The Golden Gate

Captain Ed has ANOTHER great post. He also has some reasonable seculation and asks some daunting questions. Quotable:

One of the reasons that the DoD may have sat on the captured IIS files without translating or releasing them, some speculate, was that the contents may embarrass some of our allies in the overall war on terror. One document released yesterday seems to support that analysis. According to document CMPC-2003-000878, the Russians gave more active support to Saddam prior to the March 2003 invasion than previously known — and they used Syria as a conduit…

[...]

This doesn’t have much to do with WMD, of course, but the revelation of the movement of tank engines — seventy of them for every armored unit — has to raise some eyebrows about the relationship between Washington and Moscow. It also should remind people about the materiel conduit that Syria supplied to Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin, and whether or not that conduit operated bidirectionally. Perhaps the WMD that the US seeks did not stay in Syria at all, but made its way to Russia instead.

UPDATE and BUMP: Another look at our friends in Moscow comes in document CMPC-2003-001950, which details a meeting with the Russian ambassador in March 2003. The diplomats discussed the evacuation of Russian citizens from Iraq, but also discussed current American military assets deployed in the Gulf theater[...]

Be sure to check out all the materiel our Russian “allies” gave to Saddam in The Captain’s post.

Hoping We Fail: Who loses and who wins in the high-stakes poker in Iraq?

This was a piece Victor Hanson wrote in 2003. It was recently re-presenced on his web site with this preface:

The recent hysteria and rush to judgement over alleged Marine crimes at Haditha, and the downplaying of the significance of the capture of al Zarqawi suggest that many, here and abroad, simply wanted the United States to lose in Iraq, for a variety of political reasons. Almost three years ago, VDH outlined the motives of these parties and suggested it was unwise to bet against the Americans in Iraq, especially since democracy would eventually emerge and ties between al Qaeda and Saddam’s police state would probably come to light. [em. mine]

And of course, those ties are now coming to greater light through the slow, painful, understaffed and underemphasized process of translating Iraqi documents into English.

However Stephen F. Hayes has been on the case for a few years. This post is not the oldest, nor the most recent, but it had the highest google ranking for the terms I searched.

Anywho…

Hoping We Fail is an excellent roundup of all the usual suspects and some of their underlying pathologies that lead them to root for failure–or perceive it as primary where there is more evidence for success on the balance.

It begins thusly:

It is not hard to determine who wishes the United States to succeed in rebuilding Iraq along lines that will promote consensual government, personal freedom, and economic vitality: hardly anyone. At least, few other than the Iraqi and American people.

A long-ish piece by Victor Davis Hanson that covers many elements of this war we are engaged in. As always with VDH, it is well constructed, complex,  multi-faceted, and worth reading.

I give you this excerpt not as a good representation of the peice as a whole, but becasue this is one aspect that is particulaly poignent for me right now.  All the more reason to go read the whole thing.

Finally, we are witnessing a larger existential war, in which Iraq is the central, but not the only, theater. Put simply: will the spreading affluence and liberality of Westernization undermine the 8th-century mentality of the Islamists more quickly than their terrorists, armed with Western weapons, prey on the ennui of a postmodern Europe and America — with our large gullible populations that either don’t believe we are in a real war, or think that we should not be?

Americans know exactly the creed of the Islamists and what they have in store for us nonbelievers. Yet if we are not infidels, can we at least be fideles? That is, can we any longer articulate what we believe in, and whether it is worth defending?

The problem is not that the majority of Americans have voiced doubts about the future of Iraq — arguments over self-interest and values happen in every long war when the battlefield does not daily bring back good news.

Instead, the worry is that too many have misdirected their anger at the very culture that produced and nourished them. [...]

Emphasis mine.

A rational editorial from the pages of a Canadian Newspaper:

Thu, June 29, 2006

EDITORIAL: It’s time to stand with Israel

The Toronto conference of the United Church yesterday joined the Ontario division of the Canadian Union of Public Employees in calling for economic sanctions against Israel and a boycott of the Jewish state to protest its policies in the Palestinian territories.

Basically, both are calling on Canadians to choose sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Fair enough. We choose Israel, which cannot be expected to negotiate with a Palestinian government led by Hamas, a terrorist group whose founding charter calls not only for the destruction of Israel, but for the annihilation of the Jewish people.

Further, we urge Prime Minister Stephen Harper to continue Canada’s sensible policy of refusing to recognize Hamas and denying it foreign aid until it unequivocally recognizes Israel’s right to exist and renounces terrorism.

Like Harper, we support the creation of an independent Palestinian state living in peace beside a secure Israel.

But that has never been Hamas’ goal. [...]

Read it all.  What’s next? Pigs fly and France goes hawkish on the WOT?

Hat tips: LGF & Meryl Yourish

Go check out lawhawk’s comprehensive roundup.

Meryl Yourish, who is always a pleasure to read, has the latest on the IDF’s response to the incursion, kidnapping, and murder by the “palestinians”.

Cox and Forkum weigh in.

Excellent post by Jay Tea over at Wizbang!. Too much is quotable. It is a tight, well written, compelling essay. Just go read it.

Great video that sums up my sentiments, to be sure. Woo-hoo!

Over at the Gates of Vienna [the place to go for in depth analysis on all things Islam and our struggles with its global aims] the Fjordman has filed a report on the EU with a call for its destruction in order to save Europe. Here is a taste:

The Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950, widely presented as the beginning of the efforts towards a European Union and commemorated in “Europe Day,” contains phrases which state that it is “a first step in the federation of Europe”, and that “this proposal will lead to the realization of the first concrete foundation of a European federation”. As critics of the EU have noted, these political objectives are usually omitted when the Declaration is referred to, and most people do not even know of their existence. A federation is of course a State and “yet for decades now the champions of EC/EU integration have been swearing blind that they have no knowledge of any such plans. EEC/EC/EU has steadily acquired ever more features of a supranational Federation: flag, anthem, Parliament, Supreme Court, currency, laws.” The EU founders “were careful only to show their citizens the benign features of their project. It had been designed to be implemented incrementally, as an ongoing process, so that no single phase of the project would arouse sufficient opposition as to stop or derail it.” Booker and North calls the European Union “a slow-motion coup d’état: the most spectacular coup d’état in history,” designed to gradually and carefully sideline the democratic process and subdue the older nation states of Europe without saying so in public.

In 2005, an unprecedented joint declaration by the leaders of all British political groups in Brussels called for PM Tony Blair to push for an end the “medieval” practice of European legislation being decided behind closed doors. Critics claim that the Council of Ministers, the EU’s supreme law-making body, which decides two thirds of all Britain’s laws (and the majority of laws in all Western European countries), “is the only legislature outside the Communist dictatorships of North Korea and Cuba to pass laws in secret.” As one of the signers put it: “We still have this medieval way of making decisions in the EU; people hide behind other member states, and blame them. It increases people’s sense of cynicism, but what we need is some straight talking.” According to British Conservative politician Daniel Hannan, this is how the EU was designed. “Its founding fathers understood from the first that their audacious plan to merge the ancient nations of Europe into a single polity would never succeed if each successive transfer of power had to be referred back to the voters for approval. So they cunningly devised a structure where supreme power was in the hands of appointed functionaries, immune to public opinion.” “Indeed, the EU’s structure is not so much undemocratic as anti-democratic.”

But be sure to read the whole thing.

UPDATE: this is good news:

Many adults in the Netherlands hold strong views on the way Muslims adapt to the European continent, according to a poll by Motivaction released by GPD. 63 per cent of respondents believe think Islam is incompatible with modern European life.

And they would be correct. And god help us all if modern European life is altered to accomodate Islam in its current form.

Ok. I am being dramatic. Well, at least in this context. However, we all know that if you leave Islam, you can be executed as an apostate. Makes me a little hesitant to join.

Quotable:

“We expect the government to make the enemy understand that it should change its hostile positions, as the future belongs to Islam,” it said.

The paper also recalled a letter once sent by Iran’s late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, in which he suggested conversion to Islam.

[...]

In his letter, Ahmadinejad proposed a return to religious principles as a means of restoring confidence between the two countries and revisits many of the grievances that Tehran has against Washington.

“Will you not accept this invitation?” asks Ahmadinejad in the letter, written in English and sent on Monday.

“That is, a genuine return to the teachings of prophets, to monotheism and justice, to preserve human dignity and obedience to the Almighty and His prophets?” read the letter.

While for some reason Iranian’s are all excited about their “clever audacity” they US…well, shrugs:

US officials have dismissed the rambling 18-page letter — the first open, top-level communication by Iranian leaders since ties with Washington were cut in 1980 — as more of a philosophical treatise than a political overture.

They also said it did not change Washington’s position in a worsening dispute over Tehran’s disputed nuclear-energy programme, which despite Iranian denials is seen in the West as a cover for weapons development.

Check it here.

…for the pro-freedom rally at the Danish consulate yesterday:

The Only Republican in San Francisco has some first hand details:

“I just got back and it went well. We had 70-80 people, among them a Danish journalism student from Berkeley, many flags, a hottie handing out Havarti and a complete absence of local media.”

Let’s hope we see more events like this. I found out about it too late to make it over there, but I’d love to get to the next one…

Interesting to see that T.O.R.I.S.F. poses the following question in the header area of his blog: “Imagine being an empirical, free-market thinker in a liberal town.”

Hmmmmmmmm… Gee, I wonder what that WOULD be like?

Personal to TORISF: let’s talk.

Over at Armed and Dangerous:

Americans have never really understood ideological warfare. Our gut-level assumption is that everybody in the world really wants the same comfortable material success we have. We use “extremist” as a negative epithetic. Even the few fanatics and revolutionary idealists we have, whatever their political flavor, expect everybody else to behave like a bourgeois.

We don’t expect ideas to matter — or, when they do, we expect them to matter only because people have been flipped into a vulnerable mode by repression or poverty. Thus all our divagation about the “root causes” of Islamic terrorism, as if the terrorists’ very clear and very ideological account of their own theory and motivations is somehow not to be believed.

By contrast, ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists. All three put substantial effort into cultivating American proxies to influence U.S. domestic policy and foreign policy in favorable directions. Yes, the Nazis did this, through organizations like the “German-American Bund” that was outlawed when World War II went hot. Today, the Islamists are having some success at manipulating our politics through fairly transparent front organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Be sure to read the rest. He has a very interesting list that will look all too familiar.

Via the Blog Pappy.

Last July 4^th I wrote a piece defending our Founding Fathers against the accusation of being equivalent to Terrorists. In it, I pointed out that to call American Patriots terrorists was to sabotage the meaning of the word “terrorism.” It might be semantically possible, but it is spin doctoring at its worse.

Now, I would like to point out a similar dilution of language around what have been called “protests” by Muslim fanatics who are burning Italian embassies for Mohammed cartoons about that were published in Denmark. To call these acts “protests” is both to dignify them beyond their due, and to cast a pall on the
great tradition of social protest. These acts of vandalism and destruction are not organized attempts to raise the consciousness of a culture, but pointless and chaotic expressions of hate, fear, and frustration.

I can hear the liberal revisionists screaming at me even now – who am I to determine what is or is not a legitimate protest? Didn’t our Founding Fathers destroy property and kill to communicate their sense of injustice? Aren’t these protests the equivalent of our own revolutionary beginnings?

Perhaps I am old fashioned, but I suggest that rebelling against your government for political freedom is fundamentally different than mindless vandalism against innocents out of a desire to control the world. American Patriots were not rebelling against the British to force the British to believe their beliefs but fighting so that each person could have their own. They were not offering million dollar rewards to quell the speech of (murder) the cartoonists that dared to disagree with them, but fighting for the freedom of speech for all.

To highlight the difference between considered social protest to further the rights of all and mindless rioting against innocents to silence the rights of others, I suggest we spin the language to its limits and elevate these “protests” to the status of rebellion – The Cartoon Rebellions. It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Only these aren’t rebels without a cause, only rebels without a clue.

The Cartoon Rebellions – a world-wide swath of destruction so absurd that we would think it was a bad comic strip. Cartoons causing people to act like cartoons, while cartoon apologists strive to find politically correct ways to appease the rioters. An elaborate joke that would be hilarious if it were not so tragic, unbelievable if it were not so real.

Read the whole thing.

Sample:

We are being pissed upon

I think it was the long departed H.C. Hansen, one of the great Danish statesmen of the last century, who – as the communists were demonstrating in front of Christiansborg [the Danish Parliament] – cast his gaze across the palace square and remarked: “I will not be pissed upon.”

Then he did what was necessary.

I feel that currently my beloved country is being pissed upon rather too much. Denmark has not been neglecting its duties on the international stage. We have supported poor people with acts and advice, we have worked for peace, we have sent soldiers, policemen and experts to all the far flung corners of the world. We have democracy, a rule of law and a welfare state. Not all is perfect, but we harbor no malice towards our fellow men.

And yet Denmark is being pissed upon. The spokesman of the US State Department is pissing on Denmark, the British Secretary of Foreign Affairs is pissing on Denmark, the President of Afghanistan is pissing on Denmark, the Government of Iraq is pissing on Denmark, other Muslim regimes are pissing on Denmark. In Gaza, where Danes for years have provided humanitarian aid, crazed Imams encourage people to cut off the hands and heads of the cartoonists who made the drawings of Mohammed for the Jyllands-Posten newspaper.

Excuse my choice of words, but all this pissing is pissing me off.

What is going on? I am not referring so much to the threats against Danish citizens and Danish commerce. Nor to the burnt down Embassies. I am thinking of a word that keeps popping up whenever the Mohammed cartoons are mentioned.

That word is BUT. A sneaky word. It is used to deny or qualify what one has just said.

How many times lately have we not heard people of power, the Opinion Makers and others say that of course we have freedom of speech, BUT.

They have said it, all of them, from Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, to our own Bendt Bendtsen [a Danish Politician]. Once we had to be sensitive to the easily hurt feelings of the Nazis, then came the Communists, now it is the Islamists. The reason I say ‘Islamists’ is that I do not for a moment believe all the world’s Muslims are pissing on us. I think we are dealing with thugs, fools and misled people. Those are the ones we have to deal with, and then the chickenshit politicians.

Can I get a fucking “amen”?

I say again, be sure to read the whole thing.

No really. In New Zealand.

On the face of it you have to say that Labour did in fact buy the election. The results as anyone who followed it can tell you were knife edge. Indeed we had to wait for the special votes to be counted before we knew who had won.

That winning margin? Just 2%

So when we find that Labour has overspent their campaign budget by 17% you don’t have to be a Rhodes Scholar to do the maths.

Labour has now taken the position that the laws regulating spending are “outdated”. Which is a bloody arogant way of saying they don’t suit Labour so they’ll ignore them.

Which isn’t all they ignored. National protested at the exclusion of Labours “Pledge Cards” from the budget and the Electorial Office advised PRIOR to the election that they were indeed part of the expenditure. Labour simply ignored this and kept on spending.

Spending our money. Thats right, more taxpayer dollars added to the complusary Union Fees and the free pool a workers for the “Labour Letter Factory” as they called where state servants were used to stuff envolopes. Added to this having been caught out with hospitals handing out political material in waiting rooms and having been instructed to remove it by the SSC it is very clear that there are NO rules that Labour will recognise when it comes to grasping onto power.

This is just one of the reasons that I felt that all of the American Left’s cries of stolen elections was more about projection than anything else. When you are willing to do anything just for the sake of winning, you think everyone has the same inclination.