In October of 1965, Ronald Reagan came to speak at UCLA. I was a senior, and it was a depressing time to be a College Republican. Barry Goldwater had been thrashed the previous year, and my professors were so left-wing that I took one to court because of her biased grading.

The UCLA Student Union was packed, SRO. There was a buzz that Reagan was considering running for governor against the entrenched Democrat, Pat Brown. My buddy and fellow CR Bill Anthony and I sat expectantly in the audience. As Reagan began to speak, he filled the room with an energy that was both exciting and soothing, and the thousand-plus students were entranced.

Then he caught us by surprise.

In the Monday, June 14, 2004 edition of The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan wrote a despicable hit piece on her fellow speechwriters in the Reagan White House. It was entitled “The Ben Elliott Story,” supposedly a tribute to the White House Chief Speechwriter told in the context of seeing him at President Reagan’s National Cathedral funeral service - yet it ended up being a nauseating attack on her former colleagues.

The people she attacked are my friends, and it so happened that I attended President Reagan’s service with them. That she took this sacred occasion to vindictively smear them is beyond and beneath contempt. I was compelled to write the following letter to The Wall Street Journal:

To: Ned Crabb, Letters Editor, Wall St. Journal
It is a sad and bizarre spectacle to see Peggy Noonan immolate her reputation in a gratuitous spasm of spite. As someone who worked closely with the Reagan White House speechwriters for five years - 1983-1988 - I know the source of the resentment. She was never part of the team.

In order to understand what is going on in Iraq right now, it is simply imperative that you do a quick re-read of Childishness in Iraq written in August of 2003 and posted in Classics. This will give you the initial background on Ahmad Chalabi and the source of the vendetta Jordan’s King Hussein, the CIA, and the State Department have been conducting against him.

What’s changed is that the line in the second paragraph about Jerry Bremer following the lead of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz rather than “his putative bosses at State” is no longer true. Bremer’s real boss is Robert Blackwill, Deputy National Security Advisor at the White House. He is directly in charge of US policy and operations in Iraq, and he has sold out to the squishes at State and the CIA. Which means he has sold America out to the UN.

This is a first-class disaster, folks. It is the real scandal in Iraq, not the humiliation of Baathist thugs by seven yahoos in one cell block of Abu Ghraib. The trashing of Ahmad Chalabi, epitomized by Newsweek’s cover story this week entitled “Our Con Man in Iraq,” means that State and the CIA have staged a coup in Iraq - and that only Chalabi had the guts to oppose it. So he had to be destroyed.

Here’s the sordid deal.

Back in early February, I told you that Ariel Sharon’s purpose in building a Security Fence walling off the “West Bank” was to precipitate a civil war among Palestinian terrorist groups (The Coming Palestinian Civil War, TTP Weekly Report, February 6, 2004). Four months later, we can see Sharon’s strategy is clearly working.

In those intervening months, terrorist attacks are way down while the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) has relentlessly hunted terrorists down and either killed or stymied them. Hamas has been decapitated. Arafat, sick and dying, finds his grip on power slipping away. Even senior members of the Palestinian Authority run by Arafat are admitting that it would disintegrate except that it pays salaries to 140,000 workers - which are now in serious arrears.

The February essay predicted a dark period of murderous chaos with Palestinian militants killing each other off in a warfare of competing mafias. Thus there are now news reports that militants in the West Bank and Gaza have “created a lawless society in which citizens complain more about the armed gangs than about Israeli soldiers.” Yet there are indications that this could be short-lived.

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.

As many recent commentaries have noted, there was no unified command of Afghan “Mujahaddin” freedom fighters resisting the Soviet occupation of their country in the 1980s. There were about half a dozen major groups and a host of smaller ones.

The legendary commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, assassinated by OBL (Osama Bin Laden) agents just before The Atrocity, belonged to the “Jamiat” group led by Burhanuddin Rabbani. Qari Baba, the famous commander in Ghazni who looked like a cross between Buddha and Genghiz Khan, was part of the Harakat group. Ramatullah Safi was the most outstanding commander of the Gailani group.

This past week has seen a good many Reaganaut Reunions here in Washington DC. At several of them, we raised our glasses to toast Gorby - Mikhail Gorbachev. All of the Reagan Doctrine guys loved Gorbachev - but not quite in the same way as did the State Department squishes.

Mikhail Gorbachev seemed to burst from nowhere when he became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) and leader of the USSR in March of 1985. The liberal media swooned over the smiling suave telegenic Russian - so smart, so sophisticated, so capable of making a shining success of Soviet Communism! We did everything we could to encourage the swooning press’ delusion - for we knew the truth about Gorby.

We know conclusively that the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal is as phony as a Bill Clinton sex denial because there are no calls for the resignation of the one individual most responsible for the abuses.

That would be the officer in charge of Abu Ghraib and all US military prisons in Iraq, the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski. And why have there been no calls for her resignation? Let’s be honest. It is because she is a woman.

Thus the frightening lesson of the abuse scandal: Political correctness trumps national security even in wartime.

In 1989 on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had a meeting in Prague, Czechoslovakia with a group of Anti-Communists dedicated to ridding their country from Soviet rule. Their leader was Martin Palous, a founder of the Charter 77 democracy movement.

He explained that when he and other Czech intellectuals such as Vaclav Havel formed Charter 77 in 1977, they did so against all hope. “To dream of real freedom for our country was unthinkable,” he said. “The best we could ask is some little bit of light, some small increase of breathing space for us to think and talk more freely.”

Then the world changed: Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States.