Iraqi Woman Speaks Out

The following comments, courtesy of Instapundit help to represent the general sentiment felt by most Iraqis. The post references an article in The Scotsman about an emotional speech by an Iraqi woman directed to Britain's Labor party in hopes of keeping their votes in favor of continued military support:

The woman who helped swing the vote at the Labour conference over pulling troops out of Iraq today accused party members of naivety about the situation in the country.

Shanaz Rashid – whose husband is a minister in the interim Iraqi government – was earlier given a standing ovation when she made an emotional appeal not to pull troops out.

Close to tears, she told party activists that many friends had perished under Saddam Hussein and she had kissed the ground with joy on arriving back at Baghdad after the war. She praised the Prime Minister for "standing up" to Saddam and liberating the country.

"Yes, there have been difficulties. Yes, there have been mistakes perhaps many mistakes. No, you did not find weapons of mass destruction. But for the great majority of Iraqis WMD was never the issue. We don’t understand the criticism of your Prime Minister. All we wanted was to be free."

The call for Mr Blair to set an early date for withdrawing the troops was defeated by 86% to 14%.

Bush Volunteered for Vietnam

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Recently, individuals from the Air National Guard have come forward to comment that President Bush volunteered for active service in Vietnam. While these new allegations have not been independently verified, it's puzzling that we have not heard more about this in the mainstream press. Then again, it's not surprising at all -BBM)

From Knoxville CBS: One of the criticisms leveled at the President is that he sought guard service to keep him from serving in Vietnam. Morrisey says, "...Not so. The Air Force, in their ultimate wisdom, assembled a group of 102's and took them to Southeast Asia. Bush volunteered to go. [H]e needed to have 500 [flight] hours, but he only had just over 300 hours so he wasn't eligible to go," Morrisey recalls.

From Newsweek: The standard rap against Bush is that he was ducking combat by joining the Guard. Actually, the Texas Air Guard had a program called Palace Alert that allowed pilots to volunteer for flight time in Vietnam. Three of Bush's fellow pilots — Udell, Woodfin and Fred Bradley — recalled to NEWSWEEK that Bush inquired with the base commander about signing up for Palace Alert. He was told no; he had too few flying hours at the time and his plane, the F-102, was by then deemed obsolete for air combat.

(This story broke in February. -BBM)

David Brooks on Darfur and the UN

The limits of multilateralism: David Brooks from The New York Times highlights the lack of response in the UN to the massacres/genocide in Darfur and some of the craven reasons why. The irony here is that George Bush has played by all the rules of the multilateral game with regard to Sudan, but still can't get the UN do anything. It once again demonstrates the need for a democracy caucus. Mr. Brooks most poignant observations include:

The Russians, who sell military planes to Sudan, decided sanctions would not be in the interests of humanity. The Chinese, whose oil companies have a significant presence in Sudan, threatened a veto. And so began the great watering-down. Finally, a week ago, the Security Council passed a resolution threatening to "consider" sanctions against Sudan at some point, though at no time soon. The Security Council debate had all the decorous dullness you'd expect. The Algerian delegate had "profound concern." The Russian delegate pronounced the situation "complex." The Sudanese government was praised because the massacres are proceeding more slowly. The air was filled with nuanced obfuscations, technocratic jargon and the amoral blandness of multilateral deliberation. The resolution passed, and it was a good day for alliance-nurturing and burden-sharing - for the burden of doing nothing was shared equally by all.

And we are by now used to the pattern. Every time there is an ongoing atrocity, we watch the world community go through the same series of stages: (1) shock and concern (2) gathering resolve (3) fruitless negotiation (4) pathetic inaction (5) shame and humiliation (6) steadfast vows to never let this happen again. The "never again" always comes. But still, we have all agreed, this sad cycle is better than having some impromptu coalition of nations actually go in "unilaterally" and do something. That would lack legitimacy! Strain alliances! Menace international law! Threaten the multilateral ideal! It's a pity about the poor dead people in Darfur. Their numbers are still rising, at 6,000 to 10,000 a month.

Liberal Bias in Favor of President Bush?

What does it mean when one of the most liberal democratic Senators endorses Bush over Kerry?

Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon, a democrat, has always made his opinions clear to the American public:

"I was the only senator who voted against both the Democrat and Republican resolutions authorizing the use of force in the 1991 Gulf War. In my final years in the Senate, I opposed President Clinton's decision to send American troops to Bosnia. During my 30 years in the Senate, I never once voted in favor of a military appropriations bill."

Accordingly, it might come as some surprise to know that Mark Hatfield has since endorsed President Bush for president. He explains:

My support is based on the fact that our world changed on Sept. 11, 2001, a day on which we lost more American lives than we did in the attack on Pearl Harbor. I know from my service in the Senate that Saddam Hussein was an active supporter of terrorism. He used weapons of mass destruction on innocent people and left no doubt that he would do so again. It was crucial to the cause of world peace that he be removed from power. Having seen atrocious loss in World War II, I understand the devastation of armed conflict. We have paid dearly with American and Iraqi lives for our commitment, but we cannot afford the alternative. Nor can we afford a president who puts a wet finger in the air and turns over his decisions to pollsters.

Air Phone-iness

How many times have mobile telephone users sat aboard an airplane in utter bewilderment upon hearing from the flight attendants that all electronic devices must be turned off in preparation for takeoff? Well, I have no idea, but it's always puzzled me. Quite frankly, wouldn't cellular telephones inside the terminal also affect the plane's sensitive electrical equipment?

Who are do they think they are kidding? My suspicions have always been that it is simply a ploy to force passengers to pay the egregious usage fees for the Airphones provided by the airlines.

As it turns out, I was right. Last week, Wired Magazine reported the following:

Airbus, the European aircraft maker, said it is making progress to allow passengers to use mobile phones in flight by 2006.

Test equipment aboard an Airbus A320 plane demonstrated that mobile phones can be used without interfering with navigation systems, the company said. Mobile phones onboard were used to send and receive calls and text messages using mobile and fixed telephones on the ground and other mobiles onboard.

Of course, coming from Wired Magazine, it seemed too good to be true. Accordingly, I went to the source. Here's an excerpt from Airbus' own press release of Wednesday, September 15, 2004:

Airbus has successfully completed the first in-flight trial of GSM personal mobile- telephones aboard an airliner, paving the way for their future widespread use. The trial, which took place aboard an Airbus A320 flight-test aircraft is part of an ongoing technical development project to provide an in-flight mobile telephony service to airline passengers.

The signals from the mobile telephone went first to a “picocell” inside the aircraft, next to a computer server that routed them through the Globalstar satellite communications network to the ground, and finally to ground-based telephone networks.

They used technologies based upon emerging standards - GSM/UMTS for mobile telephony, wi-fi (IEEE 802.11) and Bluetooth for mobile computing services.

The fact remains, do these findings ultimately surprise anybody?

What Else is in Syria?

The telegraph.co.uk has an interesting article about the attempted development and proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Needless to say, the excerpts below attempt to prove that it all starts in Syria:

Syria's President Bashir al-Asad is in secret negotiations with Iran to secure a safe haven for a group of Iraqi nuclear scientists who were sent to Damascus before last year's war to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Western intelligence officials believe that President Asad is desperate to get the Iraqi scientists out of his country before their presence prompts America to target Syria as part of the war on terrorism.

A group of about 12 middle-ranking Iraqi nuclear technicians and their families were transported to Syria before the collapse of Saddam's regime. The transfer was arranged under a combined operation by Saddam's now defunct Special Security Organisation and Syrian Military Security, which is headed by Arif Shawqat, the Syrian president's brother-in-law. The Iraqis, who brought with them CDs crammed with research data on Saddam's nuclear programme, were given new identities, including Syrian citizenship papers and falsified birth, education and health certificates.

Growing political concern in Washington about Syria's undeclared weapons of mass destruction programmes, however, has prompted President Asad to reconsider harbouring the Iraqis.

Key Iraqi Nuclear Scientist Speaks Out

This op-ed by Mahdi Obeidi and published in The New York Times speaks for itself. It's pretty obvious that Obeidi, the former head of Saddam's nuclear centrifuge program, states that we only ignore Iraqi nuclear scientists at our peril:

Was Iraq a potential threat to the United States and the world? Threat is always a matter of perception, but our nuclear program could have been reinstituted at the snap of Saddam Hussein's fingers. The sanctions and the lucrative oil-for-food program had served as powerful deterrents, but world events - like Iran's current efforts to step up its nuclear ambitions - might well have changed the situation.

Iraqi scientists had the knowledge and the designs needed to jumpstart the program if necessary. And there is no question that we could have done so very quickly. In the late 1980's, we put together the most efficient covert nuclear program the world has ever seen. Had Saddam Hussein ordered it and the world looked the other way, we might have shaved months if not years off our previous efforts.

This is scary stuff, and coming from The New York Times no less.

The Politic Bias of a Balanced Budget

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting commentary on the United States government budget deficit. Would it really surprise anyone to discover that the deficit is nothing more than another partisan bargaining chip?

...for the fiscal year 2004, which ends on Friday, the government will report spending $422 billion more than it took in. But the figure bears little relationship to reality. It's nothing more than the result of major-league book-cooking that would get any corporate management a nice long stretch in Club Fed.

Just consider. In FYs 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001, the federal government ran up "surpluses" amounting to $558.5 billion. So the national debt was reduced by $558.5 billion in those years, right? No, it increased by $1.312 trillion.

...So all the hue and cry coming from people running for election this fall about the deficit, is so much, well, hue and cry. If any of them were serious about dealing with the fiscal problems, they'd propose reform of the government's bookkeeping methods as a first step. That, after all, is the only way we'll know what the deficit or surplus actually is. Until then, it's just talk -- pay no attention.

When are we finally going to hold Congress to the same GAAP standards that demand of even our smallest companies?

Das Kowboy

Economists and the public alike have long questioned the reasons for the differing growth rates between the United States and the developed markets in Europe. An essay in The Wall Street Journal reviews the upcoming release of a book by Olaf Gersemann, a German author and US correspondent for business periodical, that compares the German and US economies. Some highlights include:

Why has America's economy grown 55% faster than Germany's over the past 25 years?

The Germans think they know. Americans suffer cruel inequality. They work three "McJobs" just to survive. They take on more and more debt to maintain their standard of living. Washington hides the true state of unemployment by locking up millions in jail. And forget about getting decent health care.

Right-thinking Germans even have a derogatory term, Amerikanische Verhaltnisse -- literally, American conditions -- as a shorthand for the social catastrophe they believe would result if they were ever to tackle the real cause of their slow growth: a notoriously rigid labor market.

On each score where Europeans think their system is superior, [Mr. Gersemann] shows that the Americans have actually pulled ahead. Democrats might ponder the German lesson that the costs of the welfare state lead to the very poverty and inequality it is supposed to cure.

Good News from Afganistan

Andrew Sullivan has this update on Afghanistan available on his website, The Daily Dish:

Peter Bergen is by no means a Bush-supporter. He's an excellent reporter, did pioneering work on al Qaeda and (full disclosure) was at Oxford when I was and is an old friend. He's a soft-lefty, but very trust-worthy. His endorsement of what is happening in Afghanistan is good enough for me.

Almost all the reporters or human beings I read who have been there are beginning to say that Afghanistan is a big success story. Hitch, who just returned, was almost giddy with enthusiasm yesterday. Bergen's on board [as noted above]. And here's another missive of optimism. You can read this either way, I suppose. It can make Iraq look worse in comparison - or it can be seen as a sign that, even when things look dire, the power of the franchise and a skillful leader, like Karzai, can turn things around. Maybe in Iraq too.

The Perfect Storm

I've been hearing a lot recently about this economy being the worst since the Hoover administration. This is clearly an exaggeration. I lived through the early '90s recession and frankly, it was a lot worse. Moreover, both recessions are relatively mild recession by historical standards, particularly when consideration of their short duration is emphasized.

In order to highlight the robustness of our country, it's important to review What the United States economy has gone through over the last 4 years:

-End of a business cycle.
-Bursting of the tech and telecom bubble.
-9/11 (with loss of nearly 100 billion dollars in infrastructure and lost economic activity) and the ensuing terror anxiety.
-Resultant near collapse of the airline/travel sector.
-Afghanistan War anxiety.
-Iraq War anxiety.
-Corporate and accounting scandals that created a crisis in investor confidence.
-Investment banking scandals at the nation's largest brokerage firms that question investors' reliance on impartial advice.
-Severe drought conditions in the western states and Colorado basin for the past 6 years that continue to this day.
-The arrival of China as a major production alternative that is capable of flooding the world's markets with cheap goods while simultaneously impacting domestic manufacturing jobs.
-The arrival of China as a major IT services alternative that impacts domestic software and call center employment.
-Severe energy price shocks largely as a result of a built in terror premium.
-Continued severe economic weakness within our main trading partners: Europe and Japan.

Despite this recipe for a perfect storm, the United States is still the strongest economy in the world. Unemployment stands near historical lows at 5.4%. Indeed, it is a miracle that our economy isn't worse.

Why Invasion was Necessary

I will attempt here to convey why an Iraq invasion was the least bad option available in 2003 and why the invasion went foreward. The main reason is that the status quo ante was untenable because the policy in place, containment, was unraveling and Saddam had proven himself to be both unpredictable and undeterrable. -BBM

Other reasons include the need to change the dynamic in the middle east and introduce freedom into the area. Freedom creates hope and control over one's life, and hope destroys the nihilism at the root of terrorism, as well as fostering prosperity.

Problems with the Iraq Status Quo Ante

Many of these arguments I originally saw presented by Kenneth Pollack, but I’ve added some of my own observations. As Clinton’s Iraq expert, few Americans are as qualified as Kenneth M. Pollack to comment on Iraq. He worked in the Central Intelligence Agency analyzing military developments in the Persian Gulf area for seven years, including the period of the gulf war. During the Clinton administration he served as director for gulf affairs with the National Security Council. His immersion over more than a decade in the vast sea of information available to the United States government has enabled him to offer a comprehensive analysis of United States-Iraqi relations, conditions in Iraq, the nature of Saddam Hussein's rule and his aggressive goals.

Some sample quotes (The Threatening Storm, 2002)

"There is little doubt that the Iraqis are continuing to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons," Pollack writes[2002].

"[They] know how to build a nuclear weapon and did so in 1990; the only thing it was missing was the fissile material".

"Meanwhile, regular Iraqi citizens continue to suffer under a regime comparable to that of Stalin. "Torture is not a method of last resort in Iraq, it is often the method of first resort," Pollack writes.

He paints a gruesome portrait of life in Iraq, complete with flagrant human rights abuses and atrocities committed by those in Saddam's circle of power. "This is a regime that will gouge out the eyes of children to force confessions from their parents and grandparents," he writes.

In 2002, after over a decade of diplomacy to get cooperation from Saddam, and with no inspectors since 1998, we were faced with three strategies to deal with him:

-Deterrence
-Containment
-Regime Change (could be accomplished with covert ops, native forces, or invasion)



Deterrence

This would involve removal of all sanctions and allowing restoration of normal trade relations (with Europe, China, and Pakistan, North Korea, etc.), removal of the no fly zones, and counting on our conventional and nuclear deterrent to protect the USA and our allies in the area. The disadvantages here are that it would allow Saddam to rebuild his conventional and nonconventional forces, as well as take full and murderous revenge over his Shia and Kurdish enemies. Probably, as in 1991, hundreds of thousands would die in the ensuing bloodbath. Saddam would also be free to continue funding of Palestinian suicide bombers. Given his history and aspirations as a pan-Arabist, Saddam would almost certainly rebuild his nuclear weapons program to complete his dream of being a regional superpower.

This would lead to a regional arms race, and with it increased tensions with Israel. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey would all feel compelled to build and test nuclear weapons as well, and would be able to easily, absent crippling sanctions. And what of Jordan, our ally, and the most modern and liberalizing Arab state yet?

Within months, Saddam would be able to reconstitute his chemical and biological programs from his mothballed programs. Chemical weapons are 1890s and 1900s technology and the precursors are ubiquitous.

Within, say 5 years, Saddam would have rebuilt his conventional forces and nuclear program (with prewar intel, the number for the nuclear program was thought to be even less).

Scenario: Saddam reinvades Kuwait and threatens to nuke the Saudi oilfields if the world takes action. He could then menace the Saudis into collusion with him to control the supply of over 60% of the world’s oil supply allowing him to set prices effectively. A nuclear-armed Saddam taking over Kuwait and threatening Saudi Arabia leaves us with a choice between ceding him control of the world's oil supply, or of seeing that supply destroyed and contaminated for decades by a nuclear strike, sending the world's economy into radical shock, perhaps for years. Nothing endangers liberalism, pluralism, and environmentalism like severe economic downturn. See the 1930s. Hardest hit would be the new Eastern European existing at the margins of economic survival and multi-ethnic tensions where the tensions are high (Indonesia, the Balkans, Nigeria, India, China, West Africa, etc.). Change the scenario to add in Jordan or Syria. Imagine the effect that would have on Israel, another nuclear power.

Sound unlikely? Hardly. Deterrence relies on a reasonable, cautious, careful opponent that considers all facets before taking action…. and is able to admit that failure is a possibility and what the costs would be in that case. Saddam was never able to consider that his gambits could fail… he refused to see information that would contradict his vision of victory. Study of Saddam’s history demonstrates a frightening pattern of “bizarre decisions, poor judgment, and catastrophic miscalculations”, of deeply dangerous moves made with “no assessment of risks or costs” (quoting Pollack). This pattern traces back decades into the past, to incidents that predate well-known cases like the Gulf War or the war with Iran. Saddam's 1974 abrogation of his agreement with the Kurds, his attack on Kurdistan, and his baseless belief that the shah of Iran would not intervene against him are good examples. During the Iran-Iraq war, even though Iran had again and again demonstrated its superior ability to harm Iraq with retaliatory missile strikes, Saddam nonetheless repeatedly ordered air and missile strikes against Iranian cities. This was basically because the Iranian cities were much farther from the border than Iraqi cities, necessitating the use of smaller warheads at extreme range. This was a clear breakdown of ordinary "rational" deterrence. After the Gulf War, Saddam threatened to reinvade Kuwait in 1994, ordered the assassination of a former president, and moved tanks to the Syrian border to have access to the Golan Heights to menace Israel. One wonders what he thought would happen to his regime if he had succeeded in killing a former president, or had reinvaded Kuwait.

So it seems that deterrence was at the very least a high risk strategy.



Containment

Containment, the official US policy since the end of the Gulf War, was eroding rapidly, and at the time, it was thought that it had not eliminated Iraq's nuclear weapons program. It certainly had not weakened Saddam Hussein's grip on the country and in many ways strengthened his hand at home and abroad diplomatically. In fact, Saddam Hussein had managed to manipulate the sanctions to his benefit by rewarding supporters inside Iraq with scarce goods and bribing countries outside, like France and Russia, with lucrative oil contracts. The sanctions gave him unprecedented control over the Iraqi economy… much more than he had beforehand.

He was also able to evade sanctions by smuggling oil through Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Syria, and even Iran. This was not subtle… there was a pipeline going from Iraq to Syria for example. Dozens of tanker trucks going into Turkey every day… etc. This amounted to billions per year. He was also able to subvert oil sanctions through the oil-for-food program, adding on at least $10 billion more. This was done with the full knowledge of the UN and with involvement at the highest levels- including Kofi Anon’s son. Most of this money was laundered through Russia and Saudi Arabia, and several of the companies used turned out to have known connections with Al-Qaeda. More of the money could have found its way to terrorists by way of Saudi “charities”, though this is currently conjectured.

As a result of oil-for-food, France, China, Germany, and Russia were all actively trading with Iraq, and had tens of billions of dollars per year to lose by renewing containment (or regime change). This is precisely why, up until just before the war, they all worked tirelessly to reduce or remove sanctions… because it was in their own narrow self interests.

The containment policy kept the sanctions on, allowing Saddam to blame the miserable conditions he forced on his people (by spending his illegal gains from smuggling and Oil-for-food on weapons and palaces) on the USA and UN. This played well in the Arab world, building resentment against us. It also forced us to keep troops in Saudi Arabia in case Saddam decided to make a run for the Saudi oilfields. This is significant because it was one of the primary complaints of Bin Laden that he used to justify the wave of terror attacks perpetrated by Al-Qaeda on US targets in the 1990s and of course 9/11.

Containment also necessitated the maintenance of the No Fly Zones, that amounted to hundreds of thousands of sorties over the 13 years or so they were in place. This was not cheap, either.

Saddam did not voluntarily disarm in a cooperative fashion after UN Resolution 1441. No one disputes that he remained in violation. We know what voluntary disarmament looks like, because we’ve seen it in South Africa and in Libya. Those regimes actively divulged everything, leading inspectors to sites and revealing all phases of their programs. Instead Saddam allowed inspectors back in to play hide and seek. In retrospect it is not clear why he did things this way… was he deceived by corrupt underlings into believing that he had weapons? Did he think that the coalition was bluffing? Or that France and Russia would bail him out at the last minute in the UN? Was this just another of his disastrous miscalculations?

Recall that it took surrounding Iraq with hundreds of thousands of coalition soldiers and issuing an ultimatum in the UN just to get the inspectors back in to play hide and seek. This level of deployment was unsustainable just to keep inspectors in. Once thee troops went home the inspectors would find less and less cooperation until they had to leave in frustration as in 1998. Then with the money Saddam was garnering from smuggling and oil-for-food he could rebuild his weapons programs and we would be dealing with a de facto deterrence situation, a very risky proposition as noted above.

Regional allies like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were willing to stick their necks out one more time for the USA (and the Saudis barely at that)… but not for half measures. If they thought that they were going to have to live with a resurgent Iraq (due to erosion of sanctions etc.) then they would need to hedge their bets and cozy up to Saddam a little… and that would mean not provoking him by constantly readmitting thousands of troops for the sole purpose of keeping inspectors in (and as soon as the troops went home, the inspectors would be kicked out restarting the cycle).



Regime Change

There was no sign of any impending collapse of Saddam’s regime. There were three possibilities over time (waiting for Saddam to die would have taken years, and his sons were being groomed to take power following his death):

1. Spontaneous evolution into a more liberal regime with abandonment of pan-arabist aspirations, support for Palestinian terror, and totalitarian oppression of its people. Unlikely to say the least.

2. Spontaneous implosion. Possible, but as above, there were no signs of this. And this would have led to complete disorder and civil war with millions displaced or dead of thirst, starvation, disease, and violence. It is also unlikely that Syria and Iran and Turkey would just sit idly around while Iraq descended into chaos. They would "respond to provocation" and "protect their borders" and "protect the oilfields" by occupying large swaths of the country.And don't forget: we thought at the time that there were stockpiles of WMD there that would then have fallen into the hands of terrorists or other countries. It would have been a total disaster.

3. External Regime Change: Covert operations were unlikely to succeed, and there were no groups in Iraq that could have successfully challenged even the weakened Saddam, even with American airpower assisting. There was no “Northern Alliance” in Iraq. Forces of that type (and their leaders) were all crushed in 1991 by Saddam after the Gulf War. The only option left over was invasion.


Recall also that the best intelligence of several nation suggested that there would be stockpiles of WMD found (the US, UK, Russian, and even French and German intelligence supported this). Multiple independant reviews in the US and UK found no evidence of warping of the intel or pressure placed on the intelligence gatherers. Since the invasion, the Russian President has stated that Russian intel passed along a warning that Saddam was planning attacks on US interests.

A responsible leader would have no choice. Just ask Bill Clinton:

Clinton defends successor's push for war
Says Bush 'couldn't responsibly ignore' chance Iraq had WMDs

More Fallout from CBS' Failings

Reports about political bias at CBS are really starting to hit their stride. The internet is awash with articles about Dan Rather and his producers at 60 Minutes who forced their views on televised content. This site has a good overview of Rather's history of content manipulation and his preference for stories that damaged one political party over the other.

Here's another article as reported by AP detailing the blatant motives of the CBS producer responsible for Rather's story based upon forged National Guard documents.


Courtesy of Associated Press
Mary Mapes, a Producer for CBS' 60 Minutes.
Notable excerpts include:

Mary Mapes, a veteran producer at CBS News, reported most of the National Guard story, including obtaining the documents CBS now says it can't authenticate. She also passed on the phone number of her source, former Texas National Guard officer Bill Burkett, to the Kerry campaign. Mapes, 48, was described by colleagues on Tuesday as a dogged and talented journalist who made no secret of her liberal political beliefs.

She's only a few months removed from a career-defining highlight. Mapes took a story that had received little attention - the abuse of prisoners by American soldiers in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison - and unearthed the photos that gave the story its visceral impact.

Mapes was "quite liberal" and disliked the current President Bush's father, [John Carlson, a former commentator at KIRO-TV] said. "She definitely was someone who was motivated by what she cared about and definitely went into journalism to make a difference," Carlson said. "She's not the sort of person who went into journalism to report the news and offer an array of commentary." "The mistakes she made were so obvious. This was a story that was rushed because they clearly believed it was true. They wanted it to be true."

CBS acknowledged Mapes passed on Burkett's number to Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart, and Lockhart called. Even before this story, Rather and CBS News were targets of groups concerned about an anti-Republican bias in the media. The Lockhart contact "is going to cast more doubt on not just the practices, but the motives behind the story".

Oh what a tangled web of deceit between CBS, 60 Minutes, and the Kerry campaign grows. But then again, can the viewing public be surprised that the Kerry campaign would stoop so low as to further sully the reputation of a major network in their quest to win the Presidential election?

Food for Thought

In reviewing the recent incident at CBS, am I the only one who is completely irritated that one of the major US broadcast networks is again involved in typical partisan ploys? This time round, it's Dan Rather and the producers at 60 Minutes who have shirked their responsibilities as journalists in furthering their own leftist political leanings by reporting as fact data from forged documents that had not even passed the simplest and most rudimentary fact verification. Frankly, it doesn’t take a genius and a little bit of effort to differentiate between a 1970s IBM Selectric typewriter and an adjustable font, modern day word processor. Their motives were underhanded and intended solely to impact the reelection campaign of President George W. Bush, pure and simple.

Regardless of our readers’ political persuasions and forgetting for one moment one's opinion of President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard, the general public should be reminded that all three major networks broadcast their programs over publicly-owned spectrum for free. Accordingly, a certain level of professionalism and objectivity in their political coverage is to be expected.

As for Dan Rather, it's time this bloated, biased, self-important, would-be journalist is put to pasture.

A US Perspective on the UN

(EDITOR'S NOTE: George Melloan of The Wall Street Journal makes as good an analysis of the United Nations as I have read in ages. It really has come time for the US to evaluate exactly what purpose this archaic, corrupt institution actually serves. Beyond our kowtowing to mischievous and deceitful little autocrats for international sanctions approval, the United Nations actually costs our country billions of dollars each year in scandal-ridden and neglectful programs. I could go on ad nauseum, but instead defer to excerpts from Mr. Melloan's editorial below. -EBO)


Bush Will Give Turtle Bay Yet Another Try
by GEORGE MELLOAN
The Wall Street Journal
Tuesday, September 21, 2004

...In the forefront of U.N. failures is Darfur, where tens of thousands of innocents are perishing while the U.N. dithers over whether it wants to support a U.S. charge that Sudan's government is conducting a genocide. That Khartoum has armed and supported Arab terrorists who have murdered, raped and starved the hapless black Africans of that desolate region would seem to be reason enough for U.N. action.

...North Korea and Iran are hell-bent to build nuclear weapons to use for blackmailing their neighbors and the world at large. The U.N. can't seem to decide what to do about that either. Last Friday, the IAEA board voted, after much haggling, to criticize Iran for the secrecy of its nuclear program. But the U.S. couldn't persuade the board to go beyond that.

...North Korea is even more impudent, threatening to test a nuclear weapon. As with Saddam Hussein, the end result of allowing these two governments to repeatedly thumb their noses at the U.N. is likely to be that the U.S. ultimately will have no choice but to use military force to remove the dangers to the civilized world their nuclear ambitions represent.

...U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan last week took it upon himself to say that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq last year was contrary to "international law." The invasion, of course, followed more than a decade of Saddam's defiance of U.N. resolutions demanding that he reveal whether he had weapons of mass destruction.

...Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker is investigating how it happened that Mr. Annan didn't notice that Saddam was skimming billions of dollars from the U.N. oil-for-food program to build palaces, buy weapons and bribe sundry politicians around the globe.

...In the 191-nation General Assembly Mr. Bush will address today, most of the delegates represent small, poor nations that mostly have one thing in mind, trying to wheedle as much as they can out of the large, rich nations.

It is sometimes unclear what real purpose the United Nations serves, considering how it has swollen into a secretive bureaucracy and the difficulty in marshalling any unity on how to achieve its lofty goals of world peace and prosperity.

On a Wing and Weightless?

(EDITOR'S NOTE: It took me a while to muster the nerve, but last October I finally pulled the proverbial ripcord and jumped out of a plane. Skydiving was everything that I imagined it to be and more: thrilling, frightening, and miraculous. To float among the birds, if only for a minute or so, is to carry oneself among the Gods.

Nonetheless, that first initial step out of the plane may be too much for most of our readers. Indeed, it demands overcoming eons of evolutions that taught human beings that we simply cannot fly. Thank goodness the Wright Brothers were immune to that sentiment. Fortunately, a company named Zero Gravity has an alternative. Borrowing from the same methodologies that NASA used to train their astronauts about the effects of weightlessness aboard the 'Vomit Comet', they have begun to market their services to those in the general public who yearn for the freedom of soaring. Excerpt from an article on MSNBC should offer our readers all the details they need to make their first 'visit to space'. But be forewarned, at $3000, it costs more then 10 times a simple leap from a plane. -EBO)


Zero-gravity Flights Go Mainstream
By ALAN BOYLE
MSNBC
Tuesday, September 14, 2004


Courtesy of MSNBC and Zero Gravity
Weightlessness for 30 Seconds and $3000.
After years of effort, the first commercial tour service to offer zero-gravity airplane flights in the United States is finally open for business. For just under $3,000, regular folks can get a tamed-down taste of what astronauts feel on NASA's "Vomit Comet." Passengers aboard the modified Boeing 727-200 jet will experience weightlessness for about 25 seconds at a time.

A typical parabolic flight lasts about 90 minutes, with 15 up-and-down parabolas at an altitude of 24,000 to 34,000 feet. Two "Martian" arcs simulate one-third Earth gravity, three "lunar" arcs feel like one-sixth Earth gravity, and the final 10 provide the full zero-gravity experience.

NASA's flight path can induce motion sickness in some people — after all, that's why they call it the "Vomit Comet." And during this summer's series of demonstration flights for the FAA, a couple of the passengers aboard the Amerijet plane reportedly looked a little green around the gills, though most were said to be delighted. The FAA's Bergen declined to characterize how the inspectors handled the flights, other than to say, "It was definitely a unique experience for all of them."

Options in North Korea

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Great analysis and food for thought considering options on North Korea. Four options are described and considered: military, total isolation, negotiation, and containment/deterrence. Which option is most usefull? Which is most realistic? -BBM)



The Option of Last Resort

"When the North Korean nuclear crisis erupted in late 2002, the Bush administration set into action a complex sequence of events that it felt would best resolve the situation. At the time, it appeared that Washington was depending on a combination of pressure from Beijing and six party negotiations to denuclearize Pyongyang. Now, two years later, a more complete picture has emerged, and it is clear that the United States did not expect the negotiations to be successful. Instead, Washington had used the time it bought with negotiations to lay the extensive groundwork necessary for the containment of a nuclear-armed North. As it stands, this strategy may very turn out to be most optimal."

The Price of Victory?

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Check out this thought provoking piece by Yossi Klein Halevi & Michael B. Oren. Commentary from Powerline and Winds of Change. -BBM)



Israel's unexpected victory over terrorism

The authors note that over the last six months:

[T]he Israeli army destroyed most of what remained of Hamas's organization in the West Bank and a substantial part of its infrastructure in Gaza. Just last week, Israeli gunships rocketed a Hamas training camp in Gaza, killing 15 operatives. Hamas leaders, who once routinely led rallies and gave interviews to the media, don't dare show their faces in public anymore. Even their names are kept secret. Hardly a night passes without the arrest of a wanted terrorist. Hamas's ranks have become so depleted that the organization is now recruiting teenagers: At the Gaza border, Israeli forces recently broke up a Hamas cell made up of 16-year-olds. Meanwhile, life inside Israel has returned to near normalcy. The economy, which was shrinking in 2001, is now growing at around 4 percent per year. Even the tourists are back: Jerusalem's premier King David Hotel, which a few years ago was almost empty, recently reached full occupancy. All summer, Israel seemed to be celebrating itself, with music and film festivals and a nightly crafts fair in Jerusalem that brought crowds back to its once-deserted downtown. Everyone knows a terrorist attack can happen at any time. Still, Israeli society no longer lives in anticipation of an attack.

How was this accomplished?

Israel's triumph over the Palestinian attempt to unravel its society is the result of a systematic assault on terrorism that emerged only fitfully over the past four years. The fence, initially opposed by the army and the government, has thwarted terrorist infiltration in those areas where it has been completed. Border towns like Hadera and Afula, which had experienced some of the worst attacks, have been terror-free since the fence was completed in their areas. Targeted assassinations and constant military forays into Palestinian neighborhoods have decimated the terrorists' leadership, and roadblocks have intercepted hundreds of bombs, some concealed in ambulances, children's backpacks, and, most recently, a baby carriage.

In other words, Israel got serious. It finally ignored those who said that a major counter-offensive would only create more terrorists and alienate Europeans. But the skeptics were correct as to the latter prediction. Israel has become a pariah state whose very legitimacy is now questioned. Anti-semitism in Europe has reach the crisis stage.

The price Israel has paid for its victory has been sobering. Arafat may be a pariah, but Israel is becoming one, too. Increasingly, the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty is under attack. Former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard, for example, has called Israel's creation a "mistake." In Europe, an implicit "red-green-black" coalition of radical leftists, Islamists, and old-fashioned fascists has revived violent anti-Semitism.

Along with the desecration of Jewish cemeteries by neo-Nazis and the assaults on Jews by Arab youth, some European left-wingers now sense a sympathetic climate in which to publicly indulge their anti-Semitism. In a recent interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Greek composer and left-wing activist Mikis Theodorakis denounced "the Jews" for their dominance of banks, U.S. foreign policy, and even the world's leading orchestras, adding that the Jews were "at the root of evil." In the Arab world, a culture of denial that repudiates the most basic facts of Jewish history— from the existence of the Jerusalem Temple to the existence of the gas chambers — has become mainstream in intellectual discourse and the media. Government TV stations in Egypt and Syria have produced dramatizations based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Boycotts of Israel are multiplying: The nonaligned states recently voted to bar "settlers"— including Israelis who live in Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem— from their borders. Among young Israelis across the political spectrum, there's growing doubt about the country's future and widespread talk of emigration. In its victories and its defeats, Israel is a test case of what happens to a democracy forced to confront nonstop terrorism. In their daily lives, Israelis must contend with the most pressing questions of the global war against terrorism: Can terrorism be defeated? And, in doing so, can basic democratic principles be maintained? Finally, does the moral necessity to defeat terrorism supersede the moral necessity to address the grievances of those in whose name terrorism is committed?

The authors conclude with what they think may be the most important lesson we can learn from the Israeli example:

Perhaps the greatest danger in fighting terrorism is the polarizing effect such a campaign can have — not just internationally, but domestically. To avoid this pitfall, a strong political consensus for military action is necessary. That means the president must actively reach out to domestic opposition. But American leaders must also heed Sharon's other lessons. That means an ability to endure criticism from abroad and even to risk international isolation, a willingness to define the war on terrorism as a total war, and a commitment to focus one's political agenda on winning, not on divisive or extraneous concerns. Fulfilling those conditions does not guarantee success. But it does make success possible — as Israel is, at great cost, showing the world.

The Rather Papers

The Washington Post has a great comparison between the forged Air National Guard documents presented by Dan Rather on CBS about President Bush's military history and actual, legitimate Texas Air National Guard documents from the early 1970s. You can view the differences for yourself here.

Crushing of Dissent at CBS

For those of you who have not followed the forgery scandal at CBS concerning President Bush's National Guard service, here is a good overview. And here is a detailed timeline. It seems that the first round of firings over the matter is already underway, according to an Associated Press article in The Lexington Herald:

A radio talk-show host said Saturday he has been fired for criticizing CBS newsman Dan Rather's handling of challenges to the authenticity of memos about President Bush's National Guard service. "On the talk show that I host, or hosted, I said I felt Rather should either retire or be forced out over this," said Brian Maloney, whose weekly "The Brian Maloney Show" aired for three years on KIRO-AM Radio, a CBS affiliate here. Maloney says he made that statement on his Sept. 12 program. He was fired Friday, he said.

Energy Policy Update

I support energy independence. Accordingly, an increased reliance on nuclear power will be required in the short term to drive this policy preference. It’s worth mentioning that France gets about 70% of its own electrical power from nuclear power plants.

However, new technologies are emerging. Though the interim costs may be stifling, substantial research and development might offer the breakthroughs for any of these alternatives more than a sideshow. In particular, Hydrogen has been touted as a way forward. Unfortunately, it has many problems, including storage and low energy density. Moreover, Hydrogen is a fuel but not an energy source. For example, oil and coal are both, while the sun and wind are energy sources but not fuels. As such, there is not a substantial, natural source of Hydrogen in the world; any Hydrogen that is used can only be generated by harnessing energy from another other source. Nonetheless, this only remains one barrier on the road to progress. Here's a roundup of recent advances in the news, courtesy of Winds of Change:

Three years after September 11th, there is more attention given to non-oil energy sources than ever: energy independence is widely recognized as an essential long-term goal in the War on Terror, and concerns about the extent of our contribution to global climate change continue to multiply.

Still, the increased public interest has not made the problems inherent in the massive project of transforming our energy systems any simpler. The goal is agreed upon, but the road is still unclear. Think of this roundup of energy news from the past two weeks as a series of signposts along several paths (including new paths using 'old' fossil fuels, which will almost certainly play an important role in the energy mix for decades at least), some of which intersect and run alongside each other, others which head in opposite directions - and some that we will doubtlessly abandon before we reach their end.

Wind Power
Solar
Nuclear
Natural Gas
The Grid
Hydrogen/Fuel Cells
Geothermal
Coal+
Biofuels
Misc

Here too are some links to a site run by retired engineer, Steven DenBeste. He runs some numbers in order to demonstrate the need for major breakthroughs before alternative energy sources can compete with oil and coal on a scale basis as well as an economic basis:

Alternative energy sources such as geothermal, solar, wind, solar satellites, tides, fission, hydrogen, ethanol and biomass all have technical and scalability problems. Conservation alone is not the answer to energy independence.

Why Democracy Promotion Matters

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Where there is freedom, there is hope. People have a measure of control over their lives. Indeed, nothing destroys nihilism like hope.

Presently, we are in a time, some years after the conclusion of the Cold War, which allows reflection and reassessment of outdated policies. In other words, strategies that made sense in the past may be maladaptive our current situation. Specifically, favoring stability in the Middle East at the expense of progressive democratic change must come to an end. While waves of invasions and targeted strikes are not required, a military means of confronting autarky and opponents of freedom will doubtless be necessary. Otherwise, Middle East moderates will surely die on the vine.

On several occasions, Kerry has stated that he would concentrate on building a stable Iraq, even if it came at the expense of democracy. This is dated thinking. The post cold war world of rogue states, stateless terrorism, and WMD proliferation is not amenable to the solutions of realpolitik.

In excerpts from an article in the Los Angeles Times, Max Boot, the author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power considers this issue in more detail. -BBM)


A Democratic World Is No Neocon Folly
by MAX BOOT
The Los Angeles Times
Thursday, September 16, 2004

The facts are in: Freedom is better.

"The world must be made safe for democracy," Woodrow Wilson declared in 1917. Ever since (and arguably before), that imperative has occupied a central place in U.S. foreign policy.

Yet, because of the difficulties we are encountering in Iraq, the democratization imperative is under attack today from both left and right. From Pat Buchanan to Paul Krugman, the cry has gone up that the stress on exporting American ideals is a plot by nefarious "neoconservatives." Even John Kerry, a nominee of Wilson's own party, sounds disdainful of attempts to spread freedom to places like Cuba and Iran.

Maybe, the cynics suggest, some people (the Arabs, for instance) are simply unfit for self-rule. More sophisticated versions of this argument suggest focusing on economic development first, to be followed eventually by political liberalization. If impoverished nations rush to hold elections, realpolitikers fear, the result could be the rise of "illiberal democracies" or instability and civil war. Better to deal with enlightened despots like Hosni Mubarak or Lee Kuan Yew rather than risk the messiness of freedom.

...Free countries grow faster than their more repressive neighbors. They also perform better on social measures such as life expectancy, literacy rates, clean drinking water and healthcare. And they are less prone to armed conflict.

...They note that "the 87 largest refugee crises over the past 20 years originated in autocracies," and they cite Nobel laureate Amartya Sen's observation that "no democracy with a free press has ever experienced a major famine."

Why National Missile Defense Matters

One of the salient issues in this campaign is missile defense. Bush supports continued research and development, while Kerry ardently opposes it. Critics of the missile defense program claim that NMD is a multibillion dollar boondoggle for the aerospace industry, won’t work, is too expensive, and could be destabilizing to the global balance of power. However, I think that the benefits clearly outweigh the risks in multiple theaters, but most obviously in the North Pacific and the Middle East. I’ll attempt to address the aforementioned criticisms below:


"We Don’t Need NMD":
Actually, we do. First, North Korea currently has missiles that can reach Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and probably Hawaii. More disconcerting, they are believed to have completed designs for a weapon capable of reaching the continental United States. Though it has not yet been tested, it is essentially a three-stage version of their current two-stage ballistic missile.

Second, Iran is developing nuclear weapons and ICBMs as well. They already have missiles that can reach Turkey, Greece, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and all of the major oil fields in the area. Just because they won’t be able to reach the continental US for a few years doesn’t mean that they can’t start a general Middle East conflagration. Additionally, if Iran were to achieve a nuclear capability, there would be overwhelming pressure for Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia to do so as well in order to counter the regional threat. And imagine the response from the Israelis, in a country of only 6 million people that could easily be wiped out in a surprise first strike. A regional arms race would be enormously destabilizing.

Third, India and Pakistan come very close to a nuclear exchange every few years. Do we want to see even more regional instability?

Essentially, Any NMD program will make it less valuable to have nuclear weapons, likely reducing their proliferation. Let’s face it: We’re coming up on the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Atomic bombs are 1940s technology. ICBMs are 1950s technology. If wealthy nations (such Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Japan, South Korea, Australia, etc.) want the bomb, they could, absent severe sanctions, develop one within a few years.

Some argue that the real danger is in unconventional delivery systems via terrorists, and NMD does not protect against this threat. True, but just because a boxer has a good left hook doesn’t mean you ignore his overhand right. What if Iran, having gained nuclear capability in the near future, decides to step up support for terrorists against the United States and its allies (Israel and the new Iraqi government), thinking that it can avoid reprisals by hiding behind its nuclear “deterrent”. NMD removes this deterrent.


”Missile Defense Doesn’t Work":
Hitting a small object in space moving at 15,000 mph is difficult. Currently, tests show that the land based system designed to intercept warheads in the re-entry phase has an approximately 50% success rate. Statistically, this is not actually a huge problem. The solution lies in firing 2 or 3 interceptors at each incoming warhead. Additionally, as technology progresses, accuracy should improve.

It’s also a mistake to view this as the only system… mature NMD will incorporate multiple interlocking, redundant systems that will consist of ground, sea, and air based systems, targeting the boost, mid course and the reentry phase. These systems will be kinetic, laser, and possibly electronically (EMP) based. Midcourse warheads could also be rendered inoperative with a burst of x-rays from a small nuclear weapon.

The Air Born Laser (ABL), which targets the boost phase, is already flying and in an advanced stage of development. Other systems targeting the terminal/reentry phase are due to come online in the next few years.


"NMD Is Too Expensive”:
Under the Bush administration, missile defenses have received $$7-9 billion annually. This is less than we spend on the space shuttle program.


"NMD Will Upset Strategic Stability":
The defense systems currently under construction are too small to upset the strategic balance of power afforded by mutually assured distruction (MAD) because they could be overwhelmed by the sheer numbers by other superpowers. However, rogue states with more limited resources would not have this advantage. The world has changed immesurably since the end of the cold war. The United States needs to continue to change in the future in response to ever-rising threats to our freedom.


Unless we are willing, and able, to take out the capabilities of these rogue states, a backup plan is mandatory. -BBM

Say Goodbye to New Orleans?

Cities like New Orleans and Amsterdam have always amazed me. How have they both survived sub-sea levels altitudes for so long with seemingly little trouble? New Orleans in particular rests greater than 9 feet below sea level. Well, New Orleans is about to discover if it can really suffer the wrath of Neptune. Hurricane Ivan is racing towards the city with wind speeds in excess of 140 miles per hour, strong enough for a Class 4 rating. At this speed, residents have been warned to, and are beginning to, leave the city. In the worst-case scenario, as reported on AP News, "a direct strike by a full-strength Hurricane Ivan — could submerge much of this historic city treetop-deep in a stew of sewage, industrial chemicals and fire ants, and the inundation could last for weeks, experts say." Moreover, because the city sits in a depression along the Mississippi delta, the water will not have anywhere to drain. Accordingly, a full frontal direct hit might result in submerging the city beneath 20 feet of water.

"Those folks who remain, should the city flood, would be exposed to all kinds of nightmares from buildings falling apart to floating in the water having nowhere to go," Ivor van Heerden, director of Louisiana State University's Hurricane Public Health Center, said Tuesday. Severe flooding in area bayous also forces out wildlife, including poisonous snakes and stinging fire ants, which sometimes gather in floating balls carried by the current.

It's worth mentioning that New Orleans is on the far western edge of the Gulf Coast region threatened by Ivan. Moreover, meteorologists stated that the hurricane seemed to have established a more eastern track along the Mississippi coast, thereby minimizing the risks of catastrophic flooding. Nonetheless, here's my recommendation: Get out of the house. I hear Texas is beautiful this time of year.

Stretching the Truth

You've all heard it a thousand times: If you want to avoid injury, then make certain that you stretch before working out. Well, to be quite candid, I hate stretching. For that matter, I hate jogging too, but that's another issue altogether. First off, I was always concerned that stretching out a cold muscle just didn't seem like the smartest practice. Second, stretching is just kind of a pain for those of us that are slightly less than completely flexible (read, everyone but ballet dancers and martial arts experts). Accordingly, I've essentially gone through my life just warming up gradually and not pushing it too hard until everything seemed ready to go. Well, it seems that my approach wasn't such a bad one after all as evidenced by a study appearing in the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine. Excerpts below from a summary in the The Wall Street Journal should help you to understand why I'm not changing my ways anytime soon:

In a recently published review of research on stretching and sports injuries, researchers with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that stretching increases flexibility but that, contrary to popular belief, there is little evidence this decreases the risk of injury. Likewise, other review articles have found that stretching before exercise doesn't appear to prevent injuries. One, published in the British Medical Journal in 2002, also showed stretching before or after exercise to have only a negligible effect on muscle soreness following exercise.

The latest review of studies, published in the current issue of the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine, focused on athletic performance. It showed that when people stretched right before tests of strength, muscle contraction and jumping ability, they did worse than when there was no stretching, regardless of age, gender, fitness level or type of stretching.

Assault Weapons for the Average Fool

I'll never understand our nation's fascination with guns and rifles. At the very least, one would think that a sensible registration and licensing process prior to purchasing a gun would be acceptable to the National Rifle Association. Concurrently, one would also think that a ban on assault rifles makes a lot of sense. Indeed, weren't these rifles developed for law enforcement and military applications with the sole purpose of eliminating subjects (read, human beings) from great distances? Again, couldn't a ban on assault rifles be tolerable to the NRA? Of course, it's not. As Eddie Murphy once agreed, they're "just weapons for the average sportsman". It seems more like the average sportsman prior to going on a killing spree. Sadly, it seems like this is more and more the case since the ban against assault weapons expired last night. Check out some of the details from the following excerpts appearing in a news report on Reuters:

A 10-year-old ban on assault weapons expired across the United States on Monday with a political firefight but no apparent rush to rearm by gun enthusiasts. The 1994 law, which expired just after midnight Sunday because the U.S. Congress elected not to renew it, banned the sale, manufacture and importing of powerful military-style assault weapons, along with magazines holding more than 10 rounds and certain other features such as devices to suppress the flashpoint.

With the expiration of the ban, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives sent out a letter to weapons importers clarifying the post-ban rules. "There is no longer a federal prohibition on the manufacture, transfer and possession of SAWs (semiautomatic assault weapons)," the bureau said. "To me the ban was just a way for (former President Bill) Clinton to get more votes," [firearms instructor Robert] Schlafly said. "It's all politics. It didn't hurt the firearms industry but people were mad."

[Presidential Candidate Kerry] said, "when a killer walks into a gun shop, when a terrorist goes to a gun show somewhere in America, when they want to purchase an AK-47 or some other military assault weapon, they're going to hear one word: 'sure."'

Bush spokesman Scott McClellan called Kerry's remarks "another false attack" and said the best way to stop gun violence is to vigorously prosecute gun crime.

To this end, I will agree: stronger enforcement of crimes and harsher punishments without possibility of parole would surely benefit all law-abiding citizens. Moreover, I'll agree that this gun ban was mostly a symbolic gesture by Clinton to round up suburban voters and defeat the NRA's efforts. Indeed, it hardly seemed to hamper criminals' efforts to obtain them.

Nevertheless, I still cannot understand what place an assault rifle serves in the average American's home. We may as well begin the process of removing the ban on all military weapons systems, including the F-16 warplane; the M-1 Abrams tank; and Tomahawk cruise missiles. Quite frankly, if you're going to protect your home against intruders, and it's good enough for the United States military, then it's good enough for me too. When it's boiled down in this manner, gun advocates should agree: assault rifles in the public's hands don't make too much sense, either.

Great Speeches on Leadership, Part 2

(EDITOR'S NOTE: On the eve of the 3rd anniversary of 9/11, I thought that these lines, written in the darkest hour of the republic, are particularly appropriate. Short, sweet, and to the point. -BBM)


The Gettysburg Address
Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Iran Playing the International Community Like a Fiddle

(EDITOR'S NOTE: The next crisis? Do we really want the world's number one terror state to get the bomb? Diplomacy seems to be failing. Where are Kerry and Bush on this? -BBM)


Iran Seen Using EU to Buy Time to Get Atomic Bomb

Thu Sep 9, 2:48 PM ET

By Louis Charbonneau

VIENNA (Reuters) - Iran is using negotiations with the European Union (news - web sites)'s "big three" on suspending sensitive nuclear activities to buy the time it needs to get ready to make atomic weapons, an Iranian exile and intelligence officials said.
Reuters
Slideshow: Iran Nuclear Issues

With intelligence sources saying Iran could be months away from nuclear weapons capability, the United States wants Iran reported to the U.N. Security Council immediately, charging Tehran uses its civilian atomic energy program as a front to develop the bomb. Tehran vehemently denies the charge.
France, Britain and Germany want to avoid isolating Iran and have taken a go-slow approach, negotiating with Iran to suspend uranium enrichment activities.
"Iran continues to use existing differences between the U.S. and Europe to their advantage and tries to drag out talks with the EU to buy time," Alireza Jafarzadeh, an Iranian exile who has reported accurately on Iran's nuclear program in the past, told Reuters.
"They feel they have bought at least 10 months," Jafarzadeh said. He said he was citing sources in Iran familiar with the results of a recent high-level meeting on Iran's nuclear program attended by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Jafarzadeh said officials at the meeting also decided to allocate an additional $2 billion from Iran's central bank reserves to supplement some $14 billion already spent on what he called Iran's "secret nuclear weapons program."
The EU trio has expressed disappointment at Iran's failure to keep promises it made in October to suspend all activities related to the enrichment of uranium, a process of purifying it for use as fuel for atomic power plants or in weapons. But the three remain committed to a process of engagement with Tehran.
However an intelligence official said a failure to act now as Washington would like, could be decisive for the development of an Iranian nuclear weapons capability.
"The Europeans express helplessness, despair and lack of strategy, which is exactly what (the Iranians) want to hear," a senior non-U.S. intelligence official said.
"This is their golden opportunity, between now and the coming of a new (U.S.) administration."
"PLAYING FOR TIME"
The U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been investigating Iran's nuclear program ever since Jafarzadeh announced in August 2002 on behalf of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an exiled opposition group, that Iran was hiding several massive nuclear sites from the IAEA.
Although the EU trio are reaching the point where they too might support a referral of Iran's nuclear program to the Security Council, which could impose economic sanctions, diplomats in Vienna say they will give Iran one more chance to end its enrichment activities before the November IAEA meeting.
On Tuesday, diplomats said Iran had agreed with the Europeans in principle to renew its suspension of centrifuge production, assembly and testing. But U.S. and other officials dismissed this as a ploy to escape a Security Council referral.
"Iran is playing for time," a Western diplomat told Reuters.
The IAEA Board of Governors meets next week to discuss Iran's nuclear program, parts of which it hid from the U.N. nuclear watchdog for nearly two decades. Vienna diplomats say the EU three oppose a U.N. Security Council report next week.
Diplomats and intelligence officials say this may give Iran just enough time to reach the point where it has all the technology and expertise it needs to develop an atom bomb at a time of its choosing.

"It is a matter of several months, up to a year, most probably less than a year (for nuclear capability)," the intelligence official said. "By that time we think they will have enough feed material for the centrifuges so they won't be dependent on foreign input."
Iran recently announced it would convert 37 tons of raw "yellowcake" uranium into uranium hexafluoride, the feed material for centrifuges. Experts say this is enough for a bomb.
The official said the IAEA was making a mistake by being so cautious about what the agency has called a lack of any evidence proving Tehran has a covert military atomic program.
"If the IAEA would wait forever to see a smoking gun ... it will be too late," the official said.

Capturing Carbon Dioxide

The Greens have pestered the rest of the international community for years about the need to moderate mankind’s contribution to global warming. In particular, they fear that industrial and automotive emissions have resulted in an uncharacteristically speedy advance in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

Of course, it’s important to bear in mind that there is no substantive link between mankind’s actions and increased CO2 levels. In fact, it could very likely be the result of normal, cyclical patterns in the overall lifetime of the Earth. Considering that our existence on this planet is but a blip during the 5-billion year age of the planet, I am inclined to lean in this direction.

Moreover, the Greens have based their claims predominantly on selective measurement, rhetoric, and faith instead of actual, hard scientific evidence. To that end, I might direct you to an article we posted on our site some time ago that reported on Michael Crichton’s observations about these so-called environmentalists and their claims.

In any event, researchers have recently developed a new methodology that may one day prove useful in minimizing carbon dioxide atmospheric concentrations if a direct correlation with global warming is ultimately observed. Highlights of this research are excerpted below from Futurepundit. Hopefully, this will help to appease some of the more diehard fanatics out there.

The naturally occurring mineral serpentine sequesters carbon dioxide very slowly over eons. Some Penn State researchers have found that by dissolving serpentine in sulfuric acid, they can produce compounds that will very rapidly bind to carbon dioxide.

The metamorphic mineral serpentine -- or magnesium silicate hydroxide -- is composed of magnesium, silicon and oxygen and is plentiful. The researchers used material from the Cedar Hills quarry on the Pennsylvania/ Maryland border for this study, but the mineral is available in large quantities in many places. The U.S. deposits of the minerals that can be used for this process -- serpentine and ovivine -- can sequester all the carbon dioxide emissions produced from fossil fuels.

"Previous researchers investigating serpentine for use in sequestering carbon dioxide have crushed serpentine very finely, to sizes smaller than beach sand, but, even at these small sizes, it takes high temperatures to speed up the reaction, "says Maroto-Valer. "With our method, we do not need to crush it that fine and we do not need high temperatures. In fact, the reaction gives off heat. Our method is much less energy expensive."

They aren't done developing this method to the point of being practically useful. Also, there is no big push in the United States at this point to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Still, this could turn out to be a useful technique if global warming is eventually proven to be a serious problem.

Suppose coal can be made to burn extremely cleanly without even generating carbon dioxide emissions. Add in future advances in battery technology that make batteries light enough and cheap enough to be used in electric cars. Then at some point we might burn coal to supply electricity to charge batteries in electric cars.

Letter to the Editor: Love in Reverse

(EDITOR’S NOTE: The following commentary was directed to the editors of the realist party in order to comment on the interesting anomalies that exist between males and females. His observation stemmed from an anecdote that he recently read about the differing manners in which a husband and his wife approach a similar situation. It’s a light-hearted approach, but the conclusion drawn by the author is not inconceivable.

Incidentally, while reading the anecdote, I noticed yet another reference to the now commonplace book "Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus" by John Gray. Has anyone else ever noticed that Mars was the Roman God of War, while Venus was the Roman God of Love and Beauty? Not too subtle, eh? Hmmm. Read on... -EBO)


From Anonymous in New York, New York

I never quite figured out why the sexual urges of men and women differ so much. And, I never have figured out the whole Venus and Mars thing. I have never figured out why men think with their heads and women with their hearts. I have never figured out why the sexual desire gene gets thrown into a state of turmoil when it hears the words "I do."

For example, one evening last week, my wife and I were getting into bed. Well, the passion starts to heat up and she eventually says, "I don't feel like it, I just want you to hold me."

I said "WHAT????!!! What was that?!"

So, she says the words that every husband on the planet dreads to hear..."You're just not in touch with my emotional needs as a woman enough for me to satisfy your physical needs as a man." She responded to my puzzled look by saying, "Can't you just love me for who I am and not what I do for you in the bedroom?" Realizing that nothing was going to happen that night, I went to sleep.

The very next day, I opted to take the day off of work and spend time with her. We went out to a nice lunch and then went shopping at a big, big department store. I walked around with her while she tried on several different, very expensive outfits. She couldn't decide which one to take, so I told her that we'll just buy them all. She wanted new shoes to compliment her new clothes, so I said let’s get a pair for each outfit. We also went on to the jewelry department where she picked out a pair of diamond earrings. Let me tell you...she was so excited. She must have thought I was one wave short of a shipwreck. I started to think she was testing me because she asked for a tennis bracelet when she doesn't even know how to play tennis. As you can imagine, I think I threw her for a loop when I said, "That's fine, honey."

She was nearing sexual satisfaction from all of the excitement. Smiling with anticipation, she finally said, "I think this is all, dear. Let's go to the cashier".

I could hardly contain myself when I blurted out, "No honey, I don't feel like it."

Her face just went completely blank as her jaw dropped with a baffled, "WHAT???!!!"

I then said, "Really honey! I just want you to HOLD this stuff for awhile. You're just not in touch with my financial needs as a man enough for me to satisfy your shopping needs as a woman." And, just when she had this look like she was going to kill me I added, "Why can't you just love me for who I am and not for the things I buy you?"

Apparently, I'm not having sex tonight either.

Intention or Action: LA's Failure in Illiteracy

(EDITOR'S NOTE: For years, the American public has had to endure ever-increasing calls from the Hollywood elite on their suggested solutions to improve the state of world affairs and to help the less-fortunate in the rest of this country. Despite their intentions, good, self-serving, or otherwise, they seem entirely incapable of rectifying a growing debacle in their own back yard.

It begs the question if we should even bother paying lip service to these neophytes who likely can't stand being away from center stage for more than a minute. Indeed, I have often wondered why the opinion of a usually uneducated few (who can't picture all these actors and actresses dropping out of school to pursue fame?) receives so much attention in the media. Then again, I often wonder about a lot of things. But I digress...

Excerpts from a story appearing in the LA Daily News below should help you see what's gotten me riled up this morning. -EBO)


Illiteracy Shockingly High in L.A.
By RACHEL URANGA
Los Angeles Daily News
Wednesday, September 8, 2004

Continued immigration and a stubborn high school dropout rate have stymied efforts to improve literacy in Los Angeles County, where more than half the working-age population can't read a simple form, a report [by the United Way of Greater Los Angeles] released Wednesday found. Alarmingly, only one in every 10 workers deemed functionally illiterate is enrolled in literacy classes and half of them drop out within three weeks.

"It's an emergency situation," said Mayor James Hahn, adding that poor literacy rates could jeopardize the region's economy by driving out high-tech businesses and other industries that pay well.

In the Los Angeles region, 53 percent of workers ages 16 and older were deemed functionally illiterate.

And despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent in public schools over the past decade to boost literacy rates, functional illiteracy levels have remained flat because of a steady influx of non-English-speaking immigrants and a 30 percent high school dropout rate, authors of the report said.

(The statement above highlights the fact that increased funding does not always yield increased results. As has already been adopted in New York City, it's time that Los Angeles considered the concept of student and teacher accountability, minimum skills testing, the elimination of grade promotion based on age rather than knowledge. -EBO)

"This is a ticking time bomb, a dirty secret we don't want to talk about. We are losing the battle," said Mark Drummond, chancellor of California's community college system.

A top priority should be making classes more accessible. For example, the report found that no school in the county offered Saturday classes or tailored classes for adult students with families or multiple jobs.

(The lack of a flexible class schedule clearly impedes an immigrant's ability to learn English while also trying to provide for a family. -EBO)

Though the report offers no estimate for the cost of functional illiteracy, the National Right to Read Foundation places the price tag nationally at $224 billion.

Fair Share of Taxes: Fair for Whom?

Just some numbers to mull over when someone erroneously tries to tell you that the rich don't pay their fair share of taxes. We already do have a progressive system. As it currently stands, most of the poor do not pay any taxes whatsoever. Moreover, they get payroll taxes back in the form of an earned income tax credit. And, it’s important to remember that the bottom 50% of income workers include millions of temporarily job including: teens working during the summer to make a few thousand bucks, people working part-time, the handicapped, and parents that only work a few days each week while spending the remainder of their time in the home taking care of children.

That said, let’s take a more detailed look at this so-called income tax disparity, courtesy of the Congressional Budget Office(Data covers calendar year 2001, not fiscal year 2001, and includes all income, not just wages, excluding Social Security):

-The share of income taxes paid by the top 1% of earners is 34%.
-The top 5% pay 53% of income taxes.
-The top 10% pay 65% of income taxes.
-The top 50% of wage earners pay 96% of income taxes.

The top 50% were those individuals (or couples filing jointly) who earned $26,000 and up. (The top 5% earned $276,000-plus.)

The bottom 50%? They paid 4% of all income taxes. The top 1% is paying more than ten times the federal income taxes than the bottom 50%.

And who earns what? The top 1% earns 18% (2000: 21%) of all income. The top 5% earns 32% (2000: 35%). The top 10% earns 43% (2000: 46%); the top 25% earns 65% (2000: 67%).

A more concise analysis of the data above is available here.

Not the Ticket Gore Hoped For

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Coming on the heels of a speeding ticket that I received while driving through New Hampshire, and at a far slower speed I might add, you can imagine my surprise upon finding out that I was not the only one to have come in contact with the strong arm of the law. Yes, former Vice President Al Gore was pulled over and ticketed a week ago in Portland, Oregon. At the very least I can say that the Oregon State Trooper didn't show any favortism. Of course, some of the more cynical readers out there will attribute this ticket to the fact that the trooper might be a Republican.

A local television station in Portland carried the story, excerpts of which appear below. -EBO)


Video Shows Trooper Is Surprised by Al Gore
KATU-ABC News
Friday, September 3, 2004


Courtesy of KATU-ABC News
Former Vice President Al Gore pulled over for speeding.
One month ago Oregon State Trooper Eric Tholberg made another routine traffic stop, yet what Tholberg did not know at the time was the man behind the wheel would not be in the position of getting a speeding ticket if the presidential election had gone differently in 2000.

"The reason I'm stopping you, is I checked your speed at 77 miles per hour," Tholberg said to the driver of a rental car. "Do you have any legal justification for going that fast today?"

"Uh, no, I just didn't realize it'd slipped up there," Gore said to the trooper who did not recognize him as the former vice president.

On the police video, Trooper Tholberg can be seen walking back to his cruiser, then suddenly voices his surprise into the police radio after he takes a closer look at the driver's license he was just been handed. "No way!" Just to be sure, he heads back to the rental car for another look. "This name's just now kicking in to me. Are you the Al Gore I think you are?" asks Tholberg.

"Yes, I am, Yeah." said Gore.

Back in his cruiser - Tholberg cuts the former vice president a break. He writes the ticket for 75 miles an hour instead of 77 because the price of the ticket goes up over 75 miles an hour. Tholberg told KATU he did that, not because Al Gore almost became the most powerful man in the world, but because he has given the same courtesy to other drivers.

He then explained what Gore did not know about the sometimes-dangerous highway. "We have a lot of bad crashes on this highway," Tholberg warned. "You got thousand pound elk that will step out in front of you and at 77 miles per hour, it can get pretty ugly. So, we want to see you get there safe, sir."

"I appreciate it officer," said Gore. "Thank you so much."

After the conclusion of the conversation, the man who almost became president is seen heading for the Oregon coast, possibly thinking that he never would have been in the position of getting a ticket if things had turned out differently four years ago.

(You have to admit that Mr. Gore seemed exceedingly courteous and deferential. By the way, he recently pleaded guilty to the speeding ticket and paid the fine. It remains to be seen if I'll do the same in New Hampshire. It's wasn't me, your honor, it wasn't me. -EBO)

The Rhetoric of Politics

Via today's The Wall Street Journal, reader Michael O'Guin of Dove Canyon, California writes to dispel this notion of 'taxing the so-called rich':

...John Kerry wants to repeal "tax cuts for the wealthy," yet his proposal does not fall on his family and friends, it falls on me. I am one of those he believes does not deserve a tax cut. I grew up in a lower-middle-class household. I studied hard and put myself through a good college. Ten years ago, I started my own company and for the past four years my income has exceeded $200,000 a year. Last year, I paid 40% of my income for self-employment, state and federal income taxes. From the remaining, I support five people, pay for health insurance and save for retirement.

Teresa Kerry, with assets exceeding $500 million, pays less than 2% (includes her foundation income). Instead of raising the taxes on the person flying around the world on the Gulfstream G5, John Kerry wants to put a bigger tax burden on the one driving the '97 Intrepid with more than 100,000 miles on it. While his rhetoric attacks the wealthy, his policies attack the middle class.

How naive are Kerry's supporters when they can't recognize that increasing taxes at all, even if just on the so-called rich, ultimately winds up increasing their own tax burden?

Economic perspectives from across the atlantic

(EDITOR'S NOTE: From the Guardian. It may be slightly hysterical, but is does provide a view into consitions across the "pond". -BBM)


Europe is reaching crisis point

Forget America: the government should be worrying about the situations in France and Germany

Will Hutton
Sunday September 5, 2004
The Observer



With all eyes fixed on the American presidential elections, the scale of the looming crisis in France and Germany has gone largely unremarked. But it may so change the political geography of Europe that British arguments for and against the EU will be made redundant. A pervasive sense of decline in both countries, only partially justified but none the less virulent, is destabilising not just the structures of the EU - but the political systems of France and Germany.

Last week in France, charismatic finance minister Nicolas Sarkozy resigned from the government in order to challenge for the leadership of President Chirac's UMP party, despairing of what is seen in France as a do-nothing regime that is fiddling while the country burns. The economy is mired in low growth and high unemployment; government spending at 54 per cent of GDP can go no higher.

There is universal agreement that France needs decisive action to reverse economic decline; there are rancorous arguments about not just how the economy should be run and society organised but whether the constitution of the Fifth Republic works any more. The socialist opposition wants to limit the President's current powers to allow more pluralism. With two-and-half years to run until the next presidential elections, France is descending into acrimony and division.

In Germany, Gerhard Schröder is presiding over the wreckage of the SPD, once the standard bearer of European social democracy. September sees four key state elections, including the vital election in North Rhine Westphalia, the SPD's historic heartland. Sixteen per cent behind in the polls there, its loss would be a disaster, not just for what it signals about Schröder's standing but because it will mean control that of the German upper house will pass to the conservative CDU and make him a titular Chancellor, governing only within the parameters of what his opponents will permit.

His capacity to continue will be undermined. If he went, an SPD successor would be forced to abandon recasting Germany's unemployment benefit system so that it stops offering what amounts to a generous pension for life and, instead, becomes a means of moving the unemployed from one job to another. This is a vital prerequisite to restoring German economic health, but it is the direct cause of Schröder's crisis. His party can't and won't accept the need for reform and neither does an important swath of public opinion.

Germany is still two countries and East Germans regard any reform of the welfare system as directed against them because more than twice as many East Germans are on unemployment benefit as in the West. They are right. Thus it is no surprise that the 'Monday' demonstrations against the reforms are centred in the great East German cities of Leipzig and Dresden or that the demonstrators echo the fight against communism with their chant of 'We the people'. The protests are a focus for all the resentments of reunification and for the continued feeling among East Germans that they hold a second-class status. Germany and Schröder are in a corner; reform of the welfare state is an imperative, but the reform programme threatens the cohesion of the state.

As in France, the structures of the German political system are now being put in play. Twisting and turning for any kind of electoral advantage, Schröder last week said he was prepared to reverse Germany's 54-year-long ban on the referendum, the populist tool used by Hitler to establish the Nazi regime. Germany could then hold a referendum on the EU constitution. This is a key plank of the postwar constitution being knocked away. For the paradox of referendums is that they are fundamentally anti-democratic, confusing democracy with populism and placing power in the hands of those who can manipulate public opinion for their own ends. Germany's history is testimony to the consequences.

The proximate cause of both France and Germany's political crisis is that they are not generating enough jobs and growth even though both are high productivity economies. Employment in advanced economies today comes from the service and knowledge sectors rather than traditional manufacturing, under assault from low-wage countries in an era of globalisation. Thus German and France need more investment in their universities; in research and development; and in links between universities and business. They also need to change the structures in their labour markets, from wage bargaining to rules on working hours, that inhibit employment growth in the growing parts of their economy while designing welfare systems that support and encourage workers to move from areas of decline into areas of growth. And they need more demand.

These are, at bottom, technical issues; both economies, given their inherent strengths - Germany is the world's number one exporter in 2004 - would respond quickly to any decent reform package. The issue is putting one together given the implacable opposition by organised labour in both countries to even the tiniest concession, even as both national conversations are dominated by talk of irreversible decline and the need for change - an echo of Britain in the 1970s. The immobilism and sense of decay infects consumer confidence; in both countries consumers are building up their savings, weakening demand growth and deferring still further the chances of an economic recovery.

Opposition to change may seem irrational, but that in turn is rooted in history. The German left is profoundly attached to the German welfare state not just because it represents social democracy but because it is a shield against a repeat of the 1930s. In France the idea of capitalism is compromised by its collaboration with the right and defeat in war. To surrender social advance, even in the name of reform and necessity, is to give into forces that historically have brought France low. For both countries the European Union offers a different, brighter history. But instead of buttressing the EU, Chirac and Schröder - as soft option politicians - find it easier to blame it to help them out of their political weakness. In so doing they lock themselves more tightly into thenational discourses that are the source of their problems.

It could all turn ugly; an unratified European Constitution, stagnating economies, new dark nationalist politics and a fragmenting European Union.

To imagine that Britain will be immune from this is absurd; what happens in mainland Europe will directly impact upon us as it has throughout our history. What is needed is an understanding that if European states don't hang together they will hang separately - and that because the European Union is the best we have, we'd better make it work.

Instead national leaders, Blair included, strenuously avoid the language of working together. These are unsteady times for Europe - without a recovery of purpose and leadership the future could look sticky indeed.

Available options effect diplomacy and alliances

(EDITOR'S NOTE: This article presents an interesting argument. One of the reasons that parts of Europe don't agree with the Bush administration's interpretation of how the war on terror should be fought (desire to keep American influence out of France's backyard, official pacifism, along with conflicts of interests arising from oil field development contracts, military sales, and corrupt oil for food contracts) is that their options are severely limited by their lack of military resources. Europe is unable to project power beyond its borders. If attacked, essentially Europe is limited to a) the nuclear option or b) diplomacy... which is only minimally effective because there is no conventional (ie usable) deterrent to back it up, and everyone knows that the nuclear option is so far and away a last resort that it is essentially unusable. This has led to feeble diplomacy... see the recent failures of European diplomacy in Iran. -BBM)

The Crossroads

Little public analysis has been devoted to options realistically available to Vladimir Putin in response to the massacre of schoolchildren in Ossetia. The fact is that the world has been spoiled by looking at the world through the prism of the American media. When President Bush stopped to consider his response to September 11, he had a range of options available only to a nation as unimaginably powerful as the United States of America. Japanese newspapers reported that President Bush was offered the nuclear option immediately after the attack, probably as an extreme in a range that included filing a diplomatic protest on the opposite end of the spectrum, which he rejected, choosing instead to do what no other country could do: take down the state sponsors of terrorism and pursue the terrorists to the four corners of the earth. America's unmatched power allowed President Bush to select the most humane course of war available. No European power, nor all of them put together, could have embarked on such a precise campaign for lack of means. It was a rich man's strategy, a guerre de luxe.

But no one who has seen the rags and hodgepodge of equipment issued to the Russian Special Forces can entertain any illusion that Vladimir Putin can go around launching raids with hi-tech helicopters, or follow around perps with robotic drones before firing, or use satellite-guided bombs to wipe out enemy safe houses that have been seeded with RFID chips. Nor will those detained by Russia gain weight the way detainees have done at the "inhuman" Gitmo prison. That's an American way of war which even Europeans can only regard with envy. The poor must respond with less. When the Nepalese saw the video of their 12 compatriots executed by terrorists in Iraq, they did what you could do with a box of matches: they burned the mosque in Kathmandu. To paraphrase Crosby, Stills and Nash, 'if you can't hit the one you should then hit the one you're with'.

While Russia can do better than a box of matches, the reality is that its poverty and low-tech force structure will make any response that Putin may choose a brutal and largely indiscriminate affair unless it is subsumed into the larger American-led Global War on Terror. The real price of the European vacation from history is its abandonment of the first principle of civilization. Unless there is common justice, there will be vigilante justice.

Another way to look at it from their point of view is this: What if the Russians announced that the recent episode at the school house was their 9/11, and was financed partly through funds from the Saudis (not that much of a stretch), and as a result they were going to effect regime change in Saudi Arabia.

How comfortable would you be with that? I'd be uncomfortable. I'd want it to be done through the UN... just to balance out the Russian influence. Or at least with heavy US participation so that we could insure that Saudi Arabia didn't become a Russian province/colony... so the country could eventually enter the modern world and have a hope to have a representative government, what many consider key to long term stability.

But at least we'd have the ability to offer to be part of the operation, and hence to influence the result in the direction of our interests.

The Europeans, physically unable to participate, wouldn't even have that option.

"A strategy drawn up for the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization."

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Iran is currently only a regional threat. But soon they will have the ability, and more importantly the will and motive, to start a general conflagaration. All it would take is a few missiles launched at Israel and the oilfields of the middle east. What to do? -BBM)


Iran's promise: '80 seconds of hell'
Tribune-Review
Sep 5, 2004


Let's begin by looking at some facts.On Saturday, June 26, only a few weeks ago, two security guards at the Iranian U.N. Mission were expelled from the United States, and allowed to sneak back to Tehran.

The State Department says that they were "engaged in activities inconsistent with their duties." Sure. They were spies.

The pair had been observed by the FBI for months moving around Manhattan videotaping landmark buildings and other infrastructure. It took an alert transit police officer to arrest them when he saw them taking video images on the subway tracks. They claimed diplomatic immunity and were not charged with any crime.

In Tehran, as August began, the Islamic Republic's supreme guide Ali Khamenei, was answering questions from a hundred or so Islamic guidance officials, home from foreign postings for retraining. Most of his answers were trite slogans, but when he was asked, "Is our Islamic Republic at war against the United States," he paused before replying. "It is the United States that is at war against our Islamic Revolution."

However, Khamenei's own newspaper was even more direct. Writing this July, it said, "the White House's 80 years of exclusive rule are likely to become 80 seconds of hell that will burn to ashes. Those who resist Iran will be struck from directions they never expected."

To these facts add that an Arab newspaper published in London and Beirut reported that an Iranian intelligence unit has established a center called "The Brigades of the Shahids of the Global Islamic Awakening," controlled by a Revolutionary Guards intelligence officer, Hassan Abbasi. The newspaper has a tape recording of Abbasi when he spoke of Iran's secret plans, which include "a strategy drawn up for the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization."

Missile strikes


To bring this about, Abbasi said, "There are 29 sensitive sites in the U.S. and in the West. We have already spied on these sites and we know how we are going to attack them." This Revolutionary Guard officer continued by saying, "Iran's missiles are now ready to strike at Western targets, and as soon as the instructions arrive from Ali Khamenei, we will launch our missiles at their cities and installations."

These are facts. Now let's consider the information coming in from Iraq where, day after day, our troops are being killed.

Most of the killing is now being done by Muslim militia -- Shi'ite Muslims -- in the cities of Fallujah, Mosul and Najaf. This militia appears to have some loyalty -- but not much -- to the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, but he is equally obviously not their paymaster.

The militias need weapons, ammunition, gas for their vehicles, food, water and everything else to fight the Iraqi police and our military. Just remember that these are Shi'ites. The Iranians, just over the border are also Shi'ites. So we needn't be surprised to learn that the word on the streets of Baghdad and Tehran is that they are providing millions of dollars every month for the "hot" war against the Americans.

The Iranian Shi'ites have during the past few weeks established relations with the Kurds in the north of Iraq and with the main Arab Sunni rebel group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. And, every alliance is cemented with dollars.

Great Speeches on Leadership, Part 1

(EDITOR'S NOTE: There are times when nuanced diplomacy is required such as during the Cold W for example (see Eisenhower, Nixon, Truman). Then again, there are times for determined, decisive speech and action (see Washington, Madison, Lincoln, Roosevelt, FDR, Truman, Churchill, and Reagan). When room for maneuver is severely constrained, then nuanced diplomacy can avoid crises. But, when crises occur, the dynamic must change. What makes great leaders in times of crisis (the American Revolution, the American Civil War, and World War II) is:

-the uncanny ability to hold the line believed to be right, even in the presence of naysayers and defeatism.
-the skill to maintain policies despite severe repercussions.
-the confidence to avoid any temptation to sell out important goals for stability.

There is a place for both nuanced diplomacy and determined action; the more appropriate question is what style is right for the United States right now.

It’s not widely known just how tentative foreign affairs had become in England during the spring of 1940. We could easily have witnessed a Prime Minister Halifax and the continued dangerous accommodation of Hitler in Europe. While this might have spared the Isle itself from damage and possible destruction, Churchill understood that Great Britain represented more than a rock in the North Atlantic. England had become a metaphor for centuries of long struggle for freedom, law, and hope...something that George Orwell, the famous socialist author and activist, wholeheartedly supported. He realized that any differences with the conservative Churchill paled in comparison to the menace of the totalitarian regimes.

Thankfully, Halifax turned down the job. With Churchill as Prime Minister, there would be no Vichy Britain. -BBM)


First Speech as Prime Minister
Winston Churchill
Addressing the House of Commons
May 13, 1940

I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."

We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind.

We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering.

You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.

You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory. Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realized; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal. But I take up my task with buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men. At this time I feel entitled to claim the aid of all, and I say, "Come then, let us go forward together with our united strength."

What the civilized world faces

(EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece from the AP speaks for itself. Loud and clear. -BBM)


Hostage-Takers Laughed as Kids Suffered

Friday, September 03, 2004

Fast Facts: Chechnya Conflict


BESLAN, Russia — Holding up the corpse of a man just shot dead in front of hundreds of hostages (search) at a Russian school, the rebel — his pockets stuffed with ammunition and grenades — warned: "If a child utters even a sound, we'll kill another one."

When children fainted from lack of sleep, food and water, their masked and camouflaged captors simply sneered. In the intolerable heat of the gym, adults implored children to drink their own urine.

Hours after escaping alive, a woman who had been taken hostage with her 7-year-old son and her mother spoke of three days of unspeakable horror — of children so wired with fear they couldn't sleep, of captors coolly threatening to kill hostages one by one, of a gymnasium so cramped there was hardly room to move.

"We were in complete fear," said Alla Gadieyeva, 24, who spoke to an Associated Press reporter Friday as she lay collapsed in exhaustion on a stretcher outside a hospital. "People were praying all the time and those that didn't know how to pray — we taught them."

The woman told her tale after Russian commandos stormed School No. 1 in this southern town, bringing the nation's worst hostage crisis to a shattering end of gunfire and explosions.

Alla and her mother, Irina, were in the school courtyard Wednesday seeing off her son, Zaur, on his first day of school when they heard sounds like "balloons popping."

She thought the noise was part of school festivities. But then five masked gunmen burst into the courtyard, shooting in the air and ordering people to get inside the building. Children, parents and teachers — Alla estimated there were about 1,000 in all — were corralled into a corner on the ground floor and then herded into the gymnasium.

Alla said children whimpered in fear, and all around there was screaming and crying. The hostages were forced to crouch, their hands folded over their heads.

For the rebels, the first order of business was confiscating cell phones. They smashed the phones, then delivered a warning: "If we find any mobile phones, we will shoot 20 people all around you."

On the first day, people got a tiny bit of water to drink, but no food. After that, Alla said, nothing.

When she asked the rebels for water for her mother, they laughed at her.
"My mother was terrified, and I thought she was having a heart attack. When I saw my son, my mother ... go unconscious, so tired, so thirsty, I wanted it all to come to an end," she said.

"When children began to faint, they laughed," Alla said. "They were totally indifferent."

During the ordeal, Zaur became so traumatized that he would flinch whenever someone touched him, or even brushed by him, she said. As with most of the other children, his only spells of sleep were the times he fell unconscious from thirst and exhaustion.

When asked how her son would remember the ordeal, Alla replied: "How can a person ever forget it? Would you ever forget it?"

As Alla spoke under a grove of spruce trees, she had not yet been reunited with her mother or son, although authorities confirmed to her that they were alive.

She recounted how the hostage-takers eventually took off their masks. They had beards, long hair, and spoke with Chechen (search) accents, she said.

When children started to faint from thirst, the adults urged them to urinate. It was so they could drink their own urine, Alla said.
The gymnasium was quickly transformed into an arsenal of explosives — bombs dangling from the ceiling, set on the floor, strung up on walls. She said they seemed to be homemade, primitive packages containing bolts and nails.

"They're not human beings," Alla said. "What they did to us, I can't understand."

On Friday, early in the afternoon, explosions erupted without warning, both inside and outside the gym, she said. In the chaos, she couldn't figure out how they were set off. Gunfire followed.

As the battle intensified, the rebels betrayed agitation for the first time.
"We'll shoot until our guns stop," a rebel announced to the crowd. "And when our guns stop, we'll blow up the building."

The hostage-takers began pushing people out of the gym and into the basement. That created an opening for the hostages: They began breaking windows and fleeing. Some pushed children outside.
Alla said she helped her son and mother through a window. She didn't manage to get out.

For some reason, a 6-year-old boy — whom she didn't know — was drawn to Alla. She held him in her arms. He clung to her, she said, "as if he would never let go."

A group of hostages, including Alla and the boy, finally made a rush for a set of doors in the gymnasium. As they fled, she saw bodies of captives strewn on the floor as rebels fought with Russian security troops swarming around school compound.

Some Russian soldiers appeared as they reached the doors. "At first I didn't believe it," Alla said. "I thought they were Chechens."

Her doubts soon vanished.

It's OK, the soldiers told her. "You're home now."

As Alla told her tale, townspeople kept coming up, asking her about the fate of their loved-ones.

A man, around 20, asked Alla if she knew what had happened to one of the captives, a woman.

She's dead, Alla replied.

The man bit his lip. He nodded.

And then he turned away.

Is ET Phoning Us?

It's only a matter of time before our technological advances finally allow us to listen in on extraterrestrial communications in stars and galaxies light years away.

Courtesy of Reuters
Extraterrestrial Contact?
Until then, however, I am of the belief that someone accidentally pushed the wrong button, or accidentally turned on a vacuum cleaner while observations were being made...you know, not quite unlike what happens to television reception while you are cleaning the house.

Nevertheless, Reuters is reporting that a strange signal has been picked up by researchers at a radio telescope site in Puerto Rico. Scientists are currently hypothesizing as to its origin:

An unexplained radio signal from deep space could -- just might be -- contact from an alien civilisation, New Scientist magazine reported on Thursday. The signal, coming from a point between the Pisces and Aries constellations, has been picked up three times by a telescope in Puerto Rico. New Scientist said the signal could be generated by a previously unknown astronomical phenomenon or even be a by-product from the telescope itself. But the mystery beam has excited astronomers across the world.

It was broadcast on the main frequency at which the universe's most common element, hydrogen, absorbs and emits energy, and which astronomers say is the most likely means by which aliens would advertise their presence.

As for me, I am sticking with my vacuum cleaner explanation until proven otherwise...and by otherwise, I mean photographic evidence of ET's red heart lighting up the horizon.

War Never Solves Anything, or Does It?

Courtesy of the realist party
Like all things, war has its place.

The Power of Denial

(EDITOR'S NOTE: The arab-islamic world is not completely free of introspection, of course. But the largest (UN sponsored) congregation of arab-islamic scholars ever to come together to study the sociatal ills of their cultures (the entire arab-islamic world's GDP is less than that of Spain, and publish fewer than 400 new books per year) came to similar conclusions to those below. How can this situation be improved? -BBM)


August 17, 2004

Arab-Islamic World Is a Hostage of Its Own Delusions

by Leon de Winter

Anyone who follows the developments in the Arab Islamic world will be struck by the complete absence of self-knowledge and introspection that characterizes these vexed cultures. Almost every problem is attributed to hostile external forces. The poverty and underdevelopment that plague most of the Arab world are the result of malicious machinations of Americans and Jews. This is no less true of the disaster in Darfur. Last week UPI reported that the Sudanese foreign minister Mustafa Osman Ismail had told journalists in Cairo that his government possessed "information that confirms media reports of Israeli support (for the rebels in Darfur)." He added that he was "sure the next few days will reveal a lot of Israeli contacts with the rebels."

What Mr. Ismail said, and the eagerness with which the Arab Islamic press publicized it, highlights the hopeless position of the forces for modernization in North Africa and the Middle East. Within the existing cultural context it is practically impossible to subject the widespread abuses in Arab countries to reflection and objective analysis in order to obtain a clear picture of their causes and effects. Not only are "self-reflection" and "objective research" alien concepts, there is no need to analyze causes and effects since both are by definition already known. The causes are always the diabolical forces of Jews and Christian crusaders, a central dogma even among Arabs and Muslims who have not yet joined the queue to blow up some Iraqi police station for al Qaeda. The effects are always the sufferings of the Arab nation and the ummah, the global Islamic community. Infidels, in pact with the devil, have hoodwinked and deceived the ummah, depriving it of its God-given right to rule supreme over the world.

On July 29 Egypt's government newspaper, Al-Ahram, published an article entitled "The Key to the American Voting Booths Is in Darfur: The Plot which Is Called Oil." An English translation of the article can be found on the Middle East Media Research Institute's Web site at www.memri.org.

Al-Ahram is probably the most important newspaper in the most important and populous Arab country. The article is typical for the kind of hatred and paranoia that pervades much of the wider Arab Muslim world. Given the tight control the Egyptian state has over the media in general and Al-Ahram in particular, the paper's views must also be seen as reflecting the views of the country's ruling elite. "Bush is awaiting his fate in November and the U.S. is planning to make Darfur an easy path towards its major plan to transport the (Persian) Gulf Oil and the African oil to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, so that Washington can meet its needs in the next decade," the article said.

This is the oil card--a tried and tested recipe according to Michael Moore's model that reduces American government policy to the interests of the oil industry. It shatters any hope one might have had of a rational Arab approach to internal Arab problems. The entire Arab-Islamic world is convinced that Jews and crusaders are continually conspiring to steal Arab wealth-forgetting that thousands of billions of dollars have been paid into the accounts of Arab and Islamic oils states over the past decades--and this article accuses the West of misusing the crisis in Darfur to lay its hands on Sudanese oil.

The entire Arab-Islamic world has ignored the humanitarian disasters in Darfur, but they require an explanation for the curious attention the deaths of tens of thousands of black Muslims have received in the West--which Arab opinion maintains despises Muslims and Africans. According to the Arab-Islamic view the West is not driven by a sincere concern for over a million innocent Muslims, but by oil. We Westerners are simply hypocritical when we shed crocodile tears for Darfur, the Arab-Islamic media claims.

Facts are not important here. What matters is how phenomena are "experienced" and how they fit into the underlying plot that explains the world to the average Arab and Muslim: the Muslim is the victim of conspiracies.

This is what, according to BBC World Service Monitoring, the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi had to say about the rather timid U.N. resolution demanding an end to the massacres: "For the U.N. Security Council decision to give the Sudanese government one month to disarm the jingaweit militias or face economic and diplomatic sanctions is yet another link in the chain of efforts to target Arab and Muslim countries by the U.S. and the Western world in general."

Based on this simple idea everything falls into place. It explains why power is in other people's hands, when it should be the ummah that holds sway; it explains the poverty, inferiority, the way the West supposedly tries to tempt pious Muslims with obscenities such as film, television, music, dance and drink; it explains the appalling conditions in the Palestinian territories and the unemployment in Morocco, the lack of modern research and development in the universities; it explains the internal Arab divisions; it explains why a third of all Arabs have less than two dollars a day to spend; it explains why the superior Islamic world is-temporarily-the victim of the inferior West.

Satan, devils and spirits are not just symbols. They are actual living phenomena in Islam. The notion of conspiracy is an essential aspect of modern Muslim religious philosophy and of Islamic world history.

This is what remains, in the perspective of many Arabs and Muslims, of European and American reports in the press and media, of the fundraising campaigns, of our disgust, anger and astonishment at the fate of hundreds of thousands of Islamic victims in Africa. It is unimaginable that we infidels might be inspired by compassion. Because an unbelieving crusader or Jew could never be inspired by compassion. After all, unbelieving crusaders and Jews are too busy ensuring the diabolical downfall of the ummah. While the crusader and Jew may seem compassionate, in fact they are cunning conspirators.

So last Sunday, foreign ministers of the 22-member Arab League rejected "any threats of coercive military intervention in the region or imposing any sanctions on Sudan."
Darfur is not just a humanitarian disaster. Darfur shows once again, and more tragically than ever, that the Arab-Islamic world is a hostage of its own delusions and will not lift a finger to prevent the deaths of countless fellow Muslims.

This article appeared in the August 16, 2004 Wall Street Journal Europe.
Leon de Winter is an adjunct fellow of Hudson Institute.

The Game Continues

(EDITOR'S NOTE: From Andrew Sullivan. The jihadis may be extremists but they are not fools. -BBM)


THE JIHADIST STRATEGY: A fascinating (as usual) dispatch from Zeyad in Iraq. He quotes one Mohammed Bashar Al-Faidhy, spokesman of the Association of Muslim Scholars. If you want to see how attuned these maniacs are to divisions in the West, read on:

To our brothers in the Islamic Army of Iraq. We wish to inform you that we totally understand the extreme rage that is boiling in your hearts regarding the French decision to ban the Hijab in their schools, and we share you your disappointment. We officially condemned the French decision at the time... However, killing the two hostages without considering the grave consequences of such an act would be harmful to our cause and would isolate us from our international support... Our goal is to besiege the Americans politically in every spot of the world and this act is not serving that goal... You can see how the agents of the occupation are already using this incident against us... It is
our duty as scholars to point out to our brothers what is wrong and what is right... France as an anti-occupation country has been helpful to our cause... You might say that the French stance is not an altruistic one and that they have their own political interests that caused them to disagree with the Americans, and I am not going to say that is not true but it is also our goal to turn them against each other to serve our cause so France has a strategic importance for us.

This is a fascinating and potentially important moment in the war on terror. If the Jihadists take the war to France now, we may get the Western unity that has so far eluded us. And that can only be a good thing.