OPEC PRODUCTION CUT

With the election on our minds I neglected to post anything on the production cut by OPEC. Just like the housing market crashed so it was inevitable that the oil market would follow suit. Not good news if you're funding terrorism with the money, thinks Iran.

Anyway, I came across the most thoughtful piece explaining the politics behind the production cut. What we learn is that the Saudis aren't playing along with the Persians.

The Saudis have been concerned for several years now about Iran's growing strategic influence and designs for regional hegemony in the Gulf and in a number of Arab countries, primarily Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

The sharp decline in oil prices has provided the Saudis with an opportunity to inflict pain on Iran and constrain its political ambitions for regional hegemony by keeping oil production high and oil prices down. In practical terms, the Saudi's subtle weapon against Iran is at least as potent as the U.N. and U.S. sanctions combined. An economically weaker Iran translates into an Iran that is weaker both politically and strategically, and hence less of a threat to the Gulf region.

There is one other reason which has recently emerged as a source of conflict between Shi'ite Iran and a number of Sunni countries in the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia but also Egypt, Jordan and the Arab Gulf countries. These countries have been concerned about Iranian efforts to engage in large-scale proselytizing of Sunnis into Shi'ism, which is perceived by the majority of the Sunnis, particularly the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, as a false religion whose practitioners are apostates.


A recent study by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has suggested that in order for Iran to balance its budget, the price of crude oil must not fall below $95 a barrel. The equivalent figure for Saudi Arabia is $50 per barrel and for the United Arab Emirates and Qatar even lower.

The price of oil is determined by the twin factors of economics and psychology. Economic factors are shaped by supply and demand and when demand plummets the prices quickly follow suit. But oil prices are also sensitive to psychological factors, such as perceived threats to the sources or routes of oil supply. In the latter case, Iran may seek to generate a crisis that would bring oil speculators back in droves and cause oil prices to spike. In this regard, Iran could put into action one of the following options in an attempt to both divert national discontent outward and make an economic gain at the same time:

First, Iran could escalate the conflict in Iraq to a degree that would deny the market a supply of 1.5-2.0 million b/d of much needed Basra light crude.

Second, Iran's Revolutionary Guards could sabotage an oil tanker in the Gulf of Hormuz on some flimsy argument that the tanker has violated Iran's territorial waters. Such act would raise the political tensions to high levels and greatly increase insurance premium to suffocating levels or discourage oil tankers from transporting Gulf oil.

Third, Iran could instigate a conflict between Hizbullah and Israel that could plunge the Middle East into a new round of a military conflict that might also involve Syria (Iran's strategic ally in the area). Armed conflicts in the Middle East quickly translate into higher oil prices, with or without global recession.

It looks like Obama may have his hands full soon.

WHY WE FIGHT (2004) (A Documentary Film Review)

The basis of this film is Eisenhower’s speech on the military industrial complex (MIC) and that we haven’t heeded his warning as evidenced by our presence in Iraq. The argument here is a supply side one. If we build and make military equipment then we’ll naturally use it in war for economic reasons.

The problem is the MIC is really a chicken or the egg argument. Did we mobilize for war because of foreign powers like the Soviet Union or did we invent power likes the Soviet Union in order to mobilize for war? The current argument is whether the world is dangerous because we have weapons or whether we have weapons because the world is dangerous.

The other problem with the overall argument is that it doesn’t understand and explain enough about Eisenhower to put his warning into context. Eisenhower was a pre-WWII conservative and he was ideologically isolationist. FDR favored unconditional surrender for Germany and Ike favored a brokered peace to save lives. Ike avoided confrontation with the Soviets over their invasion of Hungary to the dismay of many Americans. Fair or unfair, Democrats got us into WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. The first Republican war of the 20th Century was the 1991 Gulf War that lasted 6 weeks. Progressives in the 20th Century used war to reshape the world while conservatives looked inward. Eisenhower’s speech was harkening back to the conservatism of his youth.

Isolationism is not a dead idea on the right, but it’s no longer the majority conservative idea. Pat Buchanan, Joe Sobran, Charley Reese, and others were against going into Iraq and Buchanan has even penned books saying that we shouldn’t have fought Germany in the 1940s. Any movie trying for mileage using Eisenhower’s speech should be interviewing Pat Buchanan to understand the ideology. Instead we get neoconservatives like Richard Pearle and William Kristol who favor the war and liberals who oppose it without any explanation of how Eisenhower fits in that picture.

There is some other mischief too. The movie shows Richard Pearle saying that there is no connection between Cheney and Haliburton when he clearly means no relationship since Cheney became VP, so they can immediately contradict Pearle by showing headlines with links out of context. Gore Vidal on the other hand can say that the Japanese were trying to surrender in the summer of 1945 but Truman ignored them so that he could drop the Atomic Bomb. And Vidal gets no one to refute him.

The major point of the film is that the arms industry is so big and so influential that the U.S. enters into war to please the munitions makers. But it ignores the fact that building up arms prevents attack. Why did rogue terrorists attack us in 2001? Because no country would risk getting turned to glass. Why did we go into Iraq, really? We wanted to show nations that supporting terrorists of any kind could be just as costly. The result has been no further attacks at home. A coincidence we should believe.

Like so many ideas on the Left, the world is controlled by money interests and we’re just unknowing pawns. But the problem with conspiracy theories isn’t that a conspiracy can't be true from time to time, but that once you believe any particular conspiracy you are apt to see conspiracy anywhere because all you have to do is find one is chase the money backwards to who profited from something. But life isn’t so easy. Sometimes things have unintended consequences and people or companies make money because of luck or intuition.

In short WHY WE FIGHT puts forward the premise is that we fight because people make money from it. And yet the Left disparages the Right for being simplistic.

GUILTY AS CHARGED

Bush speaking in Israel.

ABC News' Ed O'Keefe Reports: The Obama campaign is taking issue with a comment President Bush made while speaking to the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israel's statehood.

"Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along," the President said to the country's legislative body, "We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is –- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

I heard this comment on NPR and my first thought was Bush was talking about Europe.

In a statement, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., shot across the bow: "It is sad that President Bush would use a speech to the Knesset on the 6Oth anniversary of Israel's independence to launch a false political attack.

Only a cheap two-bit politician would use Israel's birth to knock a humble man such as myself, albeit between the lines.

It is time to turn the page on eight years of policies that have strengthened Iran and failed to secure America or our ally Israel.

So let me use the event of Israel's birth to knock a fellow politician by name.

Instead of tough talk and no action, we need to do what Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan did and use all elements of American power -- including tough, principled, and direct diplomacy - to pressure countries like Iran and Syria.

Tough talk in no action? That is Bush alright. Saddam still in power after all these years, Khaddafi building a WMD program, and attack after attack on U.S. soil.

George Bush knows that I have never supported engagement with terrorists, and the President's extraordinary politicization of foreign policy and the politics of fear do nothing to secure the American people or our stalwart ally Israel."

Maybe that is why Bush didn't name you as an appeaser. Maybe he meant someone else. Maybe your own words and actions implicate you instead.

Abu Ghraib: The Documentary

In "Standard Operating Procedure", Oscar-winning director Errol Morris uses recovered footage, reenactments and the notorious photographs published round the world to shed light on the forces behind the sexual and physical maltreatment of Iraqi inmates at the hands of US troops.

The film, screened at a press preview, avoids the familiar ground widely documented in the press after the first incriminating images surfaced in 2004: the global public outrage, the trials and the eventual apology by US President George W. Bush.

Instead, in probing interviews with the troops, Morris illustrates their contrition but also the defiance many involved in the abuse show as their superiors go unpunished.

The troops' candid confessions, shot in Morris' trademark close-ups, fly in the face of claims that the events at Abu Ghraib were a mere aberration.

The soldiers describe massive pressure from the highest echelons of the military to acquire "actionable intelligence" to stop the bloody insurgency in Iraq and locate then fugitive leader Saddam Hussein.

"We were told to soften them up for interrogation," Specialist Lynndie England, who was sentenced to three years in prison in 2005, tells Morris.

Put me in that group of people that just couldn't get upset at those Abu Ghraib pictures. Whether it was a few kooks who got carried away or an interrogation tactic, the pictures made it look far worse than it was.

I don't know how much you can trust someone like Lynndie England after her conviction , but if Morris is trying to say she was a scapegoat for orders given by leaders higher up the chain, then we need to discuss whether softening them up for interrogation is a worthy trade for stopping the insurgency. Mixed in the prison were no doubt a good many non-dangerous people, but war causes tough measures and sometimes hurts the innocent. Humiliation as a tactic against the enemy is about as benign as a war tactic can get.

And we can argue whether or not humiliation is a crime at a time of war, but the greater humiliation was brought about not by the actions at Abu Ghraib, but the photos circling the globe via the press. What Morris has done here is add to the embarrassment of the inmates while pretending to be their champion.

File under Genre: "Cause Seeks Victim"

IRAQ ON PRIMARY EVE

To say the invasion of Iraq was a mistake is to forget the circumstances that led to our invasion. It’s not that Bush sent the Army over there on September 12. It was more than 18 months later. Congress passed a resolution to go to war, and the United Nations passed a resolution to stop Saddam and his weapons programs. The ball was in Saddam’s court and he could have avoided war with compliance. His defiance made war a necessity, or otherwise any resolutions passed in the future would lack the teeth of enforcement.

Quadafi gave up his weapons and the recent report says Iran stopped their program in 2003. Forget the style points for a moment and ask yourself if either result would have happened without Bush’s resolve to stop Saddam one way or the other. Both of those things could have happened without war, but only if Saddam had chosen to cooperate and the world decided to take Bush seriously. Saddam’s choice left Bush no choice.

To say that the war in Iraq is a distraction from the real war in Afghanistan ignores that there would be no action in Afghanistan either without Bush. Clinton could have and should have invaded Afghanistan after attacks in the 1990s. He didn’t have the resolve.

Clinton’s speech August 20, 1998.

A few months ago, and again this week, bin Laden publicly vowed to wage a terrorist war against America, saying -- and I quote -- "We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians. They are all targets."

They bombed the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan. They gunned down German tourists in Egypt. The most recent terrorist events are fresh in our memory. Two weeks ago, 12 Americans and nearly 300 Kenyans and Tanzanians lost their lives. And another 5,000 were wounded when our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were bombed.

There is convincing information from our intelligence community that the bin Laden terrorist network was responsible for these bombings. Based on this information, we have high confidence that these bombings were planned, financed and carried out by the organization bin Laden leads.

He pegs Osama Bin Laden for exactly what he is, but what next?

When our very national security is challenged and when we must take extraordinary steps to protect the safety of our citizens. With compelling evidence that the bin Laden network of terrorist groups was planning to mount further attacks against Americans and other freedom-loving people, I decided America must act.

What was that extraordinary thing that he had to do?

Earlier today, the United States carried out simultaneous strikes against terrorist facilities and infrastructure in Afghanistan. Our forces targeted one of the most active terrorist bases in the world. It contained key elements of the bin Laden network's infrastructure and has served as a training camp for literally thousands of terrorists from around the globe.

We have reason to believe that a gathering of key terrorist leaders was to take place there today, thus underscoring the urgency of our actions.

Our forces also attacked a factory in Sudan associated with the bin Laden network. The factory was involved in the production of materials for chemical weapons.
The United States does not take this action lightly. Afghanistan and Sudan have been warned for years to stop harboring and supporting these terrorist groups.
But countries that persistently host terrorists have no right to be safe havens.

We begged them and they wouldn’t listen so we just had to. . . sorry. We won't do it again unless they make us.

My fellow Americans, our battle against terrorism did not begin with the bombing of our embassies in Africa, nor will it end with today's strike.

It will require strength, courage and endurance. We will not yield to this threat. We will meet it no matter how long it may take.

He nails exactly what it will take to win and his actions prove that he wasn’t up to it.

Here’s Why:

This will be a long, ongoing struggle between freedom and fanaticism, between the rule of law and terrorism.

Rule of Law! No deterrent to suicide bombers like the idea that they could go to jail.

We must be prepared to do all that we can for as long as we must. America is and will remain a target of terrorists precisely because we are leaders; because we act to advance peace, democracy and basic human values; because we're the most open society on earth; and because, as we have shown yet again, we take an uncompromising stand against terrorism.

But of this, I am also sure. The risks from inaction to America and the world would be far greater than action. For that would embolden our enemies, leaving their ability and their willingness to strike us intact.

There it is in words, the entire justification for standing up to Saddam after he thwarted the weapons inspectors.

But in this day, no campaign for peace can succeed without a determination to fight terrorism. Let our actions today send this message loud and clear: There are no expendable American targets.

There will be no sanctuary for terrorists. We will defend our people, our interests and our values. We will help people of all faiths, in all parts of the world, who want to live free of fear and violence.

This is the Bush Doctrine 2 years before Bush, just without any teeth.

We will persist and we will prevail. Thank you, God bless you and may God bless our country.

Great speech, but he didn't solve the problem and confront the terrorists. He was offering a courtroom if we could catch any of them before the detonated. Terrorist leaders in a Clinton world may have to change locations, but they weren’t ever going to see any troops on the ground.

Invasion of Afghanistan in 1998 would have prevented 9-11 just like invasion of Iraq in 2003 prevented God knows what catastrophe. I bring it up because too many of the Democrats running for President are saying that Bush took his eye off the ball in Afghanistan by invading Iraq. There would be no presence in Afghanistan without Bush. Someone needs to ask Mrs. Clinton is her husband took his eye off the ball.

MARK STEYN ON MUSLIM REFORMATION

Steyn has a way of saying things that no one else is saying. You read it and think about it and then you realize there is something to it.

What if we've already had the reformation of Islam and jihadism is it? It wasn't just Seventies Bryn Mawr Muslims who were "moderates". So were, comparatively, Muslims all over the world. The Sudan's always been a nutty joint but you'd have had a harder time convincing anyone to jail an English schoolmarm over a teddy bear 50 years ago: The Prophet's authoritative cuddly-toy suras date back all of 20 minutes. In 1950, a young Pakistani emigrating to Scotland or Canada would have received an education different only in degree, not (as now) wholly foreign in kind and ever more resistant even to the possibility of assimilation. One can detect similar trends in Indonesia, Singapore, the Central Asian stans, the Balkans - and among the de-assimilationist third generation Muslims in western Europe.

The Islamic "reformation" is, in a sense, the opposite of Christianity's. The Saudis have used their vast oil enrichment to promote themselves as a kind of Holy See for Muslims, and the Wahhabization of previously low-key syncretic localized Islams in almost every corner of the planet is testament to their success. I look at the gazillions of dollars tossed into the great sucking maw of US "intelligence" agencies and I wonder why somewhere in the budget we couldn't put something aside to promote a bit of covert ideological rollback in Chechnya or Bosnia or Pakistan. But we're not that savvy, and God knows what unintended consequences would blow up in our faces.

And at one level the Islamist "reformation" makes perfect sense. After all, they look at Christianity's reformation and see that everywhere but the United States it led to the ebbing of faith and its banishment to the fringes of life. The jihadist reformation is, as they see it, a rational response to the Christian one.

IRAN AND THE BOMB

A new U.S. intelligence report says Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and it remains on hold, contradicting the Bush administration's earlier assertion that Tehran was intent on developing a bomb.

What event happened in 2003 that would convince Iran to halt their program?

And how long will it remain on hold if the anti-war party elects a president?

FUNDING PORTRAYED AS LEGALITY

Maybe you remember Michael Kinsley from his Crossfire days opposite Pat Buchanan, back when the show had a level of civility lost with the Carville/Tucker approach. He has Parkinson's disease which means he's a moral authority on stem cell research. Even though it was found that skin cells could be cloned to resemble embryonic stem cells, that's not enough for the ailing Kinsley.

But any Republicans who think the stem-cell breakthrough gets them off the hook are going to end up very unhappy. This issue will not go away.
First, even the scientists who achieved the latest success believe strongly that embryonic-stem-cell research should continue.

No law says they can't.

No one knows for sure whether the new method of producing pluripotent cells will pan out or where the next big developments will come from.

SPECIAL BULLETIN: No one knows the future!

We are still many thresholds away from anything that can be of practical value to me and others. Scientifically, it makes no sense to abandon any promising avenue just because another has opened up.

If scientists say that it should continue and it's perfectly legal to continue it then what's your point?

Second, even if this were a true turning point in stem-cell research, people like me are not going to quickly forget those six lost years. I am 56. Last year I had a kind of brain surgery that dramatically reduces the symptoms of Parkinson's. It received government approval only five years ago. Every year that goes by, science opens new doors, and every year, as you get older and your symptoms perhaps get worse, doors get shut. Six years of delay in a field moving as fast as stem-cell research means a lot of people for whom doors may not open until it is time for them to shut.

Again, what delay except by the FDA that takes forever to approve anything.

The embryos used in stem-cell research come from fertility clinics, which otherwise would discard them. This has been a powerful argument in favor of such research. Why let these embryos go to waste?

In what way are they going to waste if scientists want to do the research and the research is legal?

Even if all embryonic-stem-cell research stopped tomorrow, this far larger mass slaughter of embryos would continue. There is no political effort to stop it. Bush even praised in vitro fertilization in his 2001 speech about the horrors of stem-cell research. In vitro has become too popular for politicians to take on. But their failure to do so makes a mockery of their alleged agony over embryonic stem cells.

Is the Justice Department raiding laboratories and rounding up scientists?

Finally, the position a politician takes on an issue tells you something about his or her character, values and intellect. And that understanding doesn't disappear even if the issue itself does. Over the past six years, Bush and most Republicans in Congress have done their best to stop medical research that could cure many diseases, including one that I have.

If all knowledge, innovation and discovery can only be found at the bottom of a crate of government funding then this statement is true.

What does that mean for Kinsley's position on funding the war? This is from his column in June.

Last week President Bush condescended to sign a bill authorizing $100 billion for his war, but only after any serious timetables or criteria or deadlines for troop withdrawal were stripped from the legislation. . . it is considered the height of naivete, irresponsibility and indifference to the fate of American soldiers to suggest the possibility of any exit strategy short of triumph. If you do, you are betraying the troops. And no one sees actual triumph in the cards, so there is no exit strategy.

Kinsley mocks that anything less than victory in Iraq is a betrayal of the troops, but thinks that anything less than a government victory in stem cell research is a betrayal that shows a lack of "character, values and intellect." Stem Cell research can go on with or without government funding, but defeating our enemies is illegal without funding.

And woe betide any politician who suggests that waiting for complete triumph might not be the only alternative -- just in case democracy, prosperity, peace and brotherhood don't flower in Iraq next week. Sens . Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama opposed the war-funding bill because it lacked even the mealy-mouthed timetables in an earlier version that Bush vetoed.

But no timetable for government funding of stem cells should ever be discussed because the breakthrough is always right around the corner.

For this they got crocodile tears from Sen. John McCain. Squandering a bit more of his war-hero capital, McCain came close to accusing the two leading Democratic presidential candidates of treason: "I was very disappointed to see Senator Obama and Senator Clinton embrace the policy of surrender."

Maybe Clinton and Obama just lack the "Character, Values and Intellect" that it takes to see the importance of an American victory.

So there is a "power of the purse," you see. Congress can cut off funds for a war that people don't like. In this connection, older readers might recall the Iran-contra affair, in which sources of money were found to keep the contra war going in Nicaragua without Congress's even knowing about it. This met with the enthusiastic approval of the Wall Street Journal, even though funds you do not know about are hard to cut off.

This is the perfect example of which I speak. Congress cut off funding for the Contras so Oliver North and company raised their own money despite Congress. Kinsley, of course, didn't like it and would have liked to have seen people go to jail for it. He would have liked to have seen the funding on anti-communist freedom fighters criminalized. The action of North and company brought about free elections in Nicargua despite Congress.

Has anyone in Congress treated scientists the way the Contras and their supporters were treated? Kinsley pretends that people are treating scientists the way Congress treated Oliver North.

That Wall Street Journal editorial accuses these three Democratic senators of "vot[ing] to undermine U.S. troops in the middle of a difficult mission." If this is true of last week's vote, it will always be true of any attempt to cut off a war by cutting off funds.

So it undermines scientists to lose funding but the troops just have to deal?

VETERANS DAY

Here's my grandfather Pvt. Vincent P. (Jack) Stark (right) on the shores of the Philippines in 1943.



He was awarded the purple heart after taking some grenade shrapnel in the leg. He never talked about what happened. The shrapnel would work its way out in the early 1980s. He showed it to me as it broke through his skin. A doctor had to cut it out.












A relative told my mother that the blast knocked him out and he regained consciousness when two Japanese soldiers tried to move him. He somehow killed them both.




















Near the end of his life he told me a story about guarding an airfield that came under Japanese attack. My first inclination was to videotape his story, but I thought it would have made the moment unnatural and decided to have the memory of him telling me over the memory of the exact details.

When I was 8 years old my grandmother shared with me these two photos:

The guys he arrived with:













The guys he left with:


The war was always with him. I remember he had a relapse of Malaria in the 1970s, something he picked up during the war. His doctor in Indiana couldn't treat it and he had to travel to the south to get help.


Jack is 3rd from the left in this picture. Look at how much weight he lost compared to the stocky picture on the top. It was probably the malaria.



The biggest impact of the war was losing his baby brother. "Boots" they called him. He was a tail gunner in Europe shot down during one of those dangerous missions like in the movie Memphis Belle.

My mother has Boots' war bonds in a box. Boots married quickly before shipping out and his wife disappeared after his death forfeiting the bonds. I wonder if she is still alive.

My granfather was at Hiroshima 7 days after the drop. The army was there to help cleanup and restore order. One day he found several rolls of film. Curious to their content he put them away. The Army made him surrender the film when he left Japan, but he palmed one roll and on it was some graphic evidence of the blast. The style suggested it was shot by a photojournalist. He may have been an Army man himself and tried to hide the film from the authorities. We'll never know.

My grandfather died from cancer in 1996. His specialist in Memphis said that he had only seen his type of cancer one time before, the other man had also been at Hiroshima shortly after the war. If his death was related to the radiation, I'm blessed that he lived 50 years after the war.

QUIT KILLING THE BAD GUYS SO WE CAN NEGOTIATE

The New York Review of Books looked at three anti-Bush books over the summer. The consensus? Bush is a dumb cluck.

One of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush administration has been the creation of a near consensus among those who study international affairs, a shared view that stretches, however improbably, from Noam Chomsky to Brent Scowcroft, from the antiwar protesters on the streets of San Francisco to the well-upholstered office of former secretary of state James Baker.

Near consensus is great. There may be people who don’t hate Bush but we can’t name any. Don’t you like how Baker’s office is well upholstered? Even as a temporary ally they had to get in the Republican fat cat thing.

This new consensus holds that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a calamity, that the presidency of George W. Bush has reduced America's standing in the world and made the United States less, not more, secure, leaving its enemies emboldened and its friends alienated.

I'm not sure what friends we have alienated. Germany and France who originally opposed the invasion have both since elected leaders friendlier to Bush. And the only thing proven to embolden our enemies are articles like this one.

Paid-up members of the nation's foreign policy establishment, those who have held some of the most senior offices in the land, speak in a language once confined to the T-shirts of placard-wielding demonstrators.

Paid-up members? It sounds an awful lot like the fools that appeased Hitler in the 1930s. Remember how the State Department crossed out “Mr. Gorby, tear down this wall”? It was too provocative. Boy they really had the pulse of the world. Reagan wrote it back anyway and I’m sure that Kissinger looked up from his memoirs and cringed when he heard it.

They rail against deception and dishonesty, imperialism and corruption. The only dispute between them is over the size and depth of the hole into which Bush has led the country he pledged to serve.

If the writer knew what the world “rail” meant he would know that James Baker has never railed against anything in public life. His negotiations behind the scenes are legendary, but he always faces the microphones straightforward and respectfully.

Last December's Baker-Hamilton report, drawn up by a bipartisan panel of ten Washington eminences with perhaps a couple of centuries of national security experience between them and not a radical bone in their collective body, described the mess the Bush team had left in Iraq as "grave and deteriorating." The seventy-nine recommendations they made amounted to a demand that the administration repudiate its entire policy and start again.

He’s certainly never read Dr. Feynman’s experience with being on a Washington committee. Wisdom does not come from such a beast.

In the words of former congressman Lee Hamilton, James Baker's co-chair and a rock-solid establishment figure, "Our ship of state has hit rough waters. It must now chart a new way forward."

I thought the problem with electing Bush was that he was a rock-solid establishment figure. Remember how he was going to be cradled by all of daddy's advisors because him too dumb to run country by self. Now he's a rogue for breaking with them.

So it comes as less of a surprise than once it might have to see Dennis Ross and Zbigniew Brzezinski—two further fixtures of the national security elite—step forward to slam the administration in terms that would, in an earlier era, have seemed uncouth for men of their rank. Neither Ross, who served as Middle East envoy for both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, nor Brzezinski, a conservative Democrat and cold war hawk, could be dismissed as Nation-reading, Howard Dean types.

Why don’t we instead dismiss Brzezinski as the guy who was unable to understand the level of unrest in Iran as Carter’s National Security Advisor. An old pro like him totally misread the situation and once our embassy hostages were taken, he had no viable “rock-solid establishment” plan as to how to get them out.

Ross sounds like a career State Department guy. What’s the biggest State Department achievement in the last 25 years?

Yet in withering new books they both eviscerate the Bush record, writing in the tone of exasperated elders who handed over the family business to a new generation, only to see their successors drive the firm into bankruptcy. Both books offer rescue plans for a US foreign policy they consider to be in tatters.

If Brzezinski and Ross were as influential and effective as the writer claims, Bush wouldn’t have inherited the problems he did in 2001. Gilligan could write a better rescue plan.

Bush’s “rock-solid establishment” critics are men who thought in baby steps and pieces of signed paper instead of action. Any kind of success in the Middle East based on force discredits the diplomatic corps and it renders these men meaningless in the overall process. I'm sure with glee they look for this to be a failure so that their nuanced and ultimately ineffective approach will look at like statesmanship.

ONE BUTCHER TO ANOTHER

The children of Che Guevara, the revolutionary pin-up, had been invited to Tehran University to commemorate the 40th anniversary of their father's death and celebrate the growing solidarity between "the left and revolutionary Islam" at a conference partly paid for by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president.

There were fraternal greetings and smiles all round as America's "earth-devouring ambitions" were denounced. But then one of the speakers, Hajj Saeed Qassemi, the co-ordinator of the Association of Volunteers for Suicide-Martyrdom (who presumably remains selflessly alive for the cause), revealed that Che was a "truly religious man who believed in God and hated communism and the Soviet Union."

Che's daughter Aleida wondered if something might have been lost in translation. "My father never mentioned God," she said, to the consternation of the audience. "He never met God." During the commotion, Aleida and her brother were led swiftly out of the hall and escorted back to their hotel. "By the end of the day, the two Guevaras had become non-persons. The state-controlled media suddenly forgot their existence," the Iranian writer Amir Taheri noted. (Via James Taranto)

Both sides thought they were meeting with Sean Penn.

al-Qaeda financier' netted in Iraq

Iraqi and US forces have detained a man they believe received 100 million dollars this summer from Al-Qaeda sympathisers to hand out for "terrorist" operations in Iraq, the US military said Thursday.

A statement from the military said the man, who was detained in the central Baghdad neighbourhood of Al-Kindi, was suspected of handing over 50,000 dollars a month to Al-Qaeda using his leather merchant business as a front.

"He is believed to have received one hundred million dollars this summer from terrorist supporters who cross the border illegally or fly into Iraq from Italy, Syria and Egypt," the military said.

He is suspected of traveling abroad himself to seek money for Al-Qaeda and of employing up to 50 extremists to help deliver bomb-making materials to insurgents attacking the US-led coalition.

Why would al-Qaeda be in Iraq? Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11.

The US military also accused the unnamed man of involvement in two attacks on a revered Shiite mosque at the heart of Iraq's bitter sectarian conflict.

He was linked to purchasing explosives and weapons for the February 2006 attack on the Al-Askari mosque in Samarra, widely seen as the trigger of Iraq's sectarian strife. Another attack on June 13 of this year destroyed the mosque's two minarets.

They'll bomb their own shrines to beat us and yet we shouldn't be in Iraq when this war can be won with diplomacy.

HOW GOES THE WAR?

According to Investor's Business Daily (via Instapundit)

That the media are no longer much interested in Iraq is a sure sign things are going well there. Instead, they're talking about the presidential campaign, or Burma, or global warming, or . . . whatever.

Things have gone so well, in fact, that leading Democratic contenders have stopped calling for a "timetable" for withdrawal and can't even promise they'll remove all the troops by 2013.

In short, the U.S. is — yes, we'll use the word —winning the war against al-Qaida. And not just in Iraq. In fact, the only way we won't win is if we do something very stupid — such as letting the overwhelmingly negative media convince us we can't do what we clearly are doing.

HOW SANCTIONS ARE AS USELESS AS THE NEW YORK TIMES

After two weeks of testimony, a jury took only a few hours to convict a South Korean national, Tongsun Park, of acting as an unregistered agent of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The conspiracy of which he was a part ran for 10 years, ending in late 2002, and helped one of the world’s worst regimes maintain its grip on power.

But The New York Times did not assign a reporter to his trial, its total coverage amounting to a brief wire report on the day following Mr. Park’s conviction. Of the other major national dailies, The Washington Post ran a single news-brief item, the Los Angeles Times not a word.

Given the stakes—and what the Park trial clearly demonstrated about the seamier side of the U.N.—it hardly made sense.

The most innocent explanation is that the major newspapers had simply moved on to other things, frustrated by the apparent complexity and opacity of the oil-for-food scandal, of which the Korean fixer is only one colorful part.

But some critics contend there may have been another factor: a combination of sullenness and embarrassment on the part of what bloggers gleefully disdain as “the mainstream media.”

“The oil-for-food story began on the Op-Ed page of The Wall Street Journal. The U.N. denied it had done anything wrong for the longest time, and most of the press followed its lead,” said James Bone, New York correspondent of The Times of London. “Many of the major newspapers came to the story late and are embarrassed by it.”

The media spent the time leading up to the war saying it would be a bloodbath with thousands of Americans dying and months of fighting. When the Iraqi Army laid down like lambs, the media said that everyone knew the fighting would be easy, but re-building would be impossible because you cannot force democracy.

Since the Iraqis voted in greater numbers than Americans do the frame became Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam would have eventually fallen through the sanctions. This story shows that the sanctions only made Saddam stronger, not too unlike the way prohibition made Al Capone stronger.

Many in the media were quick to judge Bush's failure to see 9-11 coming, but they were in no way critical of Clinton's nonaction in the 1990s. It's easy to be a critic of a proactive plan, because any pencil pusher would do it differently. It's a simple economic question. You get more of the behavior you reward and less of the behavior you punish. While Bush fights terrorism I will do my part and not pay for the New York Times.

SHELBY STEELE

Via the Corner.

Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American in order to be "good," in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America. (People as seemingly desperate as President Jacques Chirac and the Rev. Al Sharpton are devoted pursuers of the moral high ground to be had in anti-Americanism.) This formula is the most dependable source of power for today's international left. Virtue and power by mere anti-Americanism. And it is all the more appealing since, unlike real virtues, it requires no sacrifice or effort--only outrage at every slight echo of the imperialist past.

Today words like "power" and "victory" are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them. For the West, "might" can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today's atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so.

He nailed it. But he's not done.

Europeans are utterly confounded by the swelling Muslim populations in their midst. America has run from its own mounting immigration problem for decades, and even today, after finally taking up the issue, our government seems entirely flummoxed. White guilt is a vacuum of moral authority visited on the present by the shames of the past. In the abstract it seems a slight thing, almost irrelevant, an unconvincing proposition. Yet a society as enormously powerful as America lacks the authority to ask its most brilliant, wealthy and superbly educated minority students to compete freely for college admission with poor whites who lack all these things. Just can't do it.

Whether the problem is race relations, education, immigration or war, white guilt imposes so much minimalism and restraint that our worst problems tend to linger and deepen. Our leaders work within a double bind. If they do what is truly necessary to solve a problem--win a war, fix immigration--they lose legitimacy.

Wow.

LESSONS OF THE COLD WAR

Something John Derbyshire blogged yesterday got me to thinking.

A few inconsequential "rollback" exercises aside (Grenada, El Salvador), the Cold War was a war of containment. The object was to prevent the advance of totalitarian communism, most especially its futher advance into Europe, then seen as the heartland of Western Civ. The bet we placed was that communism was such a lousy way of organizing a society that it would eventually turn into something else, something less threatening. The bet worked with Russia.

Islamofascism is much less of a threat -- economically, militarily, and culturally -- than communism. Why would containment not work just as well, with the expectation that these societies would crumble and change even faster than the communists did? We'd need to be vigilant against fanatical terrorists of the 9/11 type, and against moves in the MME to develop nuclear weapons. The second of those must surely be easy, though -- just a matter of decent intelligence and an occasional Osirak-type military action. For the first, we need to keep out foreign Islamofascists the way we used to keep out foreign communists, and to keep a close watch on any home-grown ones we might produce, and to publicly demonize Islamofascism -- teaching our kids that it's evil, turning out movies and TV dramas that show it as an enemy, and so on. (Where is our Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. for this "new Cold War"?) Now THAT would be using the Cold War as a model! Unfortunately, it would fly in the face of all the dogmas of tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism that our society nowadays holds to be precious and inviolable.

Bush 41 took a lot of heat a few years ago for "not finishing the job in Iraq" by liberals opposed to finishing the job in 2003. I think Derb's thinking here mirrors Bush 41's thinking back then. He pretty much beat Saddam up, but rather than create a power vacuum with Iran next door, he decided that containing Hussein would result in fewer lives lost and more stability in the region. I think Bush made a reasonable decision at the time. The containment approach was also essential considering Congress had only authorized Bush to follow the charter of the United Nations and they didn't have the stomach for much more than getting Hussein out of Kuwait and away from the Saudi border.

What Bush 41 didn't anticipate was being defeated for re-election. Clinton had no desire to keep Saddam to the cease-fire agreement. Saddam was constantly pushing the limits of the no-fly zone and shooting at allied planes. He was skimming money out of the oil for food program. Clinton let his violations go on without punishment or worry. His administration was far more concerned with religious Zealots minding their own business in Waco, Texas. And, of course, if we're talking about how U.S. action creates terrorists we cannot forget that the Waco debacle resulted in Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing.

One essential reason for removing Saddam in 2003, and no administration official can say it out loud, is that Republicans cannot take for granted that future Democrats in the White House will focus on containment. In the post Vietnam era, Democrats no longer have the stomach to back up their threats with action, and therefore the world knows that American interests will not be fought for. Democrats will solve European problems like Serbia or Caribbean problems like Haiti, but they will not take hard stand on American interests. We may think that these tin horn dictators are ignorant of our ways, but they understand the division with American politics enough that they can just wait Republicans out for a Democrat.

By going to Iraq and letting the Iraqi people re-shape their own future, it keeps Democrats from backing down. If one is elected in 2008 it will make them take the Middle East situation more seriously. A failure in Iraq post Saddam will be the failure of whatever president is at the helm.

Had a Republican like Dewey or Taft been President at the end of World War II, the Russian/American problem may have taken a different track. The cold war may have ended before it began. But since Truman invented containment, it became the Democrat alternative to all-out war up and through 1968 and the Vietnam protests. By the time Carter came around, containment meant little more than boycotting the Olympics. Reagan ended the cold war not just by out-spending them, but spending enough money that they realized he was serious about fighting if it came to that. It was the "evil empire" attitude that made them think seriously. His idea of containment had muscle behind it.

Without Reagan, I'm sure that Russia would have had to evolve their economy to makeup for the scarcity that communism creates. I'm sure it would be more open today than it was in 1980. But I'm not sure it would have dissolved already. I tend to think modern day Russian would be more like China with more economic freedom but still little political freedom. Look at Castro and how he can survive after 45 years of American sanctions. The economic part is important, but the muscle part is what makes the change.

The Democrat party is split down the middle between moderates that will fight an enemy to America and lefties that consider America the villain in any confrontation. Since the moderates cannot win without the lefties, they end up having to back down to get elected. Liberal Blogs like Daily Kos hate Hilary Clinton for trying to take the moderate position on Iraq. Don't even mention Joe Lieberman around there. Among the grass roots, Howard Dean is considered the savior of the party.

Which brings up the question if American leftists hate war, why don’t they show the strength that prevents most wars? Because they hate American power more than they hate war. That’s why instead of honoring the troops they focus on the failures and casualty rates. They’d rather see a long war with more dying that discredits America than a quick war that emboldens America. Remember how they predicted mass casualties before we invaded Iraq and then showed not the least bit of relief when we stormed Baghdad mostly unhindered? It’s not all Democrats that feel this way, it’s probably a minority, but that minority is essential to their coalition.

Containment only works if everyone is on board. This reality means that Republicans have to fight more direct wars with unconditional surrender rather than sit back and let Democrats lose the peace.

VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS

Bruce Willis, angered over the media's systematically negative portrayals of the war, is in talks to produce and star in a movie based on the heroic exploits of Michael Yon, a former Green Beret who maintains a blog at www.michaelyon-online.com.

Mr. Willis traveled to Iraq in 2003 and said last fall that he was "baffled to understand why the [positive] things I saw happening in Iraq are not being reported."

The forthcoming movie, Mr. Willis said, will dramatize the lives of "these guys who do what they are asked to for very little money to defend and fight for what they consider to be freedom."