I’m taking the day off from political commentary—I have yogurt to buy and a child to play with—but as a gesture of good will, I’ll point you political junkies in the direction of a number of interesting posts:
1) Tigerhawk notes:
Iran has threatened to retaliate against Israel if the United States attacks Iran. Going out on a limb with my hawkish friends, may I suggest that perhaps that it is stabilizing, and perhaps even comforting, that Iran has seen fit to make that threat.
Argument and analysis here.
2) Reason looks at unconstrained government power, and addresses the now widely-circulated Fukuyama criticism of the neocon agenda (first appearing the NYT Mag).
Fukuyama’s key assertion—one that will sound familiar to anyone who remembers John Kerry’s remarks during his presidential campaign of 2004 (and one that has been shared by many of the Reason-libertarians)—is that our
[…] most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism. Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally. The misjudgment was based in part on the massive failure of the American intelligence community to correctly assess the state of Iraq’s W.M.D. programs before the war. But the intelligence community never took nearly as alarmist a view of the terrorist/W.M.D. threat as the war’s supporters did. Overestimation of this threat was then used to justify the elevation of preventive war to the centerpiece of a new security strategy […]
Dubious hindsight, but even giving Fukuyama the benefit of the doubt, history has taught us that the real danger is in underestimating the potential threat from avowed enemies—and the specter of those two towers in NY collapsing, along with the subsequent Anthrax scare, should have been plenty to disabuse people like Fukuyama of the notion that the threat from Islamism is overstated (even as some who make this same argument are now OUTRAGED at a deal that would give UAE some measure of bureaucratic management over a few ports that has nothing whatever to do with security). The fact that we have not been attacked at home subsequently is, ironically, at least partially responsible for this new “realistic” chin-scratching threat assessment—even as the number of attacks from Islamists grows globally, and even as (the first Gulf War taught us) we are often too willing to underestimate, from an intelligence perspective, just how far along our enemy’s capabilities are, or how willing they are to use those capabilities offensively.
We also forget that had we not been able to evacuate so many people from those towers on 911—and had not one hijacked jet missed its target—we would already be looking at an entirely different world. Luck prevented those things from coming to pass. But we should certainly not rationalize luck into a return to the kind of “realist” foreign policy that led to the conditions for 911 and the popularity of the radicalized Islamist movement in the first place.
Terry Hastings sends along some words from Winston Churchill that should still resonate. Because they remind us that the only “arrogance” coming from the US is the assumption that our enemies, determined though we admit them to be, are somehow impotent, and so can be treated as a minor nuisance:
Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, and still yet if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you, and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”
And this:
Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
3. The CNN headline runs, ”Pentagon: Iraqi troops downgraded”. A fair line summary? Confederate Yankee thinks not:
Quite an interesting way to spin it, when the top Iraqi battalion is able to carry out a command change, force restructuring and support ops change while deployed, and 17 other Iraqi battalions were upgraded from the October review.
This is CNN?
4. Ersatz black man Thomas Sowell on the Lawrence Summers / Harvard affair:
Despite incessant repetition of the word “diversity” in academe, the tragic fact is that the academic world is one of the most intolerant places in America when it comes to diversity of ideas. Even the president of Harvard dare not step out of line.
Well, there’s a drumbeat I’m certainly familiar with.
5. MEMRI points to an film seminar covered on Iranian TV: “Tom and Jerry—A Jewish Conspiracy to Improve the Image of Mice, because Jews Were Termed ‘Dirty Mice’ in Europe”
On February 19, 2006, Iranian TV channel 4 covered a film seminar that included a lecture by Professor Hasan Bolkhari.(1) In addition to being a member of the Film Council of Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), Bolkhari is a cultural advisor to the Iranian Education Ministry,(2) and active on behalf of interfaith issues.(3)
Sadly, Professor Bolkhari misidentifies “Tom and Jerry” as a Disney production, fails to note that “Jerry” was the nickname for Germans in WWII, and seems to think the cartoon was aimed at a European audience—all very troubling signs were one to make a cursory judgment of the rigor of the scholarship involved.
Though to his credit, Bolkhari may be onto something when he says, “No ethnic group or people operates in such a clandestine manner as the Jews”—which, when you are used to people firing guns in the air and slapping effigies of their innumerable enemies with sandal bottoms during enormous street wildings, is not so crazy an observation.
Though I think “clandestine” is too conspiratorial a word. I think a more simple explanation is that Jews just don’t dig chanting so much outside of synagogue.
(via Allah; Michelle Malkin has more, including a link to video at of LGF)
6. From the WSJ: “The Iraq Violence: The Baathists want a sectarian war”
7. And finally, Glenn Greenwalds’s latest “seminal” essay describes how “[d]uring the build-up to the war in 2002 and early 2003, most prominent Democrats were bullied and intimidated into supporting the invasion of Iraq by a combination of Bush’s sky-high popularity and accusations of subversiveness which were launched at anyone who opposed the Leader’s war.”
Say what you will about Greenwald, but this is rather astute stuff—although what it shows, unfortunately, is that Democrats can only be counted on to do what they believe at any given moment to be either politically expedient or popular.
Allowing that they were “bullied” into voting against their will is as clear an admission as you are likely to get that these are politicians who are far more concerned with power than with the idealism they claim to stand for. Their reaction to the Port story, too, shows this as well: after years of alleging that Bushco was playing the “fear card,” many Democrats (prominent among them, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer) were among the first to scream that the sale of a British Company to the UAE that involved ports was likely to lead to nuclear winter in New Jersey.
All of which leads me to conclude that either a) many prominent national Dems are unsure who the enemy is, or b) they know who the enemy is—Republicans—and they will do and say anything, no matter how inconsistent, in order to regain power.
(h/t Ian Schwartz)
You have to wonder what Mr. Big Brain would make of Pepe le Peu and Speedy Gonzalez. What’s the deep inner meaning of the “duck season, rabbit season” controversy, I wonder? And why doesn’t Porky wear any goddamn pants?
SB: study
I need a grant
”…(our) most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism.”
After another successful terrorist attack in the US a lot of people are going to try and throw that argument down the memory hole.
I’m taking the day off from political commentary…
Jeff,
Care to revise (no need to extend your following several hundred) remarks?
Cordially…
TW: why. As in, because you did go on and on with commentary. That Greenwald is one provactive thinker, TBS.
Hmmm.
@ Jeff
You should also consider the height of the WTC buildings. They were about 1,400 ft tall. In that section of Manhattan the average city block is about 650 ft long. If the WTC towers hadn’t imploded, a fortunate confluence of design and happenstance, then each tower could have flattened at least 4 city blocks each. Such an event would have also driven dangerous amounts of debris further into the city.
The most amazing thing that I’ve encountered is the liberal viewpoint that somehow OBL intended to only kill 3,000 people in the WTC towers. They ignore the implosion of the WTC towers. The timing of the attack to coincide with morning rush hour.
How true, ed. I recall that at the time of the attacks, I was trying to determine how many people worked in and around the WTC buildings. If I recall, I came up with close to 200,000 as a conservative estimate. Even though close to 3,000 were murdered that morning, OBL must have surely been disappointed that the casualty figures were missing a couple of zeros.
So, now you’re crucifying Fukuyama?
BU$H KULTIST!!!
(Tastes Greenwald’s latest.) Hm. Needs more semen.
His use of “build-up to the war” there is a sloppy message change. The Times et al have settled the usage, and everyone’s already fallen in line.
Before you say “to the war,” you say “run-up,” over and over again “run-up,” to make the slowest-engaging U.S. military operation since the Civil Warâ€â€stewing since WWII, ramped up slightly by almost every administration since, and only becoming a protest-worthy Crusade in the ‘00sâ€â€seem like a snap decision, a wild aimless lashing out of Jeezo-cowboy imperial hubris (that all those Democrats voted for because [mumble mumble]).
The mumbles were important. Adding an excuse for Democrats’ insatiable lust for the blood of brown babies makes for one too many talking points to keep in the air at once. Gotta let one drop.
A moment of silence in memory of our old friend “run-up to the war,” pleaseâ€â€a casualty of careless juggling. He served us bravely, then died for nothing. What a waste.
So young, so young.
BoZ: I thought the meme was “rush to war,” no? But then I stopped reading the Times long ago.
Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer) were among the first to scream that the sale of a British Company to the UAE that involved ports was likely to lead to nuclear winter in New Jersey.
Wait – I thought they *opposed* the sale…
Re the Tom and Jerry “essay” by Iran, I’m those like Jeff who have done time in the academy will recognize, sadly, that this mad propaganda is but a skosh removed intellectually from the average peer-reviewed article on film or literary theory and western, patriarchal, blah blah, hegemony.
Re the troop downgrading, I wrote about it here. CNN is in major spin mode, playing up the downgrading of 750± from Level 1 and playing down the upgrading of 12,750± to Level 2 in five months. Level 2 is the important number because that will dictate American troop strength.
I’m surprised nobody’s erected a blog entitled “Liberals are Simply Clinically Deranged Lying Motherfuckers.”
I mean, if fits.
An easy way to expose hidden anti-Americanism.
R: how many people worked in and around the WTC buildings. If I recall, I came up with close to 200,000 as a conservative estimate.
The day of the attack, I recall late afternoon comments on Fox that 75,000 people worked in the Twin Towers alone, so your guess is probably a good one. That was the reason the early death estimates in the tens of thousands were so high. 25,000 people were evacuated (what an accomplishment!!!) and nearly 3,000 killed, so what happened to the rest of them? Answer: The first plane struck at 8:45 AM, and a lot of people weren’t due in until after 9 AM. Incoming access to the area was cut off after the first plane struck.
Even though close to 3,000 were murdered that morning, OBL must have surely been disappointed that the casualty figures were missing a couple of zeros.
True, I bet he was. But it was his own damn fault. His timing was off. Whatever anyone else may say about the “success” of the attack, he screwed up royally. He’d have gotten a lot more people if he’d had his lackeys take later flights.
mamapajamas,
I agree. Plus, after the first plane hit, the second tower was already being evacuated.
1) If both were hit at about the same time
2) If the towers were hit later in the day
2) If the towers were hit further down
Then the deaths would have been 30,000 to 50,000…
Ed, you don’t understand much and you especially don’t understand how difficult in terms of pure physics it would be for a building to remain intact and topple over. Go back to school!
Noah,
Care how you go.
If you (or anyone else) had gone to architectural engineering school prior to 9/11/2001, you would have learned that a mere fire wouldn’t destroy the World Trade Center—damage it severely perhaps, but not cause the buildings to fall. All that cladding on the steel framework, made of modern materials much better (and more, y’know, environmentally responsible), would have restricted the damage to the interior fittings and furnishings, and the separators between floor zones would restrict the fire to at most ten floors. People on the upper floors would be able to get out, because the zoned elevator system would allow them to bypass the damaged area with no problems worse than a little smoke inhalation.
Ooooopsie.
Topple over intact? Not a chance. Slump sideways, spraying burning material and red-hot chunks of glass and steel, and slamming a network of twisted girders down on the adjacent streets and structures? Not just possible. Probable. Damned likely if the jets had hit lower, in fact.
Regards,
Ric
This from the people who are complaining that we haven’t created a perfectly stable, functioning democracy from nothing in under three years.
I also liked this:
(emphasis added)
From a magazine called Reason, no less.
mamapajamas  My brother in law was in the Towers both times they got hit. He said when they saw the first tower get hit, the manaement types were actually saying, stay calm, sit tight, wait for the fire department and evacuation instructions. To which he said, fuck that and started leading the employees to the fire exits. He probably saved a lot of lives that day.
As Mark Steyn has pointed out, it was the self-starting individual citizens who probably did the most good that morning.
Hmmm.
@ noah
Are you an idiot?
Do you really think I was suggesting that the WTC towers were going to fall over like a toy constructed of Legos?
Here’s a clue for you. If the top floors hadn’t imploded into the rest of the WTC towers and had fallen over to the side it would have killed a lot of the emergency workers that had setup aid stations nearby. Additionally the towers themselves were, due to their height and wind conditions of south Manhattan, unstable. That’s why each tower had a 10-ton weight that acted to dampen the wind induced swaying motion each WTC tower had. Without that weight and the system inoperable there would have been nothing to prevent the wind from forcing the WTC towers into a dangerous oscillation that would have brought the towers down.
Dumbass.
Why on earth would anyone give a ripe rat’s ass what Mr. “The End of History” Fukiyama has to say?
Exactly! Stay away from those types.
Listen to Arianna…
http://tinyurl.com/e84x6
richard mcenroe:“To which he said, fuck that and started leading the employees to the fire exits. He probably saved a lot of lives that day.”
Now that is definitely a relative to be proud of!
I hope that I would do the same thing under similar conditions.
richard mcenroe:“As Mark Steyn has pointed out, it was the self-starting individual citizens who probably did the most good that morning.”
I agree, and it doesn’t surprise me at all. I recall firemen’s reports of people carrying disabled or elderly co-workers down all those flights of stairs without complaining about it or waiting for the firemen to come tell them what to do. They just did it. It was a true monument to human compassion.
IIRC, there was a tape captured in Afghanistan a late in 2001 of Bin Laden talking with some friends in which he expressed surprise and amazement that the towers collapsed.
I don’t think they ever did a casualty estimate. The action was more important than the results.
I intended to leave this on a post yesterday, but didn’t want to inflame that greenbaum guy:
Bill Buckley, Moonbat.
It seems clear from everyone’s behavior that the WOT is simply a subset of the culture wars ignited in the 60’s. Thus its not rabid islamists who are the problem but rather rabid conservatives or rabid liberals.
If we were all on the same page we could rap this up quickly. However, that will never happen until we beat the leftoids.
I would say it actually started in the 30’s
Poor little bullied Democrats. Spine deficit.
Hmmmm.
I think it all started with Reefer Madness!
“Faster!”
“Play faster!”
Seems to me that the (OK, a) mistake Fukuyama makes is to say that “the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism” was limited to “the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction” and “the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally.” The threat facing the United States – more accurately, the West and nations that embrace Western liberalism – is not simply physical but existential, and I think that’s what (we) neocons perceive and are prepared to act against. My husband and I argue about this point all the time lately; he keeps saying, “But in the end, they’re only cartoons,” and I keep saying “No, in the end they’re indicative of a clash of values [or civilizations, if you will – a point that’s certainly been made once or twice] that forces us to decide just how important our values are to us.” I’m not afraid of being caught in a terrorist attack, nor am I unreasonably afraid that some number of my fellow citizens will be caught in one; but I’m quite afraid that falling asleep at the switch right now will sentence my kids to a harder, bloodier, and more obviously existential fight in the future.
I don’t think I’m overstating the case, and the stories coming out of Europe seem to me to support my view. I, of course, am not Fukuyama, but I am very attached to the freedoms I enjoy and loathe to let them dribble away for mere lack of attention.
re: “Dubious hindsight, but even giving Fukuyama the benefit of the doubt, history has taught us that the real danger is in underestimating the potential threat from avowed enemiesâ€â€and the specter of those two towers in NY collapsing, along with the subsequent Anthrax scare, should have been plenty to disabuse people like Fukuyama of the notion that the threat from Islamism is overstated”
Fukuyama could be one of the worst cases of myopic hindsight in post-modern times.
Fukuyama does have the gift of anti-historical perception. Be not afraid, history’s over. Oh, shit, ‘cept for that. And, be not afraid, the dust has settled…you panzies.
I think I won’t take him at his word any more. I’m funny like that.
Greenwald had a post that got some attention, the one that called Jonah G. an “authoritarian cultist”. I thought about Fisking it…but life’s too short to correct every goofy thing said by Mr. Greenwald.
But if I understand his brand spanking new talking point correctly, weak-willed and craven Democrats couldn’t even stand up to George W. Bush–so we should elect a whole Congress-full of them, where they will stand up to the vicious dictators of the world?
Hmmm.
The Cartoon War is more important than simply a clash between value systems or even between cultures or civilizations. It is a fulcrm with which to force a cascading series of changes in Western nations. To begin the process by which free countries become dhimmis.
In the West the capstone of society is precedence and history. We do what we do, and how we do it because of precedence generated in our past. Our children’s lives will become restricted not just by their abilities and actions but also by the precedence created in our lives.
In the Islamic world there is no precedence that exceeds the Koran. In the Western world anything and everything is subject to the pervasive rule of precedence.
This is the battle you’re seeing. This is why every single outcry of outrage by muslims is directed to the legal system. This is why the redress sought after is always in terms of new interpretations of laws or new laws specifically to create precedence.
“I have a child to buy and yogurt to play withâ€â€but as a gesture of good will. “????
Well, I can see why you had to take the day off. I’ll look for you the next time “Cops” does a “white crackers on meth” marathon.
vercingetorix  Panzies? Lacy little tanks in tasteful coordinated colors?
I’ve concluded that the cartoon war tactic with its threat of violence is also a declaration of war upon all humans possessed of a free-thought capacity and States which support this capacity as morally and functionally essential to being human and having a State. The MSM press having largely failed, all such States should briefly flood their airways with the cartoons, accompanied by the rationale – 3 days worth.
Or am I only taking the bait?
Hmmm.
No you’re not.
Here’s the scenario. It’s almost a foregone conclusion that muslim terrorists will continue their attacks. It’s also a foregone conclusion that local muslims will embrace and applaud these attacks. What the Cartoon War seeks to do is to close down one of the primary means for non-muslims to learn of this approval. If it were just intimidating the media, that could have been accomplished with just death threats. But this is an attempt at using legal channels to ensure that even bloggers will be muzzled.
If the muslim community in your neighborhood approves of terrorist attacks that results in the death of some of your neighbors, then you’d like to know about it. With this push over the Cartoon War, the militants want you kept in a state of ignorance. Not only to prevent any action by you, but also to make you feel isolated. In general terms weakness is felt most keenly when a person is isolated.
A prime example of this is the conservative movement prior to talk radio. While I was a conservative back then it was very hard to find other like-minded conservatives. For many years I had thought that I was a member of a very very small group of people. Then I found out that there were tens of millions of people who believed in many of the same things that I did.
The “bait”, which you didn’t take, was to push people into a mode of thought whereby any criticism of Islam is equated to shame. This is why muslims constantly bring up racism to combat any critics. Islam isn’t a race and any number of races practise Islam, but calling people racists is usually an effective means of shutting down the critics. And the mechanism employed is shame.
*shrug* I agree with you that these cartoons need to be published everywhere. Many Americans really don’t understand how utter inconsequential these cartoons are. Many of those that I know personally, who haven’t seen the cartoons, had thought the cartoons were something very very offensive. You can imagine their surprise when they realised just how inoffensive those cartoons really were.
Republicans aren’t the enemy, but their allies the Neocons surely are.
And the Neocons are determined to keep the US in Iraq for a hundred years if they can. Longer.
No matter what the cost.
But there may be light at the end of the tunnel.
The 2006 Congressional elections are pending, and wIth any degree of luck, the GOP will again become a minority party.
Then, of course, the Neocons will have to look elsewhere for a place to pitch their imperialist dreams.
What exactly is a Neocon, Carl? I hear that word alot but am a little unclear of its meaning.
Don’t waste your time on that chickenshit Goss.
He makes his little bird-droppings in the comments, then never comes back and engages anyone’s responses to his droppings.
Flush him.
TV (Harry)
Hmmmm.
Anybody the liberals despise.
Why? Well, because they’re *pure evil*, of course! You don’t ask *why* Ming the Merciless wants to blow up the sun–he’s the *bad guy*! He’s just doing what he do!
Sometimes I wish we got trolls who were more dedicated to their arguments than your average pigeon to your average windshield.
Hey…what happened to the megathread on WFB and the definition of civil war?
The original neocons were liberals disgusted with the New Left (which has in essence taken over the Democrat party). And of course neocons and “thinking” people alike would like to see us succeed in Iraq and stay ala’ Germany and Japan in Iraq for the sake of stability and strategic purposes. Just because the Bushies have been cowed into concealing this goal does not make it unreasonable. But the lunatic left just take it as evidence of evil intent but then they don’t “think” about much of anything.
A neocon is the most recent incarnation of the Wilsonian type in American foreign policy. They advocate the use of US power to remove evil regimes and set up democracies (nation-build) as being in the interests of the US.
People such as Carl have a problem with neocons – or Wilsonians – because of the following traits/facts.
(A) They advocate the use of US power – and the US is always the questionable nation.
(B) They advocate the overthrow of nasty regimes because it would be in US interests to have them gone. Anything the US does in its interests is bad.
(C) The US plays an active roll on the world stage. Okay this is bad – for two reasons. (1) US should be out of the world to protect the world from the US; or (2) to protect the US from the world. It depends on what type of isolationism you favor, 1930’s or 1960’s.
(D) So many neocons are, you know, those people. Jews. And you know what is said about them, controlling the world with their international financiers and getting the nations of the world to fight so that they will be able to loan vast amounts to nations and then foreclose, meanwhile dancing through the rivers of blood they have created.
I know A-D have contradicitons, but it is what unites the old line isolationist right and the 1960’s marxist left. There’s enough overlap that they can hate the neocon in a unified peaceful hatred.
“southern”