant or a sergeant first class, who supervised the firing line and ensured the equipment and soldiers were ready for each salute. He also trained the whole team.

– an officer in charge (my XO, not me) who exercised actual command of the salute battery when performing ceremonies. (Although the artillery battery I commanded had salute battery duties, I assigned the salute sections to be commanded by my XO.)

– a smart NCO to count the rounds fired. For the 19-gun salute the counter signaled the end was near by about-facing at round 17 and loudly announcing,"Seventeen!" to the chief of battery. On the next round the chief of battery faced about and announced, "Eighteen!" This signaled the XO to order one more round fired. The same procedure was followed with salutes of other numbers of rounds.

– a timer, equipped with a stopwatch, whose job was to ensure the correct interval between rounds was maintained - five seconds for funerals (we never did a funeral) and three seconds for all other occasions. After each round, the timer called, "One, two, three!" and on the word, "three," the XO signaled the next gun to fire.

We also took along several artillery and automotive mechanics who hopefully would have nothing to do. Alas, they were always employed.

Before the salute began, each chief ensured his gun and crew were ready, then faced the XO and raised his right arm straight up. When all guns signaled ready the XO raised his arm likewise. This signaled the ceremony commander (aka, "commander of troops", COT) that the battery was ready.

During the ceremony, the COT would present the ceremony's troops to the honoree by rendering a hand salute. When the XO saw the COT's hand approach his headgear, he would drop his arm at gun number one, which was the gun farthest to the XO's right. The section chief would drop his arm and the gunner would fire the gun. (In actuality, we just had the gunner fire when he saw the XO drop his arm.) Once the gun was reloaded and ready, the section chief would assume the raised-arm position, signaling the XO the gun was again ready.

With three-second intervals, each section had 12 seconds to reload, recock and assume the ready position that visually informed the XO gun in action. For a well-trained crew, 12 seconds is plenty of time to do that and for the section chief ensure all is proper. But when something on the gun broke during the firing sequence, which happened with distressing frequency, the pucker factor went up real fast. The section chief's race against the clock was relentless because the precision of the interval had to be kept!

If the chief decided the gun was out of action, he instantly would order all the crew, including himself, to kneel on one knee, facing the XO, and fold their arms across their chests. The chief of battery, who continually scanned the line, would notice and announce to the XO, "Gun One [or two, three, four] out of action!" the XO would know to skip it and proceed immediately to the next gun.

So each section knew they didn't have 12 seconds to get ready to fire, they really had only nine. So the crews were very busy. There was one salute we fired with four guns beginning and two guns ending! It was, shall we say, exciting!

Occasionally the gunner would pull the lanyard and the round would not fire. Rare, but it did happen. (The ammo was as old as the guns.) When that happened we told the gunner, who would realize the misfire first, instantly to announce loudly, "Misfire!" The gunner of the next gun would hear and immediately fire with no further command. Three seconds between rounds was all we had!

A misfire always put a gun out of action because misfire procedures required 10 minutes to elapse before the breech could be opened to minimize the chance of a "cookoff" in which the propellant might be burning but not yet exploded. Extracting a misfired round was always very dicey but fortunately they were rare and caused no injuries.

I was especially proud of my salute crews because not one of them was an artilleryman. I assigned mechanics, cooks, supply clerks and other support soldiers to salute-gun duties. They performed magnificently, and at ceremonies the commander of troops and the honoree were always amazed that the salute was not fired by real artillerymen! The only actual artillerymen there were the XO, the chief of battery and the counter.

Not long before my command tour was over, the division-artillery commander reassigned salute duties to another unit on his own kaserne in Hanau. Since we were stationed near Giessen, 55 kilometers away from division headquarters in Frankfurt, the move made a lot of sense, and frankly, we shed no tears to give the salute duties away.


This salute was fired by US Marine artillery at the Reagan Library after President Reagan's casket was laid to final rest, using the same model howitzer as the Army in Washington, the M101, 105mm. Much to my future-Marine son's dismay, Fox News sluglined the Marine firing batteries as Army. To which I say, "Heh!"

by Donald Sensing, 6/12/2004 08:24:32 PM. Permalink |   

Update on Austin Bay
I have cited syndicated columnist Austin Bay a number of times (see here).

Austin is a colonel in the Army Reserve and is now on active duty, serving in Baghdad. He emailed, "My work days are extremely long, the pace relentlessly quick."

I have never met Austin, but we have emailed one another to the point that I do consider him a friend. So I pray for his safe return.

by Donald Sensing, 6/12/2004 08:47:42 AM. Permalink |   

This happens in my sermons, too
It was said of a certain preacher, "After his sermons, the people are enlightened, informed, inspired ... and many of them are well rested, too!"



As Ronald Reagan's funeral marked the first time Bill and Hill have been seen in public together for, what, years?, I suppose they should be forgiven for nodding off in the service. Maybe they were up late last night celebrating their reunion.

Nah . . .

by Donald Sensing, 6/11/2004 03:25:21 PM. Permalink |   

Cartooning Ted Rall
Geitner Simmons has it.

BTW, this is the last time I shall ever mention Ted Rall.

by Donald Sensing, 6/11/2004 12:33:40 PM. Permalink |   

Beige religion
The WaPo says,

Official Washington likes its religion beige, interfaith, tastefully alluded to rather than shouted from a mountaintop.

The piece is a good profile of a former three-term Senator, the Rev. John Danforth, who officiated today at Ronald Reagan's funeral service at National Cathedral.

by Donald Sensing, 6/11/2004 12:25:24 PM. Permalink |   

Online live video of Reagan funeraL
Fox News will video stream Reagan's funeral. It begins at 11:30 a.m. Eastern time.

by Donald Sensing, 6/11/2004 08:45:12 AM. Permalink |   

What the liberated say
Will Collier has a good roundup of what former Soviet and East Bloc people are saying about Ronald Reagan.

Update: Here are other insights into how Reagan pushed the Soviet Union into extinction.

How Reagan made Soviet society face its failures, USA Today.

Ron and Mikhail's Excellent Adventure: How Reagan won the Cold War, by Fred Kaplan.

by Donald Sensing, 6/11/2004 08:01:35 AM. Permalink |   

Audio blogging from the Capitol
For you night owls, Justin at Right Side Redux is providing hourly audio blogs from the Capitol in Washington, DC.

by Donald Sensing, 6/10/2004 07:15:09 PM. Permalink |   

Saving energy
Steven Den Beste writes about a lot of things excellently, but I think his most enjoyable and informative essays deal with engineering issues, his professional specialty. And the ones dealing with energy issues are especially good to read. Even I understand them!

Jane Galt says of his energy essays,

It's a definitive rebuttal to the apparently overwhelming majority of people who believe that if we can just increase CAFE standards, turn off lights when we're not using them, buy energy-star air conditioners, install a couple of wind farms, adn put some solar panels on our roofs, why, we'll practically have the problem licked!

But of course, we won't, and Steven explains why from a scientific basis.

BTW, Jane herself has a series of essays on energy and global warming issues (they are related issues), inlcuding, just to whet your appetite, "Why increasing CAFE standards increases the number of cars on the road."

by Donald Sensing, 6/10/2004 07:00:48 PM. Permalink |   

Gorbachev pays respects
Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet premier whom Ronald Reagan essentially checkmated into ending the Soviet Union, visited Reagan's bier a moment ago to pay his respects.



He stayed for about a minute while cameras clicked and whirred. I think it was a very decent gesture. Reagan and Gorbachev actually became good friends after they both left office. Gorbachev visited Reagan in California more than once. They even went on a speaking tour of America together one time, hosted by multimillionaire Malcolm Forbes, who flew them around on his private jet, nicknamed "Capitalist Tool."

by Donald Sensing, 6/10/2004 03:44:50 PM. Permalink |   

Time for US to go?
Jin points out a piece citing a Brookings Insititute scholar who says that anti-US sentiment in South Korea is becoming more pervasive throughout all its society.

The US already announced that it will withdraw a US Army combat brigade from South Korea to serve in Iraq. The putative reason that US forces are stationed in the South, to defend against a potential North Korean invasion, doesn't really hold water any more.

My guess is that the near-term years will see a reduction in American forces in South Korea.

by Donald Sensing, 6/10/2004 03:31:01 PM. Permalink |   

What is the Left?
In the comments to my post about the eschatology, or "Ideal Time" of the Western Left, I got into a short discussion with longtime reader and commenter Scott Forbes on the distinction between "the Left" and "liberal" when referring to American politics. Scott said that while I claim there is a distinction between the Left and liberalism, I often use the terms interchangeably.

Problem is that the media often do, too, i.e., "the left side of the aisle" means liberals (and in the Congress, Democrats) while "the right side of the aisle" means conservatives, of which there are precious few actually serving, so the term means the Republicans. Often the media, commentators and other bloggers use "the left" to refer generally to liberals, as opposed to "the right," conservatives.

So I try to make a textual distinction between "the Left" and "the left." In using "the Left," I am trying to refer to a definable set of people further to the left side of the aisle than Democrats generically. I do not mean that the Left is precisely definable, but its member have enough in common that it isn't unjustified to refer to them as a group, the "lumpen Left," if you will.

In his essay, "Why Does the Left Hate Israel?" Richard Baehr defined the Left thus:

The left in this country includes large numbers of academics, journalists, human rights activists, environmental and animal rights activists, entertainers, and some church groups, women’s groups, racial advocacy groups and unions. There are also liberals who are members of these same groups. I distinguish between leftists and liberals by one key test: how they feel about the country in which they live. If you tend to regard America as a primarily flawed, evil, unjust, racist country (or at least when Republicans are running it), and most importantly, believe that the US is the primary threat to world peace internationally, then you are a leftist, and not a liberal. ...

... But liberals, as distinguished from leftists, do not think America is a bad country. Most liberals think America is an improvable country, if only we made the tax system more progressive, spent more money on social services, and worked more through multilateral organizations abroad. Liberals tend to support overseas military missions when our effort supports a human rights concern, and much less so if the military engagement is claimed to be in support of a strategic objective. Liberals, by and large, supported American military involvement in the wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Haiti, and now Liberia, while opposing the two wars with Iraq.

Michael Totten is certainly no member of the VRWC (he defines himself as liberal), and he recently documented the anti-Judaism of the Left which they themselves proclaim. (I blogged in February 2003 that the Left and the Right are united by anti-Judaism).

Back in January Michael posted about the difference between liberals and Leftists.

Broadly defined, a liberal is a person who believes in social, political, and economic freedom. In the United States, both major parties are liberal. Most members of both support democracy, civil and human rights, and a market economy. ...

Each party is more liberal than the other in certain ways. ... Both parties champion freedom in different ways, and they do it on principle. Both parties have different liberal priorities, but they’re both generally liberal. ...

A liberal (substitute with Democrat if you want to) believes in reform. And a leftist supports revolution. Liberals (Democrats) are the left-wing of the Establishment. Leftists are radicals who seek to overthrow the Establishment (either through violence or the ballot box) and replace it with something else. ...

Liberals see America as the land of opportunity and freedom. Leftists see America as the bastion of Imperialism, Racism, and Oppression.

Liberals want higher taxes on the rich because it’s fairer to the middle and working classes. Leftists want to soak the rich out of class hatred.

Liberals want universal access to health care while leaving the system as market-driven as possible. Leftists would destroy the health care industry altogether and replace it with a state-run monopoly.

Liberals want to ban clear-cutting. Leftists want to ban the logging industry.

Liberals support globalization and trade and see it as an opportunity for economic growth and also as an opportunity to boost labor and environmental standards in the Third World. Leftists hate trade because they think it’s all about the West raping the rest.

Liberals blame the September 11 attacks on religious and political extremism in the Middle East. Leftists blame the September 11 attacks on America.

Michael admits at the end that people will disagree, but I think his essay is helpful.

The basic matrix by which the Left understands America in the world is neo-Marxist. Lee Harris's scholarly essay, "The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing," is very helpful in understanding why this is so.

The Left basically believes that America is bad for the world. Actions, military or not, that enhance America's national self interests are therefore anathema. If old "Engine Charlie" Wilson's motto was, "What is good for General Motors is good for America," the Left's motto runs perversely: "What is good for America is bad for the world."

When scratched, Leftists bleed statist blood. Leftism elevates the state apparatus and denigrates the individual. There is no greater offender to this notion than America, where individual rights are elevated and are indeed guaranteed in our founding documents, in fact, we say our rights are ordained by God himself. Hence, the Left's history of attempting to degenerate American sovereignty with inventions such as the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Treaty, and the notion that the UN Charter somehow trumps the American Constitution.

In their mind, America is imperialist in many forms - economic, cultural, linguistic and especially militarily. If America's gross transgressions are to be prevented, then America's national power, especially military power, must be turned away from promoting America's national interests.

I wish I could define a clear dividing line between American liberalism and Leftism. But they merge rather than delineate, just as conservatism and the Right tend to merge the farther right you get. (But today's conservatism is awfully similar to JFK liberalism, and much of today's liberalism is similar to old-style conservatism.)

James Taranto of OpinionJournal wrote in September 2002 of "The Reactionary Left."

As anyone who's attended an "antiglobalization" protest knows, the only thing uniting the left is its hatreds--of capitalism, America and Israel. You find at these events a menagerie of special interests promoting their own little causes. But the far left today, though it styles itself "progressive," has no coherent vision of how to make the world better--in sharp contrast with today's conservative internationalists, who favor the vigorous use of U.S. diplomatic and military force to expand democracy.

In a nutshell, liberals affirm while the Left despises the idea of America.

by Donald Sensing, 6/10/2004 03:12:41 PM. Permalink |   

Ray Charles is dead
He died today at age 73. The cause has not been announced. He died at home.

by Donald Sensing, 6/10/2004 03:08:07 PM. Permalink |   

National Council of Churches on Reagan funeral
I just got this email through the channels of the UMC:

On Friday, June 11, our country will observe a National Day of Mourning for the death of the 40th President of the United States, Ronald Wilson Reagan.

As part of this observance, houses of worship across the country have been asked to ring their bells 40 times on Friday at 1:15 pm Eastern Time.

The National Council of Churches invites all of America's congregations to share in this moment of mourning and reflection.

We express our condolences to Mrs. Nancy Reagan and the Reagan Family.

Sadly, my church does not have bells. I find no mention of this on the NCC's web site, however.

by Donald Sensing, 6/10/2004 02:55:58 PM. Permalink |   

What he said
President Bush just said in his closing remarks to the G8 summit, "The best way to defeat terrorim is to speak to the hopes and aspirations of women and men."

Note the order the sexes were spoken. Bush well knows that the civil and religious oppression of women is a main part of the dysfunction of Muslim societies (some more than others).

Liberating women was one of the chief objectives of Douglas MacArthur as he governed postwar Japan. He knew that Japanese militarism and the cult of Bushido could not survive politically enabled wives and mothers. He was right.

by Donald Sensing, 6/10/2004 02:46:41 PM. Permalink |   

Gas war!
What do you do if you are two gas stations in one of the richest sections of Nashville?

Why, get into a price war, of course.

Daily's Shell station and Chevron/ Kaya's Korner have had the cheapest gas in the area for about a week, area motorists say. Yesterday's price for regular unleaded at both locations dipped to $1.769 per gallon, or about 15 cents below the Nashville area average as reported by AAA surveys.

These prices are about 15 cents per gallon less than other area stations.

Jay Rim, manager of the Belle Meade Shell at 4409 Harding Pike, has kept regular unleaded gas at that station at about $1.95 a gallon.

"I can't make the owner of this store lose money," he said. "I can't do business if I am not making any money. At my cost (of gasoline), we would lose at least 10 cents per gallon at that price."

The manager of one of the stations said he lowered prices to boost sales of the station's convenience stores. The station next door followed suit, and the price war was on.

Of course, as Bill Hobbs points out, "a year ago $1.76 a gallon would not have sounded like a bargain." Perhaps nowadays Dinah Washington would be singing, "What a Difference a Year Makes."

by Donald Sensing, 6/10/2004 07:13:24 AM. Permalink |   

McGovern to Reagan
Author Tom Donelson has a long and insightful essay about how and why he morphed from a McGovern liberal to a Reagan conservative.

In 1972, I voted for George McGovern and 1976, I voted for Jimmy Carter. In 1980, I voted for Ronald Reagan and became a Reagan conservative, which I am still today.

Part of the reason was that Reagan was an anti-Nixon, which the Republican party badly needed.

Contrast Reagan with Nixon and you have the difference between what being Republican means today vs. in the early 70’s. Nixon was one of the most intelligent men to enter the White House and the least principled. Nixon Foreign Policy was managing a nation in decline and his policy basis began with the idea that America position in the world was diminishing. His policy was not about elevating America but slowing the eventual decline. His economic plan was surrender to the Keynesian dogma of the time and he also surrendered to the environmental ideas that we were running of our energy. Nixon was a pessimist and that is why is policies failed. They fail to take in account the American spirit.

Pretty interesting read, so browse on over.

by Donald Sensing, 6/10/2004 07:01:09 AM. Permalink |   

Chirac snubs Kerry!
I guess French President Jacques Chirac wasn't one of the foreign leaders who, said John Kerry, told Kerry they supported him against President Bush. Chirac just vicariously told Kerry to take a hike when it comes to Iraq.

by Donald Sensing, 6/9/2004 10:03:11 PM. Permalink |   

What they said about Lincoln
Congratulations to American Digest, which just passed its first birthday. Blogger Vanderleun posts about "The Passing of a President, 1865."

Harpers Magazine, June 1865, regarding the The Death of Lincoln:

"Men and papers who had opposed his policy and vilified him personally, now vied with his adherents and friends in lauding the rare wisdom and goodness which marked his conduct and character."

I am not so sure that those who vilified Reagan are now lauding his rare wisdom, but it is true that Lincoln suffered from a frequently vicious press.

by Donald Sensing, 6/9/2004 09:22:19 PM. Permalink |   

Allah's back!
Allah is in the House has returned, in case you didn't know. Allah has some comments - and some even better photos - of the G8 meeting that just ended.

Like this one, for example - I don't know, and I don't want to know!

by Donald Sensing, 6/9/2004 07:53:24 PM. Permalink |   

Ronald Reagan returns to Washington
The joint-service caisson carrying President Reagan's coffin en route to the Capitol rotunda, where he will lie in state beginning this evening.




The honor guard carries the coffin into the Capitol (next two pictures).






The president's coffin is carried into the rotunda and placed upon the bier.










Mrs. Reagan in the rotunda.



The honor guard is now posted.



by Donald Sensing, 6/9/2004 05:33:24 PM. Permalink |   

Ridiculous item of the day
Asthma prevalence now blamed on global warming

I heard on the radio this morning an ad that started off with the sounds of someone coughing and hacking. Then the voiceover said it was the sound of global warming. Asthma is increasing, said the ad, and the fault lies with global warming.

Then I was informed global warming is to blame for the decreasing visibility in the Great Smoky Mountains (along the Tennessee-North Carolina border), which have been called "smoky" since the first settlers cross them more than 200 years ago, when presumably the globe wasn't warming.

But wait! There is salvation! Call your senators today to urge them vote for the "McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act."

The bill would cap the 2010 aggregate emissions level for the covered sectors at the 2000 level. The bill's emissions limits would not apply to the agricultural and the residential sectors. Certain subsectors would be exempt if the Administrator determined that it was not feasible to measure their GHG emissions. The Commerce Department would biennially re-evaluate the level of allowances to determine whether it was consistent with the objective of the United Nation’’s Framework Convention on Climate Change of stabilizing GHG emissions at a level that will prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.

Clear?

It can't be denied that asthma is rising in prevalence, in children more than adults and in blacks more than whites, according to a US Army study, but blaming "global warming" has all the scientific grounding of "The Day After Tomorrow."

Things in the environment trigger an asthma attack. These "triggers" vary from person to person, but common ones include cold air; exercise; allergens (things that cause allergies, such as dust mites, molds, pollens, animal dander or cockroach debris); and some types of viral infections.

Not one of these things is attributable to global warming, even if we accept that human-caused global warming is a real phenomenon. Furthermore, Canadian health authorities attribute the increase in asthma in large part to more sterile home environments, which cannot even in a drunken stupor be attributed to global warming. "More sterile" really means more tightly sealed because of modern construction techniques. Australian health authorities say that such homes pose an increased threat to asthma sufferers or those prone to asthma because they trap moisture inside the home and that leads to mold infections.

The [Royal Australian Institute of Architects'] chief executive, Robin Ould, says the level of rising damp in a home can in many cases, trigger a potentially fatal attack in some asthma sufferers.
"A lot of people's asthma is triggered by dust mites, by fungus and by the spores or the pollen that comes out of mould," he said.

"So that where you've got an environment that's conducive to the build up of mould and mildew and harbours dust mites and increases the environment, where dust mites can thrive then the potential there is for people with asthma to have their asthma triggered in the home."

He says this can exacerbate an asthma sufferer's condition or it can actually trigger a very severe asthma attack.

The reason homes are built so tight these days is for energy efficiency. Tighter homes bleed less heat into the outside during winter and allow less heat in during summer. Of course, tighter homes use less energy than otherwise. Using less energy combats global warming, does it not?

So with tongue partly in cheek, I might say that the rising prevalence of asthma - which is serious, make no mistake - is due in large part to measures taken by builders and others to do things which fight global warming. So is the fight-global-warming movement actually helping to cause more asthma?

by Donald Sensing, 6/9/2004 10:43:05 AM. Permalink |   

Template tweaking
Changes to the template:

Moved several permanent links to a horizontal line across the masthead where they will be easier to find

The move necessitated changing the background color of the masthead from dark blue to pale yellow because the master style code for the whole blog makes all links navy blue (red when moused over). If there is a way to change the color of links for just the masthead, I couldn't find it.

Added some hard line breaks a few places that you may not notice, but that I did.

Sorry, no PDA-friendly page. Blogger just doesn't offer a way to publish a post to two different pages (this one and a PDA index page) at the same time. I'm still working on a solution, though I don't know what it might be.

by Donald Sensing, 6/8/2004 09:39:27 PM. Permalink |   

Incredible turnout for Reagan repose
A caller to Sean Hannity's radio show said today that he waited in in his car for five hours just to exit off the interstate to drive where Ronald Reagan's flag-draped coffin reposed for public viewing at the Reagan Library. Then he waited another five hours to stand in line to reach the coffin, where, as a retired US Marine, he rendered the hand salute and left.

Total time at the coffin: one minute, after waiting in line for 10 hours.

James Joyner has an excellent roundup of news coverage and links.

by Donald Sensing, 6/8/2004 07:39:04 PM. Permalink |   

Is hockey finished as a big league sport?
A columnist for Nashville's Tennessean paper says that the end of the Stanley Cup tourney may mark the end of the NHL as a major pro sport.

An NHL lockout is imminent, the sides incredibly far apart on the fundamental issues.

That's just the financial end of it.

The league, led by blindfolded commissioner Gary Bettman, barely acknowledges the problems with the game. Because the high-ranking guys don't like to be on the hook for altering the status quo, and because they fear tinkering with anything that might upset the Canadian hockey fanatic or the Original Six, they can't see it's more than finances that are killing the game:

The low scoring, the lack of personalities, the monstrous influx of players from outside North America, the overly long schedule, the drawn-out playoffs.

And the Stanley Cup was a ho-hummer for most of America. ABC Sports reported that, "the average rating for the five Stanley Cup final games on ABC were the lowest since the network began broadcasting the finals again in 2000."

by Donald Sensing, 6/8/2004 07:00:31 PM. Permalink |   

Who would have thought?
George Miller, who was "indoctrinated" in the superiority of the communist system while attending the University of Manchester, England, writes about Ronald Reagan and the collapse of communism.

The academics will tell a new generation a pack of lies and distortions, belittling the role of Western values and of democratic leaders and spending hours in seminars on Iran/contra while their students are forced to discover Reagan's Berlin speech on the Internet.

However, we have the evidence, on video, of the President of the American Republic standing in Berlin in 1987, appealing directly to the subjugated people of Eastern Europe to throw off their chains. Who would have thought that the most effective revolutionary visionary and strategist of the late 20th Century would be a conservative president of a democratic republic? Certainly I, indoctrinated to believe that radicalism was the preserve of the Left, did not think it remotely possible - hence the mantra and hence the realization, in his death, that Reagan, already a figure of immense importance to people who love liberty, will be regarded as one of history's great democratic leaders.

Practically alone among Western political leaders, Reagan believed that the Soviet empire would fall if pushed the right way. Fortunately, another key leader, just as tough minded as Reagan, agreed - the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher.

Stop and ponder sometime how much history of the last 100 years has been shaped by America and Great Britain.

by Donald Sensing, 6/8/2004 06:40:44 PM. Permalink |   

This blog's RSS feed
Bill Hobbs asked in a comment to the next post down whether I had an RSS feed for this blog. I have had RSS for a very long time, but his question made me realize that the link had been buried low on the left column.

So I repositioned it to the upper left, above the Blogads slot. So RSS away!

Update: A commenter pointed out that the feed only had the first part of each post, so I have changed the setting so that all of each post should now come through. I hope this helps!

Also, a reader emailed to suggest I should have a PDA-friendly page like Glenn Reynolds site does (here). I'd love to, but as far as I know, it is not possible to do this using Blogger.

by Donald Sensing, 6/8/2004 05:57:32 PM. Permalink |   

Blogads work, this blog is part of the proof!
I am very grateful to Jeff Jarvis for publishing an email he received from Jeff Sharlet, editor of the Revealer, a blog about religion at NYU.

You will notice a blogad for The Revealer in my site's upper-left column.

Jeff wrote Jeff that Blogads "blew conventional media out of the water" when it came to advertising returns:

The conventional media we chose were Beliefnet, Columbia Journalism Review, and American Journalism Review. CJR and AJR are small, specialty sites, but Beliefnet claims a readership of 2 million. I don't know what Talking Points, Little Green Footballs, and Daily Kos claim, but I'd estimate that our small, second-level blog ads on those sites EACH outperformed Beliefnet by a factor of 10. At least. Other blogs, like Matthew Yglesias, Reason's Hit and Run, and the Washington Monthly did so probably by a factor of five. And even very small blogs, like Donald Sensing's, beat Beliefnet [boldface added - DS].

I am flattered and honored to be cited!

Blogads recently released the results of its own survey about who reads blogs and responds to Blogads featured on them:

This survey shows that blog readers are older and more affluent than most optimistic guestimates: 61% of blog readers responding to the survey are over 30, and 75% make more than $45,000 a year.

Moreover, blog readers are more cyber-active than I'd hoped: 54% of their news consumption is online. 21% are themselves bloggers and 46% describe themselves as opinion makers. And, in the last six months:

50% have spent more than $50 online on books.
47% have spent more than $500 online for plane tickets.
50% have contributed more than $50 to a cause or candidate, and 5% have contributed more than $1000. (Only 25% of NYTimes.com readers have contributed anything online in the last year.)

There's more to their release, of course.

More and more business ple are discovering that advertsing on blogs is smart, and the most effective blog advertising there is is through Blogads.

To advertise of this site, just click here!

BTW, compared to those other guys Mr. Sharlett cited, my blog is smaller. But this blog is still fairly large. One Hand Clapping is ranked 38th for traffic on the TTLB Ecosystem, 52nd in importance in the Blogrunner 100, and 113th in importance out of 143,873 blogs ranked on Blogstreet - all figures as of the time of posting, of course.

by Donald Sensing, 6/7/2004 09:39:23 PM. Permalink |   

Ronald Reagan
I am probably about the last blogger in America to post about the death of former President Ronald Reagan. The big news day for his death was Sunday, the one day of the week I really try to take off from blogging. It's not a special sensitivity of doing no labor on the Christian Sabbath so much as that Sundays are my busiest day anyway. The first Sunday of the month (yesterday) is also when we celebrate Holy Communion, and on those Sundays I spend the afternoon taking Communion to our shutins and visiting with them.

I never met President Reagan nor as far as I remember did I ever see him in person. The closest brush I had with him was the day that Bob Hope almost made me rich. I remember the day Reagan was shot, but not very vividly. I was a company commander at Fort Jackson, SC, and my first sergeant heard it on the radio, then told me.

I never lionized Reagan. He was a good president overall, but I suspect a serious examination of his legacy will reveal some serious problems with how he executed a number of initiatives. Iran-Contra comes to mind.

Probably Reagan's presidency, the first few years anyway, look good partly because Jimmy Carter's presidency was so crummy. Except for the Camp David Accords, affirming peace between Egypt and Israel, it's hard to recall another noteworthy accomplishment of Carter.

James Fallows, who served on Carter's White House staff, said that Carter was a man of Great Ideas but no Big Ideas.

There was, Fallows observed, no real organizing principle to Carter's administration, just one Great Idea after another, unconnected with one another.

Reagan, OTOH, was not a man of Great Ideas. He was a man of Big Ideas, of which there were precisely three: decrease taxes, "get government off the backs of the people," and build up the military. That was Reagan's 1980 campaign platform in a nutshell, and Reagan ruthlessly stomped on campaigners or, later, his administration's officials, who tried to divert him or his administration from doing those three things.

Fallows wrote that under Carter, the administration's leaders many days literally did not know what they were supposed to be doing in their office to move the administration's goals forward. The reason was that there were so many goals, and they changed all the time.

Under Reagan, however, every department head, every administrator arose every morning and knew s/he was supposed to do one or more of three things, and s/he'd better get to it.

I think this focus became somewhat blurred in the second term, which was flawed in comparison with the first.

As an Army officer throughout Reagan's eight years, I saw firsthand the benefits of the Reagan buildup of the nation's military. There was a bit of Hollywood to some of it - the "600-ship Navy" for example. Why 600? Why not 575 or 611? Because "600-ship Navy" rolled trippingly off the tongue. It was sound bite driven.

I wrote 13 months ago that even though an Iraqi general attributed his country's defeat to American "technology beyond belief,"

There are other advantages the US military brings to the fray that are not shared by any other military force in the world, not even Great Britain's or Israel's, impressive as their forces are. They are, in no particular order:

Funding and equipping,

Training and training facilities

A horizontal organization

The first two of these items had their genesis in the Reagan administration.

The real funding advantage of American forces is found less in numbers comparisons than it is in funding endurance. The post-Vietnam austerity ended in the last year of Jimmy Carter's presidency. Under the Reagan administration, funding climbed dramatically and has stayed there since. There were decreases during the Clinton years, yes, but not anything like the services had to endure after WW 1, WW 2, Korea and Vietnam. ...

However, the main advantage that America’s military has in funding is that the defense budget has been pretty well provided for by five successive administrations (a late start under Carter, yes, but a start nonetheless). By American historical standards, this is exceptional.

A reasonable assurance that the military would not go through cycles of starvation and feasting enabled the generals and admirals to focus on training and training technology in way they never could before.

It is also worth remembering that throughout his tenure, Reagan had to contend with a Congress in which both houses were controlled by the other party. I heard a radio commentator say today that despite overall lower tax brackets, federal tax revenue doubled during his term. Yet the federal budget deficit was three times greater when he left office than when he began. Ultimately, of course, this state of affairs can be laid only on the shoulder of the Congress, especially the House, which originates all money legislation. The commentator said that for every dollar of new revenue the government brought in during Reagan's term, the Congress spent $1.83.

It would be an interesting thing to compare the budgets Reagan submitted to the Congress with both the revenues coming in for the same fiscal year and the budgets the Congress finally passed (and Reagan signed).

Reagan started off as a Roosevelt Democrat, about the time he hit Hollywood for his movie career. Yet by the late 1950s, at the latest, he had formed an anti-New Deal political philosophy. If the belief that both government and taxes should be as small as possible define American political conservatism, then Reagan was last conservative of either party we have seen. Certainly the present president is no conservative in the Reagan sense; if anything, G. W. Bush is a Roosevelt Republican, which I don't think is a good combination. Heaven knows that W. doesn't talk about smaller government or "getting government off the backs of the people," as Reagan did (even though, I believe, the federal government actually grew larger from 1981-1989).

I will not dwell on the fact that Reagan was the only president who believed that the Soviet Union could fall and would fall if American policies were stout enough to make it happen. His alliance with Pope John Paul II to shore up the Solidarity movement in Poland (the Pope's native country) was brilliant. A politically liberalized Poland reverberated throughout the entire East Bloc.

Regarding the USSR itself, Reagan was singularly fortunate to have a Mikhail Gorbachev named as his counterpart leader of the communist empire. Gorbachev entered office as the general secretary of the CPSU after heading the ministry of agriculture - not the usual route for a gensec. But Gorby's experience there revealed to him just how hollow and weak the Soviet economy was.

Gorby knew that the USSR could not continue with business as usual. There were several features of Reagan's security policies that both compelled and enabled Gorbachev to steer the USSR into a new direction that finally led to the end of the Soviet empire (which Gorby, of course, never intended):

the prospect that the US would develop and deploy a Ballistic Missile Defense (aka, "Star Wars"),

the strengthening of America's conventional military across the board,

the deployment of American Pershing II missiles in Europe - they could range Moscow and negated the Soviets' deployment of SS-20 missiles in eastern Europe,

the deployment of cruise missiles in Europe, a weapon for which the Soviets had no real counterpart and no defense.

The Soviet leadership finally had to face facts: the USSR was too broke to keep up and lacked the technical skills and industrial base to do so anyway. The rest, as they say, is history.

Reagan's arms buildup also unhinged the Kremlin. His clarion call for a missile-based defense system against nuclear weapons in 1983 helped convince the Politburo to select Mikhail Gorbachev as a less hard-line Soviet leader in 1985. "Reagan's SDI was a very successful blackmail," says Gennady Gerasimov, the Soviet Foreign Ministry's top spokesman during the 1980s. "The Soviet economy couldn't endure such competition." Mr. Gorbachev himself agrees the U.S. exhausted his country economically and acknowledges Reagan's place in history. "Who knows what would have happened if he wasn't there?" he told the History Channel in 2002.

Need I point out that the American military today is itself a legacy of Ronald Reagan? The precision weapons, communications and control systems and extremely high levels of training found among the military almost all had their genesis during his administration. If you try to imagine what the military would have looked like had it stayed the post-Vietnam course it was on in 1981, then you will discern that our options after Sept. 11, 2001 would have been extremely limited.

For all the ink now about Reagan's enduring legacy, it seems to me that only three have outlived him. The first is the power and flexibility of the military I just described. The second is the termination of Soviet communism and with it the liberation of hundreds of millions of people under the Soviet yoke. And that without a shot being fired against them. That alone gives him a honored place in history and in my view completely outweighs everything on the negative side of his presidency's ledger.

The third is his tax policy. Since his term it has been very difficult for presidential candidates to talk successfully about raising personal income taxes (notice Kerry has shut up about it in recent weeks). Even though almost all "tax reform" schemes since his term really just shift the tax burden around rather than truly lower taxes, any candidate knows that across-the-board increases are DOA. The WSJ wrote today,

When Mr. Reagan took office, the top marginal U.S. tax rate was 70%. When he left the top rate was 28%; it is now 35%, and even John Kerry has conceded with his proposal to cut some corporate taxes that the marginal rate of tax matters. Today Americans may disagree about what tax cuts are needed, how deep they should go, and what they ought to target. But the debate itself reflects Mr. Reagan's central premise: that people respond to incentives, and that high taxes interfere with natural human creativity and drive.

This Reagan tenet alone has had a lasting effect on American political discourse and will for many years to come, I am sure.

Absent these three achievements, Reagan would rank as merely mediocre. But they are huge. They propel him into the first rank of occupants of the Oval Office.

by Donald Sensing, 6/7/2004 09:32:16 PM. Permalink |   

Monastery blogging
David Whidden has a blog devoted to his stay in a monastery. Today's post:

Today I’d like to spell out what I see as the problems that exist in our churches now. First, religious commitment tends to be viewed as something that is for the benefit of the individual. ...

Second, this individualistic bent seems to have lent itself to the idea that someone can be “spiritual, but not religious.” ...

Third, the cultural individualism in which we swim creates serious issues with authority.

So take a look if you are so inclined.

by Donald Sensing, 6/7/2004 05:57:28 PM. Permalink |   

Saudis: You're either with us or with the terrorists
The Saudi government says,

... anybody who fails to report Al Qaida activities will be prosecuted as terrorist accomplices. At the same time, authorities have offered major awards for information that would lead to the capture of Islamic insurgents

The kingdom's clerics have also been ordered to condemn al Qaeda in their sermons.

by Donald Sensing, 6/7/2004 05:42:06 PM. Permalink |   

Review: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
A guest post by my son, Thomas Sensing, who earlier appeared here as Martin Luther

I am a huge fan of the Harry Potter series, having read all the books multiple times and seen all three movies - the most recent of which I saw on its opening day. Coming from my viewpoint of having read the books, I have both the blessing and the curse that comes with knowing what is going to happen and, more importantly, how it happens. This is something that non-readers (such as my father) lack.

From the viewpoint of one who has read (and loved) the Azkaban book, my first impression and impulse at the beginning of the end credits of Azkaban was "Oh no!" I was thoroughly let down by the fact that it didn’t put in many things, or under-did others. There were certain scenes where I thought that director Alfonso Cuaron needed to take more time to explain the situation so non-readers could understand better - e.g. (and not to give anything away) the scene in Madam Rosmerta’s pub and the scene in the Shrieking Shack. These scenes were paced too fast. Cuaron said that he wanted to do away with the redundancies of the previous two movies and squarely focus on Harry’s journey to find himself. From the opinion of an avid reader, Cuaron should have humored us readers and use another twenty minutes to put in more detail, which also would have helped those who hadn’t read the book.

Some scenes I knew to be true to the book and also very well done, such as the time-travel sequence. When I first read this scene in the book, I was blown away by its magnificence and coordination. The movie made no sacrifices to length of time for this scene and stayed true to the book - and that might be why I loved it so much.

Most prevalent in my mind throughout the movie was the sharp turn of spirit from the first two movies and the first three books themselves. The third book is read more like a mystery, rather than an inner journey of identity, as posed by the movie. The movie definitely strays from the generally happy nature of the book.

Now for a change of point of view. From the viewpoint of a normal moviegoer, Azkaban was brilliant. It was a thoroughly enjoyable movie that had some very funny moments and never a boring one (thanks largely to the fast pace). The acting sure was better than the first two. The scenes transitioned well, and the special effects were very good; I thought that the Dementors were especially well-done. And best of all, you leave the movie on a happy note.

I guess that my expectations were too high going in, so they were let lower going out. This didn’t stop me from completely immersing myself in the movie and having a grand time doing it. It is one that the kids will love, having the appropriate mood at the appropriate time. They’ll love the humor and tremble delightfully at the scary moments. I totally recommend going to see this movie, but see the first two before doing so, otherwise you’ll be completely lost.

And read the books if you haven’t - they’re fantastic!

Addendum from Dad:

I have not read two paragraphs total from any of the books. I thought that Azakaban was extremely well made in most places. Thomas is right - the time-travel sequence was engrossing and included the kinds of paradoxes that time-travel stories have developed over the decades. This sequence is really the apotheosis of the movie.

The acting of the three principals - Harry, Hermione and Ron - is magnitudes better here than in the first two flicks. All three actors are older (teens now, actually) and their greater intellectual maturity is evident. It's not hard to envision Daniel Radcliffe (Potter) becoming a real action-movie hero in a few years; he is developing into an actor with the physical presence and agility to do so. The thought also occurs that Emma Watson (Hermione) might someday be a Caucasian Halle Berry.

Azkaban is as good flick, somewhat grimmer in places than the first two, but that content works well because now the three youths, more grown up, have to confront grown-up issues. Their world is one of magic but not fairy tales. Urgent matters of life, death, danger, justice and compassion must be confronted with insight, skill and above all, courage. And yes, as Thomas said, Harry is compelled to confront who he is, especially in relationship to his father. This thread of the story is done with great sensitivity, I thought, and was never maudlin.

This is the only one of the three Potter films I would see again in the theater rather than wait for DVD.

by Donald Sensing, 6/5/2004 10:45:37 AM. Permalink |   

Remembering Torpedo Squadron 8
Yale University Professor David Gelernter decries the fact that today America's great battles are not known to most children and many adults. Such as the Battle of Midway, begun 62 years and one day ago. The professor quotes renowned naval historian Samuel Eliot Morrison's words about Torpedo Squadron 8:

Threescore young aviators . . . met flaming death that day in reversing the verdict of battle. Think of them, reader, every Fourth of June. They and their comrades who survived changed the whole course of the Pacific War.

The squadron flew off USS Hornet, one of three American aircraft carriers to fight the battle. (USS Yorktown was sunk, but the Japanese lost four carriers and never regained the offensive significantly.)

The photo to below shows a torpedo attack against a Japanese carrier during the Battle of Coral Sea in May 1942.

All the squadron's pilots and crewmembers except one died. Pilot Ensign George Gay alone survived, shot down, floating the in the water among the enemy fleet, where he watched the subsequent destruction of three Japanese carriers. Rescued later by a Navy PBY amphibious airplane, he said that as the Japanese carriers blew up from attack by US Navy dive bombers he thought to himself, "It's the end of the world and I have a ringside seat."

The dive bombers got through to blast the Japs because Torpedo Squadron 8 had, unintentionally, pulled all the Japanese fighters down to wavetop height, where the torpedo planes flew. Torpedoes had to be dropped fairly low and slow, and many of the squadron's pilots were new, anyway, and could not fly fancy patterns and still hit the ships.

They all died, save the wounded Ensign Gay, because their lumbering Douglas TBD-1 "Devastator" aircraft were easy prey for both enemy fighters and ship's gunners. Armed only with a wholly inadequate .30-caliber machine gun firing to the rear, the TBDs never had a chance. None of their torpedoes hit the enemy ships.

Their weapons struck no targets. Yet by the fortunes of war, these brave men - Admiral Nagumo watched them admiringly, saying, "They fight like Samurai, these Americans" - did not die vainly. Coincidentally, American dive bomber squadrons under command of Lieutenant Commanders Max Leslie and Wade McCluskey arrived far overheard in their Dauntless dive bombers, a very accurate weapon. Japanese Zero pilots were wave hopping after other torpedo squadrons that had also attacked. (All torpedo units suffered very grievously; only five of 41 torpedo planes survived the day).

With no fighters at altitude to oppose them, the Dauntlesses peeled over and literally within minutes turned the Japanese carriers Soryu, Kaga and Akagi into flaming wrecks. (The Japanese were forced to scuttle two of them June 5; the US submarine Nautilus sent the other to the bottom.) Only Hiryu escaped damage in this attack. It retaliated by sending planes to attack the American carriers. The Japanese struck USS Yorktown severely and left thinking they had sunk it. Briefly abandoned, damage-control parties reboarded and soon had the ship controlled to the point where she could be taken under tow.

The last Japanese carrier, Hiryu, was attacked June 4 about 5 p.m. by planes from USS Enterprise and some from Yorktown about the same time Hiryu's planes were attacking Yorktown. Hiryu took four bombs onto loaded flight and hangar decks, causing colossal explosions that doomed the vessel. It was also scuttled June 5. On June 6 the Japanese submarine I-168 torpedoed Yorktown, sinking her. The destroyer Hamman, alongside Yorktown, also took a torpedo and sank quickly with great loss of life.

No American aircraft matched the Japanese Zero fighter at the time of the battle. The US Navy's Wildcat fighter could dive faster and possibly match other maneuvers, except climbing, if very skillfully piloted. But the Japanese pilots of the fleet were the cream of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Almost all had years of combat experience in China, southeast Asia and elsewhere. They were not about to be outflown at Midway. Had they still been flying at their assigned patrol altitudes when the Dauntlesses appeared on June 4, there is little doubt that the dive bombers would have been savaged as badly as the torpedo planes actually were.

If that had happened, the torpedo bombers might have sunk a ship or two. But they would have been opposed not only by fighters but by ships' antiaircraft fire. Furthermore, American torpedoes of that time were notoriously unreliable, often failing to explode even on direct hit.

It was the dive bombers who destroyed the Japanese fleet on this day 62 years ago, but their smashing success was bought with the blood of dozens of torpedo plane crews. Torpedo Squadron 8 has become emblematic of them all because it lost the greater percentage. But Torpedo Squadrons 6 (Hornet) and 3 (Yorktown) also deserve our undying gratitude for their bravery and open-eyed self sacrifice.

Japan's losses were so severe that it never recovered. In addition to the four carriers, it lost several hundred aircraft. But worst of all, according to Japanese Navy fighter ace Saburo Sakai, it lost the very best pilots its navy had. There was no way to replace them.

Courtesy Strategy Page, here are the men who flew to their deaths in Torpedo Squadron 8 62 years ago today:

Lt. Commander John C. Waldron, commanding officer, KIA
Lt. Raymond A. Moore KIA
Lt. James C. Owens KIA
Lt.(jg) George M. Campbell KIA
Lt.(jg) John P. Gray KIA
Lt.(jg) Jeff D. Woodson KIA
Ens. William W. Abercrombie KIA
Ens. William W. Creamer KIA
Ens. Harold J. Ellison KIA
Ens. William R. Evans KIA
Ens. George H. Gay WIA
Ens. Henry R. Kenyon KIA
Ens. Ulvert M. Moore KIA
Ens. Grant W. Teats KIA
Robert B. Miles, Aviation Pilot 1c KIA
Horace F. Dobbs, Chief Radioman KIA
Amelio Maffei, Radioman 1 KIA
Tom H. Pettry, Radioman 1 KIA
Otway D. Creasy, Jr. Radioman 2 KIA
Ross H. Bibb, Jr., Radioman 2 KIA
Darwin L. Clark, Radioman 2 KIA
Ronald J. Fisher, Radioman 2 KIA
Hollis Martin, Radioman 2 KIA
Bernerd P. Phelps Radioman 2 KIA
Aswell L. Picou, Seaman 2 KIA
Francis S. Polston, Seaman 2 KIA
Max A. Calkins, Radioman 3 KIA
George A. Field, Radioman 3 KIA
Robert K. Huntington, Radioman 3 KIA
William F. Sawhill, Radioman 3 KIA

They saved the world. Not all by themselves, but they did save it, and you should know that, just as Prof. Gelernter said.

Update: Bill Hobbs linked to an earlier post of his that has more information, and some excellent photos, of the battle. There are links to other good sites about Midway there as well.

by Donald Sensing, 6/4/2004 09:30:59 PM. Permalink |   

Two weeks, two Purple Hearts
Staff Sgt. Robert D. Whisenant, a squad leader with the 1st Cavalry Division, was wounded twice within a two-week period.

Whisenant was wounded for the first time April 29 while conducting an IED sweep along "RPG Alley."

"Just before midnight, a rocket-propelled grenade flew out of an alley from about 100 meters away," he recounted. The blast threw all the passengers to the floor and knocked out Whisenant. But he and the gunner got back up and returned fire. “I grabbed the 240B machinegun and we just started rocking,” Wisenant said.

Then, on May 6, Whisenant was hit again, this time by an IED.

"On the way back to our mission site an IED went off next to the left track of my vehicle right next to the driver," he explained. "It blew out our communications, knocked me to the floor for a few seconds. That's when I noticed that a piece of shrapnel had come up and hit me in the neck. I could feel it burning, so I reached up and pulled it out."

"I may be eligible for two Purple Hearts, but with 10 months left to go I'm not looking for three," Whisenant said jokingly.

Two close calls would just about peg my fun meter.

by Donald Sensing, 6/4/2004 03:21:05 PM. Permalink |   

The danger of the "Ideal Time"
The ideological eschatology of the Western Left - why Islamofascism doesn't repel them

Eschatology is the theology of last things, the time when history reaches its final fulfillment. Of the world's great religions, only three are eschatological: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Christianity sprang from Judaism and Islam claims to be the true faith of revealed religion that Judaism and Christianity corrupted.

In all three religions the establishment of the end time is the establishment of the ideal time. It is when the present world is either destroyed so that perfect world can take its place, or the present world's corruption is excised and creation is purified and restored. Usually in Jewish thought, the ideal time has been the restoration of a free, independent Israel living righteously within the Sinai covenant. Jesus' disciples persistently asked Jesus when he was going to bring it about, to which Jesus basically replied, "God only knows."

The establishment of modern Israel did not fulfill this vision fully. The dream of the original Zionists was threefold: to establish and Jewish state that was (a) politically free within its borders, (b) independent of foreign control and (c) extant over all the lands of biblical Israel. To date, Israel has never achieved all three simultaneously.

Hence, there have been 12 attempts by Jewish terrorists to destroy the Muslim al-Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock, which sit atop the ruins of the ancient Jewish Temple. These Jewish eschatologists believe that there is a prophetic necessity to the rebuilding of the Temple, so the Muslim edifices there must be removed. This restoration dream is shared by many American evangelical Christians.

In Islam and most strains of Christianity, the ideal time is established after judgment of the dead and the living. The Apostles Creed (dating not to the apostles but to the end of the second century) says that Jesus will "return to judge the living and the dead." In Islam, of course, judgment is the sole prerogative of Allah, but many (maybe most) Muslims believe that Jesus will be assigned the task by Allah and will judge humanity as Allah's agent. In both Christianity and Islam, the ideal time includes no sinners, who are either excluded from entering the ideal community of righteousness or are simply destroyed. In either event, it is too late to convert once the judgment has begun.

When all three eschatologies are taken to the extreme, adherents deny the goodness and value of the present world. After all, why work to increase the value, beauty or goodness of the present world and its institutions if everything that now exists will be wiped away or transmuted by God anyway?

In more moderate practice, however, the desire for an ideal time is positive. It affirms what common sense and a glance at this morning's headlines reveal: there is something seriously wrong with the present order. Hence, it can impel adherents to avoid complacency in the face of evil, to work for the improvement of the human condition so better to prepare persons to face the coming judgment. Indeed, most Christians have held through two millennia to the idea that the Kingdom of God, preached by Jesus, is just as much a present spiritual state of community as a coming physical reality. The Kingdom is within us now, although we can never achieve it fully on our own efforts. Nonetheless, we must do the best we can.

In Christian history this understanding has led on the one hand to the monastic movements that sprang up in the early Middle Ages. Monasteries were strict communities of faith, set apart from the world (although not so separatist that their leaders eschewed commerce with the world). On the other hand it led to the 20th century's liberationist theologies, which paradoxically came to eschew eschatology altogether and focused solely on the reform and even overthrow of present political orders. (It can be argued, though, that liberationism was as much a product of The Communist Manifesto as the Bible.)

But eschatology becomes evil when its adherents see only their own purity and others' sin. When they see the present state of affairs - always of others' affairs - as wholly corrupt, godless and faithless, then it is a short step to religious radicalism, what we have come to call religious fascism. Examples given: the mullahcracy of Iran and Taliban Afghanistan, the latter internally cruel to the point of murder, oppressive and ruthlessly class-ridden, a sort of real-world Animal Farm , only infinitely bloodier.

If the eschatologists are both radicalized and evangelistic rather than monastic, then the result is holy war, jihad. Holy war focuses on destroying sinners, not converting them.

That is the state of al Qaeda and a great deal of the Muslim faithful today. Al Qaeda is actively jihadist, while many millions of other Muslims are sympathetically so. They seek to attain the ideal time - the true Islamic society. Never mind that millions of other Muslims have a different understanding of what Islamic society should be. The radicalized eschatologist simply can wrote them off as apostate and make war against them as readily as against infidels.

Non-religious westerners are just as liable to eschatological fervor as religious people anywhere. Marxism is an eschatological ideology (a godless religion in its own right, really). The ideal time is when "the workers control the means of production" after the capitalists have been violently overthrown. Lee Harris explained the basic tenets of Marxism, and its fundamental flaws, in his excellent essay, "The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing." Suffice it to say here that Marx considered revolution by the oppressed both essential and inevitable for true socialism to be established. This was a political version of Judgment Day, when the wicked capitalists would be judged and destroyed so that the pure in heart (the heavily romanticized working classes) could attain the Ideal Time.

This appealing but basically foolish ideology held power in the USSR for 70 years, abandoned long before its end by almost all the working classes themselves and most of the ruling class. Soviet communism became a shell game in which commissars and higher ranks lived large and the masses merely lived. Its Ideal Time, however, was hammered home by the propagandists as just around the corner. True Communism was always coming soon, a state in which material production was so great that all human needs were met without shortage. Greed would therefore disappear and the inherent but capitalist-suppressed natural nobility of men and women would emerge. They would be transformed into true communists - altruists who worked each day for the good of the people, not for crass, selfish profit.

But, as Soviet army officer Victor Suvorov came to realize, in a True Communist society, who would stoop to volunteer to shovel manure?

But who will be busy in the sewers? Is it possible that there will be anybody who will say, 'Yes, this is my vocation, this is my place, I am not fit for anything better?'

Of course not. Despite this basic, and indeed obvious flaw, the Soviet promise of its Ideal Time enraptured enormous numbers of Western elites who should have known better.

The old USSR has gone the way of the dodo and hardly any die-hard true believers remain in its former states. But they remain in droves in the West, convinced that Western economic-political systems remain irredeemably corrupt. Having shunned Christian faith for some decades, Western ideologues also discarded a key thing that has prevented Christian eschatologists from experimenting with Taliban-style social orders: the New Testament formally denies the possibility of the self-perfectibility of the human person. (Christian oppressions and brutalities done for other reasons were bad enough, but only rarely, and on small scales, did Christians ever attempt to enforce an Idealized community by force or coercion.)

So the philosophical and ideological origin of the modern Left: Rejecting the idea of a divinely shaped world yet to come, but believing, all evidence to the contrary, that human beings are fundamentally good, most Western ideological eschatologists found a natural fit with Marxism-Leninism: the present order must pass away, and we can build something better on our own. The violent destruction of the present order, if necessary, had a natural fit with Marxism from the beginning.

The Left, rejecting as a basic tenet of its faith the major features of Western societies, came to romanticize heavily non-Western, non-capitalist cultures, especially those of the Third World. The village society became idealized, always assumed to be populated by selfless, caring people whose spirits (never souls, which might need saving!) were uninfected by the crass materialism of capitalism. This was their Eden, the Ideal Time from humankind had sprung; Marxism-Leninism provided the framework for transforming Western societies into a New Jerusalem. Over time, and not a very long time, the Left idealized anyone who opposed the West, no matter how cruel, oppressive or personally repulsive he might be: Castro, Che, Mao, Saddam and others. And now Osama.

That such figures murdered by the thousands or millions dismayed some of the Left, to be sure. But again, Marxist theory provided a way to rationalize the deaths: building the Ideal Community might well require bloodshed, and besides, such violence and oppressive structures were understood to be mere temporary expedients en route to the Ideal Time, when the inherent goodness of human beings would finally flower and coercion would no longer be necessary.

It must be pointed out that the Left, especially the Hard Left, was always mostly from the privileged classes of Western societies. In their dreams of an Ideal Time, they always remained in power. They saw as natural allies anyone who wished to overthrow the Western order, even if (especially if?) by hard violence. They were apparently oblivious to the fact that the others never saw them as allies, not even Stalin, who had moved firmly in eastern Europe to kill or imprison the homegrown communists there before they could get the foolish idea that they would have some say in the newly established workers' paradise.

The romantic thrall much of the Left has today with Islamism is little different than its swoon over Stalin, and no more moral. The Left never had the chance to enjoy the benefits of Stalin's rule and so never really understood that he considered them "useful idiots" to be eliminated if the Soviets ever occupied their countries. Likewise today, the Left, convinced of its own moral purity, fails to understand that al Qaeda views them with contempt equal to Stalin's, and considers them nothing more than infidels to be dealt with when the time comes.

Fortunately, though, there are some of the Left (or at least of liberals) who recognize the peril (link, link, for example) and we may pray others will awaken, too.

Update: In a comment to this post, FH recommends reading "Mephisto," on Belmont Club, and I agree. Also, I recommend reading "The Ideological War Within the West," by John Fonte, whichn helps illumine these concepts. Fonte "suggests there has arisen a conflict within the democratic world between liberal democracy and transnational progressivism, between democrats and what he calls post-democrats." Well worth the time.

See also, "Six fatal shortcomings of the modern Left," by Paul Berman, an old-style Leftist, Dissent Magazine, Winter 2004.

by Donald Sensing, 6/4/2004 12:56:38 PM. Permalink |   

Gunners in Baghdad
Via Blackfive, who's been or a roll lately, I learned of an independent film maker who spent a few months self-embedded in the artillery battalion in which I was a battery commander 20 years ago. It is 2d Battalion, 3d Field Artillery Regiment, aka the Gunners. The site is called Gunner Palace, named for the unit and for the fact that they are based in one of Uday's old palaces. This is an engrossing story and the online videos are incredible, especially the one of the junior enlisted soldier silhouetted by sundown, electric-guitaring the national anthem while gunships fly overhead. A must see.

by Donald Sensing, 6/4/2004 08:49:54 AM. Permalink |   

Peggy Noonan, great as usual
California lefties want law to ban smoking on public beaches. Peggy asks,

I want to make sure I understand. If you smoke a cigarette on a beach in modern America you are harming the innocent. If you have a baby scraped from your womb, you are protecting your freedom. If you sell a pack of cigarettes to a 12-year-old boy you can be jailed, fined and sent to Guantanamo Bay with the other killers. If you sell a pack of contraceptives to a 12 year old boy in modern America you are socially responsible citizen.

Classic Peggy, read it all.

by Donald Sensing, 6/3/2004 10:12:37 PM. Permalink |   

Three not very short reads
With a hat tip to Stephen Green, here is "The Religious Sources of Islamic Terrorism," by Shmuel Bar in Policy Review. Bar is "a senior research fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel and a veteran of the Israeli intelligence community."

It is an excellent companion piece to two of my own writings, "The Soil of Arab Terrorism" and my earliest essay into this subject area, "Why We Were Attacked: Religious Motivations for Anti-Western Violence," which I wrote in September 2001.

Bar's piece traces some of the religious roots of rwadical Islamism. He says, correctly, that

... to treat Islamic terrorism as the consequence of political and socioeconomic factors alone would not do justice to the significance of the religious culture in which this phenomenon is rooted and nurtured. In order to comprehend the motivation for these acts and to draw up an effective strategy for a war against terrorism, it is necessary to understand the religious-ideological factors — which are deeply embedded in Islam.

Quite so, but to say that radical Islamism is nothing but a religious phenomenon with minimal influence from culture, history, governmment or economics would equally miss the point (Bar does not make that claim).

Like Stephen, I don't sign up to all of Bar's prescriptions for fighting Islamism, but the piece is well worth the read. (Mine, too!)

by Donald Sensing, 6/3/2004 08:51:24 PM. Permalink |   

Saudi subjects and anti-royal sentiment
I discussed briefly in my post about al Qaeda's recent ops in Saudi Arabia that while Osama bin Laden and his thugs despise the Saudi royal family, the people of the kingdom have no great love for them, either.

Comes now Dan Darling who posts what a Saudi blogger says in the wake of the most recent terrorism there:

I'd like to be able to say that the overwhelming majority of my fellow Saudis totally condemn this terrorism. Sadly, that is just not true. There is a substantial minority, if not verging on a majority, who applaud any action that discomfits a royal family whom they perceive to be "unreliable" in religious terms, and to be too friendly with the US. So they support any action against them, regardless of who dies. And I see this support for the terrorists all around me, both in furtive conversations and more overt celebrations, the smiling jokes among friends, the victory fist punched in the air.

As I said before, bin Laden considers the Saudi people his natural ally, and there is good reason to think he's right. A Taliban-style government there, though, is even less palatable for America than the current regime, anti-American as it is, as Daniel Pipes explains.

For Western states, the choice is an unhappy one, between the Saudi monarchy with all its faults and the still worse Ikhwan [Wahhabist - DS] alternative. The policy options are thus limited to helping the monarchy defeat the even more radical threat while pressuring it to make improvements in a range of areas, from financial corruption to funding militant Islamic organisations worldwide.

If Pipes is right (and I think he is) then the inherent corruption of the Saudi rulers may work to our advantage for at least the near term. Dan Darling also cites his boss, Michael Ledeen, who claims that Saudi Prince Abdullah (brother of the aged, mentally incapaciated king) has negotiated a secret accord with Osama bin Laden to be let alone in return for covert Saudi funding and assistance with bin Laden's operations against America. This is certainly not good, but for now, at least, it seems better than the alternative of a civil war in Saudi Arabia.

by Donald Sensing, 6/3/2004 04:53:42 PM. Permalink |   

Baseball blogging
Here's a baseball blog I found through my referrer logs. Speaking of baseball, my alma mater, Vanderbilt, is in the baseball NCAA playoffs for the first time since 1980 (when it also won the SEC championship).

by Donald Sensing, 6/3/2004 04:46:47 PM. Permalink |   

Surprise! Voters aren't idiots!
Dean Esmay posts about findings by a researcher "that partisans of both the left and right will generally either mock or become angry at." Such as,

Most voters are quite sophisticated and well-informed as to where the candidates stand on all the major issues.

Most voters vote based on the issues.

Attack ads do not drive down voter turnout.

Negative ads are generally ineffective, except when they are issue-based.

Most politicians are quite honest and rarely lie.

Most politicians keep most of their promises.

When they fail to keep promises, it's usually not without trying to keep them, or giving pretty good reasons why they changed their minds.

Sound bites, far from being shallow and stupid, convey a great deal of sophisticated information that is helpful to informing voters on the candidates' stances.

Interesting stuff.

by Donald Sensing, 6/3/2004 04:40:24 PM. Permalink |   

Midway
As everyone gears up for the 60 anniversary of D-Day, Citizen Smash points out that the three-day Battle of Midway began 62 years ago today.

It was the first major US victory in the Second World War, and a blow from which the Japanese Empire would never recover.

For the Japanese, Midway was a sort of naval Stalingrad.

by Donald Sensing, 6/3/2004 04:36:38 PM. Permalink |   

The awful stakes of D-Day:
The alternate history of June 6, 1944 is too terrible to contemplate

Blackfive is hosting a D-Day retrospective by bloggers. This is my contribution. His links will remain front and center on his blog through June 7.

There are few days in history that continue to capture the imagination and fascination of Americans the way June 6, 1944 does. Perhaps the day's only close rival is the day President Kennedy was shot.

There is an old preacher story, so old it is a cliche of bad sermons now, that goes like this: An angel awoke who had slept through the first two centuries after Jesus had gone down to earth and ascended back to heaven. The angel went to the Lord and asked, “Where did you go?”

Jesus replied, “I've been down on earth.”

The angel asked, "How did it go?"

Jesus said, "They crucified me."

The angel protested, "You must have had a wide influence."

Jesus said, "I had eleven followers."

The angel asked, "What will become of your work?"

Jesus said, "I left it in the hands of my friends."

"And if they fail?" asked the angel.

Jesus said, "I have no other plans."

That punchline, I think, is why D-Day remains so compelling. The specter of defeat on June 6, 1944 was overwhelmingly dreadful. The Allies had no other plans. There was no Plan B in case the landings were repulsed.

There are many "pivot" days in human history, when the course of human events swung in a new direction because of discrete actions. It is hard to find another moment in all history when so much rested on an outcome of one day as rested on the success of the Allies' landings on Normandy. In military history, no other day in American history compares. The only single day that comes to mind for me right now is the day of the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, when an Athenian army repelled a Persian landing force. The entire future of Western civilization and the idea of democracy itself lay in the balance. And yet even that may day not stand alone as D-Day does because the Persians persisted and the later battles of Plataea and Salamis were probably even more important. So there was no "one day" of paramount importance in the Persian War, even though it was almost certainly the most important war of ancient times.

The Soviets, pushing toward Nazi Germany from the east in 1944, had clamored for years for America and Britain to open a second front against Germany from the west. A second front would compel Germany to draw soldiers and materiel away from the Russian front. Allied claims that operations in North Africa, southern Europe and indeed, the UK-US bombing campaign constituted a second front were scorned by Stalin.

Placating Stalin was one reason the Allies had to invade Germany through France. All the military and political leaders remembered early 1918, when the newly-in-power Soviet government under Lenin had made a separate peace with Imperial Germany. Even though all the Allies had agreed early in WW II that no separate peace agreements would be made, the nag was always there.

Moreover, neither Roosevelt nor Churchill had any desire at all to see all Germany overrun from the east and fall under the hammer and sickle. The only way to prevent that was to place American and British soldiers on the ground inside Germany. Invasion through northern Europe was the only way to do that (Churchill's claim that an invasion from the south, through Europe's "soft underbelly," proved fantastical in rolling up the Italian peninsula. Whatever Europe's underbelly was, it wasn't soft.)

The Allies could afford to succeed by a mere whisker on the Normandy beaches. Indeed, the planned American and British timetable for operations commencing June 7 proved wildly optimistic. But they did succeed, rather handily most places, as it turned out, and that was enough.

But any failure would have been only catastrophic. As in all major military operations, logistics was the central issue. The moon and tide conditions were acceptable on days in May, June and July; in fact, May 19 was seriously discussed as the invasion date for some time. But the Allies' supreme commander, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, postponed the invasion to June 5 because doing so would yield him an additional 100 landing craft, mostly LSTs, used to land tracked and wheeled vehicles directly onto the beach. (Bad weather caused the invasion to be postponed again until June 6.)

A little-known fact is that America was continually shuttling landing craft, both for vehicles and personnel, back and forth from Europe to the Pacific. The availability of landing craft was almost always the key point in setting landing dates for both areas.

A German victory at Normandy would probably have destroyed stocks of American landing craft by two or three years production, maybe more. Not only could there not possibly been another landing even attempted in Europe for a very long time, Pacific operations would have been dramatically slowed. America was set to take the Philippines back from the Japanese beginning in October 1944. The invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, both in the first half of 1945, were to follow. Significant loss of landing craft at Normandy would have thrown that timetable badly off.

Allied failure on the French coast would have meant enormous American and British casualties. Both the 82d and 101st Airborne Divisions would have been entirely destroyed because they could not have been relieved, having dropped inland. All their soldiers would have been killed or captured. The loss of life that defeat on the beaches would have entailed would have degraded the Allies' capability to try again soon almost as much as the loss of landing craft.

The Soviets certainly would not have slacked their offensives had Normandy failed. If anything, they would have pressed all the harder, but would have pressed equally hard for a much larger share of American war production, insisting that they were making better use of it than we were. As they would have been the only dog in the fight, the demands would have been hard for Roosevelt to resist. Not only would all Germany have become communist, so would France, whose communist cells were very active and which would have benefitted greatly from having the Soviet army literally next door. Imagine the Iron Curtain falling at the English Channel. The Soviet bear would have easily swallowed countries like Denmark, The Netherlands and Belgium. Likewise, Greece's postwar communist insurgency would have succeeded. Italy might easily have turned communist also.

European Jews, of course, would have been wiped out. Israel would not exist today. The Soviet Union would have dominated the Middle East and there's no point in even trying to speculate on what the next decades would have held for the Arabs (or Persians, since the Russians had long cast a covetous eye on Iran's year-round warm-water ports).

Roosevelt, of course, would not have been reelected that fall. He certainly would have sacked Eisenhower and Eisenhower's boss, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall. (Eisenhower actually would certainly have tendered his resignation. Marshall had survived the post-Pearl Harbor headrolling, but could not have survived failure at Normandy.) There's no point speculating what Republican President Thomas E. Dewey would have done with the office, but it is fair to say he would not have pushed for the creation of the United Nations, which was mainly Roosevelt's brainchild (for good or ill, take your pick), nor would there have been any reason for Stalin to cooperate with its formation, anyway.

Britain's people were incredibly war weary by mid-1944. Success in Normandy emboldened them to see the war to its bitter, bloody end. They remembered all too well the defeat of Dunkirk, when the British army had been evacuated from the French coast at the war's beginning, leaving behind its dead, almost all its vehicles and most of its weapons. Failure at Normandy would have caused Prime Minister Churchill's unemployment faster than Roosevelt's. I have little doubt that some form of British peace party would have gained the Parliamentary majority and the PM's office. Might the Brits have sued Hitler for a separate peace? Maybe. Already strongly tended toward socialism, it's not hard reasonably to imagine that the UK itself would have turned communist had the Soviets dominated all western Europe.

Without Britain (and I'm treading very speculative ground here, I admit), America could not have continued to oppose Hitler, nor have offered any resistance to Soviet dominion of practically all Europe after they had cleaned up the Nazis. We would have continued to make war against Japan, of course. But consider that with sea-land operations slowed greatly by loss of materiel at Normandy, Japan would probably have been bombed into true oblivion, though at very great cost to American aircrews who would have lacked Iwo Jima as an emergency strip (about 25,000 crewmen were saved by its seizure). The Pacific War's end would have been greatly postponed at terrible cost of human life - American, Japanese and persons under Japanese occupation, who were dying in 1945 at the rate of 500,000 per month. Whatever Japan's postwar history would have been, it would not have resembled what it actually was.

All these things lay in the hands of fewer than 200,000 American, Canadian and British soldiers stepping onto French soil on one day. It was a burden that we should pray will never rest on human shoulders again.

Update: Alan Kellogg posts an entirely different possible set of outcomes, saying that I over-estimated the relative power of the Germans versus the Soviets.

by Donald Sensing, 6/3/2004 02:54:46 PM. Permalink |   

Tenet out
As all the blogosphere knows by now, CIA Director George Tenet has tendered his resignation as Director of Central Intelligence, effective July 7, the seventh anniversary of assuming the office.

Fox News reports that Tenet tried to resign a year ago, but President Bush talked him out of it. Tenet's remarks today strongly support his statement that he is stepping down because of personal (read, family) reasons. He basically has had no vacation since he assumed office.

There are many who believe that Tenet, a Clinton appointee held over by Bush, should have been fired in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. I don't know. After the Pearl Harbor attack, the President Roosevelt sacked a number of flag-rank officers, although it is not very clear in retrospect why they should have acted differently with the information they had available at the time. (Even the intercepted and decoded last message to the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C. from Tokyo was so vaguely worded that the empire's ambassador didn't really know what it meant.)

At any rate, don't look for Bush to appoint a new director before November's election, or before his second inauguration if he wins. The political circus that confirmation hearings would engender just don't make it worthwhile. Until a new director takes office, deputy director John McLaughlin will serve as acting director.

Somebody blogged (sorry, don't recall who) that now Tenet will right away write the obligatory kiss-and-tell book that seems de rigeur for recently former federal officials these days, and that the book will slice Bush up. I say not. First, he won't write a book because I think he wants to take a long time off, and book writing is real work. Second, Tenet really does admire President Bush and respect him greatly.

Although I am not exactly sorry to see Tenet go, I find I can't really join the group telling him not to let the doorknob hit him in the back on the way out.

by Donald Sensing, 6/3/2004 02:16:40 PM. Permalink |   

Another Bush rope-a-dope?
Did W. use the UN like cheap Kleenex to endorse a fait accompli in Iraq?

Canadian columnist David Warren thinks so, saying that the transfer of sovereignty back to Iraq has actually, if not formally, already occurred.

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

There's more.

Update: Brian Dunn writes,

The UN route to sovereignty and the real possiblity it is just giving us what we want (we had to get something from the UN for our Liberia foray after all) seems part of a strange pattern--if the US doesn't change a policy it is stubborn and bound for defeat. If we change it is a stunning reversal that admits we were wrong and losing--and quite possibly criminal--until the dramatic change. The possibility that we are merely adapting to beat an enemy that adapts does not seem to come up.

He posted other thoughts here.

by Donald Sensing, 6/2/2004 07:18:19 PM. Permalink |   

Al Qaeda, oil and Saudi Arabia
Does al Qaeda have a new strategy? It begs the question whether they ever had a real strategy to begin with.

This week terrorists in Saudi Arabia killed 22 people working in an oil-industry compound in Khobar. The attacks, the second such in a month (35 dead in the last six weeks), caused oil prices to rise sharply on the fear that al Qaeda had decided to target Saudi Arabia's oil industry. Almost all Saudi oil-production is done by the labor of foreign workers and managers; very few Saudi subjects actually work in the industry. The Saudi ruling family sets production policy and reap the profits.

I wrote last September that Osama bin Laden has a strategic goal, but not a strategic plan. While he certainly recognizes the vulnerability of the oil infrastructure,

... the region's oil is exactly what he's not interested in attacking. He considers the oil to be the common property of the ummah, the Arab Muslim masses. He has explicitly and repeatedly accused the House of Saud of squandering the oil wealth on personal luxury, one of the main grievances he has against them.

Today some Western analysts are wondering whether al Qaeda has indeed turned its attention toward crippling the oil industry in Saudi Arabia in order to strike a blow and the oil-dependent Western economies.

"It is clear that tactics have changed," said Investec Securities analyst Bruce Evers. "Terrorists have gone from attacking military targets to civilian targets, clearly trying to disrupt Saudi production, which would be critical not only to the Saudi economy but the global economy."

Mr. Evers noted that, despite the strain on drivers and businesses, the worst has not happened in Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter.

"If they suddenly start to attack oil installations, we are going to be in serious trouble," he said. "Obviously, the oil installations are very heavily guarded but it does not mean that they won't try to attack them."

The Gulf states insist, though, that their infrastructure is secure from terrorism. However, Robert Baer, author of Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, and who served 21 years with the CIA's Directorate of Operations in the Middle East, wrote that the "most vulnerable point" in Saudi Arabia

. . . is the Abqaiq complex - the country's top oil-processing facility, just 24 miles inland from the Gulf of Bahrain. After an attack there, production would slow from some 6.8 million barrels per day to a mere 1 million barrels, a loss equal to one-third of America's daily consumption. . . .

If all that oil is taken out of play, all bets are off.

With these concerns in mind, it is perhaps time to revisit the strategic goals and strategic plan (if any) of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.

First, it is worth noting that so far al Qaeda has not attacked oil infrastructure. Bin Laden has said in past years that the rightful owner of Saudi oil is not the corrupt Saudi royal family, but the Saudi ummah, who are exploited by the royal family and deprived of their share of oil profits. In that accusation, of course, bin Laden is correct.

Bin Laden's stated goal (see my September piece, please, for expanded explanation) is to overthrow the royal family and institute strict Islamic society there. He has said that all non-Muslims must be expelled from the country, which he frequently refers to as "The Land of the Two Holy Places," Mecca and Medina. Bin Laden considers every square centimeter of Saudi Arabia as specially sacred, and therefore allowable only to Muslims.

What he has never explained, as far as I know, is just who will run the oil industry once the infidels are expelled or killed. There is simply insufficient technical expertise among the kingdom's subjects to do it. Also, bin Laden, a native Saudi, surely knows that an aversion to manual labor is deeply ingrained in the Arab male's mind, and the elevated sense of Arab men's shame and honor would make them horrified at the thought of doing tasks once done by infidel foreigners. May as well make them clean houses like women! (For an in-depth examination of this cultural trait, read The Arab Mind, by Raphael Patai.)

Be that as it may, it may be that the recent attacks signal not so much a redirection of al Qaeda's attention toward the oil industry as much as simple infidel slaying. Belmont Club reported that the terrorist gunmen "hunted down Christians" and asked them,

"Are you Muslim or Christian? We don't want to kill Muslims. Show us where the Americans and Westerners live," Islamic militants told an Arab after a shooting rampage against Westerners in Saudi Arabia. The four gunmen, aged 18 to 25 and wearing military vests, grabbed Abu Hashem, an Iraqi with a United States passport, in front of his home in the Oasis compound in Khobar, but they let him go when he told them he was a Muslim. "Don't be afraid. We won't kill Muslims - even if you are an American," he quoted them as saying. ... "[The gunman] told me, 'Our jihad is not against Muslims, but against Americans and Westerners'. He asked me to show him which villas had Americans and Westerners."

Not that killing Muslims has bothered al Qaeda before! But Saudi officials say that this mercy was self-serving for the terrorists - previous murders of Muslims had made recruiting among Saudi subjects difficult for them.

At any rate, whether by intention or not, if a significant number of oil workers in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states departed because of a new lethal threat, the oil flow to the West would decline, perhaps sharply, even if the infrastructure remained intact. Some Saudis say that harming the Western economies isn't the point: it is the Saudi economy they want to hurt.

One way for the militants to reach their goal [of a strict Islamic state] is to scare off Westerners so the economy would suffer and unemployment would soar, [Saudi] officials say. That would make it easier to turn people against their ruler.

Bin Laden has always believed that the Saudi ummah are his natural allies, chafing under the rule of a Saudi royal family that is both oppressive and religiously corrupt. And he may not be far wrong, if at all. Daniel Pipes writes,

From all indications, this outlook [Islamism] has wide appeal in Saudi Arabia; it certainly has more support than the liberal approach Westerners would prefer to see succeed.

The problem is that more Saudi promises to tighten up and toughen up against the terrorist threat ring more and more hollow. After all, they negotiated with the terrorists in this week's attack and let three of the four escape, claiming that they know who they are and can capture them later.

I still insist, though, that al Qaeda generally and Osama bin Laden specifically have only a vague idea of what they want and no good idea of how to achieve it. As I wrote last September, bin Laden's original concept (surely he has been disabused of it by now) was, by his own explanation, that if America was hit hard enough, it would always retreat. He said,

We believe that the defeat of America is possible, with the help of God, and is even easier for us, God permitting, than the defeat of the Soviet Union was before.

Q: How can you explain that?

Bin Laden: We experienced the Americans through our brothers who went into combat against them in Somalia, for example. We found they had no power worthy of mention. There was a huge aura over America -- the United States -- that terrified people even before they entered combat. Our brothers who were here in Afghanistan tested them, and together with some of the mujahedin in Somalia, God granted them victory. America exited dragging its tails in failure, defeat, and ruin, caring for nothing.

America left faster than anyone expected. It forgot all that tremendous media fanfare about the new world order, that it is the master of that order, and that it does whatever it wants. It forgot all of these propositions, gathered up its army, and withdrew in defeat, thanks be to God.

It remains to be seen whether terrorist attacks against oil-related foreigners in Saudi Arabia will continue and if so, whether they will affect the Saudi economy significantly. And it is far from clear whether such action would cause the fall of the House of Saud by Saudi ummah rising up in righteous anger, which bin Laden has said is his vision for regime change there.

On the related topic of al Qaeda's possible plans for mass attacks against America, read Belmont Club's fascinating analyses in two memos to Osama, part one and part two. It pretty much validates what I wrote last September (link, again), that bin Laden has no real strategic plan,

... that bin Laden has never had any plan except violence itself, committing it where he could, when he could. He commits violence against Western targets with no vision apparent beyond the violence. He has no idea of how to constitute a true nation state. He is a man whose vision extends no further than more fighting, which is to say, he has no vision at all.

To which I still say, even when considering the compelling possibilities BC lays forth.

Update: The Saudis said today that after a 12-hour pursuit, they killed two of the three terrorists who got away last weekend.

Update: Bill Quick picks up on a thread in my post and points out a cogent point about Iraq. Democracy is wedded to free-market economies and at least some form of capitalism and Bill wonders whether the work ethic required for successful entrepreneurship will truly take root in Iraq. Click here.

by Donald Sensing, 6/2/2004 12:32:17 PM. Permalink |   

Judge rules infanticide a Constitutional right
Looney-tune judge is at it again

U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton ruled yesterday that the federal statute prohibiting partial-birth abortions is unconstitutional.

She agreed with abortion rights activists that a woman's right to choose is paramount, and that is therefore "irrelevant" whether a fetus suffers pain, as abortion foes contend.

"The act poses an undue burden on a woman's right to choose an abortion," the judge wrote.

This abortion involves removing a viable infant from the mother's womb only until the head remains. Then the abortionist either crushes the baby's skull or pokes a hole in the back of its skull and uses a machine to suck the brains out.

Justice Department attorneys argued the procedure is inhumane, causes pain to the fetus and is never medically necessary. A government lawyer told the judge that it "blurs the line of abortion and infanticide." ...

In her ruling, the judge said it was "grossly misleading and inaccurate" to suggest the banned procedure verges on infanticide.

Well, let's see: a viable infant is partially removed, then killed. If that's not infanticide, what is?

The American Medical Association has testified all along that this procedure is never justified to preserve the life or health of the mother. The chief of Vanderbilt University Medical Center's Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Dr. Frank Boehm, who supports abortion right generally, has written for many years that this procedure is never medically called for. In 1996 he said,

"We take care of women who are very sick, and babies who are very sick, and we never perform partial-birth abortion...There are plenty of alternatives. This is clearly a procedure no obstetrician needs to do."

Apart from lacking moral sense, Judge Hamilton is a loose cannon on the bench anyway. She ruled last year that public-school lesson plans requiring student to recite a basic Muslim prayer in class and perform other Muslim rites was Constitutional.

In the three-week course, Excelsior teacher Brooke Carlin had students assume Islamic names, recite prayers in class, memorize and recite verses from the Quran, and had them simulate Ramadan fasting by going without something for a day. The final test required students to critique Muslim culture.

Hamilton ruled that the instruction was religiously neutral.

Hamilton could serve as the poster woman for my February post about Alice in Wonderland judges. The power grab by the federal judiciary began, of course, with the case of Marbury v. Madison in 1803.

The critical importance of Marbury is the assumption of several powers by the Supreme Court. One was the authority to declare acts of Congress, and by implication acts of the president, unconstitutional if they exceeded the powers granted by the Constitution. But even more important, the Court became the arbiter of the Constitution, the final authority on what the document meant. ...

Which caused Thomas Jefferson to respond,

The Constitution . . . meant that its coordinate branches should be checks on each other. But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch [italics added].

How prescient he was.

by Donald Sensing, 6/2/2004 11:18:05 AM. Permalink |   

Printing press update
By the early 1500s, the inbred moral and theological corruptions of the Roman Catholic Church had made the Protestant Reformation necessary. But what made the Reformation possible was a newfangled technology called the printing press.

Probably without his advance knowledge, Martin Luther's famous 95 Theses against the Church's fundraising by selling indulgences were submitted to the press and widely distributed as broadside papers. Students probably did this (those pesky students were rebelling even back then!)

But Luther quickly picked up on the technology and made deliberate, planned uses of the printing press in later efforts. The rest, as they say, is history. While the press alone was not sufficient for the Reformation's success, there seems little doubt that it was essential.

Despite electronic media's rise, the printing press is alive and well and breathing new life because of new technology. Rich Hailey of Shots Across the Bow emailed me and many other bloggers to announce he is now the master of a start-up printing business called PhD Publishers, LLC, headquartered here in Tennessee.

Rich's company is a "micropublisher." With new kinds of computerized presses, his and other micropublisher companies can profitably print low-volume books and other products. The key is that he can print books on demand, when they are ordered, and achieve the same per-volume cost as if he printed a thousand or more at a time. This kind of printing is ideal for mail or internet orders such as Amazon.com. In fact, my grandfather's account of Confederate guerrilla Champ Ferguson, originally published in 1941, is now available from Amazon because of micropublishing.

Authors who have no commercial printing sponsor can also pay for their own books to be printed and then sell them, paying themselves back over time. Except now that time will be shorter than ever because they don't have to worry about economies of scale. Formerly, wriotes Rich, "most [such] authors wound up several thousand dollars out of pocket, with a garage full of books they couldn't sell." Now,

Rather than requiring a press run of several thousand copies to achieve a reasonable cost per book, new printing and perfect-binding processes make printing even a single copy inexpensive, which brings just-in-time inventory management to the publishing world. Rather than maintaining an inventory of several thousand copies of a book, with Book On Demand (BOD) printing, the writer can order copies of their work as they sell them, reducing the amount of capital tied up in inventory to the point where self publishing becomes a viable option for virtually everybody.

Ain't technology wonderful? Good luck, Rich!

I should point out that the Catholic Church confronted its shortcomings very soon after the Protestant Reformation was evidently not going away. The Church's Counter-Reformation, intended to blunt the expansion of Luther and John Calvin's reforms and churches, also corrected most of the corrupt practices that Luther had railed against. And to be proper about it, there were really four reformations: the Protetant Reformation, which historians call the Magisterial Reformation, the Petit Reformation, centered in eastern Europe, the RCC's Counter-Reformation of the Middle 1500s, and the English Reformation, which came much later.

Update: Douglas Chandler emails to recommend The Printing Revolution In Early Modern Europe by Elisabeth L Eisenstein for thos interested in the history of printing.

by Donald Sensing, 6/1/2004 11:07:48 PM. Permalink |   

Is the Palm PDA dead?
It's a real possibility. Sony has announced that it will no longer produce new Palm-powered Clié PDAs for the US market. Which is a bummer, since I use a Clié. Oh, well, maybe this will make a chance to get a newer model (color, say) at deep discount.

by Donald Sensing, 6/1/2004 10:45:31 PM. Permalink |   

Miss USA comes in second


In the just-concluded Miss Universe pageant, Miss Australia (right) won the crown and Miss USA was first runnerup. In the screen grab, Miss Aussie has just learned the news.

by Donald Sensing, 6/1/2004 09:58:47 PM. Permalink |   

Why I love baseball
It's the bottom of the ninth, Atlanta at bat, trailing Montreal 6-3. The Braves get two men on base, but with two outs.

Nick Green smacks one into the stands at left field, tying the game. Extra innings now are guaranteed. J. D. Drew steps to the plate and connects to smack Mr. Spaulding into the right field stand. Game over. Braves score four runs in two at bats to win by one. Just. Like. That.

It helps, of course, that I am a Braves fan. But that aside, isn't it the uncertainty of the game that draws the fans? In soccer near the end of the game a three-goal lead would be practically insurmountable. A Super Bowl similarly close to the end with a three-score (say, three field goals) difference would also be pretty well tied up.

Of course, baseball doesn't have a clock so the analogy is not exact. But that's why the fat lady never really sings in baseball until one of two things happen, both beyond the control of a deus ex machina like a game clock. Either the ump calls the sixth out of the ninth or later inning or the home team does what Altanta did tonight. No other way to sing. And you never know which it will be. And that's why I love baseball.

by Donald Sensing, 6/1/2004 09:29:03 PM. Permalink |   

The morally inept . . .
Seem to have come out of the woodwork recently. Two examples:

Blackfive posts about Reggie Rivers' morally and intellectually vacuous column in the Denver Post, "Keep Our Slaves Safe."

According to Rivers, soldiers are slaves (his word) and the American "military is one of the last bastions of slavery in the United States."

Needless to say, the column - published over the Memorial Day weekend - incensed Army veteran Blackfive, who shot off an email to the editor. He links to some other vets who take rightful umbrage, too.

Been holding on to this one for a few days. Dana Blankenhorn seems to think that because no one does wrong in his own eyes, then there are no real moral distinctions between combatant sides in the terror war.

He also says,

Our great commanders have always been haunted by what they forced men to do in the name of their causes. ... Eisenhower talked of having to act cheerful among men he was sending to death. It wears on you, he wrote.

Actually, what the great captains anguished over was not what they were sending their men to do to the enemy, but what the enemy would do to them. Eisenhower, for example, was pushed hard by his military boss, Gen. George C. Marshall, to move the Normandy-invasion airborne drops much farther inland, away from the invasion beaches.

Eisenhower's air chief, British Air Marshall Trafford Leigh-Mallory, responsible for the airborne planning, estimated that if the drops went as Eisenhower wanted, the American 101st and 82d Airborne Divisions would suffer up to 70 percent casualties, most dead, few wounded.

Even so, Eisenhower decided the paratroopers had to stay close to the beaches to pressure the beachhead's defenders from the rear. Inland they would have no such effect. Success on the beaches, he said, meant everything, even if it was bought with the blood of seven of every 10 paratroopers.

Yes, he agonized over this decision, but not for a moment over the fact that his soldiers would kill Germans, only that the Germans would also kill them. (Actual airborne losses were about 20 percent.)

Blankenhorn, though, wants us to anguish ourselves into near paralysis - at least, it seems so (the piece isn't very well written, I think).

For those who seek to do good the choices will inevitably be harder than for those who confuse ends and means. As the conflict grows fiercer, as it nears its climax, these decisions get harder. If you're not anguished by them you're not thinking, you're not truly an adult, and you're likely to be manipulated, as a child is, by the simplest tales of good vs. evil, able to rationalize anything done in your name to reach once and for all.

My prayer for America is adulthood.

It seems you and I are being manipulated (by Bush & Co., natch) because they don't anguish over their hard choices and neither do we. We are childish.

I wonder whether President Bush ever lies awake at night anguishing over the threat of an even more devastating attack against Americans on within America's boundaries. Nah, he's too busy manipulating Mr. Blankenhorn.

Update: It seems apropos to call attention to an essay on Professor Bainbridge's site (via Glenn Reynolds) on why the decline of martial virtues among society is a cause for real concern that the society is becoming more and more militarized. He quotes G. K. Chesterson:

The evil of militarism is not that it shows certain men to be fierce and haughty and excessively warlike. The evil of militarism is that it shows most men to be tame and timid and excessively peaceable. The professional soldier gains more and more power as the general courage of a community declines. Thus the Pretorian guard became more and more important in Rome as Rome became more and more luxurious and feeble. The military man gains the civil power in proportion as the civilian loses the military virtues.

This is, btw, an expanation of the naging flaw in Robert Heinlein's idea in Starship Troopers that only honorably discharged veterans should have the right to vote. By Chesterson's analysis (which seems sound to me), Heinlein's society would be extremely militarist. As indeed I think it was in the book.

I posted an essay about the martial virtues last January. I listed them as courage, commitment, competence, candor, and compassion.

by Donald Sensing, 6/1/2004 03:57:08 PM. Permalink |   

Saddam and 9/11
There seems to be a growing body of evidence that Saddam and the Sept. 2001 terrorists were connected after all. Bill Hobbs has a short roundup of links.

by Donald Sensing, 6/1/2004 03:46:00 PM. Permalink |   

Remember when you sleep . . .
That these men are standing watch. Then click here.

by Donald Sensing, 6/1/2004 03:44:27 PM. Permalink |   

The carnage of victory
I have been under-referring to blogger Reid Stott, who in addition to being a fellow Demon Deacon is an outstanding photographer and perceptive writer. His blog, The Daily Whim (formerly Photodude) is one of the best laid-out and original I know.

Lots of good stuff there in recent days:

A photo gallery of Marietta National Military Cemetery in Georgia, where more than 10,000 Union dead are interred. All the pix are his originals, taken by him yesterday.

There are about 7,000 non-Civil War graves there. More than 3,000 of the headstones there are simply marked, "Unknown."

Reid comments,

Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign and subsequent March to the Sea are considered one of the most successful offensives in military history, studied and taught in military academies even today. And yet, there were “10,000 Union dead from Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign.” As best I can figure, Sherman had between 100,000 and 120,000 troops under his command during the eight months or so of that campaign. His army (actually two, the Army of the Tennessee, and the Army of the Cumberland) suffered a casualty rate of nearly 10%, with almost a third of them buried as “Unknown.” And it was an overwhelming success remembered to this day.

If our forces in Iraq had suffered a 10% casualty rate over the past year, there’d be nearly 14,000 dead (our casualty rate there is close to one half of one percent). If we currently had [a] soldiers buried in Iraq or [b] 240 of the 803 losses listed as “Unknown,” well, you can imagine the uproar. And if we stick to the Civil War as a measure, if we’d lost the same percentage of our male population in Vietnam, instead of over 55,000 names on The Wall, there’d be over 4,000,000.

As we mourn the losses in Iraq, it’s also good to remember it could be a lot worse. It has been a lot worse. There were a lot of men in their 80’s at the WWII Memorial Saturday who can tell you it was a lot worse, not so long ago. Some of them may have looked somewhat frail in the heat at the ceremony, but those men endured and survived horrors we are too weak to even comprehend. And to this day, many of them feel guilt because their buddies got killed, and they somehow survived the overwhelming odds.

Today is a day to remember just how many good Americans have fallen fighting for their country. Not just the hundreds we count today, but hundreds of thousands. Your freedom today came on the backs of over a million American soldiers who gave their lives so we could keep it a few generations longer. It’s a heavy weight, one we take greatly for granted.

Reid also writes of the possibility that Iran played the US and the UK like a violin to get us to depose Saddam, its greatest enemy.

by Donald Sensing, 6/1/2004 03:16:38 PM. Permalink |   

U.N. takes over in Haiti
A multinational military force in Haiti has been under US command since the US peacefully invaded in 1994. The 1,900 American troops were scheduled to depart today, but ferocious flooding of Haiti in recent days caused them to stay to render assistance.

Now the United Nations has assumed command of stability operations in Haiti.

The new UN commander is Brazilian Gen. Augusto Heleno Ribeiro Pereira, who formally took command in a ceremony in Port au Prince from US Marine Brig. Gen. Ronald S. Coleman. However, very few of the projected 8,000 US troops from several differenty countries have yet arrived. The US troops are now scheduled to leave the country at the end of this month. There remain 1,700 troops of other nations, mainly Canada and France, who have served under American command.

Two dozen nations are supposed to send troops now.

by Donald Sensing, 6/1/2004 03:06:01 PM. Permalink |   

Last Civil War Widow dies on Memorial Day
Alberta Martin, the last woman to have been married to a Civil War soldier died Sunday at age 97. She was 21 in the 1920s when she married William Martin, a Confederate veteran born in 1845. She openly admitted she married him for his money - since 1921 he had been paid a monthly pension of $50 per month by the state of Alabama for his Civil War service. Alberta was born in poverty was so remained until she married Martin.

Alabama awarded Mrs. Martin survivor pension benefits for William Martin's service in 1996.

Their marriage was ended by his death after 3½ years. Two months later she married her dead husband's grandson (obviously from a previous marriage), and became a widow a third time when he died in 1983. Her first husband was a cab driver who died in an auto accident before she met Martin.

The last widow of a Union soldier died last year. I always knew the South would win in the end!

by Donald Sensing, 6/1/2004 11:27:16 AM. Permalink |