Domestic politics leave President virtually impotent to respond to Iranian acts of war
The rug has been pulled out from under the President’s ability to respond to an aggressive Iran – by his own countrymen.
On Friday, March 23, around 10:30 am Baghdad Time, while conducting a routine merchant ship inspection in the Persian Gulf, fifteen British sailors and Royal Marines – including women – were abducted, at gunpoint, by Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen, who proceeded to take them and their rubber raiding craft back to Iran, where they are currently being held hostage.
This is nowhere near the first example of Iranian interference – or hostile action – in the four-year history of the Iraq war; on the contrary, it is simply the most recent, and most overt, of those acts – any of which could be considered an Act of War against the US or her allies.
The hope that this situation – though clearly more than a simple “misunderstanding” – could be quickly or efficiently resolved, like a similar one in 2004 was, promptly dissipated Friday night when the Iranian government claimed that the British servicemen had “strayed into Iranian territorial waters illegally.” Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement which said in part, “This makes a number of times that British sailors have illegally entered Iranian territorial waters…. They were arrested by border guards for investigation and questioning.”
The following day, a British newspaper quoted an Iranian military official as saying that “a plan to capture American or British coalition troops was formulated by the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Security Council” at the beginning of the week “in response to the arrest of Iranian officers by US forces in Iraq.
According to the report:
The decision was reached after a report submitted to Iran’s ground forces commander warned that information on the activities of the Revolutionary Guards and the “Al-Quds Force” in Iraq was being leaked to British and American intelligence agencies following the arrest of senior “Al-Quds Force” officers by US troops in northern Iraq.Besides seeking retaliation for the mounting number of Iranian officers and personnel going missing in Iraq – where they are illegally directing elements of the insurgency, and where between three and four hundred personnel related to the Quds force of the IRG are now in custody – another possible motivation for this action could be an attempt by Iran to secure greater leverage in the increasingly tense nuclear situation – the next measure on which was to be decided in the Security Council the day after these abductions, with a vote on a resolution co-authored by Britain which would impose sanctions on the Persian state for its refusal to cease attempts to acquire nuclear capabilities. A “source close to the [Revolutionary] Guard” acknowledged that such tactics “had been approved by Ayatollah Khameni, Iran’s supreme leader, who warned last week that Tehran would take illegal actions if necessary to maintain its right to develop a nuclear program.”
The Security Council moved on the nuclear situation in spite of the sailors’ kidnap, though, unanimously voting to tighten sanctions on Tehran – a move which, as AP writer Alexandra Olson put it, was “intended to show Tehran that defiance will leave it increasingly isolated.”
The abduction of sailors in international waters alone is a clear casus belli, although, like they did in 2004, Iranian military officials claim that their captives “have admitted to violating [Iran’s] territorial waters.”
This situation appears poised to get worse before it improves, as, according to London’s Sunday Times, a “website run by associates of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad” is reporting that the sailors (whom it referred to as “insurgents”) will be charged with espionage – an offense punishable in Iran by death.
If this stated course of action is carried out, then any question Iran’s having committed an overt act of war will be dissolved. American troops are no less at risk of illegal action by the rogue state; the Revolutionary Guard’s weekly newspaper recently spoke of the abduction of American soldiers, saying, “We’ve got the ability to capture a nice bunch of blue-eyed, blond-haired officers and feed them to our fighting cocks. Iran has enough people who can reach the heart of Europe and kidnap Americans and Israelis.”
Sadly, were the worst to happen to these British soldiers – or were American soldiers to be similarly kidnapped and held hostage – any form of retaliation would be nearly impossible, politically, for the US administration. For months, Congressional Democrats and anti-war Leftists have been laying the groundwork for a response to any action against Iran, regardless of how real or how vicious the provocation - and have been chomping at the bit to employ such a response, which would entail the blaming of – and almost certain introduction of articles of impeachment against – President Bush for an attack on Iran which the Left has been claiming for months was being “secretly planned” by an administration which would use any excuse – true or not – to provoke another war.
Still bitter about the Iraq War, these Congressional Democrats would not only go after the administration for any action in response to an unquestionable declaration of war against us and our allies, but would likely attack any means of response at the source, by denying funding to an Iranian war effort, by passing resolution after resolution denouncing the President (with ever-increasingly hyperbolic rhetoric, including, one can have little doubt, the phrase “War Crimes”), by taking up the time of elected and appointed officials and military leaders by holding hearings (or “show trials”), and, doubtless, by attempting to impeach the President.
For a hint of the level of opposition the President would face in his attempt to respond to an Iranian act of war, one need only look at the bombshell rhetoric still being cast about regarding the Iraq war – or at the example set by Congressional Democrats like Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who in a Thursday appearance on Fox News Channel declared his intent “to sponsor a House Resolution seeking Articles of Impeachment against the President for threatening Iran with military action – an act prohibited by the United Nations.” This impeachable “threat” to Iran, as Kucinich sees it, is the President’s repeated statement that “no options are off the table” in the quest to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
Given the hysteria over what has largely been nothing to this point, is there any question how far the Left would go to destroy President Bush, and to prevent any type of US retaliation to an act – and an overt declaration – of war against us?
Make no mistake: whether they had any real suspicion that Iran would actually provoke war in the near future or not, the Left has been laying the groundwork for such a development – and for their “BushLied!™,” “I-told-you-so” response – for months, despite mind-numbingly repetitive assertions from the President, from Press Secretary Snow, from Vice President Cheney, from Secretary of State Rice, from Secretary of Defense Gates, and from many, many others that not only are we not plotting to attack Iran, but that such a war was an unimaginably improbable notion, virtually irregardless of Iran’s present or future actions.
These denials have clearly meant far more to Iran, which now feels more emboldened than ever to act against us and our allies, than they have to the Left, at whose deaf ears they have been directed. Left-wing “news” websites have been speaking nearly nonstop of “Bush’s war on Iran,” with almost-daily headlines making such sensationalistic, and fatalistic, statements as “US planning for war with Iran,” “There's time to reconsider Iran attack,” “Iran Attack Could Speed Development of Nuclear Weapons,” “Pentagon Whistle-Blower on the Coming War With Iran,” “Bush has secret plan to wage war with Iran,” “Bush’s War Heating Up - Attack on Iran Imminent,” and “Woman Colonel Urges Troops to Refuse Orders If US Attacks Iran.” As far back as July 2005, The Nation featured an article accusing the administration of conducting an “Iran war buildup,” and in January of this year published a Scott Ritter screed entitled “Stop the Iran war before it starts,” in which he asserted that “President Bush's State of the Union address proved he is hell-bent on going to war with Iran.”
A recent Rolling Stone article entitled “Iran: The Next War” began: “Even before the bombs fell on Baghdad, a group of senior Pentagon officials were plotting to invade another country. Their covert campaign once again relied on false intelligence and shady allies. But this time, the target was Iran.”
Liberal blogs, as is their wont, have advanced the level of rhetoric several steps further, denouncing the “many lies about Iran by the White House,” propagating the KnownFact™ that “the Bush Administration has been itching to find an excuse to go to war with Iran,” and calling on Congress to “de-fund the Iraq war immediately,” lest “Bush have extra funds with which he can attack Iran.”
With Friday’s incident, the denouncements – absent any action – of President Bush have been ratcheted even higher. One lefty blog called the authenticity of the British sailor abduction into question, calling it a “repeat of the Gulf of Tonkin incident” carried out by “neocons” who want “to lie their way into another war.”
It looks like we may have the provocation in the Persian Gulf that Bush has been looking for,” said another.
These are, of course, only the blog posts tame enough to be repeated – there have been far more, and far worse, than these examples.
The words and actions of Congressional Democrats have not been much better. Despite the fact that only Congress is authorized to declare war, the outcry from that deliberative body, whose members still claim to have been lied into approving the Iraq war (despite having access to no less intelligence on the matter than the White House), has continued without a letup, with Congressmen falling all over themselves to tell the President that they matter in the war making process.
Speaker of the House Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has repeatedly said that “Congress should assert itself and make it very clear that there is no previous authority for the president, any president, to go into Iran.” Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) recently introduced legislation to force President Bush to seek congressional authorization before using force against Iran. “This presidency has shot from the hip too many times for us to be able to trust it to act on its own,” he said. “We need the Congress to be involved in any decision to commence military activities.”
“I’d like to be clear,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). “The president does not have the authority to launch military action in Iran without first seeking Congressional authorization.” Said Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY): “It would be a mistake of historical proportion if the Administration thought that the 2002 resolution authorizing force against Iraq was a blank check for the use of force against Iran without further Congressional authorization.”
Jack Murtha (D-PA) jumped on board, as well, stating that “we don't have the capability of sustaining a war in Iran” – and Dennis Kucinich, as mentioned above, declared his desire to impeach the President for apparently not saying loudly and often enough that we won’t attack, or retaliate against, Iran, regardless of any provocation whatsoever.
These statements do little but encourage Iran as, combined with the administration’s own repeated words promises not to act regardless of provocation, a clear and unified message is being sent, for the first time since September of 2001, from the shores of America to those who might harm us. However, unlike the aftermath of 9/11, which saw a (very temporarily) unified American front against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, the message being sent in this case is the opposite – it is a loud and clear signal to Iran, a nation which has said over and over and over again that America and Israel are the root of the world’s problems and will soon be destroyed, that they have free rein to do whatever they wish, both against Iraq and against the US, with no fear whatsoever of reprisal.
The administration has repeated its desire for peace with Iran ad nauseam. What has been, and is being, done by the anti-war Left and the anti-Bush Democrats in Congress, though, has greatly increased the danger to this country and to its national defense. The hands of our leadership are being bound tighter and tighter, with threats of political and legal retaliation being made against the administration not for possibly acting sine casus, but for even considering taking action in defense of ourselves and our allies, in response to direct affronts and overt acts of war by a nation which has increasingly shown itself in recent months not only to be no friend to America, but to be a dangerous enemy.
The Left has painstakingly crafted the current circumstance in which the administration finds itself, forcing it to ignore any and all provocations which might come from Iran, including troop kidnappings and possibly worse, or be called on the carpet for supposedly “lying America into war once again.” Changing circumstances mean nothing to those in Congress and on the Left whose overarching goal now is political revenge for the Iraq war – and the statement that we are not going to war with Iran, followed by a response to an Iranian declaration of war on us, will be treated as a purposeful misleading of America on the part of the President, and will not be tolerated.
The anti-War Left, and their allies in Congress, have now placed the nation in an untenable position: if America’s President acts to defend his country against an attack by a blatantly hostile nation, he will not only be interfered with (and likely prevented from effectively acting), but will be mercilessly, publicly castigated for acting against a nation he had previously been forced to promise that he would leave alone – and he will have to answer to a Congress which, in the wake of their Iraq embarrassment (and due to their lingering resentment at the impeachment of their last Democratic President), has long been itching to prosecute him to the fullest degree possible – proudly issuing “we told you so’s” to the nation all the while.
This is the state of affairs we currently face – and, while it appears to be one of advantage for the Democrats, the only real winners in this situation are a hostile Iran, and any other nations who wish to harm us.
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In search of Swiftboat revenge (still)
In the name of the troops, the LA Times smears most highly decorated living American serviceman
The Left loads up, takes careful aim...and hits themselves square in the collective foot (again)
It’s no secret that the Democrats and the rest of the anti-war Left are still upset over the “swiftboating” of their Presidential nominee in 2004. Heck, they’re not over the 500 votes and hanging chads in Florida yet, so it would be pretty foolish to expect them to get over a bigger loss four years later – especially when such a large part of it (in their minds) stemmed from some squeaky-wheel veterans who just wouldn’t shut up and let their Vietnam veteran candidate continue to portray himself as a military hero.
As the Iraq war (and the debate surrounding it) has raged on in the years since, the Left has been trying harder and harder to claim the moral high ground with regard to the treatment and use of US troops, both by championing the few it can find who oppose the War on Terror, and by attempting to marginalize those who dare speak out against them.
A major problem with this strategy, though, comes from the overall ignorance on the part of the anti-war, anti-military Left to nearly any aspect of military or veterans’ affairs. From championing the likes of John Murtha (D-PA) as a paragon of patriotism and as an idolized military hero, to ignoring those real heroes whose politics don’t quite line up with the Democratic party line, the Left suffers from a fundamental lack of subject matter understanding, which, combined with the employment of the usual ham-handed tactics, often cause the Left’s continuous attempts to re-frame the debate surrounding America’s national security, the War on Terror, and respect for US troops to result simply in further setbacks to their cause.
The L.A. Times recently provided an excellent example of the Leftist tendency to load up their assault rifle, take careful aim at the right, and then deposit round after round in their own foot.
Last week, Times columnist Rosa Brooks, in a fit of continued rage over the use of John Kerry’s own words and actions to sink his presidential bid (i.e., the right’s “swiftboating” of him and his candidacy), lashed out at a panel which had appeared at CPAC to discuss “The Left's Repeated Campaign Against the American Soldier.” Her invective included calling panel participants “key” members of “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the right-wing goon squad whose defamatory insinuations helped sink John Kerry's presidential campaign.”
Her column, entitled “The Lunatic Right Returns,” continued:
What's depressing about the reemergence of the Swifties, though, is that it's symbolic of the increasing takeover of the “conservative” movement by unprincipled, right-wing extremists.
Among these “extremists” Ms. Brooks so loathes (and lumps in as a "key discredited Swift boater") is retired Air Force Colonel George E. “Bud” Day. Who is that, you ask? Well, you might remember the name if you were alive during Vietnam, or if you pay any attention whatsoever to military history.
However, if you don’t know who he is, here’s a down-and-dirty on a real American hero. According to the USAF’s Air University website, Colonel Day earned “nearly 70 decorations and awards, of which more than 50 [were] for combat” (and one was the Medal of Honor). His logged 5,000 career flying hours, including combat duty in WWII, in Korea, and in Vietnam. After being shot down in 1967, Day suffered as a POW for 67 months (that's five and one-half years for the mathematically challenged), with a two week “respite” after escaping from the North Vietnamese, during which, despite serious injury, he evaded the enemy all the way back into South Vietnam, “earning the distinction of being the only prisoner to escape from North Vietnam” - only to be recaptured and imprisoned until March 1973.
Colonel Day embodies the true essence of the phrase “Return with Honor,” which is why, in 1997, the Air Force named its newest SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) school building after him.
As “Jason” from the weblog Iraq Now says, “This is the man who LA Times columnist Rosa Brooks calls an ‘unprincipled, right-wing extremist’.”
But Ms. Brooks continues:
It's not hard to visualize the right-wing talking points that will emerge from this [panel]. The Swift boaters will be dusting off their 2004 scripts and reaching back still further to dredge up their Vietnam-era notes. Expect to see all the old myths revived: The antiwar left spits on returning troops and gives aid and comfort to the enemy. Oh, John Murtha, why do you hate our brave troops?
The antipathy and condescension for those troops who simply aren’t “enlightened” enough to renounce violence and become dyed-in-the-wool anti-war Liberals drips from Ms. Brooks’s words, as she forsakes facts for the sake of a good meme. The degradation of our troops as they returned home from Vietnam – a proud chapter in the history of America’s anti-war, anti-military lefties – has been treated by Democrats increasingly like a preposterous myth propagated by the chickenhawking Right of late, despite the fact that such instances of troops being assaulted, spit on, and otherwise defiled are a very real part of the historical record.
As to “brave John Murtha,” whom liberals hold up as their example of Democratic military heroism, “Jason” has this to say:
Oh, and I can't say that John Murtha hates our troops. He just wants them to lose, by stripping them of needed funding in the heat of battle - funding which translates to such minor items as equipment, ammunition, reinforcements, reserves, and food.
But facts, as always, get too much in the way of a good story – and of a good expression of hatred. Therefore, Ms. Brooks simply can’t be expected to abide by them.
Though she and her employers at the Times doubtless published this column with the belief that none would question their yeomen’s work on the part of the anti-war Left, they actually accomplished just the opposite. As “Jason” so aptly puts it:
“In the process of disparaging a panel entitled "The Left's Repeated Campaign Against the American Soldier" [Rosa Brooks] manages to serve up – drumroll, please – an ignorant smear campaign against America's most decorated living serviceman. (emphasis added)
If the Times has an ounce of conscience, they will disavow Ms. Brooks's comments immediately, if they do not go further (as they should) and remove her from the payroll. Furthermore, Senator Kerry and Representative Murtha need to repudiate this slander of a fellow Vietnam veteran – as does every other Democrat politician who claims to care about America and her troops (and for whom Ms. Brooks attempts to speak).
The clock is ticking. We are waiting. Surely the Left will defend a veteran and a real hero (who does not share their political views) as quickly, and with as much gusto, as they have a less-distinguished one of their own in the past.
Surely they will repudiate this hackish attempt to marginalize non-Liberal servicemen and to ridicule the idea that the Left would ever slander the troops, which consisted (in typical lefty fashion) of a slandering of the most highly-decorated living American serviceman.
Surely they will do the right thing in this situation.
Won't they?
Mr. Emanuel, a special operations military veteran, is a leadership fellow with the Center for International Trade and Security at the University of Georgia, where he also studies Classics. In addition, he is a contributing editor for conservative weblog RedState.com, and is a columnist for the Athens, GA Banner-Herald newspaper.
Labels: Heroism, Liberals, Media, Profiles in Courage, Scandals, War
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Teaching the Bible in Georgia's public schools
The Bible in public schools: A blending of "church and state," or another useful primary source?Last week, Georgia’s Board of Education, by unanimous vote, preliminarily approved two new literature and culture classes for use in public schools beginning next year. Pending a 30-day comment period, the board is expected to give these courses final, official approval.
The difference between these new courses and others – and the reason why there will be controversy surrounding them – is that they involve the Bible.
Entitled “Literature and History of the Old Testament Era” and “Literature and History of the New Testament Era,” the classes involve the reading of the Bible as literature, not as a religious text, and are intended to provide cultural, historical, and literary education and context (not religious indoctrination) through the use of a text which contains ample amounts of all.
As Senate Majority Leader Tommie Williams, the program’s legislative sponsor, said, the Bible “plays a major role in history,” and “is important in understanding many classic literary works.”
“It’s not just ‘The Good Book,’” he has been quoted as saying. “It’s a good book.”
While this development will cause the usual suspects to claim government establishment of religion, and violation of the mythic “separation of church and state,” the fact is that using the Bible as a literary and cultural reference is, in actuality, neither.
The Bible can serve as a history and a literature text every bit as effectively as it can a religious one and, despite statements to the contrary, there should no more problem with offering non-religious classes on the Old and New Testament eras (which involve the study of the Bible as a primary source) than there is with offering classes on ancient Greece, Rome, or any other civilization or culture. The Iliad and Odyssey, for example, are studied in public schools for literary and cultural edification, yet there is no outcry from those who oppose government-sponsored religion that such instruction is a governmental endorsement of Zeus or of Apollo. Likewise, the Aeneid is read and studied without interference from those who see it as an attempt to impose the Roman pantheon on poor public school students.
Sure, those are old examples; who, you might ask, would possibly consider worshipping Jupiter, Juno, or Minerva these days, anyway? These works, though, were as serious an example of religious and moral texts in their day as the books of the Old and New Testaments have been in theirs. A simple once-over of the Iliad will expose the reader to far more instances of divine intervention in human affairs than occur in the New Testament.
Similarly, diverse texts of ancient and religious law – such as the Roman Twelve Tables, or the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi – are acceptable for study. Will the simple fact of greater modern relevance prevent the Bible, which presents the laws of the Hebrews (in the form of the Ten Commandments, among others), and the later laws of Christianity, from being read as the historical documents and mores that they are?
On the other end of the spectrum, there will be those who oppose these additions to school curricula for the explicit reason that they do remove religious teaching from the study of the Bible. Lost in the protest against any non-religious study of this text, though, is the consideration of the invaluable historical, cultural, and literary knowledge and context which can be gained from such education. Such knowledge and context can be used, by those who so choose, to achieve a better understanding of Judaism and Christianity than a simple Sunday once-over of religious topics addressed by the Bible can hope to accomplish.
The events of the Old and New Testament eras are an integral part of the history of Western and Near Eastern civilization – and, by extension, of our own culture. Outlawing the study of certain parts of history, and of their particular beliefs, movements, and cultures, out of fear of accidentally promoting religion, would be akin to sacrificing education and erudition on the altar of political correctness – and political correctness is a poor reason for the breeding of ignorance in our children.
Several groups and individuals claim to oppose this new curriculum because of the lack of clearly-defined boundaries with regard to what the teachers of these classes may (and, more specifically, may not) say. Ironically, many of these also protest the Intellectual Diversity in Higher Education Act – for the precise reason that they see it as a threat by governmet to establish boundaries with regard to what teachers may and may not say. There is apparently only room for such restrictions when the teaching of a Bible literature class is the subject of the regulation.
Regardless of the obvious sensibility of this addition to Georgia’s public school curriculum, there will be protests from both sides of the aisle. In response to this, there are two options: we could kowtow to political correctness on one hand, and to fundamentalists on the other, and prevent the Bible from ever being used in a public educational setting – or we could be sensible, recognize that the Bible has as much place in the contextual study of cultural and literary history as does any other primary source which is currently being used, and allow it to be used as such.
• Jeff Emanuel, a Special Operations military veteran who served in Iraq, is a Security Leadership fellow at the University of Georgia Center for International Trade and Security.
Published in the Athens Banner-Herald on 031507Labels: Academia, Liberals, Religion
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Sacrificing others' lives for political gain the supreme wrong
From Nifong to Murtha: Sacrificing others’ lives for political gain is a hallmark of the modern LeftSince the issuance of indictments last April, the prosecution of three former Duke University lacrosse players (all young white males) for the alleged rape of a black female “dancer” has continued, despite continuously mounting evidence against their assumed guilt. Included in this potentially exculpatory data was DNA evidence (which was suppressed – an act for which Nifong has now given eleven separate explanations).
Trusting his victim more than science, Nifong decided that all he needed to proceed with his case was the fact that, “in a photo line-up done April 4, the accuser identified [two of the accused] as her assailants “to a certainty of 100 percent,” and identified” the third to “a certainty of 90 percent”
Playing to the crowd in the racially-charged atmosphere which filled the scandalized community after the “victim” made her accusations, Nifong decided that he had more than enough evidence to proceed with the ruining of three young men’s lives – despite the fact that it took all of a month for the rest of the American public to glom on to the fact that, due to her countless revisions to every aspect of her story about the night in question, the accuser either (a) had no idea what she was talking about, or (b) was a pathological liar.
Public statement after public statement followed, with Nifong having appeared in front of the media more than 70 times by the end of May (though as soon as the defense began to hit back, and negative PR – also known as “the facts becoming public” – began to taint the case, the DA began publicly considering issuing a gag order. This idea was backed by the NAACP, which was suddenly worried that “media coverage of the alleged rape [would] deprive the alleged victim of her legal rights to a fair trial.” How typical of liberals – as similarly expressed in proposals like the Fairness Doctrine for talk radio, the modus operandi is, of course, to call for silencing of one or both sides once the PR machine begins broadcasting a message not 100% in tune with the “party line.”)
Now, almost a full year into the case, we learn from Nifong himself the very good reason why he continued the rape prosecution of these young men, destroying their reputations and threatening to deny their freedom with years in jail. That reason, which was disclosed in a letter on the case from Nifong which was “included in a voluminous filing [February 28] to the State Bar,” was this:
The lacrosse case arose “during the last few weeks of a hotly-contested Democratic Party primary in which I was seeking to retain my office,” [Nifong] said. “I was not always able to give the case my full attention.”
Well, that clears everything right up. I mean, had it been something trivial, well, then it would have been worth getting upset about the fact that three young men’s lives were ruined by his wrongful, unethical, and potentially criminal prosecution. But hey, this was about politics – and that’s clearly more important than the lives and freedoms of others!
Of course, the mere fact that he was embroiled in the aforementioned “hotly-contested Democratic Party primary” in the first place shows how insignificant the concept of “honesty” was to Mr. Nifong. In an appearance last week on the Charlie Rose show, North Carolina Governor Mike Easley had this to say about his appointment of Nifong for the DA position (which opened up due to the previous officeholder’s appointment as a judge):
…I wanted someone who wasn’t going to run, that was a long-term prosecutor, just to hold the office together until somebody was elected. And our staff interviewed him. He said he wasn’t going to run, and we didn’t think he would. And then he got out and started running.
There’s a totally different standard you set for somebody who is going to be the elected district attorney and get into politics, and then there’s somebody who you want just to run the office. Because when you get out there and start making political comments, it requires a whole lot of different talent, a whole lot of different skills that obviously he didn’t have. And he would not have been appointed had we known he was going to run...
Honesty, of course, all too often takes a backseat to ambition and to political maneuvering. However, there is something far more sinister – and far more alarming – about the mindset that allows political and personal gain to be sought at the knowing expense of others’ lives. This prosecution destroyed the reputation of all three of these young men. Furthermore, they could have lost their freedom for a significant period of time, being confined to prison for years for crimes they did not commit. That mattered none to the Democrat district attorney, though, who saw an opportunity to score political points in a race-conscious community by putting away three white males for the rape of a black female – even after it became obvious, through both testimony and evidence, that no such incident occurred.
Sacrificing others' lives for personal political gain, though most often publicly attributed – incorrectly – to so-called “chickenhawks” in the nation’s (GOP) leadership, is actually a distinguishing characteristic of the modern Left.
Strong shades of the mindset which allowed a prosecutor to ruin young men he knew to be innocent, for the purpose of his own gain, can be clearly seen in other areas of power and of politics. One such area is in the Congressional Iraq debate, where elected Democrats have sought to condemn and to subvert America’s efforts there, despite the fact that their political posturing, their efforts to undermine the President’s leadership of the war, and their attempts to hamstring the administration’s (and the military leadership’s) options in a war that requires flexibility, has cost American (and Iraqi) lives.
These attempts to score political victories have cost real lives of real people – people who, due to the enlarged, overly ambitious egos of American politicians (and due to acts carried out for the simple reason of a hatred of the President), will never again return home to their families, will never live out their lives, and will never again have an opportunity to pursue their hopes and dreams like the rest of us at home will. Our troops voluntarily put themselves in harm’s way, and they do so because of a higher ideal which they believe is worth the price not only of their time and their comfort, but of their lives.
The lives of others are simply details in the game that is politics and power to such people. Scoring political points at the expense of these people’s lives – or of any people’s lives – is neither honorable nor acceptable, and those who do such, where applicable (such as in the case of Mr. Nifong), should be punished to the fullest extent possible. Those who have a (perhaps unfortunately) protected right to bluster, to bloviate, and to undermine – such as those in Congress – must either be made to see the effect of their inhuman callousness, and to realize that this is not a game – that their acts have an impact on the lives of others (though they unfortunately cannot be made to care about it) – or they must be shoved to the side and drowned out by the majority of this nation which is unified at least in its desire for the civilized treatment of their fellow human beings (let alone, in this case, in their desire for victory and for the ending of bloodshed in a way which not only spares lives in the present, but which will leave the best conditions possible for the preventing of bloodshed in the future, as well – both around the world and at home).
People who weild such power that they have a legal say in others’ freedom – let alone in others’ lives and deaths – have an indescribably immense responsibility to exercise infinitely more wisdom, judgment, conscience, patience, reason, and moderation in the exercising of that power than the normal man. People like Mike Nifong, Harry Reid, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha, and their ilk hold that power over others, but have demonstrably a total lack of (and lack of interest in) those necessary qualities and requirements when exercising it – and that may be the greatest transgression that a person entrusted with power over others can commit.
Mr. Emanuel, a special operations military veteran, is a leadership fellow with the Center for International Trade and Security at the University of Georgia, where he also studies Classics. In addition, he is a contributing editor for conservative weblog RedState.com, and is a columnist for the Athens, GA Banner-Herald newspaper.
Labels: Congress, Law, Liberals, Scandals, War
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Democrats may be swinging at Bush, but they're hitting our soldiers in the gut
The war in Iraq has, of course, been polarizing from its inception. Anti-war protests, “human shields,” and vocal recantings by formerly hawkish Democrats of the original intent of their votes to “use force” against Saddam Hussein presented, from the beginning, a divided American front in this second middle eastern war in fifteen years.Circumstances have not improved in the four years since America and her thirty-plus allies launched an operation which successfully deposed Saddam Hussein’s regime, but which failed to foresee, and secure Iraq against, the unleashing of terrorist acts and sectarian violence which have plagued that country since. The mainstream media has helped along the image of Iraq as a nationwide “death zone” by using the 24-hour news cycle to plaster images of violence and carnage from the region all over television sets across America. The “anti-war” crowd has become more shrill than ever – amidst their still-mystifying claim that they are being shut up by a totalitarian American government which will suffer no “dissent.” Democrats in Congress have now been saying for years that they were “lied to” by the President about prewar intelligence and the reasons for Saddam’s removal (even those on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who have unfettered access to the same intelligence that the President gets), or that they didn’t think that their vote authorizing the President to use force in Iraq would actually amount to anything more than the “threat of force” (emphasis added).
Faced with a potential disaster, both politically and on the ground in Iraq, President Bush announced weeks ago that, in a vigorous attempt to right the ship in that region, he was making four fundamental adjustments to the “strategy” currently being carried out.
First, Lt. General David Petraeus, PhD, Princeton graduate, former Commanding General of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), former head of the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq (the command responsible for training Iraqi forces), and author of Army FM 23-4, “a field manual devoted exclusively to counterinsurgency operations” (emphasis added), was named Commander of Multinational Forces in Iraq, and tasked with putting his field manual into practice.
Second – and perhaps most important – the rules of engagement in Iraq were adjusted to provide for more effective targeting of insurgents and insurgent leaders (as well as forces from Iran). With this alteration in strategy, the troops on the ground can concentrate once again on rooting out and arresting or killing terrorists and insurgents, instead of having to completely restrict their operations, out of fear of upsetting the fragile Iraqi governing coalition (not to mention setting off a media firestorm, which is always a threat), to driving back and forth on the same IED-infested roads and performing the same “show of force” or security missions, day-in and day-out, with little to show for it except for more dead or wounded troops.
Third, more pressure was to be put on the Iraqi government to crack down on sectarian violence and on insurgent leaders like Muqtada al-Sadr, and to work harder and more quickly toward self-sufficience, both in governance and in security.
Fourth, in order to support the other three elements of his “new way forward in Iraq,” the President announced that a “surge” of 21,500 more troops would be sent to the Iraqi theater, both to secure Baghdad and to facilitate the implementation of LG Petraeus’s counterinsurgency, defense training, and stabilization plan.
Immediately attacked as an “escalation of the war in Iraq,” the troop surge became a hot-button issue from the moment that it was announced, and, since the advent of the 110th Congress, the situation – with regard to the surge and to the prospects for success in Iraq with what we have there already – has worsened considerably. Under new Democratic leadership (which campaigned, largely, on an anti-Iraq war platform), the House and Senate have both been increasingly vocal about their desire to derail the US efforts in Iraq. Whether out of the desire to “save the lives of future American soldiers,” or simply out of the long-held yearning defeat and disgrace the hated President Bush, attempts to hamstring current operations, and to prevent flexibility and adjustment in strategy going forward, have moved to front and center on Congressional Democrats’ agendae since taking over the legislative branch of government.
This frustratingly political – in the most pejorative sense possible – process began with the introduction, first in the Senate and then in the House, of non-binding resolutions condemning the President’s troop surge. The fact that these resolutions are non-binding has caused many defenders of Congressional Democrats to argue that there is no harm being done, either to the war effort or to troop morale (though the authors had to be forced to include language affirming that they do, in fact, “support the brave soldiers already in Iraq”), and say that these resolutions simply serve to send a message to the President that Congress disapproves of his handling of the war, and will be watching him closely from here on out.
They are correct on only one count: the resolutions do, in fact, send a message – but it’s not to the White House. The only people a non-binding resolution sends a message to are our troops and our enemies, letting the former know that the vital backing from their homeland — both in will and in finances — is on life-support, and telling the latter that the American front in this war is so fractured that our determination to keep fighting could evaporate at any time, leading not only to the sacrifice of our troops in-theater, but also to a future emboldening of this enemy that will make the heart they took from our fleeing Beirut and Mogadishu look like child’s play. Said Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in one of the rare public appearances he has made since being confirmed, “It's pretty clear that a resolution that in effect says that the general going out to take command of the arena shouldn't have the resources he thinks he needs to be successful certainly emboldens the enemy and our adversaries.” Neither our troops nor our enemies are stupid. They see, hear, and understand what is going on.
As if the previous situation was not enough, Rep. John Murtha (D-PA), former Marine, longtime antagonist of the soldiers and of America’s efforts in Iraq, and chairman of the defense subcommittee of the purse string-holding House Appropriations Committee, yesterday announced that the House Democratic leaders had joined forces with several leftist “anti-war” groups (such as the “Win without war coalition,” “Americans against the escalation of the war in Iraq,” and others) in a multi-faceted – legislative action combined with a multimillion dollar ad campaign – attempt to undermine the President’s authority as Commander in Chief of the nation’s fighting forces by “limiting the administration’s options” through the passage of legislation and the inclusion of several stipulations for receipt of funding in appropriations bills. The plan is being called a “slow-bleed strategy” – an apt title, given the nature of what is being fought over in this Democrat-spurred battle of politics and of posturing.
Caught in the middle of the posturing, the politics, the debate, and the rhetoric are America’s soldiers. Those who voluntarily put their lives on the line in some of the most dangerous places in the world, and who all too frequently make the ultimate sacrifice for their fellow man or for their mission, are being sent the most dangerous of messages by these actions.
Being told that one is not supported on a dangerous mission is one thing. It is another entirely to be bled slowly into a defeat. Our young soldiers of today haven’t seen this before, but veterans of Vietnam know it well. It’s the sinking feeling that you get when you are risking your life doing something you believe can lead to victory, but the people who you are doing it for not only don’t believe in what you’re doing, but don’t believe in you, either. Obviously, the full support of a united homeland is the best possible wartime scenario. However, if it is the case that the war is nor supported, and the political leadership in question has the courage to be honest about such a stance, and to act on their conviction, then that is not the biggest problem – stop the war, by whatever means necessary, and bring the troops home. The area may dissolve into chaos the moment they leave, but more Americans won’t be killed in the immediate future, and the politicians in Washington will, at least, have been honest about their desires, and will have followed through on them.
However, the current debate, and the current strategy of so many “leaders” in Washington – most of whom are Democrats, but some of whom are, unfortunately, Republicans – does the maximum amount of damage possible. The fact that the front at home is so horribly fractured that the party in control of the legislative branch of government would seek to “slowly bleed” the war effort until it is dry of funds with which to purchase bullets, body armor, and other supplies, and until the American public is whipped into such an “anti-war,” anti-military frenzy that Iraq war veterans are as reviled as Vietnam veterans were in their day – both sadly martyred on the pyre of public opinion and of anti-American sentiment – is unconscionable to the soldier in the field, who day in and day out faces the bombs, the bullets, and the hatred of those who would kill us all were it not for our proactive action around the globe.
Imagine attempting life-or-death activities, surrounded by those who wish you dead. Difficult, isn’t it? Now imagine attempting those activities while, at home, those in charge of your equipment, your orders, your options, and, ultimately, your lives, are arguing how much of each of those should be taken away, and, for the purpose of pride and of political gain, whether one or both of your hands should be tied behind your back.
In an ideal world (as ideal as a wartime world can be), the soldier in the field has but one goal in mind, of which there are two parts: to accomplish his mission, and to see to it that the men (or women) next to him return safely. When the message that comes from the home front is a loud and clear, “your mission may not matter any more tomorrow, because you’ll all be withdrawn regardless of conditions in-theater” – or, worse, “You have to continue these missions, but you must do so knowing that we are gradually turning off the spigot of action in this war, so whatever your task is, whether you survive or not, it is not for the successful achievement of any larger goal or objective” – can the soldier possibly feel good about his situation, or about what he is being asked to risk his life to do?
Such messages are the epitome of disastrousness, not only for the message that they send to those who willingly give their lives to save ours, or to serve the higher ideal for which they are fighting, but also for the message that they send to our enemies. Any argument to the contrary of this point is laughable at best. Those who would kill us hear the same statements that our people and our soldiers do – that this war effort will be “slowly bled” to death, and that our already splintered political leadership is wavering on the edge of a total withdrawal from the region. Any who do not think that such a message emboldens the enemy – who will naturally think that an increased effort, and more dead Americans, will only hasten the surrender of the power which Osama bin Laden called a “paper tiger” with no stomach for a long fight – is not living in a reality-based world.
The message which the out-of-touch politicians in Washington most need to receive is that every bit of political posturing, every effort to undermine the President’s leadership of the war, every attempt to hamstring the administration’s (and the military leadership’s) options in a war that requires flexibility, costs American (and Iraqi) lives. These attempts to score political victories cost real lives of real people – people who, due to the enlarged, overly ambitious egos of American politicians (and due to acts carried out for the simple reason of a hatred of the President), will never again return home to their families, will never live out their lives, and will never again have an opportunity to pursue their hopes and dreams like the rest of us at home will.
Our troops voluntarily put themselves in harm’s way, and they do so because of a higher ideal which they believe is worth the price not only of their time and their comfort, but of their lives. Scoring political points at the expense of these peoples’ lives is neither honorable nor acceptable, and if people think that the soldiers we have downrange do not correctly see these actions as being exactly that, then those folks belong firmly in the John Kerry camp of troop intelligence denial.
If our political leaders lack the stomach to do what is necessary to successfully complete a war against those who wish to destabilize a region and to kill us all, then they should follow that conviction to its only possible “honorable” end, and force a withdrawal of all troops, as soon as possible. Anything else not only shows the cowardice of not fighting for what they really believe, but sends the loud and clear message that there is no real support for our troops or for their mission on the home front – a message which tells our soldiers that their lives don’t matter for anything but to serve as pawns in a political game, and which tells our enemies that they have an ally in power in this country.
President Bush’s post-9/11 words hold even more true now than they did when he first spoke them. People around the world – but especially on the home front – are, in fact, “either with us or with the terrorists.” The anti-war side of the political leadership in this country, through their “non-binding” attempts to straddle that line, are making their choice of sides crystal clear. Our soldiers, who are paying for that indecision with their lives every day, know this all too well – and the rest of us need to open our eyes and see what they are seeing, before it is too late.
Mr. Emanuel, a special operations military veteran, is a leadership fellow with the Center for International Trade and Security at the University of Georgia, where he also studies Classics. In addition, he is a contributing editor for conservative weblog RedState.com, and is a columnist for the Athens, GA Banner-Herald newspaper.
Labels: Democrats, Liberals, National Security, War
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"Terrorism Deniers"
"Terrorism Deniers"
Like Holocaust Deniers, only so much cooler
Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the portion of the War on Terror which has taken place in view of the public has been largely prosecuted far away from the United States, a fact which positively demonstrates the war’s success thus far in keeping terrorists away from the American homeland. Unfortunately, the remoteness of known combat operations, combined with the lack of terrorist success in the United States, has had a disappointingly negative effect on Americans’ view of the war, and of the terrorist threat that still faces us – despite the fact that terrorist activity has been taking place, and even more attacks have been publicly thwarted, in countries as geographically (and strategically) close to us as Canada, Spain, and Great Britain.There have been several high-profile plots. On March 11, 2004, Islamist terrorists conducted a coordinated bombing attack on the commuter rail system in Madrid, Spain, killing 191 people and wounding a further 1,824. On July 7, 2005, four suicide bombers – known as the “Fantastic Four” to Islamists the world over who cheered their actions – struck three London underground trains and a double-decker bus, killing 52 people and injuring 770. In June of last year, seventeen militant Muslims were arrested north of our border after Canadian law enforcement officials learned that they were not only preparing to conduct a string of terror bombings across the country, but were also plotting “to storm Parliament, take hostages and behead the prime minister.”
In August of 2006, British authorities arrested twenty-five people who were plotting to smuggle liquid explosives aboard airliners bound for the US, with what was thought to be the intention of blowing them up over the Atlantic Ocean. In late October, though, it was revealed that the would-be terrorists’ actual plan was to wait until the passenger-laden aircraft were physically over American cities before detonating them, so as to “maximize the potential loss of life and economic effect.” Terrorism expert and Georgetown University professor Bruce Hoffman said the case “indicated that Islamic extremists remain focused on attacking U.S. cities.”
Unfortunately, there are partisan, professional “Terrorism Deniers” who don’t see it that way – not even close, in fact. To many of the most vocal members of the American Left, the real enemy is not those who would kill us, but the elected President of their country, and the real priority is not fighting terrorists who target them and their families, but rather ridiculing (when not outright attempting to thwart) any actions the Bush administration takes to protect America from future attack.
One prime example of a Terrorism Denier is the Los Angeles Times’s David “Was 9/11 really that bad?” Bell, who wrote that Americans “need to overcome long habit and remind ourselves that not every enemy is in fact a threat to our existence,” and thus abandon our fanciful, farcical “War on Terror.”
Another Denier is Keith Olbermann, former ESPN anchor and current host of MSNBC’s “Countdown.” When not making an inexplicable comparison between Donald Rumsfeld and Neville Chamberlain (while claiming to be the Winston Churchill or the Paul Revere of our generation), Olbermann’s favorite pastime appears to be demanding apologies from the President – who, he has declared, is suffering from “frightening and dangerous delusions” – for innumerable transgressions, including going to war to defeat Islamist terrorism, and endorsing American military tactics which are “all too comparable to the actions of the extremists” (on the rare occasion that he sees fit to acknowledge that there are actually non-American extremists in the world).
“Terrorism is still being sold to the public,” he says, “as if it were a thrilling horror movie and we were the naughty teenagers about to be its victims.”
Lately, Olbermann has added a new trick to his repertoire: reprimanding the President for not showing sufficient proof that terrorist plots (hatched, one would assume, by those same terrorists whose existence he has vehemently denied for years) have actually been stopped over the last five-plus years.
Said Olbermann of the President’s reference to a foiled “al Qaeda plot to plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast” (the Library tower in Los Angeles), which he disrespectfully described Bush as having “personally revealed so breathlessly a year ago next month”:
It was embarrassing enough that you mistakenly referred to the structure as the “Liberty Tower.” But within hours it was also revealed that authorities in Los Angeles had had no idea you were going to make any of the details – whether serious or fanciful – public.That turn of phrase – and twist of logic – would be impressive were it not so inane. Not two sentences later, Olbermann attempted to shove the entire plot under the rug, saying that it was “one of many al-Qaeda operations that had not gotten very far past the conceptual stage” (which apparently means that it was never actually real).
Who terrorized Southern California that day, Mr. Bush?
Other arrests on American soil just haven’t been glamorous enough for Olbermann, who, for example, derisively referred to what he called “those pathetic arrests outside Miami last year in which a few men wound up getting charged as terrorists because they couldn't tell the difference between an al-Qaeda operative and an FBI informant,” adding that “their “ringleader” seemed to be much more interested in getting his “terrorist masters” to buy him a new car than in actually terrorizing anybody.”
Shockingly, in his quest to debunk the idea of terrorism’s very existence, Olbermann did, in fact, address the London liquid-bomb plot referenced above. Unsurprisingly, it was for the purpose of ridiculing the actual threat posed by what a London police chief called “an attempt to commit mass murder on an unimaginable scale.” Said Olbermann, as though speaking directly to the President (judging by his habitual pomposity, he may well have truly believed that the President was watching):
Turned out, sir, a few of them actually had gone on the Internets to check out some flight schedules. Turned out, sir, only a few of them actually had the passports needed to even get on the planes.It sounds to me like Mr. Olbermann is slightly bitter about no longer being able to take a drink with him onto an airplane – especially since he apparently believes there to have been no threat in the first place.
The plot to which President Bush referred was a plot without bombs. It was a plot without any indication that the essence of the operation – the in-flight mixing of volatile chemicals carried on board in sports drink bottles – was even doable by amateurs or professional chemists.
Olbermann and his fellow liberal Terrorism Deniers, who often cite the words of “intelligence professionals” to back up their downplaying of the threats that face America, do an amazing job of cherry picking – and generalizing about – those statements that they want to hear.
After all, the statements like that of Mark Mershon, head of the FBI’s New York field office – that “it would make your hair stand up to be in the room to hear that presentation” from MI5 on the liquid-explosives case – just don’t fit the template.
And when the real enemy is the President, and the real goal is promoting dissent at all costs, without regard for the lives that stand to be lost, in part, due to their cavalier public attitudes toward genuine threats, the template matters more than anything – including, and especially, reality.
Jeff Emanuel, a Special Operations military veteran, is a Leadership fellow with the Center for International Trade and Security at the University of Georgia, where he also studies Classics. In addition, he is a contributing editor for conservative web log Red State, and is a columnist for the Athens, GA Banner-Herald newspaper.
Labels: Liberals, National Security, War
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The NYT's latest big scoop
The Times breaks the story: we're detaining the enemy in Iraq!
The American military is holding at least four Iranians in custody in Iraq, including senior military officials, according to a New York Times reported released today.
According to senior Iraqi and American officials, the Iranians in question were seized in raids conducted last week against groups suspected of carrying out sttacks on Iraqi security forces and civilians. Two Iranian diplomats were also apprehended, but were subsequently "turned over to Iraqi authorities and released."
Much to the chagrin of the Times, the government did not immediately disclose the evidence against the Iranians, and declined to identify those being held. The paper quoted one official as saying that "a lot of material" was seized in the raid, but added that he "would not say if it included arms or documents that pointed to planning for attacks."
According to the Times:
A senior Western official in Baghdad said the raids were conducted after American officials received information that the people detained had been involved in attacks on official security forces in Iraq. "We conduct operations against those who threaten Iraqi and coalition forces," the official said. "This was based on information."Let's take a time out to appreciate the end of that last sentence - you know, the part where the American newspaper, in the city primarily targeted on 9/11, refers to a suicide-bombing, civilian-targeting organization, and its ilk, as "groups that the Americans regard as terrorist organizations." I never cease to be amazed by the preposterous pretentiousness involved in such condescending, pseudo-"enlightened" statements, although clearly I should have long since become desensitized to such ridiculousness.
[...]
Much about the raids and the identities of the Iranians remained unclear on Sunday. American officials offered few details. They said that an investigation was under way and that they wanted to give the Iraqi government time to figure out its position. A Bush administration official said the Iranian military officials held in custody were suspected of being members of the Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. It has been involved in training members of Hezbollah and other groups that the Americans regard as terrorist organizations.
OK, back to the story at hand. From the Times:
American and Iraqi officials have long accused Iran of interfering in this country’s internal affairs, but have rarely produced evidence. The administration presented last week’s arrests as a potential confirmation of the link. [National Security Council spokesman Gordon] Johndroe said, “We suspect this event validates our claims about Iranian meddling, but we want to finish our investigation of the detained Iranians before characterizing their activities.”It is indeed an opportunity for the Iraqi government to decide, and demostrate, just what they are willing to tolerate. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani is reportedly "unhappy with the arrests," and his displeasure is understandable if looked at from the point of view of many who have been displeased - at best - with his inability (and apparent unwillingness) to stem the Iranian insurgence and domestic sectarian violence within the nation. The publicization of this development - the detainment of Iranians suspected of active plotting and terroristic activity within Iraq - not only throws the spotlight on Iran, as they will have to answer for their own people having been caught in Iraq, but also puts the onus on the fledgling Iraqi government, forcing them into taking a public stance on Iranian insurgence and activity within their country.
[...]
The development was being viewed skeptically on Sunday by some Iraqis, who said that they suspected that the timing was intended to reinforce arguments by some in the administration that direct talks with Iran would be futile.
An administration official in Washington disputed that, saying, “When the military conducted the raids, they really didn’t know who they were going to find.”
The United States is now holding, apparently for the first time, Iranians who it suspects of planning attacks. One senior administration official said, “This is going to be a tense but clarifying moment.”
“It’s our position that the Iraqis have to seize this opportunity to sort out with the Iranians just what kind of behavior they are going to tolerate,” the official said, declining to speak on the record because the details of the raid and investigation were not yet public. “They are going to have to confront the evidence that the Iranians are deeply involved in some of the acts of violence.”
The Times's whistle-blowing effort, in this case, should play directly into America's hands in two ways, as Iran is shown to be actively - and potentially provably - working to further destabilize Iraq, and as the Iraqi government, whom we have been trying for some time now to stand up for itself, is forced to do just that, if it does not wish to aquiesce fully - and publicly - to Iran.
America is doing the right thing here: apprehending the enemy, regardless of origin, in a combat area. For their sake, and for ours, the leadership of Iraq needs to fully recognize that Iran is no friend of theirs in the region, and to finally take a public - and private - stand for their allies (us), and against their enemy, Iran. In the meantime, we can only watch, wait, and hope - and know that, should any sensitive or secret developments take place (especially those which would work against us, and to the advantage of our enemies), the New York Times will be there, doing its best to break the story and make it known to the world.
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The NYT on the Iraqi nuclear program: The Left wants to be able to have their yellowcake and eat it too
By Jeff Emanuel
Friday, November 3, 2006
The scoop was supposed to be another pre-election “outing” of administration blunders in the War on Terror by the mainstream media (a la the “missing Iraqi weapons” stories which happened to be held until right before the 2004 election). And the story was indeed a big one – but probably not in the way that the newspaper intended.
In recent years, US government established an online archive in an effort to enlist the public’s aid in the translation of, and reduction of data from, the vast store of Iraqi intelligence and governmental documents recovered since the March 2003 invasion. According to the Times, this effort led not to an increase in America’s understanding of that country’s supposedly nonexistent WMD programs or terrorist ties, but rather became a potential boon to Iran, who officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency fear may have gained knowledge of how to develop nuclear arms through the addition of Iraq’s published experience with the systems.
The documents in question reportedly contained extremely detailed information “on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs” – in other words, according to experts, “the documents…constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.”
The “thrust of the story,” to quote a former anchor, was that the Bush administration, without a second thought about the possible consequences, had deposited all of this information on the internet for anybody to access who wished to.
Anxious to drive the point home, the article added that the government site, known as the “Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal,” had also made public Iraqi documents “about chemical weapons,” including “information on how to make tabun and sarin, nerve agents that kill by causing respiratory failure.”
Apparently lost on the New York Times in this gushing about how the dangerously incompetent Bush administration made WMD technology available to Iran (thus making America exponentially less safe – although nowhere in the article does it say that Iran has definitively accessed these documents) was the most obvious detail of their story: that Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, had the capability for – and was actively seeking – not only chemical and biological weapons, but nuclear weapons, as well.The staple of the Liberal platform for the past four-plus years has been almost uniform: Bush lied us into a war in Iraq. Saddam never had any weapons of mass destruction, nor was he seeking any; Iraq was not a threat to America’s security in any way, shape, or form.
This report blows that entire argument, and its corresponding mindset, completely out of the water.
One cannot help but to almost feel sorry for the Left’s forced longsuffering at the hands of their own ineptitude. In a last-ditch attempt to discredit the GOP on national security, a viable accusation of failure in that area finally appeared to have been found: that President Bush endangered the nation, and enabled Iran, by publishing Iraqi documents on the internet that divulged how to make and use WMDs. While it probably will not hold up over time, the allegations alone should at least have been sufficient to get the Democrats through Tuesday’s election; after that, developments could have been dealt with as they came.
However, the Left’s biggest problem with accepting this accusation is that it means the complete and utter obliteration of their beloved mantra of the past four years –“Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.”
Perhaps the most damning statement in the Times’ article was the following:
“Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq had abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf War. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.”
(emphasis added)
The ineptitude of the media when so single-mindedly pursuing a predetermined target is almost staggering. Not only had the article already, in the name of showing the incompetence of the Bush administration (and, by extension in this election season, of the Republican Party as a whole) to maintain America’s national security, admitted that Saddam’s government had been actively pursuing chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, but in that one brief paragraph they pulled the rest of the “Bush lied” and “Iraq was no threat” house of cards completely to the ground, with the contention that in 2002 – on the very eve of the Iraq invasion – Saddam was less than one year away from building an atomic bomb. America seems to have made it there just in time.
The contortion of logic necessary to believe both mantras – that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, but that, due to Republican incompetence, publication of Iraqi documents gave Iran the ability to create and employ WMDs of their own – requires an intellect more "dizzying" than Vizzini’s.
Lost in this single-minded pursuit of a noose with which to hang Republicans on an issue that is one of their greatest strengths – and at this time when strength on it is so desperately needed – is real news, from a different front in the War on Terror: the Western front.
The latest development in the August terror case from Britain, in which twenty-five would-be suicide bombers were arrested (thanks in large part to allied surveillance – likely warrantless – of their communications) before they could execute their plan to blow up multiple airliners bound for the United States, was largely ignored by the mainstream media.
Allowed to be lost in the shuffle – or, rather, in the scramble to bounce Republicans from office, and to condemn President Bush yet again – was the fact that further interrogation of the suspects revealed their actual goal, which was not, as had first been thought, to detonate the planes over the Atlantic Ocean.
The terrorists’ ultimate goal, according to Mark Mershon, head of the FBI's New York field office, was to wait until the airliners had reached North America – and then "to blow them up over U.S. cities to maximize casualties."
According to the Winston-Salem Journal, representatives of MI5, the British intelligence service, had briefed the FBI on the liquid-explosives case in recent weeks. “It would make your hair stand up to be in the room to hear that presentation,” said Mershon.
While neither honorable nor respectable, it is not surprising that the mainstream media – New York Times included – has chosen to ignore that story completely. However, at a time when threats to our very lives are so real, it is nothing short of a disgrace that facts (and the warnings they entail) would be swept under the rug, and instead replaced by stories which, whether accurate or not, hope to advance the election-year narrative.
Unfortunately for the Left, this attempt not only fell short, but managed to shoot them squarely in both feet – for, not only does their utter disregard of actual national security-related developments reinforce even further the public’s perception of the Left on that all-important issue (as well, on the side, as reinforcing opinion of the mainstream media’s objectivity), but the motto of the Liberal movement, the mantra which had all but given them reason to live for the past four-plus years – “Bush lied: there were no weapons of mass destruction” – was cast aside and flushed in a mere instant – all in favor of yet another, run-of-the-mill attempt at an election-year hit piece.
Jeff Emanuel, a Special Operations military veteran, studies Classics at the University of Georgia. He is also a contributing editor for conservative web log RedState.com, and is a columnist for the Athens, GA Banner-Herald newspaper.
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Kerry's take on military servicemembers part of leftist canon
November 3, 2006 
One week before the 2006 election, one issue has risen up to dominate headlines across America: Senator John Kerry’s Monday admonishment to students that, “If…you study hard, you do your homework, you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.” Regardless of his intent at the time – and Kerry, along with many apologists, have attempted to play it off as a “botched joke about the President” – the words, and the message contained therein, are clear: work hard in school, and you’ll be all right; however, if you neglect your education, then you will end up in the military – and thus, in Iraq – with the rest of America’s uneducated, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals.
Beyond the insult offered by his words to the men and women who day in and day out sacrifice to protect our freedom, perhaps the most glaring error in Senator Kerry’s decision to utter that statement was the fact that it is so utterly – and obviously – inaccurate.
"The senator's suggestion that the men and women of our military are somehow uneducated is insulting and shameful. The members of the United States military are plenty smart and they are plenty brave, and the senator from Massachusetts owes them an apology," said President Bush Tuesday, while campaigning in Georgia for Congressional candidate Mac Collins.
And the numbers bear this out. According to a 2005 report by the Department of Defense, over 90% of military recruits have a high school diploma – while only about 75% of their non-uniformed peers do. Further, nearly two-thirds of today's recruits come from our nation's top half in math and verbal aptitude.
A Heritage Foundation report entitled “Who Are the Recruits? The Demographic Characteristics of U.S. Military Enlistment” went into greater detail on the matter, saying, “Recruits must meet educational standards, and the military provides resources for furthering education to those who might not otherwise have the opportunity to attend four-year colleges. Although rural representation is disproportional, the military offers the opportunity to gain new skills and enter industries that are not available in rural areas.”
The reality of modern military training dictates that the Democrats’ opinions of their intelligence, as stated by Senator Kerry, are not the case. The technical training necessary to operate the state-of-the-art technology today’s military utilizes, combined with the minimum aptitude and intelligence tests and diploma/degree requirements for entry into the uniformed services, make for a fighting force that is far from being undereducated – let alone sub par with regard to intelligence.
As mentioned in the Heritage report, beyond the educational and intellectual requirements for entry, the US Armed Forces are superb about providing an environment in which troops can increase their education levels while serving on active duty. Every military post has an education office which caters to the active duty serviceman, offering courses from various two- and four-year colleges, both in residence and via correspondence, and providing a path to a degree – from Associates to Bachelors to Masters level – in myriad fields. The military also offers tuition assistance funding, which essentially renders enrollment in college courses free of charge.
These benefits are not difficult to take advantage of, either. During my own time in the military, the career field I served in had a fairly high operational tempo, and we spent a good deal of time either in training or out of the country, including a year abroad in Korea. The War on Terror was also raging for several of those years. However, I was still able to successfully complete over 100 hours of college coursework during that time, and at almost no cost besides effort – a testament to the benefit itself, to the user-friendly nature of the system, and, most importantly, to the US military itself, which went to great lengths to emphasize the importance of education, and to establish a ready means of achieving it.
The fact of the matter is that America’s armed forces are composed of some of the best, brightest, and bravest men and women that this great nation has to offer; however, outside of contested election seasons, the Left has never attempted to hide the fact that they hold the military, to a person, in absolute contempt. John Kerry, who in his own defense claimed that he had been “spending his entire career honoring veterans,” is a prime example of this mindset – from his Winter Soldier testimony in 1971, in which he invoked the name of “Jen-jis Khan” to describe our troops’ tactics (and said much, much worse, as well), to this week, when he cautioned students that a lack of education would result in military service.
Clearly, Senator Kerry needs to take the time to educate himself on the nature of the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines he oversees as a member of America’s government; perhaps then he would learn that his contempt for those men and women who protect this great country day in and day out is, at the very least, unfounded.
With regard to the rest of the Democratic Party this election season, their silence on the matter is deafening. Every minute, hour, and day that goes by without rebuttals being offered to Kerry’s remarks by Democrat candidates and officeholders across the nation just reinforces even more firmly that which we already knew: that in this case, Senator Kerry speaks for them all.
• Jeff Emanuel, a Special Operations military veteran who served in Iraq, is a senior at the University of Georgia.
Published in the Athens Banner-Herald on 110306
Labels: Liberals
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On Kos, Blogs, and Influencing Elections
Let me begin by making an admission: I am a blogger. I write for RedState.com, a conservative web log which focuses on national politics, international affairs, news, and culture, and I also contribute to PeachPundit.com, a blog covering Georgia politics. I have been a contributor to TownHall.com’s web log, as well as the UGA College Republicans blog.
Blogging is an extremely efficient way to rapidly disseminate information; in my view, the blogosphere is to other media what 24-hour news was to the old, twice-a-day network version—faster, more accessible, and more efficient.
The growing prominence of blogs, both in general and in the political process, has led to some interesting questions being raised regarding not only the format and practice, but also the staying power of blogs, and their ability to influence the outcome of elections.
Naturally, any such conversation largely focuses on the liberal blog DailyKos, which is one of the most-viewed sites on the web. DailyKos was founded by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, a far-left activist and consultant who has been extremely vocal about his desire not only to reshape the Democrat Party, but to revolutionize media as a whole—and to gain influence on par with the sway he perceives conservative media outlets as having on Republican politics.
As Byron York, a writer for conservative magazine National Review, wrote, “Even if it seems that we have very little influence on things we rant about on proactive war on terrorism, about small government or about border issues, they still envy us our perceived influence over policy and integration with the Republican Party.”
The result is that Markos and his followers, called the “Kos Kids” or “Kossacks,” have set out to make his dream a reality by raising money and volunteering for candidates—as well as holding the first annual Yearly Kos convention, which took place in Las Vegas in June and commanded the attendance of Democrats such as Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Joseph Wilson, Barbara Boxer (D-Cal.), and DNC Chairman Howard Dean, who told attendees that he has “set up a special “Internet department” at the DNC, whose job is to read left-of-center blogs all day long.
In my opinion, blogs in general, and specifically the DailyKos/RedState model, which includes regular front-page content and user-written “diaries,” are not just a flash in the pan, but will be an enduring medium for the transmission of news and exchange of ideas. DailyKos has been widely-viewed, with roughly half a million readers a day, for several years now, and his exposure appears to be growing, rather than receding, as Democrats continue to lose national elections.
However, on the flip side of the coin, DailyKos’s head start in paving the way for political bloggers has spawned a large volume of quality conservative offspring, and right-of-center writers have jumped on the opportunities offered by this medium.
With the exception of DailyKos, nearly all of the top blogs in the nation—Red State, Hot Air, Instapundit, Ace of Spades, Club for Growth, and others—are conservative. More and more Republicans in Congress are being convinced of the merits of the blogosphere, as well—the result of a Capitol Hill blogging revolution currently being engineered by new-media enthusiasts like David All, Communications Director for Representative Jack Kingston (R-Ga.). Blogs offer an extremely quick and efficient way to get information out to large numbers of people, and will become more and more utilized in the future, not less—a fact evidenced by the increasing number of members of Congress with blogs, a list which includes Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Oh.)
With regard to day-to-day influence, DailyKos and his followers, perhaps unfortunately, have little over the day-to-day activities of the Democrat Party. They stand firmly against any principles which do not adhere to their fringe Left views; thus, they cannot support candidates who could have a chance of winning important elections.
Just how far left are Kos and his followers? His comments about his "indifference" to contractors being killed in Iraq, and other fringe statements, offer great insight, as does this simple example from the YearlyKos convention, which took place the weekend of Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi’s demise at the hands of US Special Operations forces in Iraq.
Governor Mark Warner (D-Va.), in his address at the convention, earned enthusiastic applause, with hoots and hollers included, with a call for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to be fired. Seconds later, though, he followed up by acknowledging that “we are all glad to see the end of” terrorist Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. That line was followed by silence.
Kos has managed to worm his way into almost-mainstream politics, appearing in TV spots for Ned Lamont, Senator Joseph Lieberman’s primary and general-election opponent, and in helping spur Howard Dean to his short-lived lead in the Democratic presidential primary of 2004. Candidates like John Kerry have had to approach Markos while conducting the requisite pandering to the far left in hopes of gaining nomination to national office, as well.
However, virtually none of Kos's anti-American, anti-Capitalist, and pro-Communist ideals can ever be put into practice here, regardless of how long and how loudly he rails against the status quo.
Even his threats last year of "Blowing up the DNC and starting over"—in response to its’ “selling out” on subjects like the Iraq war, and which he shelved "temporarily" in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina—didn't cause much consternation among those whom he was claiming to target.
The bottom line is, as long as there are resources and outlets like DailyKos, MyDD (for “My Direct Democracy”), FireDogLake, and Democratic Underground available to the far left, there will be followers—and Democrat politicians will always be forced to pander to them to some degree during primary elections.
However, when compared to the number of supporters necessary to win a national election, the entire following of Kos and his ilk is almost insignificant in number, and smart Democrat politicians will immediately not walk, but RUN toward the center of the political spectrum after securing a nomination. Two faced? Yes. Politics as usual? Absolutely.
However, should Kos and other far-left bloggers ever begin to increase their influence in the Democrat party, it can only be good for conservatives—as the 250,000,000 Americans who are not fringe-left liberals will desert these politicians and their party, leaving the Right in a position of even more leadership, solidarity, and strength.
Labels: Blogosphere, Liberals
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