The liberal Alphabet Media is once again doing its best to snatch American defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq. This time, however, there is a very big difference:
The State Department is causing most of the problems in the War in Iraq today. Squishiness is endemic to Foggy Bottom. There’s something that oozes out of Foggy Bottom that emasculates people. Richard Armitage, for example, is a powerfully built weightlifter who intimidated a lot of folks when he was at the Pentagon. Once he became a State bureaucrat, he’s just another sissified pinstripe whimpering about how the Mullah Dictatorship in Iran is really a special kind of democracy.
If surgeons wielded scalpels as carelessly as to day's journalists misuse language, the mortality rate in our hospitals would soar. The latest example of this deadly abuse of terminology was the media's declaration of "civil war" in Iraq.
It was the equivalent of describing vandalism as genocide. The blaze faded, only to be reignited briefly by former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's statement last weekend that Iraq was in a civil war - a claim he swiftly retracted, to the disappointment of anchormen and -women everywhere.Perhaps it's time to consider what a civil war actually is.
For an increasing number of Islamic historians, the tradition of Mohammed being the source and explanation of the Arab Conquest, wherein Arab tribesmen on horseback emerged out of the Arabian deserts to conquer Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya and Spain in less than 80 years (636-712), stands history on its head.
They demonstrate that the story of Mohammed uniting various Arab tribes as Genghiz Khan did for the Mongols, and providing them with the religious fervor to conquer in the name of Islam, is "sacred history," rather than real history.
Denial is an often useful innate human trait. Few of us would be able to function in the present if we did not put out of mind many unpleasant realities - such as our inevitable death. The Woody Allen character in the movie "Annie Hall" stated the comic extreme version of not using the denial mechanism when, as a child he refused to do his homework because in 5 billion years the sun would explode, "So, what's the use?"
But when a person, or a society, denies emerging or imminent dangers, the peace of mind it gains will be extremely short term, while the harm may be sustained or fatal.
A prediction we hear often regarding the War on Moslem Terrorism is that it is going to last a long, long time -- for so many years into the future that no one can see the end of it.
Maybe it will. Maybe it will be a war our grandchildren will be fighting when they’re our age. But no analysis of the war shows that it must be this way. It’s just a prediction, one which could turn out to be dramatically wrong. It’s entirely possible that the War on Moslem Terrorism could be won quickly.
BAGHDAD. I'm trying. I've been trying all week. The other day, I drove another 30 miles or so on the streets and alleys of Baghdad. I'm looking for the civil war that The New York Times declared. And I just can't find it.
Maybe actually being on the ground in Iraq prevents me from seeing it. Perhaps the view's clearer from Manhattan. It could be that my background as an intelligence officer didn't give me the right skills. And riding around with the U.S. Army, looking at things first-hand, is certainly a technique to which The New York Times wouldn't stoop in such an hour of crisis.
Let me tell you what I saw anyway. Rolling with the "instant Infantry" gunners of the 1st Platoon of Bravo Battery, 4-320 Field Artillery, I saw children and teenagers in a Shia slum jumping up and down and cheering our troops as they drove by. Cheering our troops.Quiz time. What country has the most pro-America government in all of Europe? What country offers the best investment opportunities in the whole of the European continent? What country has the most spectacularly beautiful and untouched coastline along the entire Mediterranean?
The answer to all three is: Croatia.
This Monday, March 6, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will visit Washington to discuss the Middle East. Today, March 3, a high-ranking delegation of Hamas will visit Moscow at President Vladimir Putin's invitation, to meet with Lavrov. A coincidence? Hardly.
Russia aggressively courts Iran and Hamas. Last week, Russia negotiated in Tehran on establishing a uranium-enrichment joint venture, which will supply nuclear reactor fuel to the Islamic Republic.
A nuclear-armed Iran, allied with and armed by Russia and China will become a regional challenger hostile to the US, its interests, and its allies in the region.
This is why, during Mr. Lavrov's visit, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will inform her Russian counterpart that Moscow's actions in the Middle East are jeopardizing its presidency of the group of eight (G-8) leading industrial nations, its position in the Middle East Quartet, and its international role.
It was time once again to have a couple of Glen Moranjies on the rocks at the Cosmos Club with my friend Larry. It’s on Massachusetts Avenue in DC, across the river from where Larry works in this very large five-sided building.
“You heard what the Vice-President said last night, right?” he asked. Since this was rhetorical, I let him continue. “Sure, his put downs of the Breck Boy were great, but this is the sentence to key in on:
The biggest threat we face today is the possibility of terrorists smuggling a nuclear weapon or a biological agent into one of our own cities and threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
During the last few weeks some movies have come out that are, in effect, a plea for the case of terrorists. Steven Spielberg's "Munich" is one of them. (A little known fact is that there was a 1986 TV movie, ‘Sword of Gideon,' based on the same book, Vengeance, that Spielberg borrowed from freely.)
In "Munich," the murders of the 11 Israeli Olympians are treated as, well, sort of understandable, given the feelings and anxieties of the Palestinians who committed the terrorist act.
Forgive me for not finding the current explanation for treating terrorists with kid gloves very convincing. Instead, I suspect that what is going on is precisely a tad too much sympathy with terrorists. Why? Among other reasons that come to mind I would place on top the fact that terrorists are all thoroughly anti-American.
In the Senate of Ancient Rome, Marcus Porcius Cato - 234-149 BC, subsequently known as Cato the Elder to distinguish him from his great-grandson Cato the Younger - became famous for concluding every single speech he gave, no matter what the subject, with the exhortation: Carthago delenda est. Carthage must be destroyed.
Today, we need Senators and Congressmen to conclude every speech they give with the exhortation: Fallujah delenda est. Fallujah must be destroyed.
As a former intelligence officer who spent 23 years at the CIA, I am an intelligence history buff. So it is that the current media frenzy over "illegal NSA telephone taps" has an interesting precedent.
The New York Times and the Democrat Party are waging a campaign against Bush Administration electronic surveillance (misnamed "taps," by the way) of Al Qaeda communications with its contacts here in America. Their goal is for the Democrats to gain control of Congress this November, and impeach President Bush for the "crime" of "domestic spying."
Let's ask the New York Times editors if they would have President Roosevelt impeached for crimes that resulted in America's winning World War II?
That’s the question conservative California Republicans are angrily demanding an answer to. Because there is no doubt in their minds that Karl Rove, the guy who runs GW’s election campaigns, is behaving as if he intentionally wants his boss to lose the Golden State in November.
Next week a vastly important book will be published: Preemption, A Knife That Cuts Both Ways by Alan Dershowitz. Yes, that Alan Dershowitz: the hyper-liberal Harvard Law School professor.
Yet it is only for the lack of his legal scholarship that there is nary a sentence in the book that I - a very conservative editor of The Washington Times and former press secretary to Newt Gingrich - couldn't have written.
The premise of his book is that in this age of terror, there is a potential need for such devices as profiling, preventive detention, anticipatory mass inoculation, prior restraint of dangerous speech, targeted extrajudicial executions of terrorists and preemptive military action, including full-scale preventive war.
