Scott Spiegel

In anticipation of President Barack Obama’s primetime address to the nation last night on the Iraq War, columnist Eugene Robinson wrote, “Now that the Iraq War is over… only one thing is clear about the outcome: We didn’t win.”

Actually, I can think of about 12 things that are clearer about the outcome of the Iraq War than the conclusion that we didn’t win: (1) Obama was wrong about the surge, (2) Vice President Joe Biden was wrong about the surge, (3) President George W. Bush was right to ignore Congressional Democrats and the Iraq Study Group and order the surge in 2007, (4) insurgent violence dropped precipitously after the surge was implemented, (5) if Democrats had had their way on the surge in Iraq, per Harry Reid’s declaration that “this war is lost,” it would have been lost, (6) Biden was wrong about dividing Iraq into ethnic partitions, (7) Biden is a loon for claiming that the Iraq War could be one of the great successes of the Obama administration, (8) Iraq is now the fourth-most politically free Middle Eastern country, after democracy Israel, republic Lebanon, and constitutional monarchy Morocco, (9) General David Petraeus’ Iraq surge set the model for beating back insurgents and winning in Afghanistan, (10) despite liberals’ bleating about its expense, eight years of the Iraq War—including training and preparation for the March 2003 invasion—now turn out to have cost less ($709 billion) than Obama’s useless trillion-dollar stimulus bill, (11) Bush’s popularity didn’t sink to the level that Obama’s is at now until late 2005, two-and-a-half years into the Iraq War and well into Bush’s second term, and (12) Obama’s address last night was full of bromides, revisionist history, and platitudinous prescriptions for the future that have little relation to what will actually need to be done in the War on Terror according to a fair evaluation of conditions on the ground.

But then I’m not Eugene Robinson, who recently called those who wanted an investigation into Park51 mosque supporter Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s radical ties “loudmouths,” “fraidy-cats,” and “professional victims,” dismissed Tea Partiers as racists, and called Dr. Alveeda King a “puppet” for appearing at Glen Beck’s Restoring Honor rally.

Oh, and: (13) if anyone deserves to give a triumphal speech marking the end of combat operations in Iraq, it is Bush, Petraeus, Vice President Dick Cheney, or Kermit the Frog—anyone but Obama, who opposed the war from the start and voted as U.S. senator to defund it.

And: (14) Obama has learned nothing about the danger of prematurely promising to remove our troops by a certain date and the fortifying effect this has on our enemy, as demonstrated by his declaration in his speech that we will begin removing troops from Afghanistan in July 2011 according to his preordained schedule, and by his standing commitment to remove all 50,000 troops still stationed in Iraq by the end of 2011.

Not to mention: (15) the most factual elements of Obama’s address could have been cribbed from a Bush speech on Iraq from five years ago, such as “We must never lose sight of what’s at stake.  As we speak, al Qaeda continues to plot against us,” and (16) Obama wasn’t honorable or honest enough to give Bush credit for the surge, saying only that “[N]o one could doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security,” which is about as controversial to his antiwar base as saying, “No one could doubt President Bush’s support for his family, or his love of his wife and children.”

Robinson’s liberal fantasy proclaims, “The war was on its way toward becoming a disastrous failure until the country’s Sunni minority turned against the al-Qaeda jihadists who had flooded into Iraq to fight against the hated Americans,” then adds, as an afterthought, “and Bush’s troop surge, ably led by Gen. David Petraeus, capitalized on this shift of allegiance.”  Yes, sectarian conflict facilitated conditions in which the surge could flourish, but: (17) Bush and Petraeus were savvy enough to recognize this shift in conditions on the ground, prepare a successful strategy to take advantage of it, execute this strategy despite the histrionics of Congressional Democrats, and persist until it yielded its intended results.

Give Obama credit for this: his Iraq speech was the best speech he has ever given from the Oval Office.  Of course, the only other Oval Office speech he’s given was on the BP oil spill, an address that even liberal supporters at MSNBC and The New York Times panned as amateurish and ineffective.

Bonus fact!: The Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index reports that 79% of Iraqis believe that conditions in their country will be the same as or better in 2010 than in 2009—more than you can say for residents of the United States.

 Print This Post

Related articles by Zemanta

• CBO: Eight Years of Iraq War Cost Less Than Stimulus Act (foxnews.com)
• The Ambiguity of War’s End (realclearpolitics.com)
• Troops yet to give Obama full salute (washingtontimes.com)
• Nation Building Works (nytimes.com)
• Obama speech on Iraq has risks (washingtonpost.com)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently characterized the likelihood of a resolution from upcoming U.S.-force-fed peace talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as “difficult but possible.”

He has it exactly backwards—it is easy but impossible.

“Possible” implies that both parties are on the same terrain, respect the other’s interests, and are acting in good faith.  “Difficult” implies that the two parties are far apart, but that with creativity and temerity they may be able to trade off competing interests and find win-win solutions.

“Impossible” implies that one party is inherently opposed to the interests of the other, and therefore would not negotiate in the conventional sense even if it left both parties satisfied, because the first party by definition is not satisfied if the second party is.  “Easy” implies that the first party’s demands could yield an instant solution if given up, if that party were thinking and acting rationally—or if the second party were willing and able to use overwhelming force to obviate the first party’s demands.

I think it’s safe to say that the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships are not on the same terrain, inasmuch as the preferred outcome of the conflict as expressed by Palestinians is for Jews to literally be driven off of that terrain into the sea.  Given that Israel does not wish to voluntarily self-destruct, that’s where “impossible” comes in.

If they haven’t already done so after a half-century of murderous genocidal rhetoric and blood-spattered conflict, I also doubt the Palestinians will charitably give up their demands tomorrow, which rules out “easy.”  That leaves only the overwhelming force option.

Fortunately, the Palestinians actually seem to respond rather well to that option.

The number of Palestinian deaths in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1987 is on the order of 7,500; Israeli deaths number approximately 1,500.  This disproportionate figure reflects, not the bloodthirsty, excessive use of force on Israel’s part, but their use of more sophisticated and deadly weaponry.

Israeli deaths ranged from 0 to 34 per year from 1987 to 1992.

After Israel agreed to the Oslo Accords in 1993, the number of Israeli deaths did not decline, but rather spiked at 74 in 1994 and 75 in 1996.

Following the Camp David Summit in 2000, Israeli deaths did not decrease, but skyrocketed from 43 in 2000 to 192 in 2001.

This was the same year in which the Taba Summit was held.  The next year, Israeli deaths shot up to 419.

Under George W. Bush, who subsequently ignored the futile “peace process” for the rest of his administration, since it had obviously yielded no results, Israel fought back against acts of aggression from Palestinians and their terrorists allies, thus inducing some of the highest yearly Palestinian casualty rates since the start of the conflict.

In response, the Palestinian leadership—which has proven it responds only to force, not reason—eased up on Israel: the number of Israeli casualties dropped from 419 in 2002 to 185 in 2003, and to 108 in 2004, and has been in double digits every year since 2005.

So Hillary Clinton may loftily announce, “There have been difficulties in the past; there will be difficulties ahead.  Without a doubt, we will hit more obstacles.  The enemies of peace will keep trying to defeat us and to derail these talks.  But I ask the parties to persevere.”

Barack Obama can pragmatically declare, “For any agreement to endure, peace cannot be imposed from the outside; it must be negotiated directly by the leaders who are required to make the hard choices and compromises that take on history.”

Benjamin Netanyahu can tell us, “We come to the talks with a genuine desire to reach a peace agreement between the two peoples, while protecting Israel’s national interests, chiefly security.  Achieving a peace agreement between us and the Palestinian Authority is difficult but possible.”

But anyone with a sense, not just of history but of the rigid, irrational thought system underlying Palestinian and Islamist ideology, knows exactly what a load of rhetorical crap all this is.

The Palestinians’ negotiating position recalls that of Ground Zero Mosque promoters Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife Daisy Khan, who claim they want to “build bridges” with those wary of Islam.  Sure, they want to build bridges—as long as the other side sketches the designs, supplies the materials, excavates the banks, pours the concrete, lays the deck, paves the roads, and then tosses itself off and plunges to its death.



 Print This Post

Related articles by Zemanta

• Israeli PM: Peace ‘difficult but possible’ (google.com)
• Palestinians Threaten Peace Talk Walkout (news.sky.com)
• Mideast peace talks raise stakes higher for President Obama (usatoday.com)
• Israel faces difficult choice on settlement freeze (yahoo.com)
• Mideast peace talks to look forward to? (washingtonpost.com)

The landing gear of the American Airlines plane that terrorists flew into 1 World Trade Center on 9/11 smashed through an unoccupied building two blocks away at 45 Park Place where Muslims now wish to build a monument to Allah.  The engine of the plane landed in the street behind the building.

Presumably Islamist hijackers wouldn’t attack the rebuilt World Trade Center if the new mosque might be damaged in the process.  Will Obama thus be endorsing the building of the mosque as a creative, Islam-sensitive, preventive security measure in the war on terror?

It’s true that those who wish to build Cordoba House—now the swanky- and Manhattan-sounding Park51—technically have the freedom to do so, since they are purchasing the land and have the right to build whatever they want on it if they adhere to zoning regulations.

This right is contingent on the mosque’s funders not being supported by sponsors of terror from Middle Eastern countries with which we are at war—an assumption that is highly suspect and should be investigated vigorously and precipitously.  We already know, for example, that the chief sponsor of the Cordoba Initiative, which is providing $100,000 in funding for the mosque, is the radical Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who has refused to denounce Hamas as a terrorist organization.  We also know that President Obama sent Rauf, using taxpayer money, on a Middle East “good will” tour on which he will be hitting up Islamist leaders for donations for the mosque.

(Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced her preference to investigate, not the funders of the mosque, but the funders of opponents of the mosque, which leads us to the logical conclusion that she will soon be snooping around Harry Reid’s e-mails.)

Given that Muslims traditionally build mosques on territory they have conquered, a mosque near Ground Zero would be an incontrovertible statement of conquest regarding the terror attacks on 9/11.

Opponents of the mosque have attempted to prevent its construction through eminent domain laws by declaring the site a city landmark, but the New York City Council rejected that argument and allowed the project to proceed.

Mayor Bloomberg announced that building the mosque is an expression of the noblest principles of this country and that anyone who objects should keep quiet.

Last weekend, Barack Obama came out forcefully for the construction of the mosque in front of a bunch of Muslims at a White House-sponsored Ramadan dinner: “Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country.  That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan.”

Someone evidently told Obama that his instinctive loyalty to anything anti-American, especially Islamist, would probably not go over well with the rest of the country, so he backtracked the next day and announced that his strong desire to have the Ground Zero mosque built was not an “endorsement” but rather a general statement about the religious liberty of property owners.  Next Obama will be claiming that he didn’t say property owners have religious liberty—only that people have the right to express their opinions about whether property owners have religious liberty.

Hamas cofounder Mahmoud al-Zahar expressed solidarity with his ideological buds Obama and Bloomberg, claiming that Muslims absolutely, simply “have to build” the mosque there.

Members of the Cordoba Initiative may have the legal right to build, but those who justifiably oppose a mosque near Ground Zero have rights, too:

•    Construction workers and unions have the right to boycott work on the project, as New York resident Andrew Sullivan recently committed to doing (no, not that Andrew Sullivan—the patriotic one).  In the extreme, this could prevent the mosque from being built; at a minimum, it could drive up the costs of building the mosque, perhaps prohibitively, by awarding the work to higher bidding contractors.

•    Muslims who oppose the mosque have the right to boycott and refuse to attend or contribute financially to it; if enough do so, it could be driven out of business.

•    Private citizens have the right to open businesses close to the mosque that are offensive to Islamists—not to be jerks, but to make the point that Muslims are not as tolerant when we stick them in the eye by planting something culturally odious near a sacred site as we are when they do it to us.  See, for example, Red Eye host Greg Gutfeld’s plan to build a gay bar that caters to Islamic men a couple of doors from the mosque.  I also propose the following businesses: non-halal butcheries, lingerie shops, and liquor stores.

(Hey—let’s open a day care center right near the mosque, because surely Islamists oppose the notion that women might have careers and not stay home all day caring for their infants.  Whoops—Park51 is slated to include a day care center among its amenities!)

Just because those who wish to build the mosque have the legal right to do so does not mean the majority of Americans who oppose it have no legal recourse in preventing it from existing.  Call my suggestions the libertarian approach to preventing the Ground Zero mosque from fulfilling its planners’ intentions.



 Print This Post

Related articles by Zemanta

• Obama’s Mosque Remarks Reverberate (wsj.com)
• Mischief in Manhattan (ottawacitizen.com)
• Legitimate Questions for the President (facebook.com)
• Hamas nod for Ground Zero mosque (nypost.com)
• Reid: Build mosque elsewhere (yahoo.com)

The list of countries that have provided tacit support to Israel for its imminent launch of preemptive missile attacks on Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities now includes: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Turkey, Egypt, and… not-the-United-States.

The Saudi government recently conducted drills to ensure that their missile defense system does not shoot down Israeli jets that might fly over their airspace in the near future.  This is crucial for any bombing raids Israel may conduct on Iranian nuclear facilities, because the only feasible route to Iran’s nuclear plants is over a wide swath of Saudi Arabia.  Israel might also need to fly over Jordan and Kuwait, which have not objected to this arrangement.

A much quicker, as-the-crow-flies route to Iran’s cluster of nuclear facilities at Natanz, Qom, Isfahan, and Arak would be directly over Iraq.  However, use of this flight plan has one sticking point: the U.S. commander-in-chief’s stubborn refusal to allow Israel to fly jets through Iraq’s airspace.

In arriving at this position, President Obama may have been following the advice of Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, who infamously offered the charming advice last year that if Israel tried to use Iraqi airspace to attack Iran, the U.S. should shoot Israeli jets down.

Saudi Arabia has never exactly considered Israel an ally, as the U.S. does.  Yet the Saudi government recognizes the danger a nuclear Iran poses to their country and the region, and is willing to clear a corridor of airspace for Israel over their country.  Why is Obama unwilling to do the same over Iraq, which isn’t even his country?

In 2007 Turkey allowed Israel use of its airspace in a sneak attack on a developing nuclear plant in Syria, Iran’s primary ally in the region.  At the time, the Syria attack was seen as a test run for an upcoming Israeli attack against Iran’s facilities, which means that Turkey was essentially helping Israel prepare for such an attack.

Egypt has also recently looked the other way as Israel sent warships and a nuclear-capable submarine down the Suez Canal toward the Arabian Sea in preparation for a conflict with Iran.

But due to Obama’s creepy, subtly anti-Semitic foreign policy, Israel must instead hurl its jets in a wide, boomerang-shaped flight path all the way around the southern tip of Iraq, across the Persian Gulf, and back up to central-northern Iran to get to the country’s primary nuclear facilities.

George W. Bush was certainly no hawk regarding the prospect of the U.S. attacking Iran under his watch.  However, it’s safe to assume, given the precipitous progress of Iran’s nuclear program over the past two years, Iran’s alarming self-declaration as a nuclear state this spring, and Israel’s brave willingness to confront Iran alone, that Bush would not have denied Israel the right to fly over Iraq if he were still President.

To put all of this in perspective: our current president is refusing to allow the only stable democracy in the Middle East (Israel) to serve as the U.S.’s front line of attack against the greatest state sponsor of terrorism in the world (Iran), by letting them fly over a country we recently liberated (Iraq) in order that they might serve as a model for neighboring dictatorships on the brink of regime change (such as Iran).

Ah, you say, but surely Obama has some other diplomatic maneuver up his sleeve, some nonmilitary means of pressuring Iran to abandon its nuclear program and allow weapons inspectors into the country.

Actually, no—the Obama administration has been working to weaken Congress’s proposed U.S. sanctions against Iran.  Obama fears that these injunctions may go too far and anger our allies.

These are not the sanctions imposed by the UN last week—the ones which we waited forever to be implemented, which two of the largest nations in the world (Brazil and Turkey) rejected, and which are watered down to the point of futility.  These are additional sanctions that would apply only to U.S. companies and not be legally binding on other countries.

The EU has already agreed to oil and gas sanctions of their own that go beyond the mild-mannered penalties imposed by the UN.  So even the likes of France and Germany are going further than the U.S. in isolating Iran, yet Obama still sees the need to appease our allies.

Americans ought to be deeply troubled by a U.S. foreign policy that fails to be as supportive of Israel’s right to defend itself as the doctrines of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt.



 Print This Post

Related articles by Zemanta

• Too good to check: Saudis to let Israel use their air space to attack Iran (hotair.com)
• Less allied? (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Saudis Show “Linkage” Is a Farce (commentarymagazine.com)
• White House works to ease Iran proposal in Congress (latimes.com)
• Iran says it is undeterred by EU sanctions plan (haaretz.com)

Perhaps the heartrending lament that the Turkish aid flotilla Mavi Marmara—headed for Gaza and stopped by the Israeli Navy last week—contained a bevy of innocent Nobel Peace laureates would be more compelling if recent Nobel Peace laureates didn’t include the father of modern terrorism, Yasser Arafat.

Perhaps the fact that nine passengers were accidentally killed in the struggle would carry more emotional punch if the excursion hadn’t been funded by an Islamist, anti-Israeli, Hamas-allied, Turkish front group whose dream is to unaccidentally kill six million Jews.

Perhaps the claim that helpless crew members were unarmed and sought no confrontation with Israeli soldiers would ring truer if the Mavi Marmara hadn’t been stocked with butcher knives and heavy baton-shaped pipes and sticks.

Notwithstanding Pat Buchanan’s idiotic comparison of the ship’s passengers to civil rights protestors, and Israel’s stopping the flotilla to a garden-variety carjacking, Israel is not indiscriminately lobbing cannonballs into Gaza-bound aid ships and sinking them, or raiding them for loot and hostages, Somali pirate-style.

Firing on these “aid” ships that pro-Palestinian groups keep using to try to break Israel’s blockade would actually be justifiable, given that such groups are forever trying to sneak steel, concrete, and other weapons supplies to Gaza for the purpose of constructing more rockets to fire into neighboring Israeli cities.

Instead of reacting as, say, the United States would have if Germany or Japan had tried to break its naval blockade during World War II, the Israeli Navy patiently sends multiple radio warnings to ships entering the blockade zone and gently escorts them to a nearby port, where they inspect the ships, separate any items constituting genuine aid from those that could be used to build weapons, and offer to truck the permitted goods to Gaza at Israel’s cost.

The delivery of confiscated aid to Gaza is invariably turned away.

For example, Israel allowed the Rachel Corrie, a ship named after a dumb American from the hippie Northwest who was crushed to death after she stood in the way of IDF bulldozers clearing the way for Israeli settlements, to dock in the port Ashdod last Saturday, and offered to inspect its cargo after the passengers did not engage in murderous resistance.  The Rachel Corrie held only 11 passengers and, for once, was sponsored by a group that renounces violence.  Gaza’s refusal to accept the aid confiscated by Israel disproves pro-Hamas activists’ lie that Israel is a ruthless, bloodthirsty military state out to slaughter human rights activists and prevent vital aid from getting to starving Gazans.

The United States supports the blockade, which Israel instituted after years of suicidally tolerating aid ships delivering contraband to Gaza and Hamas’s ongoing offensive in which they have fired thousands of rockets into Israel’s most populous cities.

As with all too many international affairs, it looks as though the United States and Israel will have to go this one alone.  Even in the U.S., Israel has its detractors, such as the editorial board at the New York Times, which planted the following anti-Israeli zingers in a pseudo-balanced editorial last weekend: “Turkey is understandably furious about Israel’s disastrous attack on the Turkish-flagged aid ship that tried to run the Gaza blockade…  Israel deserves to be criticized for the flotilla disaster…  [Israel] has a strong interest in repairing relations with Turkey [but] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu still doesn’t get this.”

Imagine for a second if Staten Island were populated by trigger-happy terrorists who repeatedly stated as their goal the destruction of Manhattan and the tossing of all Manhattanites into the Hudson River.  Imagine if Staten Islanders had a history of smuggling in weapons-building materials from ships sent from: Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Long Island, Roosevelt Island, Governors Island, New Jersey, Connecticut, and upstate New York.  Imagine if Staten Islanders periodically launched thousands of rockets into the center of Manhattan.  Imagine if Mayor Bloomberg shipped thousands of tons of aid to Staten Island every day, to appease the New York Times, but instituted a naval blockade around Staten Island to prevent weapons from being sent there.

Now imagine if pro-Staten Islander phony aid ships repeatedly violated the blockade, filling its passenger lists with homicidal jihadists, deadly weapons, and a few token peace activists, and refused all offers for genuine humanitarian aid to be trucked to Staten Island and distributed at Manhattan’s expense.

I think there would be just a bit more sympathy toward Manhattan’s taking steps to defend itself—even at The Times.

Here’s a suggestion to pro-Hamas groups: how about calling the next phony relief vessel to Gaza the Yasser Arafat?  How do you think that would go over on the world stage?  After all, Arafat was a humanitarian Nobel Prize laureate!

 Print This Post

Related articles by Zemanta

• Israel remains defiant, seizes Gaza-bound aid ship (yahoo.com)
• Pat HAMAS Buchanan: Qaeda Attacks on US Justified b/c of Israel (debbieschlussel.com)
• Krauthammer: Those troublesome Jews (washingtonpost.com)
• Turkey’s Fury (nytimes.com)
• Lift the Siege of Gaza (townhall.com)

Last summer, NBC’s Brian Williams wrote a piece called “The Hurt Locker: Hurting for a Fact-Checker” regarding one of the top two contenders for Best Picture at this weekend’s Oscars.  Williams noted, “I found a slew of technical inaccuracies based only on my few trips to Iraq during the height of the conflict.  Seeing the movie made me go back over many of the positive reviews I read…  [I]t is now clear none of them was written by anyone who had spent any time with U.S. armed forces in Iraq.”

Williams suggested that the filmmakers botched the following minor details: the vehicles, the armor, the armaments, the helmets, the uniforms, the communications technology, the military jargon, the unit structure, the command procedure, and the mission logistics.

On the plus side, Williams noted that the filmmakers accurately portrayed soldiers’ fingernails being dirty and their eyelashes being covered with dust.  Score one for cinéma vérité!  Williams also praised the film’s lovely desert scenery.

Williams ended, “I’d like to watch ‘The Hurt Locker’ with a combat veteran, but my layman’s eyes found way too much to quarrel with.”

Fortunately for Williams, many combat veterans have already seen the film.  Unfortunately for director Kathryn Bigelow, their criticism of the film is even more scathing than that of Williams.

Paul Rieckhoff, Founder and Executive Director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, recently concluded in Newsweek that “Hollywood’s latest attempt to define the Iraq War and the American troops who have fought in it is just as disappointing as all the others produced so far.”

Rieckhoff, while pointing out additional and more nuanced inaccuracies than Williams, argues that the snowballing accumulation of gaffes in the movie is not trivial, but rather reflects an unforgivably sloppy rendering of the military that reveals profound ignorance and amounts to great disrespect on the filmmakers’ part.

For example, Rieckhoff criticizes the depiction of the highly specialized Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) group at the center of the film as casually putting on other military hats in their spare time, expertly carrying out sniper missions and kicking in doors and checking buildings for insurgents, jobs for which they would never have been trained.

Rieckhoff writes, “The scene with Jeremy Renner’s character sneaking off base to chase a boy he is worried about is as fictional as Jason Bourne…  The men in my platoon followed rules and orders, and they stuck with their fellow soldiers…  They don’t run around on their own unless they want to be court-martialed—or killed.”

The L.A. Times’ Julian Barnes cites EOD team members in Iraq who damn “The Hurt Locker” with faint praise: they call it “a good action movie if you know nothing about defusing roadside bombs or the military.”  (How about that sound editing!)

Barnes quotes EOD technician Sgt. Eric Gordon: “I would watch it with other EOD people, and we would laugh.”  (Then again, many people I know have had the same reaction to fellow Oscar nominee “Avatar.”)  Gordon compared one soldier defusing a bomb using wire cutters to having “a firefighter go into a building with a squirt bottle.”

An even more sobering criticism of the movie involves its portrayal of the main character, Sergeant William James, as a danger-loving, adrenaline-addicted, protocol-shredding commando who wantonly disrupts unit cohesion and endangers unit members with irresponsible, tough-guy playacting.

The Washington Post quotes Iraq veteran Ryan Gallucci stating that he had to keep turning the movie off “or else I would have thrown my remote through the television.”  Gallucci admits that he kept wanting to see James “blown up…  I wanted to see his poor teammates get another team leader, who was actually concerned about their safety.”

In an essay for The New York Times subtly titled “How Not to Depict a War,” EOD team videographer Michael Kamber adds that the film’s many factual errors “are mere details compared to the way Sergeant James repeatedly swaggers up to bombs…  [T]he chances of recklessly approaching even a single command-detonated bomb and surviving are quite small.  Yet we are made to believe that Sergeant James has disabled over 800 bombs in this reckless, cowboy-like fashion.”  (Yes, but will the film win Best Sound Mixing?)

The most damning indictment of the film, however, comes from American-Israeli journalist Caroline Glick.  As she notes, “There is no plot.  We don’t know anything about these soldiers.  We don’t know why they joined the US Army.  We don’t know how they feel about Iraq…  All we are given are GI Joes who defuse bombs.  Supposedly by watching them, we are supposed to achieve some deeper understanding of the war.  But really all we see is context-free violence which teaches us nothing about war.  Supposedly James is a hero.  But we don’t have any idea what he’s fighting for.  So why should we care about him?”

So why is “The Hurt Locker” nominated for a gazillion Academy Awards?  My theory is that the movie was made for people who either (1) know nothing about war, and are curious about what it would be like to be embedded in an Army unit, or (2) care nothing about war, and are delighted to see it depicted as a meaningless, nihilistic exercise that illustrates the futility of picking up arms to fight for one’s country’s security interests.

As far as the latter group, Glick writes, “The Hurt Locker works for them because its post-modern, context-free rendering of the war is a picture-perfect far-left portrayal of war.  No, the Americans aren’t terrible, they are nothings…  War is futile.  There is no purpose to war except staying alive.”

Glick counters: “[S]oldiers aren’t two-dimensional and war isn’t about nothing.  And the war in Iraq is neither futile nor meaningless.  The Hurt Locker was a two-dimensional film about a meaningless war and nothing soldiers.”

In other words: par for the course for Hollywood war films these days.

 Print This Post

Recently the mainstream media was howling with derision over the fact that Sarah Palin had written a few words on the inside of her hand to remind herself of the key themes she wanted to address in her speech at the Tea Party Convention in Nashville last week.

Admittedly, one would have expected subjects such as Energy, Tax Cuts, and Lift American Spirits to be top-of-mind for Palin, who has consistently and admirably embodied these stances throughout her career, including her 2008 vice-presidential run.

What the MSM did not explain was how Obama’s ubiquitous reliance on his TelePrompTer, including at a recent pep talk with sixth-graders in Falls Church, Virginia, somehow reflected a greater skill at extemporizing or a more masterful command of facts on his part.

The Associated Press chided Palin for relying on a memory aid after having mocked Obama’s use of his TelePrompTer.  It’s true: Palin did jot down a few notes to help her stay focused during her 40-minute Tea Party Convention keynote address, the second-most important speech of her career.  Was Obama’s five-minute chat with 11-year-olds at Graham Road Elementary School so important to his legacy that it required twin, six-foot-tall TelePrompTer monitors to help him get every word right?

Meanwhile, Joe “Gaffe-tastic” Biden has continued to demonstrate his propensity for committing more blunders in any given week than Palin has made in her entire life.  Appearing on Larry King last week, Biden stated that the Iraq War “could be one of the great achievements of this administration.”

This is the same Iraq War, you’ll recall: (a) that Obama voted against, (b) that Biden voted for but later turned against, and (c) whose troop surge Obama and Biden voted against and denounced throughout 2008, even after it had demonstrably worked.  In 2007, Biden condemned General David Petraeus as “dead flat wrong” for wanting to go through with the surge rather than immediately withdrawing our soldiers and partitioning Iraq into three ethnic regions.

It would be one thing if circumstances had improved dramatically in Iraq since Obama took office, and the administration had acted quickly to remove troops ahead of schedule, thus saving the U.S. time and money and improving relations with Iraqis.  But the drawdown of 90,000 troops currently taking place was spelled out in 2008, according to a George W. Bush-negotiated arrangement, the Status of Forces Agreement, and is unfolding exactly as written.  So Obama doesn’t even deserve credit for “ending” the war in Iraq.

Saying that Iraq could be one of the great successes of the Obama administration is like saying that the stagehand who pulled the curtain on the debut of Così Fan Tutte is responsible for one of the great successes of the Metropolitan Opera House.

Then there’s Biden’s nutty defense of the Justice Department’s decision to read Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights after just 50 minutes of questioning.  Biden noted that the Bush administration gave the same treatment to shoe bomber Richard Reid in 2001.  Unfortunately, Biden is blissfully ignorant of the fact that the military commissions to detain Islamic terrorists had not even been set up by the time the shoe bomber had struck.  Reid attempted his attack three months after 9/11, whereas Abdulmutallab attempted his attack eight years and three months after 9/11.

Let’s not forget that Biden was one of the chief opponents of the Afghanistan surge Obama reluctantly ordered in late 2008.  Biden had argued behind the scenes for increasing drone attacks to pick off Al-Qaeda members, and against sending more troops to fight counterinsurgents.  Fortunately, Obama didn’t listen to Biden, and the surge is already demonstrating results, as in Tuesday’s apprehension of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the most significant Taliban capture in over eight years.

This has been the pattern for a year-and-a-half now: Palin makes true statements—that the Vice-President is the head of the Senate, that the health care bill would require panels of bureaucrats to ration care—that are denounced as “gaffes” and “lies,” while Biden regularly weaves twisted fantasies out of cotton candy and is heralded as the voice of wisdom and experience.

The clincher that the MSM held Palin to a higher standard than Biden throughout the 2008 presidential campaign is that they constantly compared her record to Obama’s, not Biden’s.  (“The Republicans’ #2 doesn’t have that much more executive and business experience than the Democrats’ #1!”)

It takes a serious degree of intellectual dishonesty for Democrats to claim we are safer with Biden as Vice President than we would have been with Palin.

 Print This Post

Discouraging military service, bean counting minority group members instead of evaluating achievement, injecting irrelevant sexual undertones—sound like conservative stances to me!

As Miss Manners once wrote on sexual orientation, the important distinction these days seems to be not gays vs. straights, but people who think other people’s sex lives are open for scrutiny vs. those who don’t.

A rapidly dwindling number of conservatives have been arguing that the military should preserve its ban on gays serving openly in the military.

The U.S.’s highest ranking military official, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, happens to disagree.  In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, he declared in no uncertain terms that “allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do.”  Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the nation’s other top defense official, testified alongside Mullen in support of repealing the ban.

Just before President Obama took office, 104 retired admirals and generals had signed a statement urging the next president to overturn the ban.

Apparently all of this wasn’t good enough for Senator John McCain, who had categorically stated in 2006, “The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change the policy,’ then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it.”  Last week McCain told Mullen and Gates that he still opposes lifting the ban.

I can understand some conservatives’ suspicion regarding overturning the ban on gays in the military, when the last president who tried to do so (Clinton) had nothing but contempt for the military and aggressively eroded its capabilities every year he was in office.

But those opposed to lifting the ban have offered a lame series of unrelated, “they doth protest too much”-sounding excuses more befitting liberals’ shifting defenses of their misguided and unconstitutional policies.

For example, there’s the argument that we shouldn’t “experiment” with the military while we’re in the middle of two wars.

I notice that we weren’t in the middle of any wars in 1993, when President Clinton first proposed lifting the ban.  If anything, we need more recruits now, due to the notoriously long and repeated tours of duty our soldiers have had to undergo in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the need for specialized recruits such as Arabic translators.

The notion that our current roster of troops could do their jobs better if they weren’t distracted by the presence of the estimated 65,000 gay U.S. troops helping them out is ludicrous.  The more soldiers who are trained and willing to fight our wars, the better.  One of the best conservative arguments for the greatness of the U.S. is that we are able to get so many highly qualified people to volunteer for our military, and that so few leave due to conflict or dissatisfaction.

The necessity of maximizing troop strength during wartime is also reflected by the fact that the number of troops discharged for being gay decreased almost every year from 2001 to 2009, even though general military enlistment was up after the September 11 attacks.

For what it’s worth, we did experiment with this policy in recent history, and during a war at that: the ban on discharging gays was suspended during the Persian Gulf War, with no adverse consequences.

Then there’s the highly objective and verifiable suggestion that homosexuality is “incompatible” with military service.

This flimsy proposition is torn to smithereens by the inconvenient facts that gays: (1) currently serve honorably in the military, (2) have served honorably in the military since our country’s founding, and (3) already serve openly in the military in 30 major countries around the world, including nearly every NATO member and other U.S. allies such as Australia and Israel.  American soldiers serve alongside openly gay soldiers in these armies, and I haven’t heard about any mass defections on their part over fellow gay soldiers’ unprofessional conduct.

Conservatives generally reject affirmative action, correctly viewing the policy as amounting to reverse discrimination.  Why are so many conservatives hell-bent on discriminating against gays in the military?  It is true that some conservatives probably fear the day when gay rights groups start pushing for loosened standards for gays in the military to promote diversity or to right historical wrongs.  But just because the same thing happened with race and gender doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have granted equal rights to African Americans and women.

Violent felons, card-carrying Marxists, and radical Islamists may all happily serve in the U.S. army.  What sense does it make that, say, an Episcopalian Log Cabin Republican can’t?  Even a gay person who never utters a word about his sexual orientation in the military can be discharged for the act of getting married in one of the five states that allow it.

There’s also the contention that unit cohesion would be disrupted.  Yet the same claim was made regarding racial integration of the military in the 1950s.  This assertion slanders dedicated service members by purporting that (1) gay soldiers can’t do their jobs without making sexual advances toward their peers, and (2) heterosexual soldiers can’t do their jobs without dwelling on the possibility of advances from their peers.  Here I thought conservatives were the ones who held our military in such high esteem.

Admittedly, gays are asking for a tall order from the military: namely—nothing.  Nothing needs to be done to allow gays to serve openly, except for our Commander-in-Chief or Congress to declare that it be so.  Gays already serve.  Heterosexual service members claim they already know who many of their gay unit members are and don’t care.  If heterosexual soldiers can discern the most obvious cases and aren’t uncomfortable around these people, I think they can tolerate the existence of cases so undetectable they otherwise wouldn’t have guessed if they hadn’t found out.

All the military needs to do now is stop wasting time and resources sniffing out gays like contraband and axing them after having spent millions of dollars to train them.

Leftists are usually the ones infusing sexual undercurrents and lurid motives where none exist—pointing out latent homoeroticism in “Winnie the Pooh” or condemning “heteronormativity” in Jane Austen.  Why are some conservatives so intent on insisting that the seething, passionate impetus undergirding military service is… gay lust?

 Print This Post

When conservatives correctly pointed out that one disastrous terrorist attack and another potentially catastrophic but thwarted attack both happened during President Obama’s first term in office, because his agencies overlooked the perpetrators’ jihadist intentions or failed to act on relevant intelligence, liberals responded with an argument that was discredited nearly a decade ago: “But 9/11 happened on George Bush’s watch!”

Obama supporters mocked Rudy Giuliani’s recent claim to George Stephanopolous, “We had no domestic attacks under Bush,” stubbornly avoiding Giuliani’s obvious implication that he was speaking post-9/11.  Until last week, Democrats loved to excoriate Giuliani for making endless references to the terrorist attack that occurred while he was mayor of New York; now they claim he forgets it happened.  Which is it?

Conservatives’ point is that Obama has forgotten the lessons of 9/11, which Bush did not have available to him until, surprisingly—9/11.  The Ft. Hood and Flight 253 attacks happened in the first year of Obama’s administration, and 9/11 happened in the first year of Bush’s administration, but Obama had the example of 9/11 to learn from, and Bush did not.  (Even if you count the thwarted attack by the shoe bomber in December 2001, that bomber tried to strike just months after 9/11, when fully revamped security procedures were not running as smoothly as they are now; also, the bomber used the novel, unprecedented technique of wearing the bomb on his person so that it would not be detected by luggage screeners.)

Obama not only had the example of 9/11, he had seven years in which to witness and debate and vote on the implementation of the policies his predecessor devised that kept the country safe in the years after 9/11.  Obama denounced and campaigned against these tactics every chance he got.  He hasn’t revoked all of the Bush policies—upon assuming the Presidency, he must have received access to hair-raising intelligence that made him realize the suicidal folly of reversing Bush on everything—but he has slackened up enough, rhetorically and policy-wise, that our security standards have slipped and our enemies have become emboldened.

It is not enough to say that Obama has forgotten the lessons of 9/11.  He has actively rejected them.  He has argued that doing the opposite of what Bush did will keep us safer.  We are seeing how well the Obama Doctrine is working out in his first 11 months in office.

Another error in the “Bush-was-bad-so-Obama’s-off-the-hook” argument is that Bush did not do anything to actively facilitate the occurrence of 9/11.  In contrast, the Ft. Hood shootings were aided by the politically correct refusal of the U.S. Army—under Commander-in-Chief Obama—to recognize murderous jihadist sentiments expressed by Major Nidal Hasan openly and repeatedly while in medical school and residency, and the promotion Hasan received despite his poor performance reviews.  The Flight 253 near-attack was made possible by the Obama administration’s failure to act on numerous warnings available to it, such as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s father having called the U.S. Embassy to report him, Abdulmutallab’s not having a passport or luggage, and his having bought a one-way ticket with cash.

But there’s an even more damning flaw to the contention that Bush should have been able to prevent 9/11, and is therefore as bad as or worse than Obama on national security.  Namely: just what would Bush opponents have preferred that he do in his first eight months in office to prevent terrorist acts, when they now scream bloody murder at the slightest suggestion of profiling at airports, call Bush Big Brother for trying to monitor terrorist communications, and express their clear disapproval of any war Bush started abroad to target Al-Qaeda?  Are liberals implying that they would have been fine with Bush doing all of these things in a pre-9/11 world?  They’re not even fine with The One doing these things in a post-9/11 world.

The left have been digging up examples of localized attacks carried out by truly isolated (not Abdulmutallab-style “isolated”) loonies—such as Bruce Ivins’ anthrax-laced letters to news broadcasters in September 2001, Hesham Hadayet’s shooting of two Israelis at LAX in July 2002, the Beltway sniper attacks in October 2002—as proof that Bush didn’t keep us safe.  Ignore for the moment that when each of these incidents happened, the same people criticized Bush for using these events to “hype” the threat of terrorism to justify extra security measures.  Instead ask: what level of government intervention into our lives would have been necessary to prevent every one of these attacks?  And how likely is it that liberals would have supported Bush’s carrying out such interventions at the time?

 Print This Post

So much for the lie that poverty causes terrorism.

Despite the mainstream media’s refusal to accept it, there is one factor more reliable than any other in predicting whether an individual will engage in terrorist acts against the United States and its allies:

(1) It’s not whether he lives in third world poverty and resents being overshadowed by the Imperialist West.  Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day, was the son of a prominent, wealthy Nigerian bank chairman.  Abdulmutallab attended the British School in Togo and University College London, the latter of which cost as much as Obama shells out for his daughters to attend a semester at Sidwell Friends.  Abdulmutallab’s college dorm was a $6 million apartment in London’s West End.

If poverty caused terrorism, then a corollary of this argument is that a country’s efforts to relieve poverty should prevent terrorism.  Yet the U.S. provided Arlington, VA-born Major Nidal Malik Hasan with a free medical education worth tens of thousands of dollars, which apparently did not console him enough to keep him from murdering fellow soldiers on his military post in Ft. Hood, Texas.  Indeed, Hasan planned and carried out the attack after having been promoted from captain to major, despite miserable performance reviews.

John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland and San Anselmo, California and attended a “California Distinguished School” in the Tamalpais Union High School District.

If poverty caused terrorism, then poor people the world over—rice farmers in China, untouchables in India, non-flat screen TV owners in the U.S.—would be rising up en masse to wreak havoc in hijackings and suicide bombings.

(2) It’s not post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, or any garden-variety psychological malady.  If it were, we would expect suicide bombings from Vietnam vets, or from the New York Times staff after the public option was dropped from the health care bill.

(3) It’s not whether we’re currently at war with the place where the individual resides.  I don’t recall any recent U.S. incursions into Nigeria, Arlington, or San Anselmo.

The most reliable factor in predicting whether an individual will engage in terrorist acts against the United States and its allies is: whether the individual adheres to an ideology that encourages engaging in terrorist acts against the United States and its allies.

Never mind that the ideology in question always happens to be Islamist.  At this point, even I would be fine with overlooking this fact if we would just do something about these threats when they surface.

If the warning signs sent by would-be terrorists were densely coded and difficult to decipher, delayed action by our national security officials might be understandable.  But a PowerPoint presentation urging Muslims to cut off the heads of infidels and pour burning oil down their throats is not subtle.

Nidal Hasan delivered a now-infamous lecture to an auditorium of army psychiatrists in which he imparted charming Koranic admonishments for the nonbeliever such as “Seize him and drag him in the midst of the blazing fire.  Then pour over his head the torment of boiling water” and “We shall burn them in fire.  As often as their skins are roasted through, we shall change them for other skins that they may taste the punishment.”  This is not exactly the Venona cables.

Abdulmutallab’s high school teacher reported that, when he wasn’t busy captaining the water polo team, he repeatedly defended the Taliban’s tactics in classroom discussions and endorsed the 9/11 attacks.  Abdulmutallab disappeared in October, cut off ties with his family, and moved to Yemen to learn Arabic, all of which prompted his father to call the American Embassy in Nigeria to warn that Umar was a likely threat to the U.S.

John Walker Lindh began studying Islam in high school and converted when he was 16, moved to Yemen to study at a madrassa when he was 19, and wrote his family letters, not asking for money, but praising the bombing of the USS Cole by Sudan-funded terrorists.

Yet regarding the motivations of these attackers, the current Democratic administration warns us not to jump to any conclusions, or at least any that might interfere with the bestowal of glory upon Allah.  I can sooner conceive of stubborn liberals going after Nigerian bankers as a suspect class before I can imagine them pointing the finger at Islamists.

If we can throw an American in jail for joking that he’d like to shoot the president, can we please add a militant, well-funded Islamist with terrorist connections to the crummy no-fly list?