18/12: Staying the Course
Category: America and the World
Posted by: A Waco Farmer
Today, Real Clear Politics features Charles Krauthammer's address to the Foreign Policy Research Institute from November 14, 2006 (full address here).
Some highlights:
"We are now in a period of confusion and disorientation, almost despair. I think it is worthwhile to look back historically to see how we got to where we are today."
"The Bush Doctrine held that besides attacking the immediate enemy who had perpetrated 9/11, it would have to engage in a larger enterprise of changing the underlying conditions which had given birth to this idea of Islamic radicalism, and to change the conditions that had allowed it to recruit and breed, particularly in the Arab world."
"Unless it [the Arab world] was somehow encouraged and brought along on that march [economic and political modernization], it would remain recalcitrant, alienated, oppressed, tyrannical, and the place from which the kind of atavistic attacks on America and the West that we have seen on 9/11 and since would continue.
"That's why the entire enterprise of changing the culture of the Arab world was undertaken. It was, as I and others had said at the time, a radical idea, an arrogant idea, a risky idea. But it was also the only idea of any coherence and consistency that anyone has advanced on how to change the underlying conditions that had led to 9/11 and ultimately to prevent the kind of conditions that would lead to a second 9/11."
"What we have seen [after three years of great successes], however, in the last almost two years now is what I think historians will write of as the setback.
Some highlights:
"We are now in a period of confusion and disorientation, almost despair. I think it is worthwhile to look back historically to see how we got to where we are today."
"The Bush Doctrine held that besides attacking the immediate enemy who had perpetrated 9/11, it would have to engage in a larger enterprise of changing the underlying conditions which had given birth to this idea of Islamic radicalism, and to change the conditions that had allowed it to recruit and breed, particularly in the Arab world."
"Unless it [the Arab world] was somehow encouraged and brought along on that march [economic and political modernization], it would remain recalcitrant, alienated, oppressed, tyrannical, and the place from which the kind of atavistic attacks on America and the West that we have seen on 9/11 and since would continue.
"That's why the entire enterprise of changing the culture of the Arab world was undertaken. It was, as I and others had said at the time, a radical idea, an arrogant idea, a risky idea. But it was also the only idea of any coherence and consistency that anyone has advanced on how to change the underlying conditions that had led to 9/11 and ultimately to prevent the kind of conditions that would lead to a second 9/11."
"What we have seen [after three years of great successes], however, in the last almost two years now is what I think historians will write of as the setback.
17/12: Understanding the Enemy
Category: America and the World
Posted by: an okie gardener
Understanding someone means attempting to discover what that person means by his or her speech. Not what you first think the utterance might mean. Take the word "innocent." Here is a link to a video of a BBC interview with a radical Muslim. In the interview he affirms that non-Muslims are by definition not innocent since they have rejected Islam.
So, therefore, please be aware that in the mind of a radical Islamist, no Western civilian is really an innocent life. What you mean by "innocent life," is not the same thing that a radical Muslim means by "innocent life."
In commenting on this video, Jihadwatch observes "Choudhury can and no doubt does easily support his view from the Qur'an, in which Jews and Christians are under Allah's curse (9:30) and unbelievers are the "vilest of creatures" (98:6)."
So, therefore, please be aware that in the mind of a radical Islamist, no Western civilian is really an innocent life. What you mean by "innocent life," is not the same thing that a radical Muslim means by "innocent life."
In commenting on this video, Jihadwatch observes "Choudhury can and no doubt does easily support his view from the Qur'an, in which Jews and Christians are under Allah's curse (9:30) and unbelievers are the "vilest of creatures" (98:6)."
Category: America and the World
Posted by: an okie gardener
Tagging on to the previous post on topic, this link is to a 2004 note in Middle East Quarterly on the supposed influence of the book The Arab Mind on Neocons. The Arab Mind by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist, is a book first published in 1973 with very politically incorrect conclusions.
The 2002 edition contains a forward that summarizes the book. Full text of the forward is at the above link. A portion is below, though I encourage you to go to the link and read the entire forward.
The 2002 edition contains a forward that summarizes the book. Full text of the forward is at the above link. A portion is below, though I encourage you to go to the link and read the entire forward.
16/12: Happy Hanukkah
Category: From the Heart
Posted by: an okie gardener
16/12: Give 'em Hell, George
Two days ago Real Clear Politics featured Timothy Garton Ash's blistering analysis of where we are in Iraq:
"What an amazing bloody catastrophe. The Bush administration's policy towards the Middle East over the five years since 9/11 is culminating in a multiple train crash. Never in the field of human conflict was so little achieved by so great a country at such vast expense. In every vital area of the wider Middle East, American policy over the last five years has taken a bad situation and made it worse."
Sobering observations from a voice not unsympathetic to the United States and George Bush. You should read the full essay (linked here).
However, after you read the essay--and have given it serious consideration--come back in off the ledge. Things in Iraq are bad, but with a little luck we will avoid Armageddon. Just as the graveyards are filled with indispensable men, history is littered with impossible situations--but here we are. And we are likely to survive this troubling time as well.
George Bush is no worse off than Harry Truman was in December of 1950. After suffering humiliating losses at the hands of the Republicans in the midterm elections that fall, Truman woke up one morning in late November to the news that hundreds of thousands of Chinese had crossed the Yalu River and completely turned the tide of the Korean War. American forces were in full retreat. The President's commanding general counseled that a wider war was the only option, and he seemed intent on not taking "no" for an answer. On the other hand, the joint chiefs warned that a wider war in Asia was unwinable. The President faced a cataclysmic crisis in which there were no good answers; moreover, the entire post-war strategy of containment and commitment to fighting communist aggression hung in the balance.
Truman did not find a way to win the war in Korea. He could do no better than a bloody two-year stalemate that cost more than 30,000 American lives and a swath of destruction and despair for the residents of the Korean peninsula. In the end, Truman could not even find a path out of Korea (he would leave that to a Republican administration swept into the Oval Office in 1952). More than fifty years later, Korea is still a festering sore.
There are some, undoubtedly, who would say that Truman erred in not following the advice of Douglas MacArthur and taking on the Chinese and Soviets in one final horrific battle between good and evil.
I am of the opinion that Truman did the right thing. He hung tough. He did not panic. He spent the next two years "suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," as well as dealing with the consequences of his own decisions that had turned sour.
Truman played it tough but safe. He did not bet it all. He took the long view, understanding (maybe hoping is more accurate) that the American system, over time, would win the all-important bipolar contest of ideologies.
We must hang tough--but we need not be reckless. We are embarked in an extremely long-term battle of ideologies. The race is not always to the swiftest--but to the one who endures. We must endure.
"What an amazing bloody catastrophe. The Bush administration's policy towards the Middle East over the five years since 9/11 is culminating in a multiple train crash. Never in the field of human conflict was so little achieved by so great a country at such vast expense. In every vital area of the wider Middle East, American policy over the last five years has taken a bad situation and made it worse."
Sobering observations from a voice not unsympathetic to the United States and George Bush. You should read the full essay (linked here).
However, after you read the essay--and have given it serious consideration--come back in off the ledge. Things in Iraq are bad, but with a little luck we will avoid Armageddon. Just as the graveyards are filled with indispensable men, history is littered with impossible situations--but here we are. And we are likely to survive this troubling time as well.
George Bush is no worse off than Harry Truman was in December of 1950. After suffering humiliating losses at the hands of the Republicans in the midterm elections that fall, Truman woke up one morning in late November to the news that hundreds of thousands of Chinese had crossed the Yalu River and completely turned the tide of the Korean War. American forces were in full retreat. The President's commanding general counseled that a wider war was the only option, and he seemed intent on not taking "no" for an answer. On the other hand, the joint chiefs warned that a wider war in Asia was unwinable. The President faced a cataclysmic crisis in which there were no good answers; moreover, the entire post-war strategy of containment and commitment to fighting communist aggression hung in the balance.
Truman did not find a way to win the war in Korea. He could do no better than a bloody two-year stalemate that cost more than 30,000 American lives and a swath of destruction and despair for the residents of the Korean peninsula. In the end, Truman could not even find a path out of Korea (he would leave that to a Republican administration swept into the Oval Office in 1952). More than fifty years later, Korea is still a festering sore.
There are some, undoubtedly, who would say that Truman erred in not following the advice of Douglas MacArthur and taking on the Chinese and Soviets in one final horrific battle between good and evil.
I am of the opinion that Truman did the right thing. He hung tough. He did not panic. He spent the next two years "suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," as well as dealing with the consequences of his own decisions that had turned sour.
Truman played it tough but safe. He did not bet it all. He took the long view, understanding (maybe hoping is more accurate) that the American system, over time, would win the all-important bipolar contest of ideologies.
We must hang tough--but we need not be reckless. We are embarked in an extremely long-term battle of ideologies. The race is not always to the swiftest--but to the one who endures. We must endure.
16/12: Is Muslim Culture Rational?
A question I have raised before. See this piece by Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the LA Times. A portion of the article.
ONE DAY IN 1994, when I was living in Ede, a small town in Holland, I got a visit from my half-sister. She and I were both immigrants from Somalia and had both applied for asylum in Holland. I was granted it; she was denied. The fact that I got asylum gave me the opportunity to study. My half-sister couldn't.
In order for me to be admitted to the university I wanted to attend, I needed to pass three courses: a language course, a civics course and a history course. It was in the preparatory history course that I, for the first time, heard of the Holocaust. I was 24 years old at that time, and my half-sister was 21.
In those days, the daily news was filled with the Rwandan genocide and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. On the day that my half-sister visited me, my head was reeling from what happened to 6 million Jews in Germany, Holland, France and Eastern Europe.
I learned that innocent men, women and children were separated from each other. Stars pinned to their shoulders, transported by train to camps, they were gassed for no other reason than for being Jewish.
I saw pictures of masses of skeletons, even of kids. I heard horrifying accounts of some of the people who had survived the terror of Auschwitz and Sobibor. I told my half-sister all this and showed her the pictures in my history book. What she said was as awful as the information in my book.
With great conviction, my half-sister cried: "It's a lie! Jews have a way of blinding people. They were not killed, gassed or massacred. But I pray to Allah that one day all the Jews in the world will be destroyed."
She was not saying anything new. As a child growing up in Saudi Arabia, I remember my teachers, my mom and our neighbors telling us practically on a daily basis that Jews are evil, the sworn enemies of Muslims, and that their only goal was to destroy Islam. We were never informed about the Holocaust.
Later, as a teenager in Kenya, when Saudi and other Persian Gulf philanthropy reached us, I remember that the building of mosques and donations to hospitals and the poor went hand in hand with the cursing of Jews. Jews were said to be responsible for the deaths of babies and for epidemics such as AIDS, and they were believed to be the cause of wars. They were greedy and would do absolutely anything to kill us Muslims. If we ever wanted to know peace and stability, and if we didn't want to be wiped out, we would have to destroy the Jews. For those of us who were not in a position to take up arms against them, it was enough for us to cup our hands, raise our eyes heavenward and pray to Allah to destroy them.
ONE DAY IN 1994, when I was living in Ede, a small town in Holland, I got a visit from my half-sister. She and I were both immigrants from Somalia and had both applied for asylum in Holland. I was granted it; she was denied. The fact that I got asylum gave me the opportunity to study. My half-sister couldn't.
In order for me to be admitted to the university I wanted to attend, I needed to pass three courses: a language course, a civics course and a history course. It was in the preparatory history course that I, for the first time, heard of the Holocaust. I was 24 years old at that time, and my half-sister was 21.
In those days, the daily news was filled with the Rwandan genocide and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. On the day that my half-sister visited me, my head was reeling from what happened to 6 million Jews in Germany, Holland, France and Eastern Europe.
I learned that innocent men, women and children were separated from each other. Stars pinned to their shoulders, transported by train to camps, they were gassed for no other reason than for being Jewish.
I saw pictures of masses of skeletons, even of kids. I heard horrifying accounts of some of the people who had survived the terror of Auschwitz and Sobibor. I told my half-sister all this and showed her the pictures in my history book. What she said was as awful as the information in my book.
With great conviction, my half-sister cried: "It's a lie! Jews have a way of blinding people. They were not killed, gassed or massacred. But I pray to Allah that one day all the Jews in the world will be destroyed."
She was not saying anything new. As a child growing up in Saudi Arabia, I remember my teachers, my mom and our neighbors telling us practically on a daily basis that Jews are evil, the sworn enemies of Muslims, and that their only goal was to destroy Islam. We were never informed about the Holocaust.
Later, as a teenager in Kenya, when Saudi and other Persian Gulf philanthropy reached us, I remember that the building of mosques and donations to hospitals and the poor went hand in hand with the cursing of Jews. Jews were said to be responsible for the deaths of babies and for epidemics such as AIDS, and they were believed to be the cause of wars. They were greedy and would do absolutely anything to kill us Muslims. If we ever wanted to know peace and stability, and if we didn't want to be wiped out, we would have to destroy the Jews. For those of us who were not in a position to take up arms against them, it was enough for us to cup our hands, raise our eyes heavenward and pray to Allah to destroy them.
15/12: Advice for President Bush
From Powerline: Charge
Category: American History and Politics
Posted by: an okie gardener
Copied from the Presbyterian Church (US) Washington Office
Religious and Party Affiliation
Thirteen members of the 109th Senate identified themselves as being Presbyterian (10 were Republicans and 3 were Democrats). Nine members remain after the November elections for the 110th Senate seats (seven are Republicans and two are Democrats). Presbyterians now hold nine percent of the seats in the U.S. Senate down from 13 percent).
Thirty-Eight members of the 109th House identified themselves as Presbyterian (26 were Republicans and 12 were Democrat). There are now just 32 Presbyterians in the 110th Congress, a combination of new and returning members (18 are Republican and 14 are Democrat).
Overall, the 41 Congressional Presbyterians make us the fifth most represented faith group in the Senate and the House. We trail the 126 Catholics, 57 Baptist, 50 Methodist, and 40 Protestant–Unspecified2). Following Presbyterians are 30 Jewish, 26 Episcopalian, 15 Lutheran, ten Mormon, six Unspecified, five Christian Scientist, five Eastern Orthodox, four Pentecostal, three African Methodist Episcopal, three United Church of Christ, two Buddhist, two Christian Reformed Church, two Seventh-Day Adventist, one Christian Church, one Community of Christ, one Disciples of Christ, one Muslim, one Quaker and one Unitarian. For the first time, a member of the Muslim faith has been elected to the House — Minnesota Democrat Keith Ellison.
Religious and Party Affiliation
Thirteen members of the 109th Senate identified themselves as being Presbyterian (10 were Republicans and 3 were Democrats). Nine members remain after the November elections for the 110th Senate seats (seven are Republicans and two are Democrats). Presbyterians now hold nine percent of the seats in the U.S. Senate down from 13 percent).
Thirty-Eight members of the 109th House identified themselves as Presbyterian (26 were Republicans and 12 were Democrat). There are now just 32 Presbyterians in the 110th Congress, a combination of new and returning members (18 are Republican and 14 are Democrat).
Overall, the 41 Congressional Presbyterians make us the fifth most represented faith group in the Senate and the House. We trail the 126 Catholics, 57 Baptist, 50 Methodist, and 40 Protestant–Unspecified2). Following Presbyterians are 30 Jewish, 26 Episcopalian, 15 Lutheran, ten Mormon, six Unspecified, five Christian Scientist, five Eastern Orthodox, four Pentecostal, three African Methodist Episcopal, three United Church of Christ, two Buddhist, two Christian Reformed Church, two Seventh-Day Adventist, one Christian Church, one Community of Christ, one Disciples of Christ, one Muslim, one Quaker and one Unitarian. For the first time, a member of the Muslim faith has been elected to the House — Minnesota Democrat Keith Ellison.
Category: Big-R Republicanism
Posted by: A Waco Farmer
Why I love the Grand Old Party. Part III.
"And that is the issue of this campaign that makes all of the other problems I have discussed academic, unless we realize that we are in a war that must be won.
"Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us that they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy "accommodation." And they say if we only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he will forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers."
"Let's set the record straight. There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace--and you can have it in the next second--surrender.
"Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face--that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender."
Foreign Policy: Peace through Strength.
This is certainly an area in which my big-RR Republican world view trumps my little-r republicanism. Recently, a reader of this blog struck a little-r republicanism cord, when he denounced:
"a 'strong defense,' which [is a euphemism for] a gigantic world-wide military infrastructure. I find it a violation of the principle of small government to have a military which spends more than the rest of the world combined, and which not only makes our government bigger, but seeks to become or control the government in foreign countries such as Iraq."
This is not unlike Pat Buchanan's famous "republic not an empire" sentiment. These dissenters have a point. Lower-case republicanism inveighs against standing armies. Why? Standing armies tempt despots to employ force to threaten the liberty of the people. Moreover, standing armies allow rulers to make war on foreign enemies, causing destruction and deprivation for the many in pursuit of wealth for the few.
Therefore, when the framers eschewed the republican principle of a solely defense-oriented militia, and empowered the federal government to "raise and support Armies" and "provide and maintain a Navy," they rejected a fundamental assumption of their Revolutionary ideology.
Why did they do it?
"And that is the issue of this campaign that makes all of the other problems I have discussed academic, unless we realize that we are in a war that must be won.
"Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us that they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy "accommodation." And they say if we only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he will forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers."
"Let's set the record straight. There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace--and you can have it in the next second--surrender.
"Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face--that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender."
--Ronald Reagan, "A Time for Choosing," 1964
Foreign Policy: Peace through Strength.
This is certainly an area in which my big-RR Republican world view trumps my little-r republicanism. Recently, a reader of this blog struck a little-r republicanism cord, when he denounced:
"a 'strong defense,' which [is a euphemism for] a gigantic world-wide military infrastructure. I find it a violation of the principle of small government to have a military which spends more than the rest of the world combined, and which not only makes our government bigger, but seeks to become or control the government in foreign countries such as Iraq."
This is not unlike Pat Buchanan's famous "republic not an empire" sentiment. These dissenters have a point. Lower-case republicanism inveighs against standing armies. Why? Standing armies tempt despots to employ force to threaten the liberty of the people. Moreover, standing armies allow rulers to make war on foreign enemies, causing destruction and deprivation for the many in pursuit of wealth for the few.
Therefore, when the framers eschewed the republican principle of a solely defense-oriented militia, and empowered the federal government to "raise and support Armies" and "provide and maintain a Navy," they rejected a fundamental assumption of their Revolutionary ideology.
Why did they do it?
15/12: Islam Update
Category: America and the World
Posted by: an okie gardener
I have mentioned before that we are seeing Muslims in Muslim lands converting to Christianity in unprecedented numbers. Although still small, the fact this is happening at all is extremely significant. Part of the motivation for the violent radical Islamic reaction to the West is that Islam perceives correctly that it is challenged from two sides--on the one hand the freedom and hedonism of the West, on the other from Christianity.
This article, copied by Dhimmiwatch, on the growing numbers of evangelical Christians in Morocco. Due to that famous Islamic tolerance, they must meet clandestinely.
Below is a portion of the article, and remember, Morocco is one of the most tolerant Muslim countries:
This article, copied by Dhimmiwatch, on the growing numbers of evangelical Christians in Morocco. Due to that famous Islamic tolerance, they must meet clandestinely.
Below is a portion of the article, and remember, Morocco is one of the most tolerant Muslim countries:
