Snapshots From The Front
I'm not exactly the Edward R. Murrow of the GWOT; more like its Radar O'Reilly. So feel free to consider this your camp bulletin board instead.
~ ~ ~
The coming military strike against Iran's nuclear weapons program may yet be a coordinated Israeli-American operation, with the Jewish state being amply equipped to handle the main strikes:
It's been a staple of U.S. war-fighting policy in the Middle East to keep Israel on the sidelines, but in this case there doesn't seem to be any point to it since the Jewish state's destruction is the enemy's openly proclaimed objective. But, as also is a staple of U.S. war-fighting policy in general, there is the nagging doubt about whether we or the Israelis really have the stomach for acting pre-emptively against the Iranian nuclear threat. Have the Bushies had their fill of it after all the crap they've had to take over Iraq? Can an Israel that handed Gaza over to Hamas lock, stock, and synagogues truly be all that eager to take on her region's burgeoning superpower? And, if it's true that Iran has already purchased existing warheads from North Korea, could we be being lured into a public relations trap (attack Iran with conventional weapons, get assymmetrically nuked in retaliation) that will destroy our ability to resist Islamic Fundamentalism for good?
~ ~ ~
And yet, if the mullahs are allowed to get nukes, after the North Koreans had theirs virtually handed to them by the last American administration, won't that kill the entire notion nuclear non-proliferation just as dead?
The Slate article proceeds to provide details on the regime that calls itself "Myanmar," and they read as dismally familiar. Same brutal internal repression; same anti-US paranoia, with the same ginned-up false alarmism about an "imminent U.S. invasion"; the same already-existing energy resources (in Burma's case, trillions of cubic feet of natural gas) with which to corrupt and compromise any external attempt at regime-change; the same presence of Sino-Russian cultivation of another rogue regime against Western interests; and, of course, the same ambitions to gain possession of the ultimate weapon, which is the only factor that would make military action a bona fide option.
This is what people like Helen Thomas refuse to understand. If it were simply a matter of a regime, be it in Afghanistan or Iraq or North Korea or Iran or Venezuela or Cuba (you get the picture) being bestial and nothing more, one could make the "sovereign nation" argument with some level of credibility (though for libs, who led the international charge against regimes they didn't like, like South Africa and Serbia, it would still be roaringly hypocritical). But if those same beastial regimes get nuclear weapons and the power to ignite global Armageddon that comes with them, that forfeits their precious "sovereignity" and makes it our business to put them out of business - permanently. It is why Bill Clinton should have invaded North Korea in 1995, why George Bush did invade Iraq in 2003, and why Iran must be liberated now.
The message to juntas like Burma's must be reiterated: what happened to Saddam Hussein was no fluke. If you want to survive and be left alone to strangle your own people in peace, do not seek weapons of mass destruction. Otherwise the proverbial spider hole is the best fate for which you can hope.
~ ~ ~
A few days ago we took a brief look at the looming European clash between the two titans of multiculturalist groupthink: Islam vs. homosexuality. Now there is a new contribution to the ideological war between the two that makes the famous Danish cartoons look like Mohammedan pieties:
The biggest irony is that Dubowski appears to be contending that In The Name Of Allah is some sort of "untold story" that will put over a softened, feminized, bizarro image of the ideology that threatens the entire globe. As though Mohammed's "great commission" to Islamic conquest "by the sword" was a loving exhortation to violate a part of the human anatomy other than the neck.
I can hardly wait to see the movie's Tehran premier, and the reviews it receives from Iranian clerics. But then again, since sodomites and Mohammedans share a deep-seeded hatred of Judeo-Christianity, it's possible that they could surprise me.
~ ~ ~
The above is, of course, not what the Pentagon has in mind when it speaks of the "long war" against "bin Ladenism":
However, it is also true that there's no such thing as an idea that "sells itself." Which means the only way our ideas will be sold in the Muslim world over the short-or long-term is if our nation continues to be led by people who believe in them. And that, as they say, is the rub:
That is no accident. Our enemies know that our Extreme Media is America's Achilles heel. It hasn't been a critically debilitating vulnerability because its political arm (i.e. the Democrat Party) is out of power and continues, by its foolish indiscretions, to take itself farther and farther from the American political mainstream. But the argument can be made that the establishment press has still taken its toll on the Bushies, who, if you'll recall, have taken a dismayingly Kerryesque approach to the Iranian nuclear threat at stark odds with its decisive elimination of a similar peril in next-door Iraq. And the White House, for all its weary overcaution of late, is sufficiently and prudently long-term in its strategic thinking to know that the DisLoyal Opposition will win an election again sooner or later.
Whether that takes the form of a Clinton restoration or a "fresh face" like ex-Virginia governor Mark Warner, the track record of Democrat foreign policy stewardship under its most recent two Chief Executives, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton (both of whom pretended to be "centrists" at odds with their party's far-left base), is far from reassuring that another one would actually break from the Dems' tendency towards weakness, wishful thinking, appeasement, and fantasism. Even if a President Warner were so inclined, the media elites that got him elected would not stand for it. Heck, it's fair to wonder whether any future GOP administration that succeeds the current one will follow anywhere close to Bush's footsteps, given permanent, unremitting press hostility to the war effort and the notoriously short attention span of the American public.
To put it bluntly, I question whether today's Americans are tempermentally capable of fighting another "long war" like the "greatest generation" did against fascism and communism.
~ ~ ~
As Mark Steyn continues to point out, part of the problem is a matter of sheer, straightforward, global demographics. Given the prodigious Muslim birthrate versus the low-and-dwindling-lower birthrates of Islam's targets (Europe, Russia, Japan, and to a moderately lesser degree the United States), in another generation or two the latter three will be functionally depopulated and Europe will become part of the Caliphate even without another shot being fired, and even more so since it is unlikely in the extreme that the transition will be remotely peaceful. The "free world" will then be reduced to an isolated U.S. and surviving outposts like Australia and what formerly liberated powers haven't succumbed to tyrannical relapses. And even they will be considerably further down the road the EUnuchs paved.
It will be a world much poorer (remember our own looming entitlements crunch), much more dangerous, and much less free. As Steyn concluded his latest piece, "A people that won't multiply can't go forth or go anywhere. Those who do will shape the world we live in." And we all know how Islamic Fundamentalists want to shape the world. Is it any wonder that they think the tide of history is at their backs?
~ ~ ~
The alternative to an inexorable return to the seventh century, which has been a recurring them of TKS' Jim Geraghty, is not any happier, although it would be a lot quicker:
There would certainly be some sentiment for that. Just the other day, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Jack Kelly posted the following on his blog:
Or it could tip public opinion the other way, towards retreat and withdrawal and a return to isolationism. "We'll do anything you say, accept any pro-Muslim speech codes you want, bow towards Mecca three times daily, just please stop hurting us." That's what the American Left would proclaim at the top of its lungs as the inevitable and richly deserved consequences of "neoconservative arrogance." "See, look what Bush's warmongering has gotten us! We need peace, not more war!" In that post-calamity atmosphere, would there be majority public support for the magnitude of retaliation that Mr. Kelly describes? The incineration of a single Muslim city (i.e. Tehran)? Or even an all-out conventional invasion if the next terrorist attack appeared to come in response to it?
Today the post-9/11 consensus is still behind what remains of the Bush Doctrine: "We will not allow the world's most evil regimes to obtain the world's most dangerous weapons." But who can say for sure how that consensus would change in the wake of an even more devastating "event"?
J-Ger thinks we'd go berserk. I think we'd surrender. And the only means of possibly averting either - the toppling of the Iranian mullahgarchy via American intervention - grows more imperative, and more conspicuously absent, with each passing day.
"Perilous times," indeed.
UPDATE: Here's a neat little bit of perspective from Victor Davis Hanson:
And then look at how the West is rushing to dhimmize itself to revoltingly obsequious excess without them. With nukes, the mullahs have to believe they'd rule the world.
And they'd probably be right.
~ ~ ~
The coming military strike against Iran's nuclear weapons program may yet be a coordinated Israeli-American operation, with the Jewish state being amply equipped to handle the main strikes:
Israel has long been understood by its ally United States as in possession of multiple nuclear weapons that are miniaturized for missile warhead mounts: to this point, on September 22, 1979, an American Vela-class spy sat detected an Indian Ocean double flash that was consistent with previous Chinese and French tests. Also, Israel, since 2000, is said to be in possession of a medium range ballistic missile that can strike a target at a range of nine hndred niles. Also, Israel, since 1999, is said to possess several German built Dolphin-class submarines capable of firing warhead missiles from the Indian Ocean at any time.Under this scenario, we would handle the follow-up operations against any Iranian attempts to close the Strait of Hormuz and to eliminate any targets the Israelis missed.
More, in 2004, Israel purchased, according to deliberately public reports, several hundred BLU-109 guided (bunker buster) bombs from the US arsenal.
The recommendation for on the ground special forces and simultaneous C3 and power grid strikes are also well within Israel capability. My experience is that there are multiple teams trained and tasked for most high risk missions to decapitate IRGC command and control.
It's been a staple of U.S. war-fighting policy in the Middle East to keep Israel on the sidelines, but in this case there doesn't seem to be any point to it since the Jewish state's destruction is the enemy's openly proclaimed objective. But, as also is a staple of U.S. war-fighting policy in general, there is the nagging doubt about whether we or the Israelis really have the stomach for acting pre-emptively against the Iranian nuclear threat. Have the Bushies had their fill of it after all the crap they've had to take over Iraq? Can an Israel that handed Gaza over to Hamas lock, stock, and synagogues truly be all that eager to take on her region's burgeoning superpower? And, if it's true that Iran has already purchased existing warheads from North Korea, could we be being lured into a public relations trap (attack Iran with conventional weapons, get assymmetrically nuked in retaliation) that will destroy our ability to resist Islamic Fundamentalism for good?
~ ~ ~
And yet, if the mullahs are allowed to get nukes, after the North Koreans had theirs virtually handed to them by the last American administration, won't that kill the entire notion nuclear non-proliferation just as dead?
The United States and its European allies worry that if they simply accept a nuclear Iran, other states will be encouraged to pursue nuclear ambitions of their own. But that ship may already have sailed. As the world watches the twists and turns of Iran's path toward the Security Council, the military regime in Burma may be quietly selling its energy resources to finance the acquisition of nuclear technology.
The Slate article proceeds to provide details on the regime that calls itself "Myanmar," and they read as dismally familiar. Same brutal internal repression; same anti-US paranoia, with the same ginned-up false alarmism about an "imminent U.S. invasion"; the same already-existing energy resources (in Burma's case, trillions of cubic feet of natural gas) with which to corrupt and compromise any external attempt at regime-change; the same presence of Sino-Russian cultivation of another rogue regime against Western interests; and, of course, the same ambitions to gain possession of the ultimate weapon, which is the only factor that would make military action a bona fide option.
This is what people like Helen Thomas refuse to understand. If it were simply a matter of a regime, be it in Afghanistan or Iraq or North Korea or Iran or Venezuela or Cuba (you get the picture) being bestial and nothing more, one could make the "sovereign nation" argument with some level of credibility (though for libs, who led the international charge against regimes they didn't like, like South Africa and Serbia, it would still be roaringly hypocritical). But if those same beastial regimes get nuclear weapons and the power to ignite global Armageddon that comes with them, that forfeits their precious "sovereignity" and makes it our business to put them out of business - permanently. It is why Bill Clinton should have invaded North Korea in 1995, why George Bush did invade Iraq in 2003, and why Iran must be liberated now.
The message to juntas like Burma's must be reiterated: what happened to Saddam Hussein was no fluke. If you want to survive and be left alone to strangle your own people in peace, do not seek weapons of mass destruction. Otherwise the proverbial spider hole is the best fate for which you can hope.
~ ~ ~
A few days ago we took a brief look at the looming European clash between the two titans of multiculturalist groupthink: Islam vs. homosexuality. Now there is a new contribution to the ideological war between the two that makes the famous Danish cartoons look like Mohammedan pieties:
A new documentary exploring the lives of gay Muslims could soon set off another round of violent protests in the Middle East.You can say that again. And given that Islam is typified by paper-thin-skinnedness and violent cultural xenophobia, I have no doubt that the likely reaction to this film will indeed help the world better understand the true nature of Islam. Or, rather, would if the world had any interest, or the attendant courage, to attain that level of understanding.
The film’s producer, Sandi Dubowski, has promised to submit his movie to all the major film festivals of the Muslim and Western worlds. And even if it is rejected, he told Variety magazine, "We’ll find ways of screening it in every Muslim nation, even if it’s underground.”
The film, titled In the Name of Allah, will give viewers a glimpse of the Muslim world from a gay, lesbian, and transgender perspective.
Dubowski said it was important for understanding Islam. "The world right now needs to understand Islam,” he told Variety, "and these are the most unlikely storytellers of Islam.”
The biggest irony is that Dubowski appears to be contending that In The Name Of Allah is some sort of "untold story" that will put over a softened, feminized, bizarro image of the ideology that threatens the entire globe. As though Mohammed's "great commission" to Islamic conquest "by the sword" was a loving exhortation to violate a part of the human anatomy other than the neck.
I can hardly wait to see the movie's Tehran premier, and the reviews it receives from Iranian clerics. But then again, since sodomites and Mohammedans share a deep-seeded hatred of Judeo-Christianity, it's possible that they could surprise me.
~ ~ ~
The above is, of course, not what the Pentagon has in mind when it speaks of the "long war" against "bin Ladenism":
The recently released Quadrennial Defense Review, which reveals long-term military planning, shows a top brass worried about the ideology of hate preached by imams across the Islamic world. This ideology, though twisted, is somewhat coherent and calls for using terrorism to create a "caliphate," a unified Islamic state, stretching from Afghanistan and Iran all the way to Spain and including most of North Africa. For a lack of a better term, some American military planners call this ideology "bin Ladenism."...Sounds like a plan, doesn't it? Every war perforce has its propaganda side, which has to ultimately be won in order for battlefield hostilities to be brought to a conclusion. And there's no question but that our ideas - freedom, self-determination, peace - are superior to anything the enemy can offer because unlike Koranic hatred, they truly are universal.
To counter bin Ladenism, the military is planning a two-stage war. The first is being fought in open battles in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere and looks a lot like the kind of war most Americans assumed we'd wage on al Qaeda and terror-sponsoring states after the September 11 attacks. The second stage is what senior military planners - including Mr. Rumsfeld - call "the Long War." It involves countering one set of ideas with another.
However, it is also true that there's no such thing as an idea that "sells itself." Which means the only way our ideas will be sold in the Muslim world over the short-or long-term is if our nation continues to be led by people who believe in them. And that, as they say, is the rub:
It is this stage of the war that President Bush, Mr. Rumsfeld and other members of the Administration worry isn't well understood by most Americans and therefore is in danger of being lost after Mr. Bush leaves office. At the Press Club, Mr. Rumsfeld reminded the journalists in the audience that al Qaeda and its affiliates have "media relation committees." "Think of that - they get up in the morning, have committee meetings and think about how they're going to manipulate the world's press to their advantage," he said. It's not just that al Qaeda members watch CNN or the Fox News Channel for tactical information, but they have "proven to be highly successful at manipulating the world's media here in this country."
That is no accident. Our enemies know that our Extreme Media is America's Achilles heel. It hasn't been a critically debilitating vulnerability because its political arm (i.e. the Democrat Party) is out of power and continues, by its foolish indiscretions, to take itself farther and farther from the American political mainstream. But the argument can be made that the establishment press has still taken its toll on the Bushies, who, if you'll recall, have taken a dismayingly Kerryesque approach to the Iranian nuclear threat at stark odds with its decisive elimination of a similar peril in next-door Iraq. And the White House, for all its weary overcaution of late, is sufficiently and prudently long-term in its strategic thinking to know that the DisLoyal Opposition will win an election again sooner or later.
Whether that takes the form of a Clinton restoration or a "fresh face" like ex-Virginia governor Mark Warner, the track record of Democrat foreign policy stewardship under its most recent two Chief Executives, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton (both of whom pretended to be "centrists" at odds with their party's far-left base), is far from reassuring that another one would actually break from the Dems' tendency towards weakness, wishful thinking, appeasement, and fantasism. Even if a President Warner were so inclined, the media elites that got him elected would not stand for it. Heck, it's fair to wonder whether any future GOP administration that succeeds the current one will follow anywhere close to Bush's footsteps, given permanent, unremitting press hostility to the war effort and the notoriously short attention span of the American public.
To put it bluntly, I question whether today's Americans are tempermentally capable of fighting another "long war" like the "greatest generation" did against fascism and communism.
~ ~ ~
As Mark Steyn continues to point out, part of the problem is a matter of sheer, straightforward, global demographics. Given the prodigious Muslim birthrate versus the low-and-dwindling-lower birthrates of Islam's targets (Europe, Russia, Japan, and to a moderately lesser degree the United States), in another generation or two the latter three will be functionally depopulated and Europe will become part of the Caliphate even without another shot being fired, and even more so since it is unlikely in the extreme that the transition will be remotely peaceful. The "free world" will then be reduced to an isolated U.S. and surviving outposts like Australia and what formerly liberated powers haven't succumbed to tyrannical relapses. And even they will be considerably further down the road the EUnuchs paved.
It will be a world much poorer (remember our own looming entitlements crunch), much more dangerous, and much less free. As Steyn concluded his latest piece, "A people that won't multiply can't go forth or go anywhere. Those who do will shape the world we live in." And we all know how Islamic Fundamentalists want to shape the world. Is it any wonder that they think the tide of history is at their backs?
~ ~ ~
The alternative to an inexorable return to the seventh century, which has been a recurring them of TKS' Jim Geraghty, is not any happier, although it would be a lot quicker:
History will remember that after 9/11, the overwhelming desire of many in America and elsewhere in the West was to punish al-Qaeda and the Taliban and help democracy, liberty, and governments free from religious extremism take root in Afghanistan. Up until Iraq, there was something of a consensus in the U.S. that democracy, human rights, religious tolerance, freedom of speech and freedom of the press and women's rights were worth promoting in the Muslim world; from Algeria to Pakistan, Muslims deserved the same rights as Americans.
There will not be the same reaction after the next terrorist attack in the United States - and sad to say, sooner or later, there will be another attack. I suspect the aftermath of the next attack will feature many Americans saying they're ready to write off the Muslim world as hopeless — not decent human beings worthy of liberation and liberty, but a bunch of inherently homicidal maniacs to be contained and, if need be, eliminated. [emphasis added]
There would certainly be some sentiment for that. Just the other day, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Jack Kelly posted the following on his blog:
The radicals are overplaying a weak hand. We are reminded constantly there are roughly 1.4 billion Muslims in the world. The radicals need to be reminded that if we in the West become aggravated sufficiently, we could reduce that number to 50 million or so in less than a week. [emphasis added]"Sufficient aggravation" would be unlikely to grow out of Muslims rioting for the expansion of Western political correctness (like our libs need any outside urging to stamp out freedom of speech). But the nuking of Chicago, irradiating of Minneapolis, and/or nerve-gassing of the New York subways? Or a biological attack, like the Iranian ebola strike depicted in the Tom Clancy novel Executive Orders? That could be a different story.
Or it could tip public opinion the other way, towards retreat and withdrawal and a return to isolationism. "We'll do anything you say, accept any pro-Muslim speech codes you want, bow towards Mecca three times daily, just please stop hurting us." That's what the American Left would proclaim at the top of its lungs as the inevitable and richly deserved consequences of "neoconservative arrogance." "See, look what Bush's warmongering has gotten us! We need peace, not more war!" In that post-calamity atmosphere, would there be majority public support for the magnitude of retaliation that Mr. Kelly describes? The incineration of a single Muslim city (i.e. Tehran)? Or even an all-out conventional invasion if the next terrorist attack appeared to come in response to it?
Today the post-9/11 consensus is still behind what remains of the Bush Doctrine: "We will not allow the world's most evil regimes to obtain the world's most dangerous weapons." But who can say for sure how that consensus would change in the wake of an even more devastating "event"?
J-Ger thinks we'd go berserk. I think we'd surrender. And the only means of possibly averting either - the toppling of the Iranian mullahgarchy via American intervention - grows more imperative, and more conspicuously absent, with each passing day.
"Perilous times," indeed.
UPDATE: Here's a neat little bit of perspective from Victor Davis Hanson:
Just imagine the present controversy over the cartoons in the context of President Ahmadinejad with his finger on a half-dozen nuclear missiles pointed at Copenhagen.
And then look at how the West is rushing to dhimmize itself to revoltingly obsequious excess without them. With nukes, the mullahs have to believe they'd rule the world.
And they'd probably be right.
posted by JASmius at 6:21 PM
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