Read it here, or there
I posted my essay yesterday on the factual and methodological errors of a UC Berkeley research fellow's op-ed in the WaPo. The subject was the import of the casualty in Iraq, compared with the rates of World War 2 and the Vietnam war.

RealClearPolitics has picked up the essay and run it on their site, complete with my misspelling of "sanguinary" as "saguinary." That's my fault, of course, not RCP's, to whom I extend my thanks for the compliment.

by Donald Sensing, 11/30/2004 08:00:00 PM. Permalink |

Linkagery

Whatever this is, a "tank silencer" isn't it. Assuming the photo is legit, the vehicle in the pic is an M109-series, self-propelled howitzer, not a tank. It would be some kind of test structure, but I can't imagine what would be tested. Anyone know?

Bare Politics is a new discussion board, if you're into boards.

George Will recently wrote about the leftist domination of American colleges. A blogging faculty member speaks up in agreeement.

Kos, unsurprisingly, accuses opponents of his position on gay marriage of basing their arguments "entirely, 100 percent, on emotion." (As if he is always the serene voice of reason, you see.) Anyway, he actually had an idea about the subject on 11/29 that I wrote of at length way back in February: get the state tend to legal contracts between persons and to allow the church to tend exclusively to spiritual aspects of marriage. However, I argued myself out of it a little while later in a fit of untenable emotionalism.

by Donald Sensing, 11/30/2004 07:56:00 PM. Permalink |

Can the jihad last?
I recounted a short history of jihad in late October, in which I explained how the long but victorious war against the Soviets in Afghanistan had created a mentality of jihad among tens of thousands of Muslims who fought or supported the war. Later I posted about why "martyrdom operations" are literally self defeating and of the internal contradictions of the concept of holy war.

Martydom might be a fine thing in the abstract, but I'm guessing that it has much less appeal in the concrete. "Martyrdom operations" are literally self defeating anyway: they consume your own troops at a 100-percent rate and leave no one to come home a hero, where gleamy-eyed potential recruits can gaze gauzily at them, wanting to be one, too. ...

There is also the important question of why holy jihadist warriors are losing badly to the infidel dogs, making the Arab street (remember it?) probably wonder whether Allah intends to show up for the match anytime soon.

Comes now two new views on the subject. Historian and military analyst James Dunnigan says that the Muslim world is awakening to the internal dangers of Islamic radicalism:

Iraq has been a real turning point. In the beginning, even many Iraqis believed that the al Qaeda attacks, which killed so many Iraqi civilians, were somehow staged by the American. No more. Not only have the Iraqis concluded that Islamic terrorism is evil, but so have most Moslems in the rest of the world. The conspiracy theories about the CIA staging terrorist attacks can still get traction, as can stories about mass rapes of Iraqi women by American soldiers, and similar atrocities. But the dark secret about Islamic conservatives is out in the open. The Islamic conservatives are still there, still spewing their hate, and still being listened to by some. And many of those that listen to the hateful talk about evil Westerners are still willing to act on it. The catch is that the Islamic reactionaries now find themselves confronting fellow Moslems more often. And their fellow Moslems don’t like Islamic terrorism any more than New Yorkers do.

James concludes that "the reformation in under way." It's salutary that Muslims are awakening, however slowly, to the fact that they are as endangered by radical Islamism as the West. After all, al Qaeda's primary war is against other Muslims, and the sooner the Muslim world understands it, the better the whole world will be.

Next, T. Bevan of RealClearPolitics examines the state of the jihad and draws similar conclusions. The evidence, he says, shows that "the enthusiasm for terrorism, death and jihad isn't as great as the bad guys had hoped."

Imagine what continued success could look like a year from now: the first freely elected government in Iraqi history, significantly reduced U.S. troop levels in Iraq, Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and movement toward settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with Arafat now out of the way. Where exactly would this leave Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri and their grievances of the oppression of Muslims? Same cave. Same handy cam. But with far fewer followers and far less influence.

Don't forget that Musab Abu al-Zarqawi, al Qaeda's point man in Iraq, said that democracy is "suffocation" to al Qaeda's attempts to radicalize Iraq. The crippling, though not total defeat the insurgents have suffered this month in Fallujah is real and will be longlasting. The calls for jihadist volunteers Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden's right-hand man Ayman al-Zawahri have made are being mostly unheeded by their audience. Jihadism is losing steam among Arab populations just as Iraqis move with increasing vigor toward democracy.

by Donald Sensing, 11/30/2004 05:46:00 PM. Permalink |

This generation's most widespread burden
The greatest burden to be borne by the generation now coming into adulthood is the fight against Islamofascism. But the most widespread burden is much closer to home - the crushing load of debt they are already shouldering.

I wrote about this before, and now the CS Monitor documents the problem.

by Donald Sensing, 11/30/2004 06:13:00 AM. Permalink |

A Blogad refused
A little while ago I rejected a Blogad submitted for the SmogBuster, "A quarter sized disc you stick, glue, or tape to the bottom of your fuel tank to achieve increased fuel savings; gas or diesel. Emissions are reduced greatly, oftentimes to immeasurable levels."

SmogBuster™ is a small green hologram about the size of a quarter. It installs in seconds and it's simple to do it! To attach the hologram, you will need to clean a small area on the "bottom of your gas tank". (use a wire brush if necessary) For added security we recommend using super glue or equivalent to securely fasten the disc to the tank. This is easily done at your local oil change facility.

You will need to watch your oil and change it sooner than normal after application of the SmogBuster™. The carbon deposits that have built up in the heads and engine will be removed and dropped into the oil pan causing you to need an oil change quicker than normal. We recommend on passenger vehicles an oil change at approximately 500 and 1,500 miles once SmogBuster™ is applied.

Yep, you read right: it's a hologram attached to the outside of your gas tank that cleans your engine. And according to this "test page" it will cut your vehicle's zero-to-sixty time by up to 23 percent!

And it's only $299! A great gift for Christmas!

by Donald Sensing, 11/29/2004 08:43:00 PM. Permalink |

The myth of counting casualties
Berkeley researcher can't do math and his piece doesn't add up anyway

Brian Gifford writes in the WaPo that the "historically light" casualties of American forces in Iraq are deceptive in their import and that they bode much worse than things might seem. But as a research fellow with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation at the University of California at Berkeley, he should have been able to do better research.

First his claim, coming at the end of his piece:

The focus on how "light" casualties have been so far rather than on what those casualties signify serves to rationalize the continued conduct of the war and prevents us as a nation from confronting the realities of conditions in Iraq. Even more troubling, daily casualties have almost tripled since before the first attack on Fallujah in April. Conditions are getting worse, not improving. To be sure, American forces are winning the body count. That the insurgency is nonetheless growing more effective in the face of heavier losses makes it difficult to imagine an exit strategy that any reasonable person would recognize as a "victory."

I'll discuss the non-merits of this claim later. First, here are the figures he uses to buttress his claim:

Gifford writes of American casualties in World War Two and Vietnam (skipping Korea, for some reason).

Compared with the more than 405,000 American personnel killed in World War II and the 58,000 killed in Vietnam, Iraq hardly seems like a war at all.

Gifford's method, though, is deficient. There were indeed approximately 405,000 deaths from all causes among all US troops in WW2, including troops who never left the States. During the years of the Vietnam war American forces lost 47,410 KIA, approximately 10,000 non-battle dead in Vietnam and 32,000 dead elsewhere in the world. Hence, from all causes and in all places, American forces suffered not 58,000 but 90,000 dead during the Vietnam war (cite).

Gifford next delineates the obvious fact that the ratio of dead to wounded in the Iraq war is the lowest of any of America's wars, but he gets the numbers wrong there, too.

In World War II there were 1.7 wounded for every fatality, and 2.6 in Vietnam; in Iraq the ratio of wounded to killed is 7.6. This means that if our wounded today had the same chances of survival as their fathers did in Vietnam, we would probably now have more than 3,500 deaths in the Iraq war.

Problem is that Gifford computes the ratio of killed to wounded for WW2 based on deaths from all causes anywhere, the ratio for Vietnam based on battle and non-battle dead only in the Vietnam theater, and never explains what raw numbers he uses for Iraq. Because thewhole basis for his argument is the numerical relation of dead to living, these errors are fatal. As well, he misstates the number of living in those wars, too.

Let's compare apples to apples. The ratio of killed to wounded can't sensibly include non-battle dead. It can only meaningfully compare killed in action to wounded in action. So -

World War Two's ratio of combat wounded (671,846) to combat deaths (291,557) in WW2 was 2.3:1, not 1.7:1 as Gifford avers.

The same ratio for Vietnam was 153,303 to 47,410, or 3.28:1, not 2.6 as Gifford claims(see tables).

According to a DOD fact sheet dated today, in Iraq there have been 9,326 wounded and 981 battle deaths, for a ratio of 9.5:1, not 7.6:1 as Gifford writes.

Another Gifford stat:

During World War II, the United States lost an average of 300 military personnel per day [from all causes, anywhere - DS]. The daily figure in Vietnam was about 15 [it was actually about 23 per day from all causes, anywhere - DS].

The Iraq average is two per day, says Gifford (pretty close, I think, but he doesn't account for non-Iraq deaths). Gifford says that the effect of losing two troops per day is greater than one might think because the total force is so much smaller than earlier wars. During the Vietnam war, he says, America had 3.5 million troops in uniform at its height, compared to 1.4 million today. But the Vietnam war cost only one-fourth more casualties as the Iraq war when measured as a percentage of the total active-duty force, says Gifford.

Again, Gifford can't keep his numbers straight. There weren't 3.5 million troops in uniform during the Vietnam war, there were that many who served there over the war's ten-year period. There were 8.7 million who served somewhere, including Vietnam, during the ten years. Likewise, there are approximately 1.4 million service members overall today, but about 140,000 serving in Iraq.

If we want to do what Gifford tries to do - compute the ratio of KIA to the overall force, by war, then we have to use corresponding numbers for each war:

During World War Two, 16 million men and women served altogether. Of them, 1.82 percent were killed in battle; 2.53 percent died from all causes.

During Vietnam, 8,744,000 served altogether. Of them, 0.54 percent were KIA, 1.03 percent died from all causes.

The Iraq war is not over yet, so any figures are preliminary. The 2004 active-duty end strength authorized for all the services is 1.4 million (it will increase slightly next year). Because the war is only three years old, there hasn't been near the personnel turnover that the other two wars experienced over their periods. Neither has there been a massive expansion of the force. There has been a large callup of the reserve components, though, and these troops are no longer counted against end-strength totals as they were before. So somewhat more than 1.4 million persons have served; I am going to guess about 1.7 million.

Of them, 1,041 (0.06 percent) were KIA (not only in Iraq). I was not able to find the number on non-battle, non-theater deaths since 2001, but did learn that 435 members died accidentally in 2000. Because the overall accident rate since 2001 has been rising, I'll presume that 2002-2004 have claimed the lives of 1,500 members total by accident, including accidental deaths in theaters. That means that of the 1.7 million persons I estimate to have served since 2001, approximately 2,451 have died from all causes, an overall rate of 0.15 percent.

These numbers mean that Gifford is quite wrong. The Vietnam loss rate per the total force was not a mere one-fourth higher than today, it was almost seven times higher than today, and the WW2 rate was almost 17 times higher.

So Gifford has completed a mathematical non-sequitur. His numerical categories are inconsistent from one war to the next. And he concludes that the overall force can't take the strain, over the long haul, of its loss rate of two per day because its effect is greater proportionally than that of earlier wars. But he simply didn't compute correctly. The GWOT's loss rate is many times smaller proportionally than any earlier war.

Then Gifford leaps from incorrect math to conclusions unjustified by any math, correctly computed or not. Gifford says that the Iraq insurgency is "growing more effective" because, as he notes, "daily [American] casualties have almost tripled" since April. But heavier direct combat would naturally result in higher friendly casualties. Gifford simply dismisses the fact that "American forces are winning the body count" because he doesn't understand the saguinary calculus of war.

In the Civil War, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant observed he could lose two soldiers for every one Gen. Lee lost, and still win. An article in the Air Force Association magazine in 2003 discussed casualties in their historical context, including this nugget:

Departing from the more cautious approaches of his predecessors, Grant threw the mass of his Army of the Potomac, again and again, against Robert E. Lee’s retreating Army of Northern Virginia.

Grant’s campaign was marked by the large numbers of killed and wounded. To get the job done, he was willing to accept higher casualties than he inflicted.

In the first month, according to Weigley, the Army of the Potomac “suffered 55,000 casualties, not far from the total strength with which the rival Army of Northern Virginia began the month.” Lee’s army took 32,000 casualties that month, but Lee had more difficulty than Grant did in replenishing his ranks.

Militaries have known for centuries what Mr. Gifford does not: engaging the enemy in intensive combat is more costly in lives than not engaging them. Rising US casualties at the moment are not related to whether we are winning or losing overall. By Gifford's reasoning, we were winning WW2 in 1942 but losing it in 1945. We invaded Guadalcanal in August 1942, for example, losing 1,600 dead and 4,400 wounded securing it. In 1945 we invaded Iwo Jima and secured it only after losing 6,800 dead and 19,200 wounded - more American casualties there than Japanese, in fact.

In fact, the number of American dead and wounded rose every year during World War Two, culminating in the abattoir of Okinawa, where so many Americans died in battle (12,000) that it led directly to President Truman's decision to atom-bomb Japan.

Gifford's says his math supports his contention that "conditions are getting worse, not improving" because "the insurgency is nonetheless growing more effective." Hence, there is no end to the war that "any reasonable person would recognize as a 'victory.'" But this conclusion is an ideological one, not a mathematical one. It is qualitative, not quantitative.

Gifford's mathematical house of cards falls from two fundamental causes: his math is wrong and his conclusions can't be supported by math to begin with. It all just proves that figures lie and, well, you know the rest.

by Donald Sensing, 11/29/2004 03:47:00 PM. Permalink |

A little revolution now and then would be a good thing
Why the Founders said that the proper attitude toward all government is one of deep, continuous suspicion: a piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer from April 2003 and republished on the site of Gillies Coffee Co.

The worst part of waking up is finding Big Brother in your cup.

Gillies Coffee Co. of Brooklyn has roasted beans for 163 years, claiming the title of America's oldest coffee merchant. But the firm is now threatened, due to a shocking discovery by geniuses at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection:

The roasting process, the DEP found, emits odors that smell suspiciously like roasted coffee.

A neighbor's complaint about the strong smell of java resulted in the DEP fining Gillies $400 for giving off "fugitive odors."

Consider yourself on notice, coffee lovers. That's not the sweet smell of Jamaican Blue or Full-City Roast rising from your mugs. According to the DEP, it's air pollution.

A judge has ordered the coffee company to stop its emissions. The firm even hired engineers, who concluded it's impossible to prevent a coffee-roasting plant from smelling like roasted coffee.

And this aromatic controversy is taking place in New York, of all places. City of a thousand smells. You would think a whiff of roasting coffee every now and then would be welcome relief from the garden-variety Gotham bouquet.

The DEP has also fined pickle companies, bagel bakeries, and Krispy Kreme outlets.

It's too bad NYC officials can't discern the difference between pleasurable aromas and air pollution. What a bland world this would be without life's distinct scents.

Let's hope the overreacting DEP backs off. The city that never sleeps needs all the caffeine it can get.

This just proves Den Beste's law: the job of bureaucrats is to regulate, and left to themselves they will regulate everything they can.

by Donald Sensing, 11/28/2004 07:52:00 PM. Permalink |

Michael Jordan and me
What do basketball superstar Michael Joran and I have in common?

Well, nothing. But Michael's older brother is Command Sgt. Maj. James Jordan of XVIII Airborne Corps's 35th Signal Brigade at Ft. Bragg, N.C. I served for a few months on the staff of that Brigade from 1986-1987, then transferred to the Corps staff.

CSM Jordan has asked his mandatory retirement date be waived so that he can deploy to Iraq with the brigade. More here. (ht: Instapundit)

by Donald Sensing, 11/28/2004 07:36:00 PM. Permalink |

Hey, hey, goodbye
The Tennessee Titans's season is effectively over now that they have fallen to 4-7, defeated by Houston, who was the home team.

Plagued by too many injured or playing-hurt key personnel, the flash of Titans-of-yore the team showed in the first half today just couldn't be carried through the whole game. QB Steve McNair (now sometimes known as "Impaired McNair" he's been hurt so often) was brilliant during the first few possessions, but couldn't keep it up. Shaken up in the third quarter, he gamely loped through to the end of the game.

Problem was, he turned the ball over three times with two fumbles and a game-killing interception in the last two minutes of the game. Behind 24-21, Tennessee was outside field goal range when McNair threw the ball directly into the arms of a defensive secondary.

What to do for the last five games? A week from now they play the red-hot Colts in Indy. Let's get real, T. fans, it ain't gonna happen. And at this point in the season, even if it did it really wouldn't much matter. The team should concentrate on physical recovery, especially of McNair. He's only 31 and should have a few good years left, but he needs to get well. And the team needs him well next year.

The playoffs are now out of reach for sure. Best to stop worrying about the rest of season and play to minimize player stesses.

by Donald Sensing, 11/28/2004 06:38:00 PM. Permalink |

Ya learn something new every day
Auctions are "all about the money."

by Donald Sensing, 11/28/2004 01:48:00 PM. Permalink |

Well, I'd leave the area, too!
Headline: "N.J. residents split over F-16 strafing"

by Donald Sensing, 11/28/2004 01:44:00 PM. Permalink |

Maybe they should help veterans instead
Headline: "Communities open hearts to hurt vets"

by Donald Sensing, 11/28/2004 01:42:00 PM. Permalink |

The Sunday Sermon
My sermon for First Sunday of Advent is now posted.

by Donald Sensing, 11/28/2004 01:37:00 PM. Permalink |

National Treasure - a review
We all went today to see the noontime viewing of National Treasure, currently the number one movie in America.

A great movie? Heck no, not by a long shot.

An enjoyable, entertaining movie that's fun for the whole fam? Absolutely!

My youngest is 11 and there was not one objectionable word or scene. These days, that's a big deal out of Hollywood. And it worked at the adult level, too.

Forget that the entire premise is utterly unbelievable, a fact that the script actually mocks itself about. The movie is utterly bereft of cosmic wisdom and believe me, don't place any stock in its rendition of American history. And its lead is Nicolas Cage playing Nicolas Cage.

But so what. This flick combines elements of several good-fun movies into one: a techno-heist story, a cops-and-robbers story, a treasure hunt story (of course), some elements of Indiana Jones and The Mummy. But most of all it's really The Goonies for grownups, less all the profanity and with all the comic relief.

The movie keeps your attention and entertains. So I give it two all-seeing eyes wide open.

Update: Roger Ebert wrote,

"National Treasure" is so silly that the Monty Python version could use the same screenplay, line for line.

This is true, and Roger thinks it's a backhand. But he fails to consider that maybe that's a good thing because all right-thinking people love Monty Python! Probably the movie is so enjoyable because it has a certain Pythonesque style and doesn't take itself seriously as Roger apparently thinks it does.

by Donald Sensing, 11/27/2004 03:48:00 PM. Permalink |

Alexander - a very brief review
Wednesday my nephew, 26 and niece, 24, got into town for Thanksgiving (their hometown is too far for a brief trip) and that night they took Son 2 to see Alexander.

Nephew said the movie was "incredibly bad." How bad? This bad:

With about 15 minutes left to go, the projection system broke. The screen went blank and the sound quit. After a few seconds, when the audience realized that it wasn't just a sudden gap between reels or the like, they clapped and cheered.

My intrepid kin ducked into the next screening room of the multiplex and saw the final minutes anyway. But they're not sure why.

Update, 11/27: I saw National Treasure today and give it a much more positive review.


by Donald Sensing, 11/26/2004 04:56:00 PM. Permalink |

Playing tug of war with God
Is Europe about to have a great awakening?

More than a million people from all over Europe are to deliver a petition to Tony Blair and fellow EU leaders calling for changes to the constitution recognising Europe's Christian heritage.

One robin does not make a spring, and one instance of mass protest does not make a revolution. But does this petition has collected more than one million signatures in a short time. Coupled with the rising realization that Europe's greatest threat is religious - radicalized Islam (see here and here) then it may well be that secularized Europeans will be drawn to re-examine their continents' Christian religious roots.

Meanwhile, back in the colonies ...

The religious roots of America are being given the equivalent of educational Round Up.

Young students across [Maryland] read stories about the Pilgrims and Native Americans, simulate Mayflower voyages, hold mock feasts and learn about the famous meal that temporarily allied two very different groups.

But what teachers don't mention when they describe the feast is that the Pilgrims not only thanked the Native Americans for their peaceful three-day indulgence, but repeatedly thanked God.

"We teach about Thanksgiving from a purely historical perspective, not from a religious perspective," said Charles Ridgell, St. Mary's County Public Schools curriculum and instruction director.

School administrators statewide agree, saying religion never coincides with how they teach Thanksgiving to students. [link]

Except, of course, that the Pilgrims' Thanksgiving was all about thanking God. Censoring their religion and teaching about the day from its "purely historical perspective" is like trying to teach about democracy while making no mention of voting. Taking the Pilgrims' religion out of the pedagogy simply guts the subject.

by Donald Sensing, 11/26/2004 01:34:00 PM. Permalink |

Happy Thanksgiving!
I am not going to be tied up writing at the computer today, so here are some links you may wish to peruse, in various categories.


Thanksgiving-related posts

My own photo-essay illustrating what I'm thankful for.

James Jewell has two posts of interest, the first about to whom thanks are given and the second relating an insight of Prof. Langdon Gilkey on how the answer to greed and injustice is not less wealth but the development of moral character.

Langdon was one of my professors in seminary, and I didn't know until I read James's post that he recently died. It's a great loss.

Austin Bay recently returned from several months on active duty in Iraq and has a focused perspective on what to be thankful for.

Titusonenine links to two worthy reads:

The Union Leader's piece, "America's religious holiday."

Mark D. Roberts on "Our Need for Gratitude."

The crumbling edifice of the United Nations

Diplomad blog documents that UN staff see Corruption as a Way of Life.

Former Sen. John Danforth, now the US ambassador to the United Nations, actually wondered aloud whether the UN has any real utlity anymore.

Employees of the UN Secretariat in New York actually cast a vote of no confidence in the United Nation's management because of corruption scandals.

William Rusher at Human Events asks, "Is the United Nations Worth Saving?"

And it seems that at least one UN agency actually employs members of terrorist organizations on its payroll.

Belmont Club weighs in with a good rollup of the UN's main problems.

And while we're on the topic, it might be helpful to review what the UN was really founded to do (surprise!).


GWOT related

A Marine captain fighting in Iraq is delighted to have a CBS News crew embedded with his company. Seriously. Anyone who thinks that embeds should summarily be yanked should ponder this officer's letter a lot.

A retired Marine pilot returned to duty in the Air Force Reserve and wound up flying a plane full of Marine coffins back to the States. As Marine dad this piece really got to me. I am so thankful we have men (and women) like this serving.

You really should read about three amazing medics in combat in Iraq known as Charlie's Angels.

Blackfive posts emails home in Thanksgiving in Fallujah.

Joe Gandelman offers more exploration of the meanings in bin Laden's recent videotape.

The IHT elaborates on how Europe is paying the price for cultural naivete, namely that Muslims immigrants have largely rejected the multiculturalist "tolerance" on which Europe prides itself.

OTOH, Tony Blankley thinks that Europe is starting to wake up to the danger.

Belmont Club has a third installment about the Triangle of Death.


This and that

It's baaaaccckkk -- Mt St. Helens is rapidly rebuilding itself to its former size. And I always was taught that geologic processess were slooooooooooww - you know, eons long.

A physicist has some thoughts about religion and morality.

Might the now-infamous basketbrawl between the Pacers and Pistons been an elaborate hoax? The mind boggles!


A camel's nose inside the tent? Heck, we've got the whole darn hump now!

A California teacher has been barred by his school from giving students documents from American history that refer to God -- including the Declaration of Independence.

by Donald Sensing, 11/25/2004 10:51:00 AM. Permalink |

What I am thankful for

Little girls who wear braces but still smile




Sons who grow up to honorable manhood




The Missoula Children's Theater




High school sports events




Good music and the people who make it ...




... especially American-born music.




The interstate highway system




The saving love of God




Pioneer women, who actually settled the country - the men only occupied it.




That this man and his peers lived when they did




For all those who labor in the healing arts and sciences (this is Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin)




For Boy Scout leaders and Eagle Scouts




And for goofy Girl Scout parties, too!




That America went to the moon and I got to watch it live on TV ...




... and for private dreamers who made the moon come true, and will again.




That I lived to see another day in 1998




For Christmas mornings




For the magnificence of this land




For those who build our country ...




... and who just go to work each day




For the heroes of our home soil ...




... who lifted our hearts in darkened days




For sacrifices of past generations ...




... and of the present one (Lance Cpl. Stephen Sensing, USMC, vic. Fallujah, Iraq, 5 Nov. 2005)




For the hearts of American GIs - past ...




... and present ...




... who fight for freedom ...




... and bear the scars on their souls.


"The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time. The hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them." Thomas Jefferson

by Donald Sensing, 11/24/2004 06:37:00 AM. Permalink |

MNF intro so tame
The just-completed intro to tonight's Monday Night Football program was so tame that I have to think the network canned its already-taped intro because it might have been racy like last week's intro.

The intro tonight simply showed several players from the contending teams, in full uniform less helmet, saying a variation of "It's Monday night at nine p.m. And you know what that means."

Then came an Al Michaels voiceover describing the upcoming contest between the Pats and Chiefs. The whole thing lasted maybe 30 seconds, then cut to Hank Junior's standard dance and sing gig.

Yeah, the intro was dull as dishwater, and there wasn't a female to be found.

by Donald Sensing, 11/22/2004 07:59:00 PM. Permalink |

Beer-cup thrower identified
The "fan" who threw the beer cup at Indiana Pacers player Ron Artest, sending him into a furious charge into the stands near the end of Friday's game with the Detroit Pistons, has been identified, reports a Detroit TV station.

John Green, of West Bloomfield, was caught on tape throwing his cup of beer onto Indiana Pacers player Ron Artest, Local 4 reported. The act sent Artest into a rage in the stands, where players and fans then fought during the game between the Pistons and the Pacers.

Local 4 learned that Green has a criminal history, which includes the following offenses:

2003 -- Operating under the influence of liquor/operating while visibly impaired (second offense)

1989 -- Assault with intent to do great bodily harm less than murder

1989 -- Escape from prison

1986 -- Carrying concealed weapons

1986 -- Uttering and publishing, which is using a false, forged, altered or counterfeit record, deed or instrument to injure or defraud.

Artest had already been struck by Pistons player Ben Wallace on the court. Artest retreated and laid down atop a scorer's table when the beer cup came sailing to hit him on the chest. That was the end of Artest's serenity. He blasted into the stands and went straight for Green, but

Green stepped aside and another person took the initial blow. The tape of Friday's fight then shows Green attacking Artest from behind.

The other, innocent guy went down hard, too.

Detroit police have said that "anyone who threw a cup or a punch -- including players and fans -- could face criminal charges." As well they should. Artest's rage has already cost him almost $5 million, his remaining salary for the season. NBA Commissioner David Stern suspended Artest for the rest of the season, and he won't be paid during his suspension. Eight other players were also suspended, though none for the rest of the season.

by Donald Sensing, 11/22/2004 07:46:00 PM. Permalink |

Linkagery

A tragedy befell a reporter where fellow blogger Michael Silence works, the Knoxville (TN) News. One of Michael's colleagues collapsed and died in the newsroom this afternoon. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family.

Bill Whittle is selling his book on his site, a precursor to later sales on Amazon, B&N;, etc.

Speaking of books, Scott Ott's Axis of Weasels is still going fairly strong on Amazon.

Over at V. D. Hanson's site, Joseph D'Hippolito compares the rhetoric of jihadism and Nazism In Their Own Words.

Joe Gandelman says this is the Dumb Idea Of The Century: Embedding Reporters With Jihadists.

Michael Crane is updating Political Junkie Handbook to include new information, such as "Comparing Economic Freedom with Political Orientation."

David Kaspar in Germany says that Matthias Doepfner, chief executive of German publisher Axel Springer AG, has written a blistering attack in the daily WELT against the cowardice of Europe in the face of the Islamic threat: "Europe - Thy Name is Cowardice."

Slowplay.com is a new blog that offers political commentary as well as sports and entertainment stories. See what you think.

Barbara K. Kaye, Ph.D., Associate Professor, University of Tennessee-Knoxville and a research partner of Southern Illinois University-Carbondale are conducting an online survey that examines the credibility of online and traditional media, and the motivations for accessing the Web, weblogs, chat rooms, bulletin boards and other Internet resources for political information. To participate, click here.

The Jerry Falwell comeback - a good thing? James Jewell says certainly not. He's right, too.

Phone cards are needed by the troops.

Evolution in the headlines again. Does the standard evolutionary model fail Stephen Hawking's two requirements of a good theory? Hawkings wrote,

A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements. It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements. And it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.

A scientist says it fails the second requirement, and passes the first.

If you haven't read The Diplomad, a blog by active and retired foreign service officers, you should.

For that matter, Peaktalk is also worth your time.

Speaking of evolution, a peer-reviewed biology publication of the Smithsonian Institution published an article in August that "argues that no current materialistic theory of evolution can account for the origin of the information necessary to build novel animal forms" and which "proposes intelligent design as an alternative explanation for the origin of biological information and the higher taxa."

by Donald Sensing, 11/22/2004 06:24:00 PM. Permalink |

NBC videographer speaks out
Kevin Sites was the videographer who captured on tape the Marine shooting a wounded Iraqi insurgent in the head inside a Fallujah mosque on Nov. 13.

The video generated enormous controversy and Sites himself has become a focal point of debate. Now, on his own blog, Sites explains at length what happened that day and what he saw. Here's a zinger.

Immediately after the mosque incident, I told the unit's commanding officer what had happened. I shared the video with him, and its impact rippled all the way up the chain of command. Marine commanders immediately pledged their cooperation.

We all knew it was a complicated story, and if not handled responsibly, could have the potential to further inflame the volatile region. I offered to hold the tape until they had time to look into incident and begin an investigation -- providing me with information that would fill in some of the blanks.

So Sites can hardly be fairly accused of being an antiwar propagandist. The real question here is why the Marine commanders didn't accept his offer to sit on the story until they could get an investigation properly started.

In the event, the video was shared with every other news outlet covering the battle, as it had to be under the media pool rules in effect. It was broadcast in the US two days after the shooting. But it immediately gave a huge propaganda coup to our opponents and domestically engendered a debate about the place of media on the battlefield. This debate, however, has hardly risen above the level of background noise which shows it isn't really very important. And the best example of mdeia self-examination I've seen comes from Britain, not America. Yesterday the UK Telegraph published a piece by Kevin Myers that examines the complexity of the question - and of the circumstances our soldiers find in battle:

Lance Corporal Ian Malone and Piper Christian Muzvuru, 1st Battalion, Irish Guards, RIP, took no such precautions in Basra in April last year. They simply ignored the body of the dead fedayeen fighter as they dismounted from their Warrior armoured fighting vehicle - and it, being on a suicide mission, promptly rose up and shot them both, before itself being blown apart. Thenceforth, the "Micks" probably made it their business to re-kill every corpse they saw.

And almost of this shooting will done away from the camera lens. Myers concludes,

We in the media must learn what our role in that struggle will be. Vicarious indignation at so-called atrocities is a moral frivolity: it proves that we are unaware of the scale of the crisis we face, now and into the foreseeable future. Our common enemy has vision, dedication, courage and intelligence. He is profoundly grateful for whatever tit-bits come his way: our media have a moral obligation to ensure that we are scattering absolutely none in his direction.

This self-examining debate doesn't seem to be going on at all in American media. Apparently, American media continue to think they are reporting "just the facts" and where the chips fall is not relevant to the jobs of those reporting the first draft of history. But there is no unbiased reporting. "All text has intention" was one of the insights I learned in seminary. All text springs from the points of view of the author(s), is selective in what it includes and omits, and in what perspective it tells its story.

The beginning of reportage wisdom would be to recognize that bias in inherent in all reporting. "Objectivity" is not truly obtainable (but "balance" is, though only roughly). The question, then, is not whether to be biased, but which biases shall be chosen, and why.

As I wrote back in May, there are only four basic 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 cultures so that terrorism does not threaten.

2. The Islamofascists achieve their goals of Islamicization of the entire Middle East (at the minimum), 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.

Perhaps you can think of another, different outcome, but I think these pretty much cover them.

So the question for commentati, whether based on the web or in traditional media, is this: which of these outcomes is best?

As for me, I choose the first, and have no qualms admitting I am heavily biased in favor thereof. And that bias certainly shapes what I write in this blog!

As for the news media, I ask you: 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 is no neutral ground here, no "God's eye view" of events, and hence no possibility of not taking sides. One way or another, what you print or broadcast, what stories you cover and how you cover them, what attention you pay to what issues and how you describe them - all these things mean that you will support one outcome over another. Which will you choose? How will you support it? These are the most important questions of your vocation today. But you seem not to be facing them at all.

Roger Simon is right: this war is war at its most basic: "It's about civilization versus a death cult. Make a choice!"

by Donald Sensing, 11/22/2004 07:10:00 AM. Permalink |

Ford's Salute to the Armed Forces
Yes, it's an ad, but it's also a great tribute in streaming video.

My Marine son went to the field for two weeks of Marine Combat Training at Camp Lejeune three days ago. This Thursday will be the first Thanksgiving he hasn't been home, and the first Thanksgiving meal he'll eat from a mess kit. So maybe Ford's salute hit me a little harder than otherwise.

by Donald Sensing, 11/21/2004 09:16:00 PM. Permalink |

No more "any soldier" mail or packages
Do not mail cards or packages addressed to "any soldier" (or any Marine, airman, sailor, etc.).

The military's capacity to transport mail and packages to overseas areas, principally combat theaters, is so strained that the Defense Dept. has announced it will not accept any mail or packages addressed to "any soldier" serving overseas.

This year, with full combat in Fallujah and increased attacks on convoys carrying fuel, bombs and bullets, the Department of Defense is limiting the mail to items addressed by name only — and asking that they be sent only by immediate family and friends... .

People will still send "any soldier" mail, of course, but it will not be accepted by military postal services and won't reach anyone. Actual military supplies always take priority. And the services won't warehouse "any soldier" mail until transport becomes available. It will just get pitched.

by Donald Sensing, 11/21/2004 07:12:00 PM. Permalink |

The Sunday sermon, 11-21
My sermon for Thanksgiving Sunday is up.

by Donald Sensing, 11/21/2004 04:35:00 PM. Permalink |

Assimilation message spreads to Germany
Just a few days after prominent, conservative Dutch politician Geert Wilders demanded that Muslim immigrants either assimilate into the mainstream of Dutch culture and politics or leave the country, one of Europe's leading liberal leaders echoed his words.

[Germany's] Chancellor Gerhard Schröder called on Muslims to better integrate themselves into German society and warned over what he called a "conflict of cultures."

The same article covers a 20,000-strong march in Cologne today, "to protest against the use of violence in the name of Islam." Significantly, the march originated from both a mosque and a cathedral. The marchers "converged in the middle of the city for the event organized by the Islamic-Turkish Union with the slogan 'Hand in Hand for Peace and Against Terror.'" As Glenn Reynolds said, "It's a start," hopefully toward an interfaith alliance against religious terrorism. The Muslim marchers, though, were almost excusively Turks who hail from the most democratic and liberalized societies in the Islamic world.

The article doesn't say, but I would guess the cathedral was, well, the Cologne Cathderal, one of the architectural treasures of all Europe. Miraculously, it escaped serious damage during World War II, despite being located almost next to the city's main train station, which was heavily, repetitively bombed by the Royal Air Force. The target of the first 1,000-bomber raid of the war, 95 percent of the city center was turned to utter ruin, all around the cathedral.

In the mid-1980s, when I was stationed in Germany, my wife and I visted the cathedral a few times. One day were buttonholed by a man who gave us a discourse about being a child seeking shelter inside the cathedral from the bombs falling all around. Miraculously - I almost use the word quite seriously - the flying bomb splinters and concussions did not damage the priceless and irreplaceable stain-glass windows.

by Donald Sensing, 11/21/2004 02:44:00 PM. Permalink |

Politics through an evangelical prism
The New Republic has a piece about whether evangelical Christians really are under liberal attack in America today. On the whole, it's a fair though short (hence, superficial) article.

But it comes up short here.

What ... liberals are saying is that the Christian Right sees politics through the prism of theology, and there's something dangerous in that. And they're right. It's fine if religion influences your moral values. But, when you make public arguments, you have to ground them--as much as possible--in reason and evidence, things that are accessible to people of different religions, or no religion at all. Otherwise, you can't persuade other people, and they can't persuade you. In a diverse democracy, there must be a common political language, and that language can't be theological.

Almost right, but still wrong enough to be plain wrong. It's condescending to say "it's fine" for religion to influence one's moral values, then insist that religion be set aside in making public arguments. This reveals one of the major weaknesses of the left side of the aisle in addressing religion: TNR and its ideological allies grudgingly allow me to be religious (as if I need their acquiescence) but insist that I leave my religion at home when venturing into the public domain. What gives this author the right to set such rules? Nothing.

If liberals, as TNR uses the term, were to be true to their longstanding, self-stated principles, they would welcome any basis for arguing public policy. The United States somehow manages to putter along with every other stripe of ideology active in the public square, but TNR thinks that evangelicals alone are "dangerous."

But then, instead of explaining why evangelicalism is "dangerous" to the republic, TNR instead claims it is merely impractical: evangelical arguments aren't "accessible" to non-evangelicals and hence "don't persuade" them. If true, how can unpersuasive, narrowly-constructed arguments with no broad appeal be dangerous?

It strikes an incongruous chord for the writer to say that evangelicals' claims of anti-Christian bigotry are overstated while claiming that evangelicals are dangerous.

Even so, the broader point seems right: religious arguments don't persuade anyone outside the religion. "The Bible says" is a claim of decreasing power in America today, and has been for a long, long time. TNR continues,

Sometimes, conservative evangelicals grasp this and find nonreligious justifications for their views. (Christian conservatives sometimes argue that embryonic stem cells hold little scientific promise, or that gay marriage leads to fewer straight ones. On abortion, they sometimes cite medical advances to show that fetuses are more like infants than pro-choicers recognize. Such arguments are accessible to all, and thus permit fruitful debate.) But, since the election, the airwaves have been full of a different kind of argument. What many conservatives are now saying is that, since certain views are part of evangelicals' identity, harshly criticizing those views represents discrimination.

It is discrimination or bigotry when criticizing evangelicals' arguments is done simply because evangelicals make them. Nonetheless, a particular weakness of theologically conservative Christians is that they often are close to absolutism. Insistence on absolute truth is a religious weakness, not strength, especially in the broader, public arena. I agree that religiously-founded beliefs, to be translated into some sort of public policy, need to include arguments from reason as well as revelation. That is the tactic I used to write about same-sex marriage last February, for example.

In the secular democracy of the United States, all public-square arguments are finally judged on their merits, whether they are religious or not. If an increasing number of people find religious arguments politically persuasive, then welcome to a working democracy. Personally, I think the chance of that is somewhere between slim and none, and slim has left town.

Update: This evangelical thinks,

The Presidential election of 2004 will be a miserable victory for evangelicals. They coalesced in record numbers to vote for a man who didn't mean what he said and didn't deserve their vote. They voted for a lame duck who no longer needs their votes.

The heartbreaker is that such a vote of solidarity was unprecedented. It's unlikely to happen again anytime soon.

Yep, slim is out of town. (ht: Dean's World)

Update: Check Pelto has a lot more to say on this topic and the TNR article over at his blog.

by Donald Sensing, 11/20/2004 07:17:00 PM. Permalink |

Speaking of sports brawls


This was an on-field meleee that broke out at the South Carolina-Clemson game today. That's USC Coach Lou Holtz in the pic, trying to restore order.

by Donald Sensing, 11/20/2004 06:13:00 PM. Permalink |

How to say thanks to a troop
Reader Matt H. emails,

I live in Berkeley, CA - perhaps the heartland of the anti-war "movement". As a somewhat grudging Republican and a full supporter of the GWOT, I'm often in my own flavor of enemy territory. That said, I on rare occasion see a man in uniform and feel a strong urge to communicate my feelings of gratefulness and thanks.

I'm stumped, however, as to how to express that. In Berkeley, I feel like my simple "I just wanted to thank you for your service" might be interpereted as ridicule or ... something less than I intend. I just don't know how to approach a serviceman and express my appreciation in a clear and respectful way. I thought I'd write you and ask what you think would be the best way to tell someone in uniform how much I appreciate their efforts and sacrifice.

Actually, Matt, I think that if you said just that, and said it in a way that indicated no insincerity (as I know you would), it would be accepted and appreciated. Try something like this:

"Hello, my name is Matt H. I don't see many people in the armed forces around here, but when I do I take a moment to say how much I am grateful I am for their service. So want to thank you for defending America."

No need to speak longer than that. Or you could print something like that on Avery do-it-yourself business cards and hand one to the service member.

by Donald Sensing, 11/20/2004 05:39:00 PM. Permalink |

Basket-brawl in Detroit
That's how ESPN characterized the near-riot that erupted last night in the last minute of the NBA game between host team Detroit Pistons and visitors Indiana Pacers. The fight, which involved both benches and a number of fans, was one of the worst sports brawls ever.

The AP reports today,

The NBA suspended four players indefinitely Saturday for their roles in one of the worst-ever brawls in the league, a fight with fans that commissioner David Stern called "shocking, repulsive and inexcusable." Indiana's Ron Artest, Jermaine O'Neal and Stephen Jackson and Detroit's Ben Wallace were suspended, the NBA said Saturday.

Police in Auburn Hills, Mich., were investigating, but did not comment on who might be charged.

The fight broke out after Pacer player Artest fouled Piston Wallace during a layup. Wallace retaliated by striking Artest in the upper body or neck with both hands, sending him reeling backward. To his credit, Artest backed away, encouraged by an official. Even when Wallace continued to lunge at him, Artest did not respond aggressively. In fact, Artest actually laid down on his back atop a table a courtside, either an officials table or an announcers table. Meanwhile coaches and other players were succeeding, gradually, in calming Wallace.

That would have been the end of it, no doubt, had not a spectator thrown a plastic cup, filled with either beer or soft drink (beer gets my vote) directly at Artest, striking him on the chest. It was not a hard blow, obviously, but it enraged Artest, who immediately leaped up and charged into the seats, attacking a man he believed had thrown the cup. Teammate Jackson joined in and within seconds, a general melee had erupted in the stands. Several other spectators rushed apparently to defend the fan Artest had attacked, but more likely just to fight. One pounded Artest from behind. Another fan bashed Pacer Fred Jones from behind as well.

After a short while, Artest returned to the court where another fan verbally confronted him. Artest slugged the man in the face, knocking him down. As the fan was getting up, Pacer Jermaine O'Neal cold-cocked him on the side of his face, knocking him back down.

With police and venue officials working hard to restrain the crowd and players, both teams grudgingly returned to the lockers, but the players, mainly Pacers, were assailed by spectators the whole way. Attendees threw drinks and popcorn and clothing items at them, leading to more brawls breaking out near the tunnel. Pacer Jemal Tinsley actually came back form the tunnel brandishing a metal dustpan above his head, as if to strike, but apparently thought better of it and went back inside.

So who's to blame? Well, Wallace started the whole thing. As ESPN commentators pointed out, Artest's foul on him from behind wasn't all that hard. Unquestionably, Wallace far over-reacted.

But Artest can't be let off the hook. He did right by "chilling" through the first few moments, but he entirely over-reacted to being struck by a plastic beer cup.

Finally, sports fans are such idiots. Okay, some sports fans are such idiots. Last night the idiots ruled and clearly exacerbated the situation. Whomever threw the cup at Artest should be charged, as should others who attacked some of the players. In fact, a number of players and spectators alike should stare at the world through bars.

Both low- and high-resolution video of the brawl can be seen or downloaded here.

by Donald Sensing, 11/20/2004 04:41:00 PM. Permalink |

Assimilate or leave
So says a Dutch politician to radical Islamists.

"We are a Dutch democratic society. We have our own norms and values," right-wing lawmaker Geert Wilders told The Associated Press in an interview. "If you chose radical Islam you can leave, and if you don't leave voluntarily then we will send you away. This is the only message possible."

Whatever the merits of Wilders' position, this sort of reaction to Islamism, if more widely adopted, will also serve to unleash the anti-Judaism that has tragically never been far below the surface of European society.

Winds of Change has a lot more.

by Donald Sensing, 11/19/2004 04:19:00 PM. Permalink |

I just don't get it
I simply do not understand why this is considered newsworthy at all. Truly, I'm baffled.

Update: My point being that Rondstandt's musical celebrity and talent gives her no wisdom into American politics. In fact, she proves that point by claiming that the majority of voters "voted against themselves." What gives her the authority to say that? Nothing.

I read one author (can't recall his name) who called this kind of article the conferring of horizontal expertise, the notion that expertise on one area bestows authority in others. His example was Noam Chomsky, MIT professor of linguistics, who unaccountably claims and is conferred expertise and authority in international affairs. But what on what basis other than fame or notoriety? None at all, and the same for Rondstadt.

Just to be even handed about this, I would say the same thing about James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family. Dobson is a quite competent child psychologist, his professional field, but unaccountably claims and has been conferred with political expertise and authority not only by the religious right, but also by the mainstream media. I think Michael Totten covered this demagogue rather well, so I won't repeat. Dobson, unfortunately, has a substantial political bloc following him, so I suppose that makes him at least minimally newsworthy, but I still claim that he, like Chomsky, gets far more media attention than he actually warrants, based on factors unrelated to his actual political-affairs expertise, which is nil.

by Donald Sensing, 11/18/2004 10:25:00 PM. Permalink |

The "Cult of Powell"
A recently-retired foreign service officer gives a mixed review to Colin Powell's tenure as SecState.

On the substance of policy, however, he proved highly conventional. He was a classic Europe-oriented Wilsonian; he believed in established international institutions; in the Atlantic Alliance; was slow to reposition State to focus more on the Pacific; and was clearly at odds with the President or, at least, uncomfortable with the White House stance on key policy issues, e.g., Kyoto, International Criminal Court, Article 98 waivers, the ABM treaty. He quickly also became a more traditional manager; much of his initial talk of encouraging new ideas and debate and dissent quickly fell by the wayside, as he and his management team (many of them military) instituted a very top-down, no talk-back, "we know what's best for you" management style that demanded absolute unquestioning loyalty to the "cult of Powell."

As I previously quoted Christopher Hitchen's piece on Powell, "... few things became Secretary Powell’s tenure more than the leaving of it."

I was stationed in the Pentagon when Powell was the JCS chairman. I didn't work for Powell, but did coordinate with his staff from time to time. His star was shining bright then, as you may recall. I remember how not merely loyal, but highly admiring, his staff was of him.

by Donald Sensing, 11/18/2004 08:03:00 PM. Permalink |

Iran smacks down bloggers
Yesterday I posted about the 14-year-old Iranian boy who was sentenced to death by an Islamic court for breaking the Ramadan fast. Technically, he was sentenced to receive 85 lashes of the whip, but the judge certainly knew it would kill him.

I said, "Expect all the West's human-rights watchdogs to mount an aggressive campaign to .... oh, never mind." Michael Chaney responded in comments by pointing out that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have been covering abuses in Iran.

So, willing to accept correction or fact checking when it is offered, I point the way to HRW's current story, "Iran: Web Writers Purge Underway, Arrests Designed to Silence NGO Activists," for which HRW deserves commendation, not only for reporting issues in Iran but for also recognizing the importance of blogs for freedom in the country.

Iran has been arresting Internet writers and bloggers since Sept. 7.

Human Rights Watch said that to date none of the detainees have been charged with any crime. Judicial authorities have given differing reasons for these arrests. On October 12, 2004, Jamal Karimi Rad, the judiciary’s spokesman, said that the detainees were accused of “propaganda against the regime, endangering national security, inciting public unrest, and insulting sacred belief.” The head of the judiciary, Ayatollah Shahrudi, in an interview with state-run television on October 27, 2004 stated that “these people will be tried in connection with moral crimes.”

Nemat Ahmadi, defense counsel for some of the detainees, has been repeatedly barred from meeting his clients and has stated that they are being kept in solitary confinement.

“The only criminal behavior here appears to be that of Iran’s judiciary officials,” [HRW director Joe] Stork said. “They seem to be ready to defy the country’s own laws as well as its international human rights obligations in solidifying their hold on power.”

Iran, btw, is a theocracy.

by Donald Sensing, 11/18/2004 06:17:00 PM. Permalink |

The coming American theocracy
I spoke at lunchtime today to a Nashville civic organization. It was their weekly meeting. I gave a little talk of comparative religion - what distinguishes Islam from Christianity and (with less emphasis) Islam from Judaism.

During the Q&A; one of the men there "probed" (not directly asked) for my thoughts about his assertion that President Bush wanted to establish a theocracy in America. I didn't bite, but the point has nagged me ever since.

What is this fear of a looming theocracy based on? We all know that Bush is a religious man - but Jimmy Carter spoke very openly about being born again. Bill Clinton filled many speeches with Christian allusions and language and spoke in a lot of churches. Yet no one gasped fearfully that either Carter or Clinton wanted to establish a theocracy.

Now along comes Bush, whose speeches are practically bereft of biblical language, and a significant section of the other side of the aisle thinks he wants to institute religious rule.

But on what actual basis is that fear (or accusation) based?

Truly, I'd like to know. Someone leave a comment explaining this (please, no email). It doesn't count that Bush is religious for the reasons I said above. If any reader thinks, as the man did today, that Bush wants to establish a theocracy, then please provide evidence, not assertion, such as:

What legislation that Bush has sponsored that is theocratically aligned?

What executive orders has he issued that move America closer to religious rule?

In what way have the cabinet departments administered in a way that is theocratically inclined?

Or other such topics as you may think of.

Also, any answer, to be persuasive (to me, anyway), must account for the fact that the Defense Dept. just folded like wet paper to the ACLU's demand that military bases no longer sponsor Boy Scout troops because the BSA is religious. If Bush wants to establish a theocracy, why did Bush permit this?

BTW, it will help if commenters actually know what a theocracy is.

Update: As it turns out, William Sjostrom asked much the same question back on Nov. 4.

by Donald Sensing, 11/18/2004 06:11:00 PM. Permalink |

Austin Bay on Arafat's legacy
There's no reason to miss him, that's for sure.

by Donald Sensing, 11/17/2004 09:59:00 PM. Permalink |

Killed for eating
A 14-year-old boy was executed in Iran for eating, after being convicted in an Islamic court of the crime. Expect all the West's human-rights watchdogs to mount an aggressive campaign to .... oh, never mind.

by Donald Sensing, 11/17/2004 09:13:00 PM. Permalink |

Did that US Marine commit a crime?
By now all readers surely know about the video taken by NBC cameraman Kevin Sites Nov. 13 that shows a US Marine shooting an apparently helpless, wounded Iraqi man inside a mosque in Fallujah.

The Marines had battled armed insurgents who were holed up inside the mosque Friday. They killed 10. Before leaving, the Marine treated five enemy wounded. The next day the Marines returned.

On the video as the camera moved into the mosque during the Saturday incident, a Marine can be heard shouting obscenities in the background, yelling that one of the men was only pretending to be dead.

The video then showed a Marine raising his rifle toward a prisoner laying on the floor of the mosque but neither NBC nor CNN showed the bullet hitting the man. At that moment the video was blacked out but the report of the rifle could be heard.

The blacked out portion of the video tape, provided later to Associated Press Television News and other members of the network pool, showed the bullet striking the man in the upper body, possibly the head. His blood splatters on the wall behind him and his body goes limp.

Sites reported a Marine in the same unit had been killed just a day earlier when he tended to the booby-trapped dead body of an insurgent.

American commanders in Iraq announced shortly after the incident was broadcast that a formal investigation was being opened. The Marine who fired the shot has not been publicly identified but has been taken out of combat.

So: did the Marine commit murder? Sites said that the Iraqi the Marine shot was already severely wounded, but breathing, when the Marines entered the room. The Naval Criminal Investigation Service, NCIS, will conduct the investigation and decide whether a case for prosecution exists. In the military law system, the Marine's commander will then decide whether he will file the actual charges against the Marine, if any charges are to be filed. An Article 32 investigation, conducted by an appointed senior officer, will determine whether evidence is sufficient to go to trial; and Art. 32 investigation is the military parallel of a grand jury investigation. If the case goes to trial, I would say it will be a General Court Martial, the highest level of military court, affording both the greatest protective rights for a defendant and the strictest judicial procedures. It is presided over by a military judge, for this case (if a case it turns out to be) almost certainly a full colonel. (For details about military courts, read here.

The apparent facts are that the Marines entered the room where they encountered five Iraqi men whom they reasonably concluded were insurgents. At least one was dead, the others wounded. The Marine shot and killed one of the wounded men.

My first blush on this event is that this Marine is in trouble. I did see the tape the same day it was first broadcast, although the actual shooting itself was blacked out. Summary execution of wounded enemy is expressly forbidden by the Geneva Convention, to which the United States is a signatory and which is embodied in US federal law as the Law of Land Warfare.

Article 12 of the Geneva Convention of 1864 states that "…Members of the armed forces and other persons (…) who are wounded or sick, shall be respected and protected in all circumstances. They shall be treated humanely and cared for by the Party to the conflict in whose power they may be, without any adverse distinction founded on sex, race, nationality, religion, political opinions or any other similar criteria. Any attempts upon their lives, or violence to their persons, shall be strictly prohibited; in particular, they shall not be murdered or exterminated, subjected to torture or to biological experiments…". The Parties to the Geneva Conventions also have to search for and collect the wounded and sick and to ensure them protection and care (article 15). [link, italics added]

However, it must be recognized by all that the protections afforded by the Conventions confer certain obligations upon the protected parties in order to retain the protected status. Mosques, for example (and churches and synagogues, etc) are not be damaged or destroyed, but neither may they be militarized by using them as armories or fortresses. If so - and there have been plenty examples of this in Iraq - they lose their treaty protections. Nota bene:

The definition of wounded and sick for the purpose of the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol 1) is "…persons, whether military or civilians, who, because of trauma, disease or other physical or mental disorder or disability, are in need of medical assistance or care and who refrain from any act of hostility ." [italics added]

I don't know whether the shot Iraqi made any gesture that could reasonably have been interpreted as hostile in intent; I suspect not, for what I know at the moment. But if the investigation shows that the insurgents made a habit of continuing to fight when wounded - which wounded fighters may do if they wish - or if they made a habit of booby-trapping their dead, then they have effectively surrendered protection under the Convention. That will weigh heavily in favor of the Marine.

In World War 2, the Japanese did both things so often, including pretending to be dead, that Marines and soldiers fighting them came to the point of simply shooting on sight Japanese bodies that were not obviously dead. As well they should have.

But the investigation in Iraq should go forward unhindered. Let the NCIS and the Marines commanders do their job.

Update:

Marine Lance Cpl. Jeramy Ailes, 22, of Gilroy was killed Monday in Al-Fallujah by small arms fire. "They had finished mopping up in Fallujah and they went back to double-check on some insurgents. From what we gathered, somebody playing possum jumped up and shot him," said his father, Joel Ailes, who learned of his death Monday evening. "It's extremely hard."

If the Marine in the video does stand trial, testimony of Marines who witnessed acts like those that killed LCPL Ailes will practically guarantee an acquittal.

by Donald Sensing, 11/17/2004 05:06:00 PM. Permalink |

Powell resigns roundup
Joe Gandelman is compiling an index of blogger reaction to the resignation of SecState Colin Powell. It is pretty large already and he will keep adding to it.

Update: Myself, I think that Christopher Hitchens, no member of the VRWC he, pretty much got it right in Foreign Policy: "... few things became Secretary Powell’s tenure more than the leaving of it."

by Donald Sensing, 11/15/2004 01:00:00 PM. Permalink |

Nukes via Mexico?
I posted Friday that Osama bin Laden has reportedly obtained a Saudi sheik's divine sanction of OBL's desire to nuke America. I concluded,

Whether this development means that OBL has, or thinks he will soon obtain, a WMD is an interesting but probably unfruitful speculation.

Well, perhaps not unfruitful after all.

A key al-Qaeda operative seized in Pakistan recently offered an alarming account of the group's potential plans to target the U.S. with weapons of mass destruction, senior U.S. security officials tell TIME. Sharif al-Masri, an Egyptian who was captured in late August near Pakistan's border with Iran and Afghanistan, has told his interrogators of "al-Qaeda's interest in moving nuclear materials from Europe to either the U.S. or Mexico," according to a report circulating among U.S. government officials.

The border security between Mexico and the US, of course, hinders illegals from crossing northward about as well as a screen door stops rain, a fact about which the Bush administration evinces no apparent concern.

Update: Gerard Van der Leun says that there's no need to smuggle a nuke north of the Rio Grande. Exploding it in Mexico - say in Juarez - would work just as well.

by Donald Sensing, 11/15/2004 08:56:00 AM. Permalink |

Why not use tear gas in Fallujah?
And some thoughts about the intentional lethality of battle

Day before yesterday Michael Totten posted some thoughts about who "Ain't Studying War No More," and why they should. In the comment, Joel wrote,

After watching some news of the fighting in Fallujah, my reflexively pacifist wife ... asked why our soldiers couldn't use tear gas to clear enemy fighters out of buildings--so we wouldn't have to kill people who were trying to kill us. Seriously. I was dumbfounded.

I answered Joel in a comment, but I figured I'd address it here, too.

Actually, Joel's Mrs. didn't ask a stupid question at all. In World War II, American commanders considered using gas weapons against Japanese islands. When the casualty list at Iwo Jima grew shockingly long - a quarter of all Marine casualties in the war were suffered at Iwo - there was a brief but loud public demand that the Japanese be gassed to death to avoid such harsh fighting again.

There are several aspects to answering Mrs. Joel. One is that the Iraqi army had an abundance of gas masks. I am confident that the insurgents have some on hand or can get them fairly quickly.

The first is that she sees using tear gas as a way to take the terrorist fighters prisoner. But getting a lung full of tear gas doesn't drive soldiers to surrender; it drives them to go bonkers. They are just as liable to run out firing furiously as anything else. So no surrender is assured. However, it may have the benefit of driving them into the where our troops could kill them more easily.

Unfortunately, in close quarters urban combat, our troops would be sucking their own tear gas, too, meaning that our soldiers would have to fight gas-masked. That seriously degrades their effectiveness in endurance, visibility and hearing, not desirable.

No gas can distinguish between combatants and civilians. Its use would endanger noncombatants unacceptably. They would be probably more liable to be driven into lines of fire than the insurgents.

Finally, in 1997, the United States signed an international treaty banning wartime use of chemical weapons. Although tear gas is not classified as a chemical agent (it is a riot-control agent) the treaty we signed specifically forbids use on RCAs in battle: "Each state party undertakes not to use riot-control agents as a method of warfare."

The treaty does allow for RCA to be used for "law enforcement," but that is a huge can of definitional worms that no one wants to touch. And whatever is going on in Fallujah now, it isn't law enforcement by any stretch.

Finally, Mrs. Joel seems to have a mistaken idea of what we are fighting the battle to do. The cruel, hard fact is that we and our Iraqi allies are giving battle to the insurgents to kill them, not take them prisoner. It is their destruction, not their surrender, we are trying to accomplish. Certainly any of them who offer surrender, and some have, will be accepted and they'll be treated humanely. But we didn't begin the offensive for that purpose.

Not making a symbolic gesture.

Not understanding the intentional lethality of battle is a very common misperception among people of the comfortable classes such as Mrs. Joel - for example, the graduate students I had dinner with one night just after the air campaign began against the Afghan Taliban. They apparently thought that our bombing was a form of posturing, a symbolic display, intended to yield psychological, not lethal, effects on the enemy.

One guest said that the bombing "wouldn't intimidate" the Taliban.

"We're not trying to intimidate them," I said.

"Then why are we bombing them?" came the question.

"To kill them," I answered. There was a long silence at the table. The concept seemed not to have occurred to them.

On the one hand, quashing the insurgency requires killing as many of the insurgents as possible. On the other, it won't be possible to kill them all. At what point the insurgency will be unable to continue, or the remaining insurgents unable to continue, is very difficult to ascertain. The insurgency will likely wax and wane over a long time. Military force can take the counter-insurgency effort only so far. Its final elimination will not be won by battle but by the ascension of human rights, representative democracy, reconstruction of Iraq's infrastructure and inculcating civil society - all daunting tasks at this stage of postwar Iraq.

Update: A Marine major fighting in Fallujah wrote on Nov. 10,

There is no negotiating or surrender for those guys. If we see the position and positively ID them as bad guys, we strike. When they run, we call it maneuver and we strike them too. Why? Yesterday the muj attacked an ambulance carrying our wounded. The attackers were hunted down and killed without quarter. These guys want to be martyrs.....we're helping.

Emphasis added. One of the natures of urban combat is that it becomes up close and personal much more quickly than open-area combat. Mini-vendettas such as the one the major described are not unusual.

by Donald Sensing, 11/15/2004 08:23:00 AM. Permalink |

Today's sermon
Is now online.

by Donald Sensing, 11/14/2004 07:16:00 PM. Permalink |

Democracy in Iraq - lousy odds?
Way back in early February of last year I expressed some pessimism about the chances that postwar Iraq would develop an American-style democracy. Specifically:

So will there be Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq? I don't think so. Maybe the best we can hope for is a confederation of tribal regions, united only in their desire to share in oil profits. I don't see a successful federal system being emplaced there. The boundary lines of "Iraq" on the map will be merely the limits of centripetal expansion of tribal regions.

I gave some other reasons, too, and I still say that successful growth of democracy, whether specifically America-type democracy or European type, can't be taken for granted. There are large numbers of Iraqis risking and giving their lives to make it happen, but their success is not assured yet.

Robert Kaplan has a cautionary piece in the NY Times today in which he calls for pragmatism is American policy regarding democracy in Iraq.

While democracy can take root anywhere (look at Indonesia and Afghanistan), it cannot be imposed overnight anywhere. Keep in mind that in Afghanistan we dismantled only a regime and not an entire bureaucratic apparatus of control like in Iraq; for in Afghanistan no such apparatus had existed. Over sizable swaths of the country there had been only warlords and tribal militias, with whom we had to work for many months before we began to co-opt them into a new legitimate authority: or, as the situation demanded, help that new authority to gradually ease them out. In Afghanistan following 9/11, we did what we had to do, and otherwise accepted the place as it was. The result has been change for the better.

Pragmatism is not about looking away, but it is about humility in the face of long-standing historical and cultural forces. In foreign policy, a modest acceptance of fate will lead to discipline rather than indifference.

It would have been nice if Kaplan had actually come to a conclusion, but I take his point anyway - that is, what I think is his point, which seems to be, "go slow."

In my 2003 post I said that the most likely form of Iraqi democracy would be a confederation of tribal areas, united in their desire to share oil profits, but not really held together by much else. This form of national organization has come to be called consociational government, which in fact is what Afghanistan has under the Karzai Germany (usually referred to there as a consociational oligarchy). Yet I conclude that consociationality is not so likely now for two reasons. First, Iraq is less tribally organized than I thought; while tribal identity there is still important, it isn't overwhelmingly so. Second, according to Daniel Byman and Kennethh Pollack,

A consociational oligarchy would be difficult to establish for the simple reason that Iraq currently lacks potential oligarchs. Before Saddam took power, Iraq had numerous tribal, religious, military, municipal, and merchant leaders of sufficient stature to exercise considerable independent power. “Had” is the key word. Because Saddam ruthlessly eliminated any leaders in the country with the potential to rival himself, strong local leaders are lacking. Those who remain in the armed forces, in the Sunni tribes, and among some of the Shi‘ite militias and religious figures are political pygmies, lacking anything resembling the kind of independent power needed to dominate the country. The armed forces, particularly the Republican Guard, had the power to rule the country, but they have been decimated and fragmented by the U.S. military offensive.

Meanwhile, 75 percent of the population is urban, and even those citydwellers who retain some links to their tribes reportedly do not want to be represented by unsophisticated, rural shaykhs who know nothing about life in Iraq’s cities. Nor do these mostly secular Iraqis want to be represented by clerics whose goals might be very different from their own.

Byman and Pollock go on to point out that another form of distatorship, even "benevolent" at first, would solve nothing and result not in a stable though undemocratic Iraq, but invite civil war and foreign adventurism.

If neither oligarchy nor dictatorship portend for Iraqi stability, what is left if not democracy? Well, nothing, but even so, Iraq is very hard soil for democracy to take root. Even so, it can take root (Kaplan does say this). Iraqi Dr. Laith Kubba said in 2002, considering post-Saddam Iraq,

If I want to some up what is the meaning of democracy in Iraq, I will sum it up in one word: participation. Unless Iraqis participate and take charge and responsibility democracy will remain a distant dream and it will not take place. It is not going to be given to them. The recourse to corrupt politics in Iraq has resulted in the inability of Iraqis to bring change due to their lack of participation.

Democracy is not going to happen from the top: it is not going to be introduced by a decision of a decree. Democracy will happen everywhere when Iraqis start developing small institutions and groups and demand it in a constructive way. Participation is the key. ...

Of course there are obstacles. Iraqis have been conditioned in the last 30 years not to participate. They have been conditioned to fear. They have been conditioned not to venture outside their own heads and to think about what they can do and what they should do. This conditioning needs to be broken down and the only way to break it down is to set out models and examples. Initiatives like this and initiatives by other Iraqi groups are bound to have an impact.

Dr. Kubba also implicitly renounced consociationalism.

The near-hand task: crushing insurrection

One of the most important tasks governments must accomplish to be stable (whether democratic or not) is to gain and enforce a monopoly on the use of force. For the countries of Europe and the United States, the notion that the government alone may rightfully use violence to achieve its purposes is firmly established. This isn't the case in Iraq for at two reasons. First, Saddam never restricted using violence to rightful causes; he was his own cause. Rather than using minimal force when needed to protect people from exterior aggression or interior criminality, Saddam ruled by violence itself. Second, the country is still embroiled in civil war, for that is what is being fought there now.

The civil war must be won by the Allawi government if the next Iraqi government is to have a chance of enjoying the monopoly of force. Even after the current insurrection is defeated, there well may be, tragically, no little blood shed before the right of monopoly is cemented. But only if the government is democratic in fact, not in face, can that bloodshed be ended. The Iraqi people will not surrender recourse to violence unless the central government truly represents them. Success in this and other endeavors will require a reasonably strong central government.

PS - I wrote an essay last year about how Israel solved the monopoly problem; it took a short Israeli civil war.

by Donald Sensing, 11/14/2004 07:04:00 PM. Permalink |

Osama goes sheik shopping
Drudge has a report about the CIA's former chief expert about Osama bin Laden, Michael Scheuer, who says that OBL has now gained religious approval to nuke America.

Even if bin Laden had a nuclear weapon, he probably wouldn't have used it for a lack of proper religious authority - authority he has now. "[Bin Laden] secured from a Saudi sheik...a rather long treatise on the possibility of using nuclear weapons against the Americans," says Scheuer. "[The treatise] found that he was perfectly within his rights to use them. Muslims argue that the United States is responsible for millions of dead Muslims around the world, so reciprocity would mean you could kill millions of Americans," Scheuer tells [interviewer Steve] Kroft.

Riiiight. I can't match Scheuer's credentials when it comes to Osama expertise, but I don't think that OBL is so sensitive that he's willing to kill thousands of people with airplanes but thinks he needs a sheik's blessing to kill a few multiples more.

Besides, al Qaeda's mouthpiece in the Mid East, Suleiman Abu Gheith, said more than two years ago that they "have the right to kill 4 million Americans - 2 million of them children - and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, it is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons..." But not nukes. right? Nope, sorry, that dog don't hunt.

But it is possible that OBL wants the sheik's blessing to provide PR guard among other Muslims.

Scheuer says bin Laden was criticized by some Muslims for the 9/11 attack because he killed so many people without enough warning and before offering to help convert them to Islam. But now bin Laden has addressed the American people and given fair warning. "They're intention is to end the war as soon as they can and to ratchet up the pain for the Americans until we get out of their region....If they acquire the weapon, they will use it, whether it's chemical, biological or some sort of nuclear weapon," says Scheuer.

Whether this development means that OBL has, or thinks he will soon obtain, a WMD is an interesting but probably unfruitful speculation. We have to be alert and continue to keep reducing al Qaeda.

by Donald Sensing, 11/12/2004 08:52:00 PM. Permalink |

Your own personal howitzer



How would you like one of these in your back pocket?

Bill Hobbs emailed me the link to a piece on The Speculist that wonders why individual infantrymen can't have artillery targeting capability built into their rifles.

Why should an infantryman always have to carry his ammunition? A soldier could be equipped with a modified rifle that forwards target coordinates to an artillery battery that would automatically fire on the target. The targeting and firing decisions would be made solely by the infantryman with the pull of a trigger.

The advantages to such a system would be significant. Each soldier would have a practically inexhaustible supply of ammunition that he doesn’t have to carry.

Well, the question must be asked, inexhaustible ammo supply for whom? Artillery ammo doesn't grow on trees. A 155mm high-explosive projectile weighs 95 pounds; its accompanying propellant cannister weighs about thirty. It's a whole lot easier to push rifle bullets around the battlefield than artillery ammo!

Artillery is so destructive that armies learned decades ago it must be centrally controlled. And not only artillery, but all fire support, including mortars, attack helicopters and tactical air support. All their fires must be planned together, targets identified and deconflicted, time phased and it all has to conform to the force commander's guidance, including accordance with permissive and restrictive fire-support measures.

Fact is, even if this proposal was desirable (it isn't), there's just not enough cannons to go around. There are thousands of infantrymen in a division, but only dozens of cannons. The idea that every grunt can somehow have his own personal howitzer fails on that mathematical reality. Willie and Joe might pull the trigger to shoot artillery at a target, but so is almost every other grunt. So Willie and Joe get a message back, "You are number 1,241 in line to have your mission fired. Wait time is four days." Not very practicable, eh?
.
Speaking of messages, if every grunt is going to become an artillery observer, every grunt will have to be equipped with secure, digital, GPS-linked communications. Plus the laser rangefinder, also GPS linked. Plus a map showing all the battlefield geometry and fire-control graphics so he doesn't blowup other American units. Before long, his rifle is just as afterthought and he's not really an infantryman any longer, he's an artillery forward observer. But we already have one of those for every infantry platoon. We don't need 30 more.

by Donald Sensing, 11/12/2004 06:31:00 PM. Permalink |

It's over but it's not over
Always look on the bright side of life. . .

Okay, Scott Peterson was convicted of murder. This trial has been a burr under my saddle since it began. I simply did not and still don't care about the whole case one way or the other. As murders go, it was brutal, but they always are, no? The news coverage was magnitudes more than the case ever merited.

Now while waiting for him to be sentenced, we will be sentenced to days and days of additional, overdone coverage. Yet until just now, I had not realized there was a bright side to all this:

My main feeling is disappointment that it's over: For many, many months I've been able to look up at TVs in bars, restaurants, the gym, etc. -- and when the Peterson trial was on, I knew right away that there was no actual news to report. Now I've lost that valuable tool.

Well, that's true. But fear not, something else will fill its hole.

by Donald Sensing, 11/12/2004 04:07:00 PM. Permalink |

Arafat's legacy
The list is long and tragic.

by Donald Sensing, 11/12/2004 07:49:00 AM. Permalink |

The Great War

by Donald Sensing, 11/11/2004 07:32:00 PM. Permalink |

Amsterdam and Fallujah
Not really worlds apart after all - so says Austin Bay, writing of murder as Islamofascism's tool of terror. Referring to murdered Dutch libertarian filmmaker Theo van Gogh, -

Holland benefits from the democratic rule of law, and [accused killer] Bouveri is already in custody. However, his crime is a glimpse of how the "murder tool" is used by political and religious reactionaries to thwart moderate voices and frustrate freedom's advocates throughout the Middle East. For decades, Palestinian moderates have complained that they literally live under the gun, fearing reprisal and death.

Is the international press describing Bouveri as a Dutch insurgent or an Islamic insurgent? ... The thugs in Fallujah, whether inspired by Saddam or bin Laden, aren't insurgents, either. They are reactionaries whose only route to power is murder. Iraq's interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi now says the rule of law is coming to Fallujah. It would be nice to see a few of van Gogh's film-land friends (who claim to value political and artistic freedom) send Allawi a letter of thanks.

Indeed.

by Donald Sensing, 11/11/2004 07:12:00 PM. Permalink |

Local ABC cops out
WKRN-TV, Nashville's ABC affiliate station, has decided to slap veterans in the face:



This is the tail of their weasly explanation of why they won't broadcast Saving Private Ryan, the network feed, tonight, that they are cowering before the FCC. The full statement read,

Our ABC affiliated stations have, with reluctance, elected not to broadcast the highly acclaimed movie, Saving Private Ryan, in response to new and troubling legal standards from the Federal Communications Commission governing the kind of program content that may be broadcast prior to 10:00 p.m.

The broadcast of this movie on Veteran’s Day would have served as a fitting tribute to the brave men and women in uniform who in the past and to this very day serve our nation with honor and distinction.

This has been a difficult and agonizing decision for us. However, we have a responsibility to operate in accord with the law, and until the FCC or the courts clarify what the broadcast legal standards are for programs of this type, we will continue to be confronted with these difficult choices.

We encourage our viewers to share their thoughts with us on all of our program decisions. We value viewer input and will, consistent with our legal responsibilities, continue to be responsive to it.

Deborah A. McDermott
President, Young Broadcasting, Inc.
November 11, 2004

I simply do not believe Ms. McDermott. This was a political move on her part to bring pressure, however indirectly, on the FCC. I'll file my protest to WKRN, to no avail, of course.

by Donald Sensing, 11/11/2004 07:02:00 PM. Permalink |

Veterans Day links
Jim Webb has some nice thoughts.

Captain Ed has a thought from Iraq on traditions and reality. He also has some observations about why some ABC affiliate stations really won't run Saving Private Ryan tonight.

Blackfive has good stuff, including this photo of our troops observing Veterans Day in Iraq.

Army veteran Phillip Carter's thoughts are here.

A Small Victory quotes Emerson to good effect.

by Donald Sensing, 11/11/2004 06:50:00 PM. Permalink |

Veterans Day, 2004
At 5 a.m., November 11, 1918, representatives of the Imperial German army affixed their signatures to an instrument of armistice to end the fighting of World War One. Under the terms of the armistice that had been worked out over many days prior, combat was to cease six hours after the armistice was signed. Hence, all guns fell silent at 11 a.m. that morning. The allied powers soon memorialized the day the killing stopped. In America, November 11 was called Armistice Day until 1954, when President Eisenhower renamed the day Veterans Day, intended to honor living veterans of military service. I always try to preserve the distinction in American tradition, reserving Memorial Day to memorialize Americans who died in service or survived but died later.

But with our armed forces engaged today in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, some losing their lives, we would be crass to ignore their sacrifices. Journalist Dennis Anderson was an embedded reporter in the conquest of Iraq last year, when his son was in high school. This year his son is a Marine fighting in Fallujah. Mr. Anderson wrote in Editor and Publisher late last week,

On eve of battle, I see my son sleeping. His picture moved on The Associated Press and a few days ago was the "Marine Corps Times Picture of the Day." A huddle of Marines, exhausted after a night mission. And my son's angle of repose so similar to his sleepy lull on the way home from a camping trip in the Sierras.

He is all of them, to me, and all of them are our sons. They have put it all on the line for us. Like the men on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Like the men on Iwo Jima and those other Pacific atolls.

For this father, on this smaller but dreadful D-Day's eve, my prayer is for my sleeping boy, and all the others gathered with him.

For all the ones who return, they will have done their work, so that you, and I, and everyone who voted Tuesday, will be somewhat safer in this haven we call home. This is the week we honor veterans. Pretty soon the veterans will be returning from Fallujah. If you love life, honor them.

Chesty Puller was the only Marine ever to earn five Navy Crosses. His biographer Burke Davis wrote that after Puller retired as a lieutenant general with more than thirty years service, his wife asked him, "Is there anything you'd wish for, now that's it all over?"

Puller replied, "More than anything, I'd like to see once again the face of every Marine I've ever served with."

We who are veterans remember our buddies, always with longing, sometimes with melancholy, sometimes with humor. I remember a young cannon crewman when I was a second lieutenant assigned to 1st Battalion, 38th Field Artillery. One day I was acting as a safety officer for the live-fire exercise of another firing battery. The division artillery commander appeared, a full colonel. At one howitzer, the colonel noticed that the young cannoneer was yanking hard on the lanyard to fire the howitzer. Because the firing mechanism was spring loaded, the gun would fire with only a slight flick of the wrist; yanking on the lanyard was entirely unnecessary, especially as hard as the soldier was doing.

The colonel asked the young soldier, "Why are you pulling the lanyard so hard?"

The soldier, a Spec. 4 as I recall, gave the colonel one of those looks that if you were an officer you recall having received one time or another, and if you were enlisted, you recall having given an officer at one time or another. Then he explained, "Sir, the harder you pull it, the farther she goes!"

When I took command of an artillery battery, a senior officer told me, "Love your soldiers." It was good advice. Sometimes you have to love your troops because no alternative works. I have in mind the encounter between a recruit at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and its commanding general one Sunday afternoon. Major General Bolduc's house was along the shore of a small lake in the main post area. That spring afternoon he donned only his swimming trunks and stretched out his bleach-white body on a portable chaise lounge at the lakeshore.

It was at that time that a drill sergeant sent a small group of trainees on police call around the lake. But they weren't to pick up anything so ordinary as cigarette butts or candy wrappers, no. They were directed to pick up all the pines cones lying around the lake. This being South Carolina, there were approximately three-quarter million of them.

So Private Snuffy, wearing a helmet liner with his platoon number painted on it, dragging a big, plastic lawn bag behind him, eventually walked over to where the commanding general was lying in all his tanless glory. The general opened his eyes as Snuffy neared so Snuffy nodded his head and said, "How ya doin'?" Then he leaned over a picked up a pine cone.

"What are you doing?" asked Major General Bolduc.

"I'm picking up pine cones," answered Snuffy, innocent as a lamb, as he picked up another one. The general was baffled because that's the most senseless thing to spend time doing in South Carolina that you can think of.

So he asked again, with iron in his voice, "No, I mean what are you doing?"

So Snuffy gave this anonymous sun bather the look, leaned over and held a pine cone in front of the general's face. Then he said slowly and distinctly, "I ... am ... picking ... up ... pine ... cones."

I'm not positive, but I don't think any civilian occupation provides humorous moments such as these that form such an important thread in the tapestry of veterans' memories. Such experiences are part of what holds men and women in uniform together.

Most living veterans saw their service during time of war, but relatively few of us were in actual danger during their service. More than five thousand sailors crew an aircraft carrier yet only dozens of fliers face danger in enemy skies. Yet there is always the potential of dangerous service for all, even in peacetime. When I was on field maneuvers in Germany, an artillery battery fired a salvo with improper fuze settings by accident. The shells detonated over another unit, killing six men and wounding more than a dozen.

My son is a US Marine, en route to be trained as an Abrams tank crewman, which I am quite happy about because the interior of a tank is probably the safest place on our battlefields. In Iraq it has been the mechanics and clerks and truck drivers who face the deepest danger in daily operations.

This shared risk is crucial glue. There are no jobs in the service that are absolutely safe. On Pelelieu Chesty Puller asked for replacement infantrymen. He was told there were no more infantrymen; the only men left were cooks and bakers and messengers. “Send them up,” Puller answered. “The ones left alive tomorrow will be infantrymen.”

What makes American soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and guardsmen unique?

Is it their incontestable bravery? Our veterans do not disparage the courage of their enemies.

Is it the fact that we fight on behalf of freedom? Now we're getting closer, but our British and Australian allies fight for it, also, and so do the newly-organized Iraqi soldiers dying with us in Fallujah today.

Historian Stephen Ambrose quoted an unnamed World War II veteran thus:

"Imagine this. In the spring of 1945, around the world, the sight of a twelve-man squad of teenage boys, armed and in uniform, brought terror to people's hearts. Whether it was a Red Army squad in Berlin, Leipzig, or Warsaw, or a German squad in Holland, or a Japanese squad in Manila or Seoul of China, that squad meant rape, pillage, looting, wanton destruction, senseless killing. But there was an exception: a squad of GIs, a sight that brought the biggest smile you ever saw to people's lips, and joy to their hearts.

"Around the world this was true, even in Germany, even - after September 1945 - in Japan. This was because GIs meant candy, cigarettes, C-rations, and freedom. America had sent the best of her young men around the world, not to conquer but to liberate, not to terrorize but to help. This was a great moment in our history."

The moment is not over. Here's a scene from Baghdad last year.

"Only now will I start living." So said a 49-year-old man to the Associated Press in April of last year: "I'm 49, but I never lived a single day," said Yusuf Abed Kazim, a Baghdad imam who pounded the statue's pedestal with a sledgehammer. "Only now will I start living. That Saddam Hussein is a murderer and a criminal." As Marines and soldiers entered the heart of Baghdad, "We were nearly mobbed by people trying to shake our hands," said Maj. Andy Milburn of the 7th Marines. One Army contingent had to use razor-wire to hold back surging crowds of well-wishers.

But not just in Iraq. An Air Force aeromedical evacuation flight nurse wrote,

My unit has picked up NATO soldiers at hospitals here in Kosovo that in the states we would consider condemned. Hospitals where there are no pillows, blankets, or sheets and wires are hanging from the ceiling and there are holes in the floors. When we arrive the NATO soldiers always look up at us with gratitude in their eyes and say thank God please get me out of here. Yesterday I did a Med Cap in town. I was giving out medications to over 200 people and being very busy when one old woman grabbed my arm demanding my attention and stopping me from working. She held my hand with one of hers and with her other hand she patted my cheek. For a moment in my own self righteousness I shuddered from her touch. All I could think about was the filth and the stench of the woman and what disease she could be transmitting to me by touching me. But then she began saying something in Albanian over and over again. I turned to ask my interpreter what she was saying and he told me that she was saying, "God bless America, God bless America, that's all I can say is God bless America."

As affirming as such scenes are, we must remember that William T. Sherman was right, that war is hell, as proven by this report in the Tennessean during the Iraq war:

It was just past noon Saturday. [Pfc. Nick] Boggs and other soldiers with the 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, entered this city of 400,000 under intense fire from machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. ...

Boggs, 21, a machine-gunner with B Company, 3rd Battalion, found himself running through 100-degree heat carrying a load weighing almost 100 pounds. ...

Looking down the street, the soldiers saw an Iraqi soldier sprinting for cover. He was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade, a devastating weapon in urban combat. ...

The Americans opened fire and cut down the Iraqi soldier. Suddenly, two boys no older than 10 darted from an alley, soldiers with Boggs said later.

Boggs raised his weapon, a light machine gun that spits out 600 rounds a minute.

''I had my sights on it,'' Boggs said.

Boggs had his finger on the trigger. At that range, a few hundred feet, he knew he wouldn't miss.

''I didn't shoot. I didn't shoot,'' he said.

Then one child reached down and grabbed the rocket-propelled grenade.

''That's when I took him out,'' Boggs said. ''I laid down quite a few bursts.''

When the smoke cleared, both small boys lay in the street, clearly dead. ...

Boggs said he has already seen enough combat to suit him. ...

Boggs' platoon leader, 1st Lt. Jason Davis, said the machine-gunner has no reason to second-guess his decision to open fire. ...

But Davis also acknowledged that Boggs will have a tough time living with the memory.

''Will it hurt him for the rest of his life? Yes,'' he said. ''Will it haunt me? Absolutely.''

The prophet Micah wrote, God will judge between all the peoples and will settle disputes for strong nations far and wide. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. All people will be at peace, and no one will make them afraid, for the Lord Almighty has spoken (Micah 4:3-4).

Let us pray that day comes quickly. Until then may our country and its armed forces be instruments of justice and enablers of ultimate peace.

by Donald Sensing, 11/11/2004 05:56:00 PM. Permalink |

Mother of Marine KIA on Michael Moore
Tennessean writer Tim Chavez wrote today of Gold Star Mother Eva Savage, whose son, Lance Cpl. Jeremiah Savage, was killed in action in Iraq last May. Eva lives in Livingston, Tenn. She responded to the use of her son's photo in Michael Moore's mosaic of President Bush's face, a mosaic made up of photos of dead American service members.

I am the mother of a United States Marine. Jeremiah was killed in action in Ramadi, Iraq on May 12, 2004.

People like Moore would have you believe that we hold President Bush responsible for my son's death. Michael Moore has not spoken to me — ever. So he cannot profess to know how I feel. He is a coward who thrives on the lives of others by twisting the truth and rewriting it to suit his own agenda.

Lance Cpl. Jeremiah Edward Savage was a United States Marine. He was not drafted. He chose to join. It takes a special person, someone with a sense of honor, duty, commitment and courage to be a member of the Armed Forces. My son believed in his mission, in his duty to protect the way of life all Americans enjoy.

A few Americans take that for granted and would have you believe that our military heroes have died in vain. My son did not die in vain. The only way that would be true is if you believe people like Michael Moore. My son died for Moore's right to use the First Amendment. But if Moore had said those same things about Saddam Hussein as an Iraqi, he would no longer be living.

Michael Moore wants us to believe that the picture of President Bush's face — a mosaic of the lost lives of our soldiers in Operation Iraq Freedom — is a statement that President Bush is responsible for lives lost in vain. Let me tell you what I see: I see heroes who gave the ultimate sacrifice so we can continue to be free. I see faces that make up the face of our commander in chief who is not afraid to stand his ground, not afraid to say 'enough is enough' and will not back down to the terrorist, not afraid to cry with a mother, a wife when he meets with them, not afraid to admit he prays to the living God. I see honor, duty, commitment and courage. I see Semper Fidelis (Always faithful).

I will continue to speak out against closed-minded co-wards like Michael Moore. I used to be afraid to say what I thought for the way someone would think of me. Not any more. You do not walk in my shoes, Mr. Moore. You do not know what I feel or think. Until you have stood where I stand, do not put words in my mouth.

I have a voice, and it is about damn time I stop being silent. My son died giving me the right to speak, and speak loud. I will not allow his name or even his picture be disgraced.

As Tim Chavez added, "This Gold Star mother — not some Hollywood filmmaker — will have the last word about what her son died for."

Jay Reding composed his own mosaic of Michael Moore, using "images of Iraqi mass graves – hundreds of thousands killed by Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical regime."

by Donald Sensing, 11/10/2004 04:43:00 PM. Permalink |

Happy Birthday, Marines!
As the proud father of a United States Marine, a hearty congratulations to the Corps is in order. Today is the 229th birthday of the USMC; you can read the Commandant's message.

This man is a Marine sergeant fighting now in Fallujah. He and his comrades are delivering a smackdown to the anti-democratic thugs there. The son of former embedded reporter Dennis Anderson is a Marine there as well. Dennis wrote in Editor and Publisher,

The boy I carried in my arms and spooned ice cream with at midnight is now the man lined up to battle the bombers, murderers and beheaders. Our women soldiers are also in harm's way. But the burden of an assault is for infantrymen, armor and artillery: combat arms soldiers. Grunts at the front.

On eve of battle, I see my son sleeping. His picture moved on The Associated Press and a few days ago was the "Marine Corps Times Picture of the Day." A huddle of Marines, exhausted after a night mission. And my son's angle of repose so similar to his sleepy lull on the way home from a camping trip in the Sierras.

He is all of them, to me, and all of them are our sons. They have put it all on the line for us. Like the men on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Like the men on Iwo Jima and those other Pacific atolls.

For this father, on this smaller but dreadful D-Day's eve, my prayer is for my sleeping boy, and all the others gathered with him.

For all the ones who return, they will have done their work, so that you, and I, and everyone who voted Tuesday, will be somewhat safer in this haven we call home. This is the week we honor veterans. Pretty soon the veterans will be returning from Fallujah. If you love life, honor them. [HT: AlphaPatriot]

Retired Marine Phil Seymour wrote of his Marine company in a desperate firefight in Vietnam. Of 172 Marines who started the day, only 30 were both alive and unwounded at its end.

It was apparent to each of us, as well as to the many wounded lying about both in the cleared LZ and still in the jungle below, that our ability to provide an effective defense was at an end. We could not keep the NVA soldiers from completely overrunning our position for much longer. It was then that First Lieutenant Jack Ruffer, a former enlisted man who had since received a commission (commonly referred to as a "Mustang"), began singing the Marine's Hymn. Other Marines, both wounded and as yet unscathed, picked up the Hymn as well. It was a last ditch effort to "rally the troops" for one last rush down the hill. With the Hymn still echoing through the hills and valleys, those few of us still on our feet moved back into the underbrush toward the advancing shadows. The singing of the Hymn felt somehow reassuring and familiar. It also provided a sense of peace and continuity with those Marines from wars past.

Captain John Gallagher's Delta Company also heard the singing. They began pushing up the trail we had come down the previous afternoon and almost immediately encountered the North Vietnamese encircling our position. His men blasted a hole in their lines and spread into and over our small LZ. I had not been aware that Delta Company had indicated that they were on the move for our relief. Nor can I recall the emotions that I experienced when I first realized that they had made it through the enemy force surrounding us. On reflection, I believe it was a mixture of pure exhaustion and unadulterated relief! I do recall making it back to the LZ where I dropped my rifle to the ground, followed by my cartridge belt and helmet. I then sank to my knees; I had nothing left.

It's never been easy to be a U.S. Marine. May God protect them all.

by Donald Sensing, 11/10/2004 03:42:00 PM. Permalink |

See you Thursday
I'll be offline until Thursday, tending to vocational matters. Please do not send email; I will not be reading email until Thursday. Have a great week!

by Donald Sensing, 11/08/2004 09:03:00 AM. Permalink |

The Sunday sermon, 11-7
An excerpt -

One way to perceive how persons or societies deal with mortality is to discern what their god is. Methodist Bishop William Willimon wrote that sex is the major modern substitute for God in America these day, because as a society we have lost desire for anything more interesting. I would add as well that the gods of American society are consumerism and entertainment, but also note that the principal content of both is sex. Or violence, - or more likely, sex and violence. But these are empty things, for inside each one of us is a God-shaped void that only God can fill. The frantic busy-ness that fills our lives or our ruthless drive to get ahead (whatever that really means) give evidence of spiritual infancy and an unfilled void of God in our souls.

We do not live today as though we will live forever, for who would want to live forever the way we are living today?

Read the whole thing here.

by Donald Sensing, 11/07/2004 04:40:00 PM. Permalink |

Major objective taken in Fallujah
CBS News reports that a major objective has been taken in Fallujah before the long-expected allied offensive has even been ordered.

The Iraqi 36th Commando Battalion, accompanied by American Special Forces, seized the main hospital in the city with no casualties, in fact, no fighting.

Sharp fighting was reported on the outskirts of the city, however.

Developing . . .

by Donald Sensing, 11/07/2004 04:01:00 PM. Permalink |

Saudi clerics issue holy war edict
A small group of Saudi religious scholars has declared that fighting American troops in Iraq is jihad, or holy war. (I posted a short history of jihad last month.)

In their letter, the scholars stressed that armed attacks by militant Iraqi groups on U.S. troops and their allies in Iraq represent "legitimate" resistance.

The scholars were careful to direct their appeal to Iraqis only and stayed away from issuing a general, Muslim-wide call for holy war. They also identified the military as the target, one that is considered legitimate by many Arabs who view U.S. troops and their allies as occupiers.

One of the issuers of the fatwa, or religious decree, is Sheik Safar al-Hawali, whom the article says "once was close" to Osama bin Laden. "Once" was close - yeah, right.

The timing of the fatwa is interesting. One, it comes just as the US and Iraqi national forces are preparing to clean out Fallujah. It's no coincidence that the Saudis and the Baathist insurgents in Fallujah are Sunnis. This fatwa is underlaid by a revulsion at the idea of a free Iraqi government taking power next January with significant, perhaps majority, Shia representation.

Also, Osama bin Laden's pre-election surprise videotape hardly mentioned Allah and never even hinted at renewal of jihad, which OBL had emphasized in past public proclamations. So these clerics might have thought they needed to pick up the slack. I posted a rather snarky view of OBL's change of tone, in which I pointed out that martyr recruitment is almost certainly falling as it sinks into the Arab consciousness that however fine martyrdom sounds in the abstract, it has much less appeal in the concrete.

The evidence of this is that foreign insurgents in Fallujah amount to less than five percent of the total, according to Strategy Page. Don't hold your breath for swarms of new jihadis haring out for Fallujah because of the scholars' fatwa. The non-foreign insurgents are mostly unregenerate Baathists and their Sunni sympathizers who also can't stomach the thought of Shia voices in government. There are some Iraqi insurgents motivated by jihadism as well.

The Saudi clerics proclamation of jihad is a sign of how desperate the anti-democratic resistance has become. Nonetheless, the stakes are high all around. As Iraqi blogger Salaam says,

It is now amply clear that the time has long passed for negotiating with the enemy [see here for the latest ploy -DS]. The Saddamist-Sectarian-Foreign Extremist enemy has opted for bloody conflict, murder, and intimidation long time ago. ...

Friends and allies: this is War and a very serious and dangerous one too. Do not underestimate the enemy. In Iraq you have at least 80% of the population on your side and desirous of change and success in creating the new society. Anybody who tells you otherwise is simply a liar. Wars are terrible and cruel but what must be done must be done. ... The right side must win this war too, for the sake of our future generations and world peace.

The insurgency must be ended quickly. Prime Minister Allawi has said time is running out to avoid force to end it. He cannot afford delaying much longer.

Update: This news report says, "Military planners believe there are about 1,200 hard-core fighters in Fallujah — at least half of them Iraqis." So the five percent figure for foreign fighters may be wildly low.

by Donald Sensing, 11/06/2004 08:22:00 PM. Permalink |

Hurricanes were Bush's jobs-creation program
You may recall that George W. Bush was blamed by the "Scientists and Engineers for Change and Environment2004" and the NAACP National Voter Fund for the hurricanes that devastated Florida this year.

No, really, he was.

Now we learn that bringing hurricanes to Florida was part of his devilishly clever pre-election economic program:

Last month, American employers added 337,000 new jobs, the largest increase in seven months.

The biggest single engine for job creation was the hurricanes.

Part of the pick-up in jobs was down to the worst hurricane seasons for many years. About 71,000 new construction jobs had been added - the most since March 2000.

Kathleen Utgoff, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said this "reflected rebuilding and clean-up activity in the south-east following the four hurricanes that struck the US in August and September".

And they say Bush is not very bright. . .

by Donald Sensing, 11/06/2004 09:08:00 AM. Permalink |

A good job for nought
I think it was Jonathan Swift who observed, "You cannot reason a man out of a position he was never reasoned into."

Even so, Mike Jericho gives it a try. He disassembles Jane Smiley's Slate screed line by line. It's an excellent job and worth reading in order to learn what careful analysis really looks like when done well.

Alas, its factuality will be futile on Smiley or any of her ideological allies. Her position is really one of secular-political fundamentalism, emotionally deep rooted and not refutable by anything so irrelevant as facts and investigation.

by Donald Sensing, 11/06/2004 08:46:00 AM. Permalink |

Insurgents' minds get concentrated
I think it was Samuel Johnson who said that nothing concentrates the mind like the knowledge one will be hanged in a fortnight.

The unlawful combatants in Fallujah don't have a fortnight, and they know it. As a result, their minds are mightily concentrated now:

BAGHDAD, Nov. 5 -- As Marines step up preparations for military offensives on two major Iraqi cities, a number of Sunni Muslim leaders are forwarding a plan to establish the rule of law in those areas through peaceful means, with the promise of reducing the insurgency across a large swath of the country.

The bid is led by groups that have encouraged violent resistance in central, western and northern Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion 18 months ago. The groups say they'll withdraw their support for violence if Iraq's interim government can reassure Sunni leaders wary of national elections, which are scheduled for the end of January.

There was a list of demands, such as that American troops remain confined to their compounds for a month before the election in January. Believe it or not, that demand was seen by observers as a softening of the insurgents' demands, which previously were that all foreign troops had to be out of Iraq beo=fore elections could be held.

One Iraqi government officials was openly scornful at the proposals, though.

"They don't seem to get it. The monopoly of power is over," said a senior Iraqi government official, referring to former President Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated government. "One wonders how representative these elements are of the mainstream Sunni population. They may represent nostalgia for the past, but for sure no realistic vision for the future."

But the offer is getting buzz all over the country and among many US officials. It needs be noted, though, that the offer comes from Iraqi insurgents, not the foreign jihadis who have invaded the country from other Arab countries, principally Syria and Saudi Arabia. "One advocate of the new initiative said Iraqi Sunnis would persuade the foreigners to leave, though it may take time."

Since the US-Iraqi coaltion forces are about to pull the trigger on the insurgency, there is no time to dither. If there is any merit at all to this offer, it must be proven by their side, and proven within 24-36 hours, tops. We should respond with an ultimatum for further negotiation, namely that the Iraqi Baathists take physical control of all non-Iraqi insurgents and turn them over to coalition custody. Once that is done, other talks are possible. Otherwise, game over.

by Donald Sensing, 11/05/2004 10:30:00 PM. Permalink |

The leaking blogs
Thanks to Glenn Reynolds' tip, I turned on ABC News in time to see Prof. Daniel Drezner in a story about how the bogus exit polling data got leaked to the general public early Tuesday afternoon.

I thought the story was neutral in tone; reporter did say that the initial poll data were flawed to begin with. I did notice that the only blogs shown by name as liable for spreading the false information were Wonkette and Daily Kos. Imagine.

Speaking of Daniel, his co-authored, learned piece in Foreign Policy, "Web of Influence," is well worth the read.

by Donald Sensing, 11/05/2004 05:49:00 PM. Permalink |

Jane Smiley and projection
An essay on Slate by novelist Jane Smiley is getting a lot of attention today. Entitled, "Why Americans Hate Democrats — A Dialogue," it is an incredibly vitriol-filled diatribe against everyone who voted for George W. Bush, especially southerners.

It's telling, I think, that she accuses her political opponents of hating her when her essay makes it abundantly clear it is she who is overflowing with hatred and contempt for them. If I recall, this is called projection, ascribing to others what one does or feels oneself.

Her essay is so incoherent and fact free that it really isn't worth fisking, and would be a waste of time anyway. Novelist Roger Simon did respond, however, by pointing out that Jane has invented her own private reality. I demur because reality, private or not, has no contact with Jane's essay.

by Donald Sensing, 11/05/2004 01:26:00 PM. Permalink |

Not Baghdad



A fireworks factory in Denmark caught fire and exploded today.




One explosion was measured at 2.0 on the Richter scale.




A fireman was killed battling the conflagration, dozens are reported injured.

by Donald Sensing, 11/04/2004 07:17:00 PM. Permalink |

Links to think
James Joyner posts the by-county, electoral red-blue maps of the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004. Also some excerpts and comments about newspapers' commentary of today.

Geitner Simmons is starting a blogging hiatus today to finish his book. But there is lots of great stuff he posted until yesterday. Just page down to the many treasures he has posted.

Gerard van der Leun reviews in fine detail why we are in Iraq. Here's an interesting point: it's not about the oooiiiiiiillll, it's about the water.

RealClearPolitics continues to be absolutely indispensable.

Maureen Dowd and Richard Cohen display amazing pixellated incoherency. Really.

by Donald Sensing, 11/04/2004 06:48:00 PM. Permalink |

Osama has-bin Laden
I have been saying since Afghanistan's Operation Anaconda in the spring of 2002 that al Qaeda is busted. Since then it has never posed near the threat it posed beforehand. When the Osama bin Laden videotape surfaced last month I did caution that victory over al Qaeda has not been won and that we should not let down our guard, but that al Qaeda is really dangerous outside, not inside, the United States.

Exhibit A, with none other needed: election day came and went with and the liquid running in the streets was not American blood, as al Doofus threatened, it was only the tears of the non-elected. Counter-terror operations like this one prove the point, not its opposite.

While it is unfortunate that Osama bin Laden is still breathing (unlike this terrorist, thankfully), his impotence against America is now evident for all the world to see. Not a single virgin-mad jihadi showed up with even a dull butter knife to slash Americans into terror. Bin Laden is not exactly a has-been, but he's rapidly getting there.

Speaking of jihadis, I wonder how many of them in Fallujah had to buy new pants after they heard that Bush was reelected? Did they understand that the boom is already being lowered on them? The Iraqi elections are now barely more than two months away. Fallujah, as the center of anti-democratic terrorism, will not be in play then. The foreign jihadis Osama has-bin Laden has been sending there for 18-plus months - where they promptly were entrapped by our flypaper strategy - are going to be given up now by Iraqi Fallujans like a hot watch in a police shakedown. The US Marines are there, gathering ferocious steam, and the newly-invigorated Iraqi security forces now know the issue is no longer in doubt.

Speaking again of jihadis, I think the volunteer pool is getting pretty dry. Notably absent from bin Laden's recent tape was his usual clarion call for more "martyrdom operations." Whassamatta, Osama, the line is forming, like, nowhere? Martydom might be a fine thing in the abstract, but I'm guessing that it has much less appeal in the concrete. "Martyrdom operations" are literally self defeating anyway: they consume your own troops at a 100-percent rate and leave no one to come home a hero, where gleamy-eyed potential recruits can gaze gauzily at them, wanting to be one, too. As for the ladies, they sure see no future in marrying a future martyr. Consider the choices a might-be martyr has to consider:

A mere promise of wild, hardcore romps with 72 virgins in Paradise, from which no one has ever returned to give personal testimony thereto, and which he has to die a violent death in battle to obtain; breaking your neck falling down a stair in Fallujah en route to the bakery doesn't count.

The near-certainty of milder but still highly appealing episodes within marital life with a local lady, who is present now, in the flesh, but who will never agree to give a future martyr a carnal farewell.

What to do, what to do?

There is also the important question of why holy jihadist warriors are losing badly to the infidel dogs, making the Arab street (remember it?) probably wonder whether Allah intends to show up for the match anytime soon. The answer is that he won't, not now, not ever. But that's a topic for another post.

by Donald Sensing, 11/04/2004 06:14:00 PM. Permalink |

Canadian border closed
My Canadian friend Joe Katzman points the way to the shocking closure of the border between the US and Canada. There are shocking photos of this shocking development that are sure to shock you. I'd be shocked if they didn't.

by Donald Sensing, 11/03/2004 05:54:00 PM. Permalink |

Today's speeches
Kerry finally shows oratorical depth

John Kerry's concession speech was gracious and gentlemanly. I really liked his near-closing line, "I saw in them the truth that America is not only great, but it is good." It brought to my mind de Tocqueville's observation that America is great because Americans are good, and that when Americans cease to be good, America will cease to be great.

Kerry gave the explanation for his concession clearly, cogently and gently. Whatever criticisms have been offered about his turgid speaking style in recent months (many by his ideological allies), this speech, ironically, was well composed and finely delivered. He stated that he wanted the election to be decided by the voters, not courts, and having done the arithmetic, he bowed out as gracefully as anyone had a right to expect. All Americans were well served by John Kerry at the close of his campaign.

I thought that Kerry gave a better concession speech than Bush gave a victory speech. There was nothing wrong with Bush's speech, but it seemed more of a "stock" talk than Kerry gave, even though neither man's sincerity should be doubted.

It strikes me that if Kerry and Bush had given speeches all through the campaign of a style and tone that they each gave the afternoon after the election, Bush might have been conceding, not Kerry.

by Donald Sensing, 11/03/2004 05:12:00 PM. Permalink |

An interesting day
White House chief of staff Andrew Card has claimed victory on behalf of President Bush, saying Bush has at least 286 electoral votes. Reports say that Bush himself is planning a speech claiming victory, but is holding off to give Kerry a chance to concede. But John Edwards said that his ticket will "fight for every vote." Kerry does not concede Ohio, but with 100 percent of precincts reporting, Bush leads 51-49 in points, and has 126,000 more votes. Commentators seems to agree that including provisional and absentee ballots will not swing the win.

by Donald Sensing, 11/03/2004 06:25:00 AM. Permalink |

Faithless elector?
An elector in the GOP column in West Virginia has apparently said that he may break ranks to vote for someone other than Bush. But at least one network has credited Bush with one elector in Maine, which proportions its electoral college. So it cancels out, I would guess.

by Donald Sensing, 11/03/2004 01:08:00 AM. Permalink |

Bush three votes short?
With Ohio and Alaska being called for Bush by networks, he needs only one more electoral vote to reach the 270 needed for reelection.

It appears at the moment that Bush will pick up New Mexico with five votes. As of time of posting, here are states yet to be called:

New Mexico - 51-47, Bush, 76%, 5 EVs.

Nevada - 50-49, Kerry, 17%, 5 EVs.

Minnesota - 53-46, Kerry, 55%, 10 EVs.

Iowa - 50-49, Kerry, 80%, 7 EVs.

Wisconsin - 50-49, Kerry, 60%, 10 EVs.

Michigan - 51-48, Kerry, 60%, 10 EVs.

Hawaii - Polls are just now closing.

I predict that Bush will win New Mexico and probably one other state. But New Mexico alone is enough.

by Donald Sensing, 11/02/2004 11:48:00 PM. Permalink |

Pennsylvania back in play?
The networks called the Keystone State for Kerry when the margin was 59-41 (CNN) or close to it. That was a few deciles ago of precincts reporting, too.

Now with a fifth of the precincts yet to report, the margin has closed to 53-46. Is there a chance for Bush to take the lead, be it ever so small? Kerry has lost six points since the call was made, Bush has gained five. But each has to move four more points for Bush to get a majority. However, third-party candidate account for approximately a point. Percentage-wise, Kerry and Bush could tie at 49.5 each, with one having a tiny number of votes more, and win it all.

11:35 CST: Now the spread is 52-47.

12:05 CST: With 90% reporting, Kerry's margin holds at 52-47, so Pennsylvania stays in the Kerry camp.

by Donald Sensing, 11/02/2004 11:11:00 PM. Permalink |

120 million voters?
Drudge trumpets the figure, linking to a Yahoo news story, but when you go there, no mention is made. If accurate, the figure would be approximately 20 percent more than of 2000's turnout, IIRC.

Here is a chart showing turnout for about the last century.

by Donald Sensing, 11/02/2004 10:51:00 PM. Permalink |

Florida to GOP
Just now broadcast--

FoxNews: Bush campaign staffer claims Florida, with 97 percent of the vote tallied.

CNN's Judy Woodruff: Kerry campaign staffer admits Kerry has lost Florida.

News reports have Bush ahead 52-47.

by Donald Sensing, 11/02/2004 10:41:00 PM. Permalink |

Too much restraint?
Ann Althouse asks,

IS MSM REFRAINING FROM CALLING STATES FOR BUSH that they would call for Kerry if the numbers were running the other way?

This only matters if you think that MSM calling a state has anything to do with who takes the oath in January. If media coverage of the returns is thought of as a soap opera, then when the MSM call a state is of concern. Otherwise, who cares?

I do note, however, that Chris Matthews just called California for Kerry with zero votes counted and zero precincts reporting.

by Donald Sensing, 11/02/2004 09:58:00 PM. Permalink |

More realtime vote tallies
Realtime vote tallies are available for Pennsylvania and Ohio in addition to Florida. The Ohio and Florida pages are operated by the states' elections divisions, the Penn. page is a Yahooo news page.

David Gergen, who has served White Houses of both parties, just said that if Bush wins two of those three states, he almost certainly will stay in office. Right now, Bush is getting clobbered in Pennsylvania, but leads in Ohio and Florida, though barely in Florida. No one has called any of the three for either candidate - Wolf Blitzer said that the Penn. returns are heavily weighted with Philadelphia returns, which are massively Democratic.

Update: The race in Fla. is far too close to call, even with more than half of precincts reporting (Bush is at 51.7 percent, Kerry at 47.4). But since the returns first started being tallied, the momentum has gone steadily Kerry's way.

by Donald Sensing, 11/02/2004 08:36:00 PM. Permalink |

Who ya gonna believe?
News shows have Bush leading in Florida with between 53-56 percent of the vote. But the state's Division of Elections web page shows a much tighter race, presently with Bush at 52.1 percent, 46 percent of precincts reporting. I trust the state's page, myself.

by Donald Sensing, 11/02/2004 08:23:00 PM. Permalink |

Commendable restraint
I think the news networks are being commendably restrained in putting states in the Bush or Kerry column, even refraining when I would have made a call, myself. This is an enormous improvement over the 2000 election. Good for them!

by Donald Sensing, 11/02/2004 08:08:00 PM. Permalink |

Site surfing for election returns
I am not even trying to blog the election returns. But in case you're interested in how I am keeping up with the results, I TV surf between FNC, MSNBC and occasionally CNN. On the internet, I switch between the Washington Post, the Washington Times, Instapundit, Drudge, The Florida Dept.of State elections page, FoxNews and Outside the Beltway. I try to hit The Command Post, too, but often have trouble getting the page loaded, for reasons I explained a couple of posts down.

by Donald Sensing, 11/02/2004 07:48:00 PM. Permalink |

Well, I doubt they died on purpose
UPI headline: "Indiana voters declared dead by mistake."

by Donald Sensing, 11/02/2004 07:43:00 PM. Permalink |

Florida vote tally in real time
The Florida State Dept. has a real-time vote tally page, which is pretty cool, I think. So why don't other states have one?

by Donald Sensing, 11/02/2004 07:04:00 PM. Permalink |

The election night choke
Nope, not the candidates, not the media pundits. What's choking is the internet itself. The heavy use of bandwidth is giving the entire internet a case of the slows.

The same thing happened two years ago, and that was an off-year election. The situation seems not to have improved. I recall reading recently that the traffic capacity of the internet in the US is low compared to China and some other eastern countries. Anybody know?

A Small Victory points the way to a forum at HostingMatters that explains the issue. But when I tried to go there, the page was 404. Which I guess kind of proves the point.

by Donald Sensing, 11/02/2004 06:37:00 PM. Permalink |

The democracy debate
There is a short but lively (and not always quite civil) comment discussion over at Bill Quick's site on whether democracy and republicanism (note small "r") are exclusive. Bill's post read,

[T]he United States is not a democracy. It is a republic. Second, our rights - including our right to self-determination - are not gifts of any earthly government or ideology, they are inalienable to us by virtue of our very human existence.

There follows some comments about how democracy and republicanism are not mutually exclusive, etc., to which Bill replied that he would stick with the Founders' opinion on the matter.

It would probably be helpful to think of the distinction this way: the Founders' concept of democracy was that of direct democracy, in which the people decided each issue of import by direct vote. But even in a country of small towns this was never a real possibility. The former colonies had had assemblies (proto-legislatures) for well more than a century. The assemblies didn't function as modern legislatures do because each colony's executive was appointed by the crown and was responsible to the crown, not to the assembly nor the people of the colony. But the assemblies did pass enabling acts for purely colonial matters.

The Founders never considered, as far as I know, any form of national government that deprived the people of assembly representation. Besides, the Founders recoiled from establishing a mostly democratic government, as opposed to a mostly republican government. Here's why.

America’s founders realized that the people of a democracy would inevitably divide into factions, setting the people in opposition to one another. For that reason, the founders mistrusted direct democracy. “Democracies,” wrote James Madison in Federalist 10, “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” The founders feared the tyranny of a democratic majority almost as much the tyranny of a monarchy. The script of 1999's blockbuster movie, The Patriot , reflected this fear when Mel Gibson’s character expressed doubts about the revolution by asking a colonial assembly, “Will you tell me why should I trade one tyrant three thousand miles away for three thousand tyrants one mile away?”

Hence the founders rejected direct democracy. In fact, wrote historian Fred Barbash, “Democracy, as we think of it, wasn’t a serious option. Democracy was an alien notion; the word itself was rarely used in the debates of that time. The real power, they believed, resided in the House of Representatives, elected by popular vote.” In fact, its appropriate on this election day to observe that the founders thought that presidential elections would be decided by the House more often than not. “It will rarely happen that the majority of the whole votes will fall on any one candidate,” said George Mason of Virginia. What they apparently didn't foresee was the rapid rise of a strong, enduring two-party system.

There is the famous anecdote of Benjamin Franklin leaving the Constitutional Convention and being asked on the sidewalk what kind of government the nation would have. “A republic,” he answered, “if you can keep it.” Of course, a republic has factions, too, but is much less subject to their ill effects. It would be nice to say that the founders thought that high-falutin ideals like truth, justice and the “American way” would protect national unity, but they weren’t so naive. They knew high ideals could be easily perverted for tyranny’s purposes. The unity of the nation may be rooted in the ideal of the government but can be preserved only in the form of the government. So the founders made the nation a republic, which is the main reason we have the electoral college rather than direct election.

A republic, as defined by the founders, is a government which–

derives all its powers from the people, and

is administered by persons holding their offices for a limited period.

Essential to a republic is that elected officials come from all segments of society and not from a small proportion, or a favored class. Furthermore, every tenure of office must be conditional in some way, either by limiting terms by law or by enabling removal by law.

Factionalism cannot be eliminated from society. “The latent causes of faction are sown in the nature of man,” Madison wrote, because differing interests always have divided humankind “into parties . . . and rendered them much more disposed to . . . oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.” Madison observed that the tendency toward disunity was so deeply rooted in human nature that the most violent conflicts have been kindled for the most frivolous reasons.

Madison thought it folly “to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” Furthermore, of necessity politicians deal with matters immediately at hand and rarely take a long view of things.

So we can take some reassurance of the durability of the American republic by noting that the Founders seems to have anticipated the kind of turmoil we are going through now. In fact, I think a strong case can be made that they thought turmoil would be the natural order of things.

by Donald Sensing, 11/02/2004 03:10:00 PM. Permalink |

The return of the Old Folks Sedan?
Last April I wrote of my elderly parents shopping for a new car. I wrote of why my mother liked the Toyota Matrix - a car aimed at the youth demographic.

... it sits higher than a sedan, it was easy to get in and out. All she had to do to get in was pivot, sit down, pivot and to get out reverse it.

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

But the Matrix lacked the features the elderly need, such as power seats and non-gripping seat upholstery.

Enter now the Ford Five Hundred sedan, new on the market. Built on the same basic platform as the Volvo S80, the 500 features a passenger cabin much higher than a typical sedan - hence Ford's ad slogan, "Elevating the art of the sedan."

I saw on in a parking lot a couple of weeks ago. I thought it was very attractive. I didn't get a close look, but it seemed roomy and well screwed together. Makes me wish I wasn't several years away from buying another car.

by Donald Sensing, 11/02/2004 03:08:00 PM. Permalink |

Exit polls - bah!
I don't think that exit polls are informative at all. For one, an awful lot of people just duck the exit pollster altogether. That means that the sample from exit polling is largely self-selected, the sampling flaw that makes online polls or surveys fun but meaningless.

by Donald Sensing, 11/02/2004 02:58:00 PM. Permalink |

My election-day predictions
Polls and pundits are quite unhelpful in the waning hours of the presidential campaign. Pro-Kerry pundits say that Kerry will win tomorrow and pro-Bush pundits say that Bush will win. I am unaware of any partisan commentator who predicts the other guy will win.

As for polls, they are less reliable than ever, IMO. Most of the polls out there seem to lean toward Bush, but as far as I can tell practically all of them are within the statistical margin of error. So if the polls turn out to predict accurately the totals tomorrow, I think it will be largely by accident.

Furthermore, polling companies themselves have over the past months expressed how difficult it it is becoming to obtain valid polling samples of the American voting public. One factor, so I've read, is that more and more people have only cell phones now, especially younger folks. So some significant part of the electorate is becoming unreachable to pollsters.

I am not going to predict a winner. But I have some observations.

Voters will not be dissuaded from heading to the polls because of early-evening commentary by networks. Recall that in 2000, every network called Florida for Gore before polls closed in much the state's panhandle. A few thousand voters didn't vote in principally-Republican districts.

Even if the networks make the same blunder in Florida or elsewhere, the voters will vote. Ditto for voters in western states regarding returns from the eastern time zone; Republicans in California, for example - which all agree is solidly in Kerry's column - will vote nomatter what the networks say about Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Florida, etc. I don't know whether that will make a difference anywhere in the west, but I wonder whether the relative totals in the western states will be closer than pollsters now predict.

Which brings me to another point. All the news shows I have seen predict that voter turnout tomorrow will be heavy, at least 60 percent of the eligible voters. (I'm not going to get here into the questions of valid eligibility.) This figure contrasts with a history in past elections going back to 1964 or so, IIRC, of about 50 percent turnout. Will this year really have such a heavy turnout, and has that pbeen pre-accounted for in poll figures? To both questions I have no idea, although I am confident that turnout will be heavier than we've seen in many recent elections.

Everyone except journalist Mark Steyn says the vote will be close. I tend to side with Mark. Bearing in mind that I'm not predicting a victor, I agree with Mark that the returns actually will show a six-point spread, or more, between the candidates.

And sadly, I predict that lawyers will file suits about the election before the day has ended.

by Donald Sensing, 11/01/2004 06:58:00 PM. Permalink |

Full bin Laden transcript
Bill Hobbs points the way to al Jazeera's full transcript of Osama bin Laden's recent videotape. Dan Darling has a lengthy analysis.

by Donald Sensing, 11/01/2004 06:54:00 PM. Permalink |

US troops off Korean DMZ
American soldiers have patrolled the Korean DMZ since the truce ending large-scale fighting was agreed to in 1953. I say the truce ended large-scale fighting because small-scale fighting continued for decades afterward, including when I pulled a tour on the DMZ in 1978. (BTW, any fighting you are involved in is large-scale!)

Now the 51-year era is ended, as the US and South Korea agreed last spring.

I wrote early last year on what it was like to serve on the DMZ "back in the day."

by Donald Sensing, 11/01/2004 06:31:00 PM. Permalink |