Brutality elsewhere is no reason to duck trying to do something ourselves.
All too often emotion and irrational demands drive legislation and when it does the legislation can be overboard - witness 'Obamascare.' That said, there is some sound reason to debate the merit of restricting the manufacture and sale of weapons that are overly automatic.(See 1 below.)
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I posted this speech by Bill Whittle in a previous memo. It was sent to me again by a dear friend and fellow memo reader so I re-listened and found it worth re-posting.
Click on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wgxlp2UJI5I
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A counter argument to those who understandably have been disheartened by what took place in Connecticut.
As I wrote earlier, too much bad and counterproductive legislation follows an emotional and heart rending occurrence.
On the other hand, if one waits for emotions to cool the passion that drives bad legislation, or any for that matter, wanes as well. (See 2 below.)
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My friend, Bret Stephens, on Chuck Hagel for Sec. of Defense. (See 3 below.)
A somewhat more inflammatory view from a tough minded Caroline Glick. (See 3a below.)
You decide!
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Can Islam be reformed? Do those who care and believe it should have any ability to bring it about? (See 4 below.)
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Iraq post our withdrawal. Any lesson to be learned? A forerunner for Afghanistan? (See 5 below.)
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Is Obama taking us forward into the past? Worse, is the Republican Speaker of The House aiding and abetting? (See 6 below.)
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One of the prime reasons states are generally better managed when it comes to fiscal matters is most have Constitutional bans on deficit spending.
Were the Federal Government to have such restraints we would all be better off but not the politicians who are driving the train. A Balance budget Amendment would take away their play toys, ie. your tax dollars. (See 7 below.)
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Will the New York Times go the way of all flesh? I have suspected it would if only because it can no longer produce a significant profit, one sufficient to sustain its staff and keep the paper technologically current. Then there is the matter of declining ads and readership partly because of the economy and partly because the New York Editorial Board and owners have gone over the cliff.
Newspapers, in general, are struggling because young people would rather get their news from other sources. I have had an interesting talk with the publisher of our local paper as to what he is doing to keep the paper on track.
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I have a friend and fellow memo reader who rails against education in this country and rightly so. He sent this about connecting dots. (See 8 below.)
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Dick
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1)God Help Us
A massacre that has turned the world upside down.
Sunday
I learned about the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school while we were setting up at Fox News to tape Cavuto on Business. The news was so horrible that we all felt as if we had lost our legs and could no longer stand. It was such horrible news that it simply turned the world upside down.
It still is that kind of news, and it’s incredibly depressing about the nature of humanity. And my wife and I pray all day for the souls of those dear children and for the peace, if there ever will be peace, of their families… and for the souls of the adults and the peace of those who knew and loved them.
As usual, the smartest comment about the whole subject came from John R. Coyne, Jr. “There is evil in the world. It’s beyond mental illness, beyond gun control. It is evil.”
The killer got his weapons from his mother, who apparently had bought them legally and registered them. That tells us something about what anti-gun laws would do, although maybe the mother should not have had them either. In this world, a killer devil can kill his mother and steal her guns to kill six year olds. That’s what some humans are and I am not sure what laws will stop them.
Second, I read that the killer was socially awkward (putting it mildly) and “reserved.” I know what that often means. He spent much of his miserable life playing shoot ’em up video games on line or on machines. I see a troubled young man doing that often.
Up close and personal.
In these games, the “player” just spends his whole day attempting to exercise and exorcize his loneliness and low self-esteem by shooting imaginary creatures and creating damage all day long.
At a certain point, just “killing” on the console blurs into doing it in real life. “Killing” is just what the kid does all his life. How much of a stretch is it for him to shoot into a movie theater or a political gathering or a kindergarten in “real life” if his life is so pitiful that he does not know what’s real and what is not? If you are looking for a villain, try shoot ’em up games.
Third, what motivates “great” deeds? So that a man’s name will not be forgotten and he will be sung about even after his death, goes the ancient saying. That’s what you get if you slaughter 26 totally innocent people at a grade school. If you want another villain, try the media itself, which has now given Adam Lanza fame beyond what he could have dreamt of. It is impossible to blame the media, but evil men like Adam Lanza have gamed the system to perfection.
Fifth, why are these killers always men? What is it that we teach our young men in this world that makes them think it’s a mark of manliness to kill the unarmed and innocent? Whatever it is, it’s disgusting. It’s not manly to kill any unarmed human. It’s miserable, crawling cowardice.
Finally, a comment that will enrage the beautiful people. The whole world is rightly overwrought and crazed with grief over the murder of twenty totally innocent and blameless souls last Friday in Newtown. It was and is a catastrophe for the ages.
But Mahmoud Ahmadinejad promises to kill every Jew in Israel and then in the whole world, including babies… and he had his defenders, even at the Democratic National Convention. And it was daily life in Nazi-occupied Europe from 1939 to 1941 to kill thousands of Jewish children every day. But powerful, intelligent men and women in this country defended Hitler, spoke up for him and for keeping America from even sending arms to Britain when England stood alone. What are we to make of that?
No one even mentions, no one even knows about the horrendous Armenian genocide by the Turks in 1915, when well over a million of the most talented people on the planet were wantonly murdered — and the world has still not officially called it genocide — and Hitler explicitly said it was a model for him. Who today even talks of the purposeful mass starvation of millions of beautiful Ukrainian children by Stalin? The U.S. did not say one word about it as a government. The U.S. still will not confront Turkey seriously about the Armenian children.
Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge killed roughly one third of all of its people, including children, from 1974 to about 1977 — and it was U.S. policy to avoid doing anything to stop them — because they were opposed to the North Vietnamese Communists and Communist Vietnam, which had just taken over South Vietnam — our ally. What can we say to that? We cheered the deposing of the President — Richard Nixon — who would have stopped the Khmer Rouge from taking power. There is plenty of Cambodian blood on our hands. There is plenty of blood of all kinds on our hands, especially of the most innocent and blameless among us… real babies, truly innocent.
God help us. Man is made of such crooked stuff that it is impossible to set him straight, said a famous philosopher. God help us.
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2)
Invincible Ignorance
Must every tragic mass shooting bring out the shrill ignorance of "gun control" advocates?
The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.
If gun control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive.
Places and times with the strongest gun control laws have often been places and times with high murder rates. Washington, D.C., is a classic example, but just one among many.
When it comes to the rate of gun ownership, that is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but the murder rate is higher in urban areas. The rate of gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, but the murder rate is higher among blacks. For the country as a whole, hand gun ownership doubled in the late 20th century, while the murder rate went down.
The few counter-examples offered by gun control zealots do not stand up under scrutiny. Perhaps their strongest talking point is that Britain has stronger gun control laws than the United States and lower murder rates.
But, if you look back through history, you will find that Britain has had a lower murder rate than the United States for more than two centuries-- and, for most of that time, the British had no more stringent gun control laws than the United States. Indeed, neither country had stringent gun control for most of that time.
In the middle of the 20th century, you could buy a shotgun in London with no questions asked. New York, which at that time had had the stringent Sullivan Law restricting gun ownership since 1911, still had several times the gun murder rate of London, as well as several times the London murder rate with other weapons.
Neither guns nor gun control was not the reason for the difference in murder rates. People were the difference.
Yet many of the most zealous advocates of gun control laws, on both sides of the Atlantic, have also been advocates of leniency toward criminals.
In Britain, such people have been so successful that legal gun ownership has been reduced almost to the vanishing point, while even most convicted felons in Britain are not put behind bars. The crime rate, including the rate of crimes committed with guns, is far higher in Britain now than it was back in the days when there were few restrictions on Britons buying firearms.
In 1954, there were only a dozen armed robberies in London but, by the 1990s-- after decades of ever tightening gun ownership restrictions-- there were more than a hundred times as many armed robberies.
Gun control zealots' choice of Britain for comparison with the United States has been wholly tendentious, not only because it ignored the history of the two countries, but also because it ignored other countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States, such as Russia, Brazil and Mexico. All of these countries have higher murder rates than the United States.
You could compare other sets of countries and get similar results. Gun ownership has been three times as high in Switzerland as in Germany, but the Swiss have had lower murder rates. Other countries with high rates of gun ownership and low murder rates include Israel, New Zealand, and Finland.
Guns are not the problem. People are the problem-- including people who are determined to push gun control laws, either in ignorance of the facts or in defiance of the facts.
There is innocent ignorance and there is invincible, dogmatic and self-righteous ignorance. Every tragic mass shooting seems to bring out examples of both among gun control advocates.
Some years back, there was a professor whose advocacy of gun control led him to produce a "study" that became so discredited that he resigned from his university. This column predicted at the time that this discredited study would continue to be cited by gun control advocates. But I had no idea that this would happen the very next week in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
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3) Chuck Hagel's Jewish Problem
The would-be secretary of defense has some curious views.
By BRET STEPHENS
Prejudice—like cooking, wine-tasting and other consummations—has an olfactory element. When Chuck Hagel, the former GOP senator from Nebraska who is now a front-runner to be the next secretary of Defense, carries on about how "the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here," the odor is especially ripe.
Ripe because a "Jewish lobby," as far as I'm aware, doesn't exist. No lesser authorities on the subject than John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of "The Israel Lobby," have insisted the term Jewish lobby is "inaccurate and misleading, both because the [Israel] lobby includes non-Jews like Christian Zionists and because many Jewish Americans do not support the hard-line policies favored by its most powerful elements."
Ripe because, whatever other political pressures Mr. Hagel might have had to endure during his years representing the Cornhusker state, winning over the state's Jewish voters—there are an estimated 6,100 Jewish Nebraskans in a state of 1.8 million people—was probably not a major political concern for Mr. Hagel compared to, say, the ethanol lobby.
Ripe because the word "intimidates" ascribes to the so-called Jewish lobby powers that are at once vast, invisible and malevolent; and because it suggests that legislators who adopt positions friendly to that lobby are doing so not from political conviction but out of personal fear. Just what does that Jewish Lobby have on them?
Ripe, finally, because Mr. Hagel's Jewish lobby remark was well in keeping with the broader pattern of his thinking. "I'm a United States Senator, not an Israeli Senator," Mr. Hagel told retired U.S. diplomat Aaron David Miller in 2006. "I'm a United States Senator. I support Israel. But my first interest is I take an oath of office to the Constitution of the United States. Not to a president. Not a party. Not to Israel. If I go run for Senate in Israel, I'll do that."
Read these staccato utterances again to better appreciate their insipid and insinuating qualities, all combining to cast the usual slur on Jewish-Americans: Dual loyalty. Nobody questions Mr. Hagel's loyalty. He is only making those assertions to question the loyalty of others.
Still, Mr. Hagel managed to say "I support Israel." This is the sort of thing one often hears from people who treat Israel as the Mideast equivalent of a neighborhood drunk who, for his own good, needs to be put in the clink to sober him up.
In 2002, a year in which 457 Israelis were killed in terrorist attacks (a figure proportionately equivalent to more than 20,000 fatalities in the U.S., or seven 9/11s), Mr. Hagel weighed in with the advice that "Israel must take steps to show its commitment to peace." This was two years after Yasser Arafat had been offered a state by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David.
In 2006, Mr. Hagel described Israel's war against Hezbollah as "the systematic destruction of an American friend, the country and people of Lebanon." He later refused to sign a letter calling on the European Union to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. In 2007, he voted against designating Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organization, and also urged President Bush to open "direct, unconditional" talks with Iran to create "a historic new dynamic in U.S.-Iran relations." In 2009, Mr. Hagel urged the Obama administration to open direct talks with Hamas.
In fairness to Mr. Hagel, all these positions emerge from his belief in the power of diplomatic engagement and talking with adversaries. The record of that kind of engagement—in 2008, Mr. Hagel and John Kerry co-authored an op-ed in this newspaper titled "It's Time to Talk to Syria"—hasn't been stellar, but at least it was borne of earnest motives.
Yet it's worth noting that while Mr. Hagel is eager to engage the world's rogues without preconditions, his attitude toward Israel tends, at best, to the paternalistic.
"The United States and Israel must understand that it is not in their long-term interests to allow themselves to become isolated in the Middle East and the world," he said in a 2006 Senate speech. It's a political Deep Thought worthy of Saturday Night Live's Jack Handey. Does Mr. Hagel reckon any other nation to be quite so blind to its own supposed self-interest as Israel?
Now President Obama may nominate Mr. Hagel to take Leon Panetta's place at the Pentagon. As a purely score-settling matter, I almost hope he does. It would confirm a point I made in a column earlier this year, which is that Mr. Obama is not a friend of Israel. Perhaps the 63% of Jewish-Americans who cast their votes for Mr. Obama last month might belatedly take notice.
Alternatively, maybe some of these voters could speak up now, before a nomination is announced, about the insult that a Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel would be. Jewish Democrats like to fancy their voice carries weight in their party. The prospect of this nomination is their chance to prove it.
3a)Chuck Hagel for Defense Secretary - Bring it On!
Many in the American Jewish community are aghast to discover that President Obama is planning to appoint former Senator Chuck Hagel to serve as Defense Secretary. If you want the skinny on how Hagel has come to be known as one of the few ferociously anti-Israel senators in the past generation, Carl from Jerusalem at Israel Matzav provides it.Meantime, all I can say is I don't understand how anyone can possibly be surprised. Shortly after word came out that Hagel is the frontrunner for the nomination, I read a quaint little blog post written by a conservative leaning commentator voicing her belief that Obama wouldn't want to risk his relations with Israel's supporters by appointing Hagel. But asPowerline pointed out today, this is the entire point of the nomination. Obama isn't stupid. He picks fights he thinks he can win. He hasn't always been right about those fights. He picked fights with Netanyahu thinking he could win, and he lost some of those.But he is right to think he can win the Hagel fight. The Republican Senators aren't going to get into a fight with Obama about his DOD appointee, especially given that it's one of their fellow senators, even though many of them hate him. The Democrats are certainly not going to oppose him.Obama wants to hurt Israel. He does not like Israel. He is appointing anti-Israel advisors and cabinet members not despite their anti-Israel positions, but because of them.Some commentators said that Susan Rice would be bad because she was anti-Israel and they hoped that Obama would appoint someone pro-Israel. But John Kerry is no friend of Israel. And as far as I was concerned, we would have been better off with Rice on the job.Unlike Kerry, Rice is politically inept. She walked into Sen. John McCain's office with the intention of convincing Sens. McCain, Lindsey Graham and Oympia Snowe that she was competent to serve as Secretary of State despite the fact that she deliberately misled the public on what happened at the Sept. 11 jihadist attack on the US consulate in Benghazi.But she failed. In commenting on the meeting, all three senators said they were more concerned after speaking with Rice than they were before they did. That is, they said she was a political incompetent. Can there be any doubt that Sen. Kerry will be able to play the politics of Capitol Hill far more effectively than Rice?And what reason does anyone have to believe that Assad's great defender will be any more supportive of Israel than Rice would have been? But with him in the driver's seat now, instead of having a political incompetent whom no one can stand serving as the spokesman for Obama's anti-Israel foreign policy, in Kerry we will have a competent, reasonably popular politician on the job.It's time for people to realize the game has changed. Obama won.Obama won with 70 percent of the Jewish vote despite the fact that his record in his first term was more hostile to Israel than any president since Jimmy Carter. No one can expect him now, after his victory, to feel even slightly constrained in his desire to weaken the US relationship with Israel.So far, he has made clear that he feels no constraints whatsoever. Take the Palestinians at the UN for example. Obama enabled the Palestinians to get their non-member state status at the UN by failing to threaten to cut off US funding to the UN in retaliation for such a vote.Both Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush issued such threats during their tenures in office and so prevented the motion from coming to a vote. Given that the Palestinians have had an automatic majority in the General Assembly since at least 1975, the only reason their status was only upgraded in 2012 is because until then, either the PLO didn't feel like raising the issue or the US threatened to cut off its financial support to the UN if such a motion passed. This year PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas said he wanted to have a vote and Obama responded by not issuing a threat to cut off UN funding. So the Palestinians got their vote and, as expected, it passed overwhelmingly.Seeing the upgrade as a Palestinian move is a mistake. It was a joint Palestinian-American move.And Obama made that move and no one balked. Indeed some New York Jews applauded it.Let there be no doubt, Obama will get Hagel in at Defense. And Hagel will place Israel in his crosshairs.The only way to foil Obama's ill intentions towards Israel even slightly is to be better at politics than he is. And he's awfully good.Moreover, one of his strongest advantages is that Israel's supporters seem to have never gotten the memo. So here it is: Obama wants to fundamentally transform the US relationship with Israel.He isn't playing by the old rules. He doesn't care about the so-called Israel lobby or the Jewish vote. As he sees it, to paraphrase Jim Baker, "F#&k the Jews, they voted for us anyway."As strange as it may sound, I am slightly relieved by Hagel's appointment, and by my trust that Kerry will be a loyal mouthpiece of Obama's hostility. The more "in our faces" they are with their hostility, the smaller our ability to deny their hostility or pretend that we can continue to operate as if nothing has changed. As we face four more years of Obama - and four years of Obama unplugged -- the most urgent order of business for Israelis is to stop deluding ourselves in thinking that under Obama the US can be trusted.So welcome aboard Secretary Hagel. Bring it on.
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4) Can Islam reform?
By James Lewis
When liberals sound out on religious fundamentalism they never seem to think of Islam. Yet the Religion of Surrender -- Islam means "surrender," not "peace" -- is by far the most fundamentalist religion in the world.
Everything is supposed to go back to the Qur'an, written in the Arabian Desert in the 7th century, straight from the mouth of Allah and therefore impossible to question. If you can't question something you're set for mind-lock, and all the troubles flow from that.
As historian Bernard Lewis points out, Islamic civilization always gets stuck in dogmatism whenever the fundamentalist priesthood takes over. That is why the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution took place in Europe and then America, and not in Muslim Persia, Spain or Ottoman Turkey. In a rigidly closed society everybody becomes mind-locked. We can see it every day in the media.
Liberals claim that the US Constitution should be a 'living document" -- meaning they want it dead. Well, the Quran brings the ancient desert war of Mohammed back to life. There's a living document that'll kill ya! That kind of fundamentalism is utterly stuck in a dysfunctional past.
Liberals respect the Qur'an more than the US Constitution. The Qur'an runs a billion Muslim minds, half of them women living under virtual house arrest, and subject to constant fear and indoctrination -- and murder if they try to escape.
Liberals respect that kind of thing.
When Muslims encounter the modern world they may yearn for freedom, or they may wish to go back to the mythical past. They feel torn between past and future, just like other, less militant creeds.
The battle for civilization will be won or lost in their minds and in ours.
Civilized peoples always hope to fight a war of ideas, so that we will not have to fight a hot war. But peace is not won by cowards. If you can't stand up for your beliefs during family holidays -- politely but firmly -- you have not yet begun to fight.
Conservatives have to bear a share of the blame for the victory of radical liberalism in the recent election. Not all the blame, but we have not done enough. Half of America is on our side, at least 100 million people.
We must begin by standing up for our beliefs to friends, family, local leaders, then nationally and internationally. This is a worldwide struggle.
You have in your hands the most fabulous tool ever invented for outreach. If we don't use computers and the web, as well as personal contacts, to stand for our values, nobody else will do it for us. When we stand up for our values we also empower others to do the same thing.
So far the United States and our "allies" have failed dismally to stand up for our values. We keep surrendering to barbarians, a sure formula for civilizational defeat. It is abject cowardice, and there's no excuse. None.
The answer to the election of 2012 is not to retreat from our principles, but to redouble our efforts, work smarter and harder, do retail politics -- everything is local -- and never, never, never, never give in. Churchill had it right. Persistence wins the day.
The election did not change right or wrong, good or evil. They are what they are. A lost election is a setback. So was Valley Forge. So was the Battle of the Bulge.
Our history is full of setbacks followed by victories.
We need to read history. This isn't the first time control freaks have tried to take over. King George was a control freak. Slavery in the South was bloody control freakery.
Abe Lincoln was the first Republican president of the United States, and contrary to media myths, Republicans have stood for freedom when the Democrats stood for slavery, Jim Crow, the Soviet Union and the Chicago Machine.
In a few places like India there are peaceful Islamic sects, but Saudi Arabia and Iran are run by totalitarian war cults. The Saudis were pure desert warriors until the British Empire raised them to power a century ago. Even Karl Marx couldn't get more fundamentalist than the Wahhabis, a tiny sect with oceans of oil money to buy corrupt socialist parties and media.
When we see mosques rising today we should see them as another sign that Saudi oil money is coming back to destroy constitutional government. Saudi religious fundamentalism can't tolerate real freedom, just as radical socialism can't. You can see it in the liberal media and their politicians. Hillary's recent PR bomb against Israel did not happen by chance. Those pro-jihadist PR bombs show all the signs of being orchestrated, because normal people don't mouth the identical words on cue, day after day, like the Hollywood liberal artillery brigade.
Normal people have diverse beliefs. Only ideological monopolies repeat the same slogan over and over again. Presumably somebody pays for those PR bombs. They are much too predictable to be accidental.
No major religion today is as fundamentalist as Islam. If you doubt that, kindly explain which Christian or Jewish sect would commit the atrocities of 9/11? Southern Baptists? Holy Rollers? The Lubavitcher rebbe? What religious Christian or Jew believes that God wants him to commit those civilian massacres that constantly plague the Muslim world?
We stand in horror of the murder of children in Newtown, CT. We should. That is what civilized people do. But let a hundred Shi'ite pilgrims in Iraq be blown to pieces by Sunni terrorists, and there is no outrage. To liberals, Muslim massacres mean nothing. They don't fit the agenda.
Everything comes down to ideology. Muslims don't kill impulsively, but for ideology. When they kill other Muslims it's because there is no worse enemy than a heretic in their eyes. That is why 40,000 people have died in Syria in a war between Sunnis and Shi'ites that started a thousand years ago. Talk about being stuck in the past? Talk about religious fundamentalism? In the House of Peace everybody is somebody's heretic.
Everybody hates somebody sometimeEverybody falls in hate somehow
... but it's not funny in the real world.
Islam is a fundamentalist religion at war with itself, and with infidels like us, because it preaches a war doctrine rooted in 7th century Arabia. Islam cannot change as long as it stays mind-locked in the 7th century.
So the question Can Islam reform? is no small matter, as Samuel Huntington wrote in his classic The Clash of Civilizations. We don't know the answer yet. An Islamic Reformation is one of Rumsfeld's Unknown Unknowns, the biggest one we all face today.
But then every civilizational war starts off as a complete unknown. In 1938 Churchill didn't know that the civilized world could win against Hitler. He guessed, and then acted on his hope and passion, and made it happen.
We have to become Churchillian again.
There is no other way.
Imperialistic Islam may be able to reform, but only if the civilized world resists with all its might.
Think of those half billion women under religious house arrest, if that will clarify your values. The media don't tell us about those women, and that's a giveaway all by itself. What the media hide from us is more important than what they say. By their evasions ye shall know them.
If we surrender to sly media infiltration and open sabotage, we will keep being bamboozled by the Obamas of this world, and civilization will die.
It's happened before.
Dark Ages happen throughout human history, and they always come from a tyrannical media priesthood. This is an old, old struggle. Reagan said that civilization has to be reborn in every generation. He was right.
Nazi fascism lasted only thirteen years in power, but that was long enough to kill many millions of human beings.
Soviet imperialism lasted from 1917 to 1990, seven decades of inconceivable horrors, covered up by the major Western media and deliberately spread to China and North Korea, where the death camps are still running today.
Resurgent Islam got its biggest boost in the 1970s when Jimmy Carter enabled the rise of fascist Khomeinism in Tehran, something he keeps defending even today. There is no rational defense of criminal neglect, Jimmy. No defense at all.
The atrocities of 9/11 were a direct consequence of Carter and Clinton decisions. Good ole Bill had four chances to catch Osama bin Laden and never wanted to take the political risk. When 9/11 happened, Clinton insiders knew instantly who was to blame. Obama comes straight from the Carter-Clinton school of leading from behind.
Thinking people know that aggressive Islam must be resisted the way we resisted Hitler and Stalin. We know how to do it. We did it until a few decades ago. But the recent election shows that the American people are not ready to face that reality. Not yet. Maybe never. Maybe the monopoly media have poisoned our minds beyond repair.
If we fail, the Western Enlightenment -- think of the US Constitution -- will fade from history. China, Iran, Russia are intent on world power. Maybe civilized values will arise again. Or maybe not. If we leave the struggle to the ignorant, the mind-locked, the gutless, the mediocre and the lazy, if we let America-haters run our politics and media, they will win.
Gird up your loins, folks.
Militant Christianity had its Reformation, a crucial beginning of free thought in Europe. Judaism had a self-reformation after the Second Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 CE.
All religions have a history of war, because human beings started out that way. Indian religion starts from a tale of chariot warriors in the Bhagavad-Gita, the Song of God.
Yes, American Pop Buddhism claims to be pacifist today, but that's the usual ignorance about history. Zen Buddhism was adopted by the medieval warriors of Bushido Japan, who saw no contradiction in practicing Zen. Like the warriors of the Bhagavad-Gita, they thought that spiritual practices made them better warriors.
Civilized religions emerge from an ancient history of warfare. When humans get lucky we discover ways to be more civilized. But we keep teetering on the edge, ready to fall back to the bloody past.
It is possible that Islam can reform itself. But liberal collusion with Islamist warlords will not make it so. Surrender will not help. Phony pacifism will be laughed at by war cults every single time. Helping radicals like Morsi rise to power in Egypt is suicidal. Obama policy in supporting militant Islam is either delusional or malevolent.
Twenty years ago the Soviet Union crumbled because its imperialist thrust was resisted by the West, led by the United States. We contained Soviet imperialism without major war, until they ran out of aggressive energy.
But first we had to name the enemy.
If you can't name the enemy, you can't think about him. If you can't think about him you can't resist.
Our biggest struggle is not on the battlefield but in our minds. It always is.
China's Philosopher Kung, Confucius, insisted that the right use of words has to come first.
Start by telling the truth -- the right use of words -- and the right answers will follow.
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5) Iraq: One Year After Withdrawal
By Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi
One year after the completion of the pullout of American troops from Iraq, what are the main issues affecting the country today?
Russian Arms Scandal and Corruption: On October 9, Iraq announced the signing of a $4.2 billion arms contract with Russia. Commentators took this deal to be a sign of waning U.S. influence in Iraq since the deal — had it gone through — would have drastically reduced Iraqi dependence on American arms supplies.
Thus, when it was announced on November 10 that the deal was scrapped over concerns of corruption, these same commentators (e.g. Michael Weiss) surmised that the cancellation must have somehow been due to U.S. pressure.
This sentiment was fueled by the BBC's quoting of a Russian analyst — Igor Korotchenko — at the Moscow-based Center for Analysis of World Arms Trade. For he speculated: "As far as talk about corruption is concerned, I think it's a smokescreen. I believe this is just a pretext and the true reason is Washington applying pressure on Baghdad."
Moreover, the assumption made by commentators of U.S. influence at work here reflects the excessive tendency to view affairs in Iraq through the eyes of a "Great Game" between foreign powers (cf. the question of Iranian influence in Iraq).
However, as I said on Twitter from the beginning about this matter, such speculation from a Russian pundit is only to be expected in a country where anti-American discourse and conspiracy theories are rife, with a tendency to see a hidden American hand behind any development that negatively affects Russia. Indeed, a spokesperson for Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki quickly made it clear to Russian news agency RIA Novosti that the cancellation of the deal was not due to U.S. pressure. While pundits argued that a shift away from dependence on U.S. arms supplies signified a decline in U.S. influence, it is notable that no one actually quoted an American official expressing concern about the arms deal with Russia back in October, contrasting with the U.S. government's publicly urging Iraq not to allow arms shipments from Iran to Syria to pass through Iraqi territory. Iraq has in fact been buying weapons from Russia for years, and the Americans have never once voiced objections.
The reality is that the fallout over the arms deal does reflect concerns over corruption, and as ever, the nature of personal rivalries in Iraqi politics has come to light, indicating the flaws in a solely sectarian-based paradigm of analysis that views the main ethno-religious groups as only or primarily acting on collective group-based perceptions of interest.
In the case of this fallout over the Russian arms deal, the deep tension between the Iraqi premier and the Sadrists has once again come to the forefront, following on from the talk on multiple occasions in the spring and summer from the leader of the Sadrists — the anti-American Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr — of ousting Maliki in a no-confidence vote.
Now, at the center of the tension between Maliki and the Sadrists — who are supposed to be allies in a coalition government — are accusations from the latter that Maliki's son Ahmad has personally profited from the arms scandal. Maliki's spokesperson Ali al-Dabbagh was also accused of being partly responsible for the arms deal scandal, and while he denied any wrongdoing, he nonetheless resigned his position at the end of November.
Sadr had been against the Russian arms deal from the beginning, describing it as a "waste of Iraqi public funds," and has most recently claimed that the arms deal was not about purchasing arms for Iraq at all but rather for unspecified foreign agents, prompting a sharp rebuke from Maliki and in turn triggering Sadrist protests in the Shi'ite holy city of Karbala against the premier.
Corruption remains an endemic problem at all levels of society in Iraq, but the prevalence of the phenomenon does not mean that corruption allegations are never taken seriously.
Similar uproars have arisen over corruption scandals in the Ministry of Electricity, which is still proving inadequate to the task of meeting the large upsurge in demand since 2003 as a result of the increase in the availability of consumer goods. The situation as regards electricity — in which Baghdad is not even meeting 50% of demand — notably contrasts with the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in the north of Iraq that is now able to meet the electricity demands of the vast majority of its population.
Expect the fallout over the Russian arms scandal to continue into next year, as the Sadrists are clearly attempting to exploit it to give themselves an image of vox populi and maximize electoral potential in the upcoming provincial elections in 2013. Ultimately, Sadr's goal is to lead the Shi'ite community in Iraq, and not, as some have speculated, simply function as Iran's mouthpiece and serve Iranian interests in the country.
Maliki and Authoritarianism: There have long been allegations of autocratic tendencies on the part of the Prime Minister, both as regards monopolization of power over institutions and cracking down on voices critical of the government.
The most recent case that can be interpreted as a unilateral power grab is the issuing of an arrest warrantagainst Sinan Shabibi, who was head of Iraq's Central Bank: a move that was criticized by all of Iraq's political factions, including Maliki's Shi'ite allies in the coalition government (i.e. the Sadrists and the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq).
Here, one should compare with the behavior of Egypt's Islamist and autocratic president Mohamed Morsi and his attempts to consolidate control over the Central Bank in his country, although Maliki's approach is not quite as forward and confrontational as that of Morsi, who unlike Maliki does not have nearly as many sympathizers in the judiciary on whom he can rely to issue verdicts in his favor as regards executive-branch government control of various institutions.
Similar concerns exist for the question of press and academic freedom in Iraq. For instance, individual journalists out on assignment may be subject to arbitrary arrest and other forms of harassment by the security forces. However, it is important to emphasize that — as when looking into allegations of monopolizing control over government institutions — each case must be judged on its own terms, and not reduced to a dogmatic paradigm of analysis.
In this context, take the case of the TV station al-Baghdadia, which is owned by Iraqi exiles residing in Egypt. On November 24, the Iraqi security forces barred it from covering the festival of Ashura in Baghdad, and havemost recently compelled the outlet to go off-air, with the Ministry of Interior citing a refusal to sign a list of regulations (unclear as to precisely what) and lack of payment of proper broadcasting fees. The latter allegation also exists against the women's radio station al-Mahaba, which has been compelled to shut down as well.
While it is tempting to see the move against al-Baghdadia as simple intolerance of a media outlet critical of the government (recall that Mundathar al-Zaidi — the journalist who gained international renown for throwing his shoe at George Bush in a meeting with Maliki — worked for this station), a closer analysis should show that there is at least one other factor at play here. The fact is that the station was forced to shut down briefly before for giving a voice on air to the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) terrorists who massacred 52 people in the Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad in October 2010.
In a speech at the opening ceremony marking the restoration of the church this month, Maliki urged the EU not to encourage Iraqi Christians to emigrate. Yet around the same time, on December 13, al-Baghdadia TV broadcast a fatwa by Ayatollah al-Baghdadi (who currently resides in Syria), declaring Iraq's Christians to be "polytheists" and "friends of Zionists" who should either convert to Islam or die. Catholics from Baghdad
speaking to AsiaNews said that the fatwa could trigger alarm in some quarters.
From the above evidence, it is reasonable to conclude that at least part of the reason behind the recent shutdown of al-Baghdadia TV is a need on the part of the government to demonstrate some form of commitment to protecting Christians against extremist incitement, even if such a justification for moving against the station has not been declared specifically as an official reason.
For comparison, one should note the uproar triggered when al-Jazeera's Baghdad office was ordered shut for a month in August 2004 by the interim Iraqi government on charges of inciting extremist sentiment.
Kurds, Border Disputes and Violence: Much media attention has focused on the recent build-up of Kurdish Peshmerga militiamen and Iraqi army forces in the disputed areas in the north of Iraq. The build-up began with an incident in the town of Tuz Kharmuto in which there were alleged clashes between Iraqi troops and Kurdish Peshmerga.
Before assuming an impending all-out Arab-Kurd conflict, however, it is important to realize that much of the current tension between Baghdad and the KRG is centered on the personal rivalry between Maliki and KRG premier Massoud Barzani, who not only gave refuge to Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi (handed multiple death sentences on terrorism charges, which — issued as they were in the context of political rivalry between Maliki and Hashemi — nonetheless probably have basis in reality) but also aimed to have Maliki unseated in the efforts to bring about a no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister.
In contrast, Jalal Talabani, who heads the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in coalition with Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party in the KRG, has remained an ally of Maliki: indeed, it was Talabani's indication that he would not support a no-confidence vote that proved most decisive in preserving Maliki's position. When these personal rivalries and alliances are noted, it comes as no surprise that Talabani appears to have played a role in mediating between Baghdad and the KRG and defusing the latest round of brinkmanship.
In fact, as I predicted, the entire affair was brinkmanship all along. It is of course true that much heated rhetoric is thrown around by both sides. For example, Barzani accused Maliki of planning to bomb KRG sites with fighter jets, and has said that all disputed areas should be renamed "Kurdish" areas, while Sami al-Askari — a member of Maliki's State of Law bloc — has threatened war if Exxon Mobil goes ahead with its plans to explore for oil and gas resources in disputed areas following its signing of such contracts with the KRG (considered illegal by Baghdad).
Further, the remnants of the Sunni Arab insurgency — principally al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Baathist Naqshibandi — are attempting to whip up further sectarian tensions in the disputed areas with opportunisticbomb attacks.
Nonetheless, the fact is that both the KRG and Baghdad recognize that an all-out open conflict is not in anyone's interests, and so the heated rhetoric remains no more than just talk. Given a similar incident ofbrinkmanship on the Syrian border back in the summer, the outcome here was somewhat predictable. All that said, issues like the status of the disputed town of Kirkuk and the establishment of the Tigris Operations Command by the central government in the area seem likely to continue to evade full resolution.
On a concluding note, something should be said about recent speculation on a pending energy deal between the Turkish government and the KRG. According to journalist Ben Van Heuvelen, this deal is essentially as follows: "A new Turkish company, backed by the government, is proposing to drill for oil and gas in Kurdistan and build pipelines to transport those resources to international markets."
Since Baghdad is responsible for supplying most of the KRG's budget, a deal could over the next several years greatly reduce the KRG's financial dependence on the central Iraqi government and prove a significant step towards independence if so desired. One of Turkey's main considerations as regards importing energy resources from Iraqi Kurdistan is the fact that energy demand is rapidly growing in Turkey, and unsurprisingly Ankara feels a need to diversify its range of suppliers.
Yet according to Heuvelen's report, the man responsible for reviewing the alleged pending deal between the KRG and the Turkish government is the Energy Minister Taner Yildiz, who — as journalist Wladimir van Wilgenburg notes — has indicated to Turkish newspaper Hurriyet Daily News that no energy deal will be signed without the approval of the Iraqi central government, which would be fiercely opposed to any deal between the KRG and Ankara without prior consultation of Baghdad.
In addition, Turkey has yet to indicate support for any kind of independent Kurdish entity — given the problem of its own restive Kurdish population in the southeast — and despite the generally poor relations with Baghdad, is still committed to the idea of a unified Iraq. In truth, much of the current speculation could be a repeat of the exaggerated media hype in the summer as regards energy negotiations between Turkey and the KRG.
In short, therefore, as leader of the opposition "Gorran" movement in the KRG put it to the Turkish newspaper az-Zaman in a recent interview: "It is the dream of all Kurds to have an independent state. However, one has to take into account the realities of the situation and realize that there is still a lot of work that needs to be done before we can start thinking about independence. So, as it currently stands, I believe it will be some time before we can start considering this realistically."
To conclude, it can be seen that internal politics are generally not given their due when it comes to assessing events inside Iraq. Foreign influence is greatly overplayed, and it is clear how personal rivalries have become deeply intertwined with major issues like corruption.
In general, there is also a tendency to view things too much through the ethno-sectarian paradigm — something that also gives rise to excessive sensationalism. This has been most apparent in the coverage of trends in violence as well as tensions between the KRG and the Iraqi central government. While instability is a great concern, Iraq is hardly "unraveling."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and a student at Brasenose College, Oxford University.
6)"Forward" to the Past?
The political slogan "Forward" served Barack Obama well during this year's election campaign. It said that he was for going forward, while Republicans were for "going back to the failed policies that got us into this mess in the first place."
It was great political rhetoric and great political theater. Moreover, the Republicans did virtually nothing to challenge its shaky assumptions with a few hard facts that could have made those assumptions collapse like a house of cards.
More is involved than this year's political battles. The word "forward" has been a political battle cry on the left for more than a century. It has been almost as widely used as the left's other favorite word, "equality," which goes back more than two centuries.
The seductive notion of economic equality has appealed to many people. The pilgrims started out with the idea of equal sharing. The colony of Georgia began with very similar ideas. In the midwest, Britain's Robert Owen-- who coined the term "socialism"-- set up colonies based on communal living and economic equality.
What these idealistic experiments all had in common was that they failed.
They learned the hard way that people would not do as much for the common good as they would do for their own good. The pilgrims nearly starved learning that lesson. But they learned it. Land that had been common property was turned into private property, which produced a lot more food.
Similar experiments were tried on a larger scale in other countries around the world. In the biggest of these experiments-- the Soviet Union under Stalin and Communist China under Mao-- people literally starved to death by the millions.
In the Soviet Union, at least 6 million people starved to death in the 1930s, in a country with some of the most fertile land on the continent of Europe, a country that had once been a major exporter of food. In China, tens of millions of people starved to death under Mao.
Despite what the left seems to believe, private property rights do not exist simply for the sake of people who own property. Americans who do not own a single acre of land have abundant food available because land is still private property in the United States, even though the left is doing its best to restrict property rights in both the countrysides and in the cities.
The other big feature of the egalitarian left is promotion of a huge inequality of power, while deploring economic inequality.
It is no coincidence that those who are going ballistic over the economic inequality between the top one or two percent and the rest of us are promoting a far more dangerous concentration of political power in Washington-- where far less than one percent of the population increasingly tell 300 million Americans what they can and cannot do, on everything from their light bulbs and toilets to their medical care.
This movement in the direction of central planning, under the name of "forward," is in fact going back to a system that has failed in countries around the world-- under both democratic and dictatorial governments and among peoples of virtually every race, color, creed, and nationality.
It is one thing when conservative leaders like Ronald Reagan in America and Margaret Thatcher in Britain declared central planning a failure. But what really puts the nails in the coffin is that, before the end of the 20th century, both socialist and communist governments around the world began abandoning central planning.
India and China are the biggest examples. In both countries, cutbacks on government control of the economy were followed by dramatically increased economic growth rates, lifting millions of people out of poverty in both countries.
The ultimate irony is that the most recent international survey of free markets found the world's freest market to be in Hong Kong-- in a country still ruled by communists! But the Chinese communists have at least learned, the hard way, a lesson that Barack Obama seems oblivious to.
We are going "forward" to a repeatedly failed past, following a charismatic leader, after a 20th century in which charismatic leaders led countries into unprecedented catastrophes.
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