Notice how quick President Bush’s father was to explain to the press that we don’t have to take seriously what his son said at his second inaugural about “ending tyranny in our world”? Thanks for sharing, Dad. What you really made clear is why you never had a second inaugural yourself.

The speechwriter who wrote Bush the Elder’s first and only inaugural address (where he pledged to achieve a “kinder and gentler nation,” and Nancy Reagan exploded in anger, whispering to her husband, “Kinder and gentler than what?”), Peggy Noonan whined once again in the Wall Street Journal today about GW’s “overweening” idealism, and that his speech had no “historical context.” I guess Peggy, like her former boss, didn’t pay much attention to the news last year.

Perhaps the most important story of 2004 was the achievement of democracy in so many countries. Every “realist” squish in Washington has the vapors over GW’s suddenly becoming a radically dangerous Lone Ranger cowboy - when what’s really happened is he’s acting on the old political adage that if you discover a parade that’s going where you want, get out in front and lead it.

GW’s second inaugural address was the Vision Statement. What is needed now is the Business Plan, how the vision is to be actually implemented. For an insight into Bush’s Business Plan for Ending Tyranny, we can look at the drunk coal miners of Donetsk.

Dr. Wheeler's Final Behind The Lines Column from Strategic Investment

It is a humbling experience to have a deep conversation with a truly great man. Harry Wu has been nominated repeatedly for the Nobel Peace Prize. He is in the same league with Andrei Sakharov, Lech Walesa, Aung San Suu Kyi, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It is Harry Wu who deserved the Nobel Peace Prize last year, not a racist kook, Wangari Maathai of Kenya, who believes AIDS was invented by white scientists to exterminate black Africans.

When I had lunch with Harry this week, we agreed that China faces chaos - and that the Chicoms will most likely try to cure the chaos with war.

The New York Times reports (12/31/04) that there were over 60,000 - sixty thousand - riots, disturbances, and public protests throughout China in 2004. "People can see how corrupt the government is while they barely have enough to eat," a demonstration leader was quoted. "Our society has a short fuse, just waiting for a spark."

Chinese, written and spoken, is my candidate for the weirdest major language on earth. At the Monterey Institute, where US diplomats are taught foreign languages, it takes on average 600 hours of instruction to be fluent in a European language such as French or German, 1200 for Arabic - and 2400 in Chinese. (This means, of course, that for China and the world to communicate, Chinese must speak English, as the world will never speak Chinese).

Beyond the technical difficulties lie far deeper problems, resulting in a grossly myopic view of China’s history and future. The one buried most deeply is the way Chinese grammar reverses time: the past, in Chinese, is in front of or before you, while the future is behind you. Chinese culture is oriented towards the past, reading Chinese history through a distorted lens, and stubbornly attempting to apply illusory lessons to the present.

This is precisely what China’s military and government leaders are doing with their strategy towards America.

The deepest and darkest joke I’ve heard in a long time goes like this. Osama bin Laden prays to the spirit of Yasser Arafat who then appears before him. “Yasser, please help me understand something,” requests Osama. “We’re both fellow terrorists. You’ve even killed more infidels than I have. Yet you get the Nobel Peace Prize, your funeral is attended by heads of state from around the world, and European newspapers compare you to Moses - while I am the world’s most hunted and hated man, reduced to hiding in inaccessible mountain caves. How did you do it? What is your secret?”

Yasser breaks into a ghostly smile. “That’s easy,” he explains. “I only killed Jews.”

A deep joke always reveals a black truth. European hatred of Jews is an ancient hate, and periodically erupts from the darkness of men’s souls into the light of history. Today in Europe -- particularly France -- another eruption has begun. It will get worse unless it is fought and opposed.

It is getting worse because Jews are the Europeans’ perennial scapegoat for cultural failure. Old Europe now faces demographic doom because its native inhabitants refuse to have children, and economic doom because they would rather go on vacation than work. You know how bad it is when Consumer Reports currently ranks Mercedes and BMW as the most poorly made of the world’s luxury cars.

To rescue Old Europe economically and demographically, to exorcize its Jew-hatred, it needs to be rescued culturally. There is only one way to do that, and only one group of folks to do it: American Christians.

In the spring of 2000, I was the keynote speaker at a conference of business leaders from Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, held in Cartagena, Colombia. The fellows from Venezuela all had the same question: What can we do about Hugo Chavez?

I told them they had to face reality. As an admirer and protégé of Fidel Castro, there is one way and one way only he will leave office: in a coffin. This was not what they wanted to hear...

Democracy is not only the best guarantor of peace between countries, but the best guarantor of peace within a country as well. When people can choose their government with ballots they do not have to - nor have any moral right to - resort to bullets.

Here’s the flip side: When people cannot choose their government with ballots, then they do have to resort to bullets - and they have a moral right to.

Democracy is institutionalized peace. Dictatorship is institutionalized violence. So let’s state it clearly: A dictator has no right to life. By his violent and murderous suppression of freedom, the people so suppressed have the moral right to terminate his existence.

As an Army General, Colin Powell knows how to wage war. Unfortunately, the kind of war he knows how to wage best is bureaucratic, not military. Worse than unfortunately, the war he is waging is against his own president.

It is tempting to hurl accusations of treason or something close to it in the face of the State Department’s chronic obsession of coddling America’s enemies. But with rare exceptions, the Pinstripes are far from traitors and look upon themselves as loyal Americans. Conservatives need to resist the urge to question their patriotism, and examine instead their method of diplomatic reasoning - which can be characterized as Sophisticated Stupidity.

The Moslem terrorists who bombed the Madrid trains last month are members of an Islamic movement called Takfir wal Hijra (Repentance and Migration). Originally formed in Egypt in the 1970s as part of Iqwan Muslimi (The Moslem Brotherhood), it was responsible for the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981, and scores of savage atrocities in Algeria. The organizer of the Madrid terrorism, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is a Takfir. (See Michael Ledeens column on Zarqawi in this weeks TTP report.)

The Takfiris are now leading a reorganized Al Qaeda as the main Islamic threat to the West. For not only do they advocate the most purposefully vicious terrorist acts they can conceive, but also using immigration as a Trojan horse to conduct Jihad inside Western countries.

As a recent Wall Street Journal article (3/29/04, pA16) puts it: Takfiris see immigration as a key way to extend the radical ideas into Western Europe. One Takfiri scholar, Abu Basir, wrote in 2001 that jihad and immigration go together...the one cannot be achieved without the other.

Which brings me to Mexico.

[Written ten days after the start of The War in Iraq, March 31, 2003]


Let me say it straight. I am almost sixty years old, and I have never in my life been prouder to be an American than I am today.

I was talking to my friend Tony Blankley, editorial editor of the Washington Times, the other day, and when I compared George Bush to Ronald Reagan, Tony replied, “It may turn out to be the other way around.”

It is a commonplace in a story or article about the Arab-Israeli conflict that mentions Jerusalem to repeat the Moslem mantra that “Jerusalem is the third holiest city in all Islam, next to Mecca and Medina.”

You’ve heard this innumerable times -- but how come? Just why is Jerusalem so important to not just Jews and Christians but Moslems as well?

Have you ever noticed that the older you get, the scarier the world gets -- because you keep noticing that many of the folks who run it are not very smart?

I was at a private luncheon in Washington earlier this week and among the guests were two guys from the CIA. Not only were they clueless -- we were discussing Russia -- they were just not bright. OK -- so picking on folks from the Three Bad Words is too easy. Let’s raise the bar and talk about the Chinese.

There are a lot of people here in DC who constantly worry about the Chinese, and predict the Chicoms -- China’s Communist rulers -- will soon pose the greatest threat to America’s security. The worriers offer considerable evidence for their argument and they may well be right. But here’s a question:

If the Chinese are so smart, how come they are busy surrounding themselves with neighbors who can aim nuclear missiles at them?

The critical insight about the Soviet Union that led to its downfall was -- as I explained in countless Reagan Doctrine briefings during the 1980s -- that the Soviet Union didnt simply possess an imperialist empire of colonies beyond its borders: it was itself a colonial empire within its borders.

It was a gorgeous spring day in Washington D.C. when I got a call from Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA). The year was 1995. "Hey, Jack, can you come to my office late this afternoon? The Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg and his entourage will be here and I'd like you in on the meeting."