The Rant

I am sure many Republicans, given the benefit of hindsight, would nix invading Iraq. I certainly would. I do believe that the last five years has been a learning experience for Americans, forced to take their minds off the sports schedule and latest electronic gadget or new car in order to try and focus on this confusing group of world citizens called Moslems. As they listen to news from London and Paris and Spain about what the Moslem immigrants are up to, as they listen to what Moslems all over the world have to say about the United States and the west, as they examine the way politics works in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, "Palestine," Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, etc. it is slowly dawning on our somewhat slow witted masses that Moslems are not necessarily "just like us." Nor is Islam just like Christianity or Judaism. Moslems do not believe in "turning the other cheek." THings we take for granted such as freedom of speech, freedom o...

Bob: An small part of the Vanity Fair article available in the Jan 07 issue or at www.vanityfair.com . I think what is interesting is that the orignal premise...going to Iraq is not questioned. Iraq Neo Culpa Please don't call them "architects of the war": Richard (Prince of Darkness) Perle, David (Axis of Evil) Frum, Kenneth (Cakewalk) Adelman, and other elite neoconservatives who pushed for the invasion of Iraq are beside themselves at the result. by David Rose January 2007 A preview of this article was published on VF.com on November 3, 2006. Iraq-war cheerleader Richard Perle now says an invasion may have been the wrong way to topple Saddam Hussein. Photographs by Nigel Parry. I: About That Cakewalk … I remember sitting with Richard Perle in his suite at London's Grosvenor House hotel and receiving a private lecture on the importance of securing victory in Iraq. "Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform," he said. "It won't be Westmi...

In considering the mess in Iraq, not to mention other areas of the world I was moved to be thankful that I live in the U.S.A. We may not be perfect, but we can hold an election with a low probability that the candidates will be assasinated. We have a dominant religion that promotes peace, not jihad. We are able to hand over power from party to party quite regularly without violence. Our courts are relatively fair and bribery is rare in my experience. We have the best set of colleges in the world, as is reflected by all the foreign students seeking to come here. Overall, this is a great country and we are lucky to live here. One of the chief problems in Iraq is that they do not seem to have the basic buidling blocks for building a Constitutional democracy. They come from a culture of violence, where all disputes are settled with guns or swords. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink. I think it is time to turn Iraq over to the Iraquis with our best wishes. Onl...

Bob: I was watching the Colbert Report last night. He reports our great vice-president annouced recently that.....drum roll please...... Don Rumsfeld is the greatest Secretary of Defense our nation has ever had........ I just wanted you to know.

Here is another suggestion by Diana West to just withdraw and let the Muslims continue their 1000 year old sectarian battle. _______________ Funny thing about the recent op-ed by Nawaf Obaid in The Washington Post outlining likely Saudi actions if the United States withdraws from Iraq: namely, that Saudis would both support Sunnis in Iraq (versus Shi'ites supported by Iran) and manipulate the oil market to "strangle" the Iranian economy. I think it sounds peachy, this let-them-devour-each-other strategy — which I'm guessing many Americans mutter to one another in frankness, if not also in confidence. You can read the entire thing here. --------------- I note that this sort of suggestion was not included in the Iraq Study Group. It has increasing appeal to me because I am less sanguine about the possibility of "moderate Muslims" who would appreciate our efforts to institute a western style Constitutional democracy. They say they want this, to get our mon...

Hillary Clinton and some Democrats are seeking a single provider health care system. As someone who has made frequent use of our medical system of late, this catches my interest. A single provider health care system is basically a government monopoly on health care. Advocates for such a system emphasize that it is free. The problem is that you can not pay for services if you want to. All private healthcare is outlawed. Any "free" product or service will necessarily create shortages as anyone who has every studied basic economics can confirm. The market price of a product is the price that the demand equals the supply. If you raise the price above market price, you will have a surplus of goods. If you lower the price, you will have shortages. Free is always below the market price. In Canada, which makes private paying for medical services illegal, there are long waits for things we take for granted, such as an MRI or simple routine surgeries. Michelle Malkin hosts a short fil...

December 12, 2006 By Bruce Bartlett For many years, those who consider themselves to be libertarians have been fairly reliable members of the Republican coalition. Although no libertarian would consider himself or herself to be entirely in agreement with either major party, they have historically sided with the GOP. But the relationship today seems more deeply strained than any time in the last 30 years, and a divorce may be forthcoming. Basically, libertarians are allied with the right on economic issues and the left on everything else. They believe in the free market and freedom of choice in areas such as drugs, and favor a noninterventionist foreign policy. Consequently, someone who is a libertarian could prefer to ally with the right or the left, depending on what set of issues is most important to him or her. I first became aware of the libertarian philosophy in 1969, when there was a big split in a college-based group called Young Americans for Freedom, which was supposed to be t...

Iraq’s Biggest Failing: There Is No Iraq By ROGER COHEN Published: December 10, 2006 WAR spews words. They make up its fog. Washington was awash in them last week as the damage control exercise called the Iraq Study Group culminated with a proposal to extract all American combat brigades by early 2008, leaving a few tens of thousands of troops to train the Iraqi Army or protect the trainers. As befits a bipartisan report on what looks like a lose-lose situation, it was a fudge. But beyond the words — from President Bush’s chagrin at “the pace of success” to the report’s “grave and deteriorating” situation — lie people, the millions of Iraqis who have to get their kids up in the morning, those dimly discernible objects of the myriad political contortions. One of them, a 32-year-old Iraqi engineer encountered earlier this year in Baghdad, had this to say in a desperate e-mail message: “I am facing the most difficult times of my life here in Baghdad. Since I am a Sunni, I became a target ...

Ahmadinejad And Thin Ice By George F. Will Newsweek Dec. 18, 2006 issue - How gruesome was 2006? the year's most consequential person was Iran's president, who says the Holocaust did not happen and vows to complete it. Regarding his nuclear aspirations, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose manias are leavened with realism, treated the United Nations as a figment of the imagination of a fiction—the "international community." Democrats, given control of Congress because of Iraq, vowed to raise the minimum wage. Nimble and graceful Barack Obama became the Democrats' Fred Astaire, adored because of, well, perhaps the way he wears his hat, the way he sips his tea. And the way he isn't Hillary. This year's civil-rights outrage was "soaring" and "record" gasoline prices, a violation of Americans' inalienable right to pay for a gallon no more than they paid 25 years ago. By December the price of a gallon, adjusted for inflation, was 83 cents lower th...

by Andrew Sullivan By the way, the Iranians have developed a missile called “Zelzad 1.” Its namesake is a Koranic verse that tells of a conflagration that precipitates Judgment Day. The missile is emblazoned with the slogan: “We will trample America under our feet. Death to America.” Meanwhile, less than a month ago, MEMRI recorded Yahya Safavi, a commander of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, repeatedly referring to the United States as “the enemy” in an interview on Iranian television. “The Americans,” Safavi brayed, “have many weaknesses. In fact, in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they clearly displayed their strengths and weaknesses. We have planned our strategy precisely on the basis of their strengths and weaknesses.” He added that Iran had been studying “the enemy” and determined that there wasn’t “any motivation among the American forces in Iraq. They are very cowardly…. When their commanders encounter a problem, they burst into tears. We did not see such spectacles in the ei...

FP: So is there any possibility of building democracy in the Islamic world? Davis: In a word, no. If one means by democracy nothing more that some kind of nominal electoral process, then technically there are already democracies in the Islamic world, but that definition is not terribly meaningful. If ones means democracy as an open society on the Western model with freedom of speech, religion, and equality before the law, then the answer is categorically no. As we saw in the elections held in the West Bank and Gaza, the will of the people there is for Islamic government. It is possible to have elections in an Islamic country as long as Sharia law is not violated - which is hardly what we would call democracy. Democracy implies some sort of pluralism, which is the very antithesis of a Sharia state. Installing genuine democracy would first require a program of de-Islamization, which would be simply impossible. . . . . This is a harsh reality but one we must face. Islam has existed in its...

How the US distorts its self-image By Robert Kagan Published: December 5 2006 18:20 It is astonishing how little Americans understand their own nation. Recently, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a man long on intellect and government experience, opined that the Iraq war has generated so much controversy because it is such an aberration: “The emphasis on promotion of democracy, the emphasis on regime change, the war of choice in Iraq – all of these are departures from the traditional approach.” Many Europeans would certainly like to believe that Iraq was the product of aberrant “neo-conservative” ideas about foreign policy and that a traditional America lies just around the corner. Many Americans would like to believe this, too. We prefer to see ourselves as a peace-loving, introspective lot, a nation born in innocence and historically never choosing war but compelled to war by others. This self-image is at odds with reality, however. Americans have gone to war freque...

Islam gets concessions; infidels get conquered What they capture, they keep. When they lose, they complain to the U.N. By Raymond Ibrahim, RAYMOND IBRAHIM is a research librarian at the Library of Congress. His book, "The Al Qaeda Reader," translations of religious texts and propaganda, will be published in April. December 5, 2006 LATimes http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ibrahim5dec05,0,5108432.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail IN THE DAYS before Pope Benedict XVI's visit last Thursday to the Hagia Sophia complex in Istanbul, Muslims and Turks expressed fear, apprehension and rage. "The risk," according to Turkey's independent newspaper Vatan, "is that Benedict will send Turkey's Muslims and much of the Islamic world into paroxysms of fury if there is any perception that the pope is trying to re-appropriate a Christian center that fell to Muslims." Apparently making the sign of the cross or any other gesture of Christian worship in Ha...

By Charles Krauthammer WASHINGTON -- Now that the "realists'' have ridden into town gleefully consigning the Bush doctrine to the ash heap of history, everyone has discovered the notion of interests, as if it were some new idea thought up by James Baker and the Iraq Study Group. What do people think we've been doing for the last five years? True, the president's rhetoric has a tendency to go soaringly Wilsonian, e.g. the banishing tyranny stuff in his second inaugural address. But our policies of democratization in Iraq and Afghanistan and Lebanon have been deeply rooted in the most concrete of American interests. If we really had been in the grip of "idealism,'' we'd be deep in Chad and Burma and Darfur. We are not. We are instead trying to sustain fragile democracies in three strategically important countries -- Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon -- that form the geographic parentheses around the principal threat to Western interests in the region, t...

By Victor Davis Hanson With the gruesome killing of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, Vladimir Putin's Russia stands accused of poisoning yet another critic. Meanwhile, Syria continues to mastermind the murders of Lebanese democrats. Israeli-free Gaza is as violent as ever. Hezbollah is busy replenishing its stock of Iranian missiles. The theocracy in Iran keeps promising an end to Israel. Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is slowly strangling democracy in Latin America in a manner that an impoverished Fidel Castro never could. And then, of course, there's Afghanistan and Iraq. It's easy to think that all of this violent instability across the globe is unconnected. But, in fact, in one way or another, oil and its huge profits are at the bottom of a lot of it. Islamic jihadists, fed from petrodollar wealth of the Middle East, have the cash to arm and plan operations from Baghdad and Kabul to Madrid and London. Thanks to oil, unhinged leaders like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran...

BAKER'S SELLOUT PLAN By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN McGANN November 29, 2006 -- CAN Iran help us bail out of Iraq? Maybe - but we'd better take a hard look at the price. The idea has reportedly been floated via a draft report to the Iraq Study Group (headed by former Secretary of State James Baker), which calls for a "dialogue" with Iran as well as Syria. Along the same lines, British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently said Iran could be a "partner" with the West if it did not develop a bomb. Presumably, we'd ask Iran to help stabilize the situation in Iraq, curb the Shiite militias and encourage the Iraqi government to make sufficient concessions to the Sunnis to end or at least reduce the violence. Would it work? It could. Iran certainly has sought to arm and enflame the Shiites in Iraq. Maybe the mullahs can rein in their proxies, and let us withdraw in dignity - not holding onto the skids of the helicopter as it lifts off our embassy this time. But why...

">link Gingrich makes some good suggestions about putting the Iraq issue in a larger perspective of the worldwide conflict with countries that want to destroy us. Searching for Victory in Iraq Why the Baker-Hamilton commission ought to visit Mount Vernon. by Newt Gingrich 11/28/2006 12:00:00 AM THE SUNDAY BEFORE Thanksgiving Callista and I took some friends to Mount Vernon to see the new education center. It is an amazing tribute to George Washington and the creation of America. We watched a movie about George Washington crossing the Delaware on Christmas Eve and surprising the Hessians (German mercenaries) on Christmas Day in Trenton. As I watched, I was struck by the amazing difference between the attitude of the father of our country and the current attitudes in the city that bears his name. General Washington had had a long and painful summer and autumn of defeat in 1776. His American Army had been defeated across New York--in Brooklyn, in Manhattan, and in White Plains--a...

Constantinople was 50% Christian as recently as 1914 (its name was changed to Istanbul in 1930); today, it is less than one percent Christian. The Catholic Church has no legal recognition; Catholic churches, like other churches, remain inconspicuous so as not to draw the angry attention of mujahedin. Even the recognized Churches are not allowed to operated seminaries or build new houses of worship – in accord with ancient Islamic Sharia restrictions on non-Muslims in an Islamic state, which restrictions paradoxically enough still have at least some force in secular Turkey. The righteous fury with which the Pope will likely be greeted in Turkey will shift attention from the shame Turkish authorities should feel over the mistreatment of Christians in their land that nominally allows for religious freedom. The mainstream media will focus on protests against the Pope, and pay scant attention to anything he may say, if he says anything at all, about the oppression of Christians in Turkey....

It was only a matter of time. Depraved Palestinians first sent young adult men wearing explosives to blow themselves up on Israeli buses and in pizza parlors. Then came the phenomenon of young women doing the same. Now a grandmother has chosen this fiendish way of death. Fatma Omar An-Najar was a mother of nine and grandmother of more than 30. Her suicide in the Gaza Strip lightly injured three Israeli soldiers, so she failed to take "infidels" with her. But that is of little comfort. The use of a grandmother means more horror is coming. With teenagers as young as 16 already blowing themselves up, children are next in line to become "martyrs." Terror masterminds are brainwashing a new generation in Muslim countries. Everything from animated cartoons to educational programs to textbooks urge young people to kill and die for Islam. Clerics preach that the fastest way to get to Paradise is Shahada, or to die for Allah. Those who do are called shahids and children as yo...

John Keegan argues no, because there are no armies or battles, merely attacks against civilians. In another sense, all Islam is in permanent civil war because there is no agreement as to the legitimate successor to Mohammad. Civil war or no, it is a pain in the ass.