Posted on 05/30/2007 3:34:26 PM PDT by rellimpank
Americans -- at least really stupid Americans like George Bush -- believe the natural state of the world is to have individual self-determination, human rights, the rule of law and a robust democratic economy. On this view, most of the existing world and almost all of world history is a freakish aberration.
In fact, the natural state of the world is Darfur. The freakish aberration is America and the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world.
The British Empire once spread the culture of prosperity around the globe -- Judeo-Christian values, tolerance, equality, private property and the rule of law. All recipients of the British Empire's largesse benefited, but the empire's most successful colony was the United States.
(Excerpt) Read more at humanevents.com ...
I was a really stupid American in the sense Ann uses it, too. I believed Iraqis wanted freedom and democracy, that everyone in the Middle East wants freedom, and that deposing Saddam with a little rebuilding was all we had to do as we watched the ME dominoes fall.
If I read the chicken entrails correctly, is the core of neoconservatism. It’s Wilsonian, I admit. Turns out it’s also wrong.
Coulter is, I believe, repudiating neoconservatism and Bush as its leader.
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And there is more to come:
The Case for Bombing Iran
By Norman Podhoretz
From “Commentary”: June 2007
Although many persist in denying it, I continue to believe that what September 11, 2001 did was to plunge us headlong into nothing less than another world war. I call this new war World War IV, because I also believe that what is generally known as the cold war was actually World War III, and that this one bears a closer resemblance to that great conflict than it does to World War II. Like the cold war, as the military historian Eliot Cohen was the first to recognize, the one we are now in has ideological roots, pitting us against Islamofascism, yet another mutation of the totalitarian disease we defeated first in the shape of Nazism and fascism and then in the shape of Communism; it is global in scope; it is being fought with a variety of weapons, not all of them military; and it is likely to go on for decades.
What follows from this way of looking at the last five years is that the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq cannot be understood if they are regarded as self-contained wars in their own right. Instead we have to see them as fronts or theaters that have been opened up in the early stages of a protracted global struggle. The same thing is true of Iran. As the currently main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11, and as (according to the State Department’s latest annual report on the subject) the main sponsor of the terrorism that is Islamofascism’s weapon of choice, Iran too is a front in World War IV. Moreover, its effort to build a nuclear arsenal makes it the potentially most dangerous one of all.
-— snip -—
Much of the world has greeted Ahmadinejad’s promise to wipe Israel off the map with something close to insouciance. In fact, it could almost be said of the Europeans that they have been more upset by Ahmadinejad’s denial that a Holocaust took place 60 years ago than by his determination to set off one of his own as soon as he acquires the means to do so. In a number of European countries, Holocaust denial is a crime, and the European Union only recently endorsed that position. Yet for all their retrospective remorse over the wholesale slaughter of Jews back then, the Europeans seem no readier to lift a finger to prevent a second Holocaust than they were the first time around.
Not so George W. Bush, a man who knows evil when he sees it and who has demonstrated an unfailingly courageous willingness to endure vilification and contumely in setting his face against it. It now remains to be seen whether this President, battered more mercilessly and with less justification than any other in living memory, and weakened politically by the enemies of his policy in the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular, will find it possible to take the only action that can stop Iran from following through on its evil intentions both toward us and toward Israel. As an American and as a Jew, I pray with all my heart that he will.
How can it be a world war when only one side shows up? Americans don’t have to political will to pursue this to the extent required for victory, the Brits are going to be assimilated, and no one else is big enough to matter.
“How can it be a world war when only one side shows up? Americans don’t have to political will to pursue this to the extent required for victory, the Brits are going to be assimilated, and no one else is big enough to matter.”
Good question. Perhaps you could address it in a letter to Podhoretz for possible publication in the next issue of Commentary after this one:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm/main/printArticle.html?article=com.commentarymagazine.content.Article::10882
The Case for Bombing Iran
By Norman Podhoretz
From “Commentary”: June 2007
Or to rmlew, who by his/her byline seems to have adopted the “WWIV” outlook. One could have found your view frequently as the months ticked down to September 1939, e.g., as Auden expressed it:
http://www.esrnational.org/september1_1939annotated.htm
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
It’s a very narrow question, but still a question.
Who has declared war on whom? Bush did not ask congress for a declaration of war. The jihadists have vowed to kill us and Israel. Was that a declaration of war? If so, is that sufficient to call it a world war? Maybe it is, but I think until most of the world is at war, what you have isn’t a world war. It’s pickey, I know. But I don’t believe in defining World War down.
Threat inflation through language redefines torture as making someone put his underpants on his head. I’m not ready for that yet.
Two more views that mostly mirror Coulter on the immigration question.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110010148
PEGGY NOONAN
Too Bad
President Bush has torn the conservative coalition asunder.
Friday, June 1, 2007 12:00 a.m.
What political conservatives and on-the-ground Republicans must understand at this point is that they are not breaking with the White House on immigration. They are not resisting, fighting and thereby setting down a historical marker—”At this point the break became final.” That’s not what’s happening. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. This is sad, and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future.
The White House doesn’t need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don’t even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.
For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don’t like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don’t like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.
But on immigration it has changed from “Too bad” to “You’re bad.”
The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic—they “don’t want to do what’s right for America.” His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, “We’re gonna tell the bigots to shut up.” On Fox last weekend he vowed to “push back.” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want “mass deportation.” Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are “anti-immigrant” and suggested they suffer from “rage” and “national chauvinism.”
Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens? And often, though not exclusively, concerned conservatives? It is odd, but it is of a piece with, or a variation on, the “Too bad” governing style. And it is one that has, day by day for at least the past three years, been tearing apart the conservative movement.
I suspect the White House and its allies have turned to name calling because they’re defensive, and they’re defensive because they know they have produced a big and indecipherable mess of a bill—one that is literally bigger than the Bible, though as someone noted last week, at least we actually had a few years to read the Bible. The White House and its supporters seem to be marshalling not facts but only sentiments, and self-aggrandizing ones at that. They make a call to emotions—this is, always and on every issue, the administration’s default position—but not, I think, to seriously influence the debate.
They are trying to lay down markers for history. Having lost the support of most of the country, they are looking to another horizon. The story they would like written in the future is this: Faced with the gathering forces of ethnocentric darkness, a hardy and heroic crew stood firm and held high a candle in the wind. It will make a good chapter. Would that it were true!
If they’d really wanted to help, as opposed to braying about their own wonderfulness, they would have created not one big bill but a series of smaller bills, each of which would do one big clear thing, the first being to close the border. Once that was done—actually and believably done—the country could relax in the knowledge that the situation was finally not day by day getting worse. They could feel some confidence. And in that confidence real progress could begin.
The beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me. For others the beginning of distance might have been Katrina and the incompetence it revealed, or the depth of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq.
What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom—a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don’t need hacks.
One of the things I have come to think the past few years is that the Bushes, father and son, though different in many ways, are great wasters of political inheritance. They throw it away as if they’d earned it and could do with it what they liked. Bush senior inherited a vibrant country and a party at peace with itself. He won the leadership of a party that had finally, at great cost, by 1980, fought itself through to unity and come together on shared principles. Mr. Bush won in 1988 by saying he would govern as Reagan had. Yet he did not understand he’d been elected to Reagan’s third term. He thought he’d been elected because they liked him. And so he raised taxes, sundered a hard-won coalition, and found himself shocked to lose his party the presidency, and for eight long and consequential years. He had many virtues, but he wasted his inheritance.
Bush the younger came forward, presented himself as a conservative, garnered all the frustrated hopes of his party, turned them into victory, and not nine months later was handed a historical trauma that left his country rallied around him, lifting him, and his party bonded to him. He was disciplined and often daring, but in time he sundered the party that rallied to him, and broke his coalition into pieces. He threw away his inheritance. I do not understand such squandering.
Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be painful, but it’s time. It’s more than time.
http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2007/tst052507.htm
Immigration ‘Compromise’ Sells Out Our Sovereignty
Ron Paul
May 28, 2007
The much-vaunted Senate “compromise” on immigration is a compromise alright: a compromise of our laws, a compromise of our sovereignty, and a compromise of the Second Amendment. That anyone in Washington believes this is a credible approach to solving our immigration crisis suggests just how out of touch our political elites really are.
The reality is that this bill will grant amnesty to virtually all of the 12 to 20 million illegal aliens in the country today. Supporters use very creative language to try and convince us that amnesty is not really amnesty, but when individuals who have entered the United States illegally are granted citizenship – regardless of the fees they are charged – what you have is amnesty.
What is seldom discussed in the immigration debate, unfortunately, is the incentives the US government provides for people to enter the United States illegally. As we know well, when the government subsidizes something we get more of it. The government provides a myriad of federal welfare benefits to those who come to the US illegally, including food stamps and free medical care. Is this a way to discourage people from coming to the US illegally?
Additionally, one of the most absurd incentives for people to come to the US illegally is the promise of instant US citizenship to anyone born on our soil. That is why when Congress returns next week I will be re-introducing my Constitutional amendment to deny automatic citizenship to individuals born on US soil to parents who are not US citizens or who do not owe permanent allegiance to the United States .
There are many other very troubling items buried deep in the Senate’s immigration compromise. The bill explicitly calls for an “acceleration” of the March 2005 agreement between the US president, the president of Mexico , and the prime minister of Canada , known as the “Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) of North America .” This somewhat secretive agreement – a treaty in all but name – aims to erase the borders between the United States , Canada , and Mexico and threatens our sovereignty and national security. The SPP was agreed by the president without the participation of Congress. It should be eliminated, not accelerated!
According to the pro-Second Amendment Gun Owners of America, the legislation also makes it easier to target gun dealers for prosecution. Even gun clubs could find themselves targeted under this immigration reform legislation.
Immigration reform should start with improving our border protection, yet it was reported last week that the federal government has approved the recruitment of 120 of our best trained Border Patrol agents to go to Iraq to train Iraqis how to better defend their borders! This comes at a time when the National Guard troops participating in Operation Jump Start are being removed from border protection duties in Arizona , New Mexico , and Texas and preparing to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan ! It is an outrage and it will result in our borders being more vulnerable to illegal entry, including by terrorists.
I will continue to oppose any immigration bill that grants amnesty to illegals or undermines our liberty and sovereignty.
And, an observation that puts the immigration policy debate among conservatives in a wider context:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-rlc/1835625/posts
Do Conservatives Hate Their Own Founder?
by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
Toward the end of his life, Russell Kirk, one of the great founders of American conservatism, became contemptuous of Republican militarism. Didn’t know that? Neither do most readers of National Review, for which Kirk wrote for so many years.
Kirk’s opposition to relentless war makes him a “liberal” in NR’s lexicon. Now it’d be kind of hard to describe the key founder of modern American conservatism as a liberal – harder even than NR’s task of making the obviously corrupt (and personally sleazy) former federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani seem like something we should want in a U.S. president. So the whole Kirk problem is simply passed over in silence.
Young conservatives, take note: what you are about to encounter is the voice of the real thing, whose opinions are worth more than those of a million talk-show ignoramuses put together. That these views would never, ever get published in the typical “conservative” magazine today tells you all you need to know about the state of the “conservative movement”: so remote is it from the genuine article that Kirk himself would be unwelcome.
The remarks from which I draw here are taken from a 1991 speech to the Heritage Foundation. What a difference a decade and a half can make: these opinions would never be permitted at Heritage today. Of that you can be sure.
Oh, once in a while you’ll still get tributes to the great Kirk, but his foreign-policy views will be ignored – or greeted with awkward smiles and a cough, if anyone is so discourteous as to break the silence on the subject.
Now remember, this is 1991, so Kirk is speaking of George H.W. Bush, not the current president, for whom these remarks could be amplified many times over.
“Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson were enthusiasts for American domination of the world,” Kirk said in his speech. “Now George Bush appears to be emulating those eminent Democrats. When the Republicans, once upon a time, nominated for the presidency a ‘One World’ candidate, Wendell Willkie, they were sadly trounced. In general, Republicans throughout the twentieth century have been advocates of prudence and restraint in the conduct of foreign affairs.”
President Bush, Kirk said, had embarked upon “a radical course of intervention in the region of the Persian Gulf. After carpet-bombing the Cradle of Civilization as no country ever had been bombed before, Mr. Bush sent in hundreds of thousands of soldiers to overrun the Iraqi bunkers – that were garrisoned by dead men, asphyxiated.”
And why, exactly? “The Bush Administration found it difficult to answer that question clearly. In the beginning it was implied that the American national interest required low petroleum prices: therefore, if need be, smite and spare not!”
Kirk then recalled Edmund Burke’s rebuke to the Pitt ministry in 1795, when the British government seemed to be on the verge of going to war with France over the issue of navigation on the River Scheldt in the Netherlands. “A war for the Scheldt? A war for a chamber-pot!” Burke said. Today, said Kirk, one may as well say, “A war for Kuwait? A war for an oilcan!”
Since a war for an oilcan turned out to be not so popular, President Bush “turned moralist; he professed to be engaged in redeeming the blood of man; and his breaking of Iraq is to be the commencement of his beneficent New World Order.” Kirk said Bush had embarked on what Herbert Butterfield called “the war for righteousness.” “It has been held by technicians of politics in recent times,” Butterfield wrote in Christianity, Diplomacy, and War, “that democracies can only be keyed up to modern war – only brought to the necessary degree of fervor – provided they are whipped into moral indignation and heated to fanaticism by the thought that they are engaged in a ‘war for righteousness.’”
“Now indubitably Saddam Hussein is unrighteous,” said Kirk,
but so are nearly all the masters of the “emergent” African states (with the Ivory Coast as a rare exception), and so are the grim ideologues who rule China, and the hard men in the Kremlin, and a great many other public figures in various quarters of the world. Why, I fancy that there are some few unrighteous men, conceivably, in the domestic politics of the United States. Are we to saturation-bomb most of Africa and Asia into righteousness, freedom, and democracy? And, having accomplished that, however would we ensure persons yet more unrighteous might not rise up instead of the ogres we had swept away? Just that is what happened in the Congo, remember, three decades ago; and nowadays in Zaire, once called the Belgian Congo, we zealously uphold with American funds the dictator Mobutu, more blood-stained than Saddam. And have we forgotten Castro in Cuba?
And now Russell Kirk – conservative among conservatives – makes the obvious point that the loudmouths today ridicule and condemn: perpetrating large-scale violence can make people angry. Only Americans get angry when violence is committed against them – no one else!
Now here is Kirk: “We must expect to suffer during a very long period of widespread hostility toward the United States – even, or perhaps especially, from the people of certain states that America bribed or bullied into combining against Iraq. In Egypt, in Syria, in Pakistan, in Algeria, in Morocco, in all of the world of Islam, the masses now regard the United States as their arrogant adversary; while the Soviet Union, by virtue of its endeavors to mediate the quarrel in its later stages, may pose again as the friend of Moslem lands. Nor is this all: for now, in every continent, the United States is resented increasingly as the last and most formidable of imperial systems.”
Well, away with Russell Kirk, then: he “blames America” for terrorism! To be sure, anyone who is both 1) truthful, and 2) has an IQ above 50, knows he’s done no such thing, but since our politicians and journalists do not distinguish themselves in either of these qualities, we can imagine their pretense of shock at the outrageous Kirk.
Oh, and what kind of leftist said the following? “Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace comes to pass in an era of Righteousness — that is, national or ideological self-righteousness in which the public is persuaded that ‘God is on our side,’ and that those who disagree should be brought here before the bar as war criminals.”
The founder of American conservatism, that’s who.
These are the words of a civilized man. I have my differences with Kirk on important questions, to be sure, but this is a learned, serious thinker whose work and thought anyone can and should respect – which is more than can be said for the sloganeering Ministry of Propaganda that now dominates official conservative media.
So who plans to be first in line to denounce even the deceased Russell Kirk as an “unpatriotic conservative”?
“It’s a very narrow question, but still a question.
Who has declared war on whom? Bush did not ask congress for a declaration of war. The jihadists have vowed to kill us and Israel. Was that a declaration of war? If so, is that sufficient to call it a world war? Maybe it is, but I think until most of the world is at war, what you have isn’t a world war. It’s pickey, I know. But I don’t believe in defining World War down.”
“Threat inflation through language redefines torture as making someone put his underpants on his head. I’m not ready for that yet.”
Another good question, especially since none of the US wars since WWII were accompanied by formal declarations of war. In retrospect, Truman’s successful entry into the Korean conflict, under the auspices of the United Nations, without a congressional declaration of war (it was “merely a police action”), has become the norm. It represents a fairly significant erosion of constitutional government, which has continued in subsequent administrations.
The protean elasticity of our political language makes a coherent answer to your question difficult. “War” has become a label attached to a variety of high cost government activities trolling for funding (mostly with great succes, at least the funds search was successful).
Recall that in the decade before WWII, there was an accumulation of localized incidents that culminated in the carving up of Poland between Germany and the USSR, and the Japanese outbreak into the Pacific against holdings of the European empires and US Pacific military assets.
It doesn’t take a huge mental leap to see a somewhat parallel sequence emerging: Bush I’s excellent “great coalition (under the UN)” ME adventure in 1991, Bill’s in the Balkans in the late 1990’s (tied to UN direction and NATO execution), miscellaneous attacks on US assets and interests throughout the decade, along with economic warfare on Iraq and “no-fly” zones enforced by US/NATO air power, culminating in 9/11/01, followed by Afghanistan, Iraq, a crumbling “ally” in Pakistan, and now (possibly) Iran.
Perhaps we’re not “there” yet, but the multiple small fires seem to be accumulating into a fairly broad global fire, with China, Russia, and EU still waiting on the sidelines for their roles to play as the next stage unfolds. The ruinous 20th century wars left several empires in the dust bin, mortally wounded the colonial emprires of the surviving powers, and set the stage for US and USSR emergence. We are not immune from a an approximate recycling of this pattern, where we play the role earlier played by Britain and France.
” We are not immune from a an approximate recycling of this pattern, where we play the role earlier played by Britain and France.”
You’re obviously conversant with the history of those times, so I’ll speculate that where we are as Britain and France is the Phony War. Whether it leads to all out conflict or an eruption of suicide bombings and internal operations remains to be seen.
If I had to bet, I’d bet that our open border hasn’t played out yet to be the horrible mistake it will prove. And frisking old people while looking for weapons while softpedaling maniacs running drills for domestic catastrophe will put the notion of world war to rest in favor of domestic warfare.
The fox is in the henhouse.
“The fox is in the henhouse.”
Yes, and perhaps we can help to assure that all he finds are rotten eggs and inedible stew chickens... before his lights are punched out.
I note that the only partially successful response to the 9/11 suicide homicide teams was made by the un-regimented but determined citizens on Flight 93, who were alerted via cell-phone of their real predicament, and took decisive action to thwart their captors’ intentions to inflict one more ‘high impact’ catastrophe that day. Meanwhile, our multiple trillion dollar “defense establishment” muddled its way to unimpeded catastrophes (despite the flash of brilliance by the air traffic controller who grounded the entire commercial air fleet).
If we don’t let the “guns kill people” zealots disarm the general citizenry, we can hopefully anticipate a hot welcome for the next teams of “foxes” when they emerge from their holes. Not much hope in the measures like “airport security” which mainly serves as a medium for inducting air travelers into the rigors of enduring the bureaucratic indignities of a garrison state, and steadily trading their residual habits of liberty for an illusory “security”. Avoidance of airports, “gun free zones” (aka “free fire zones for perps”) and network media is a helpful counter-strategy. It’s still a big country, and a minor nuisance to circumvent inducements to waste time in such places, or gawking at talking heads spouting lies and dysfunctional attitudes.
Shalom.
Israel’s air line has it right. They search for terrorists not weapons. Until America drops our suicidal PC ways, I think the attackers have the advantage.
It’s been a real pleasure conversing with you.
Ok then, I guess “conservatives” like me really don’t belong on here anymore. I still like the President for a lot of the things he’s done right, things I voted for him to do.
But just because he goes against many (I guess) on this one issue, they’ve turned on him. They call him a traitor, sell out..., well take your pick. They say he should be impeached. Really now, this is going way to far in my own opinion! It’s one thing when the extreme left attack him and threaten impeachment, but people from the other side bad-mouth him, and threaten impeachment, that’s really too much.
Another thing many haven’t considered is this: Our military forces out in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our troops in the war zone need a strong Commander-in-chief to lead them. He has done that well at least, hasn’t he? Have I missed something? Do you people really want to deprive the troops of strong leadership in a crucial phase of the war on terror? If he is impeached, who do you think is going to lead them, then? How is he going to get the job done? Have you that have turned against him, thought of that at all? I realize that people aren’t happy with the immigration bill, I’m not happy with much of it either. But there are some parts that might have merit if they are done right. That’s not all that I think about. Immigration is a deep concern, but not the only one.
There are many other things that he said he’d do, and did accomplish. What about tax cuts, ban on Partial Birth Abortion, conservative judges, strong support for our military, getting us out of world court, and much more. Aren’t these accomplishments good enough anymore? I thought that most conservatives wanted all of that, don’t they?
Because I do still admire him, and appreciate what he’s done on many other things, I guess I’m an oddball on here now. I guess I won’t be upsetting people on here with my honest admiration of our President, Vice-President, and many of our Republican leaders then. I won’t dream of spoiling the general bash-fest of our President and others above. Go ahead and have at it. Just don’t expect me to go along with you.
I just fear what will happen when they go, and wonder what will happen if people on the “other side” get in there. Then I’m afraid people, that we will have a lot more to fear than fighting about immigration.
Good Night
Ron
Thomeas Woods, like far too many others are under the delusion that one must either be a neconservative or paleoconservative. He lost it.
Last time I checked there are also fusionist conservatives and activist traditionalists.
“Russel Kirk despised ideology. He had no time for isolationists who refused to understand the motivations of Soviet expansionism. Were he still alive, he would rightly rebuke isolationist “paleoconsevratives” who refuse to understand Islam.”
I don’t know him well enough to predict what he would say today. At the time of the first Gulf War, he didn’t seem to be very enthusiastic about the operation, and it seems reasonable to infer that he would not be thrilled by Bush II’s Wilsonian turn either. What do you suppose he would think about this murky chameleon notion of a “War on Terror”? Don’t you suppose he would be as derisive of that as the various other pseudo-wars, the “War on Poverty”, the “War on Cancer”, the “War on Drugs”, etc., etc.?
Don’t you suppose it is possible to understand Islam, and the progress of Islamofascism in the cultures heavily influenced by it, and still be unsold on the idea of a fuzzy-minded Wilsonian crusade to “make the world safe for democracy” with the equally fuzzy branding of “War on Terror”?
Since a substantial plurality, if not a majority, of the victims of Islamofascism have been Muslim, it does not seem unreasonable to expect that an internal Muslim resistance to the Salafists and Iraninan revolutionists and their (conflicting) “revived Khalifate” dreams might develop and be encouraged, as we labor to renew our own culture’s foundations which have been eroded by the proponents of the warfare/welfare state that has been erected over the past century?
In spite of temporary alliances based on mutual hostility towards the non-Islamic world, the severe fracturing of Islamic thought over many centuries has severely degraded the operational effectiveness of its various branches. So, it is a mistake to view Islam as a monolithic enemy, since it is actually a “kingdom divided against itself”, going through a process somewhat resembling the fracturing of Western Christendom in the 16th-17th centuries, except occurring on a global rather than continental stage. Looking at the political gridlock we face at home, we have some severe internal divisions to resolve as well, while preparing for the coming challenges from China/India/Japan, Europe/Eurabia/Russia, and the current porosity of our borders.
This should be an interesting century.
What do you think of Podhoretz’s proposal to attack Iran?
John Kerry, is that you?
You must be in St. Augustine or some Palm Coast town. Go to Tampa or Orlando and you'll see the coming 3rd World hell-hole that FL is becoming. I can't wait to get out and I'd already be gone if not for grandkids.
John Kerry would say something against Rosie O’Donnell - even if nuanced? Not likely.
I’m in redneck (and....loving it!) Clay County, just SW of Jax. All Americans doing the hard sweaty jobs up my way.
Sounds good to me.
I always wanted to ask you about your nic. Did you get it from the TM series of books? I loved those! Can’t recall the author’s name at the moment. Thomson? I know he died at least 20 years ago if that is the same guy.
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