Free Republic

This column will not be about Iraq, directly. I think it is about something more fundamental. You know me: I’m a fundamentalist. My attempts to make sense of the world around me, in which I invite my reader to share, do not restrict themselves to the news as conventionally reported, especially on Sundays. But then, they usually start from there. Consider the following news report: “Congressional Democrats will work with anti-war groups to pursue a ‘slow-bleed’ strategy on Iraq. Instead of voting to abandon Iraq, directly, they'll use their control over budgetary processes to gradually choke off U.S. military resources,...

I admit, I am about to present a paradox, that may take up to a minute to think through. But it will be time well invested. The reason one utters a threat, to another person who is threatening to hurt us, is not, usually, because we want to fight. It is, usually, because we don’t want to fight. We are hoping to persuade this enemy -- who must be an enemy, because he threatened us first -- to back down. We are explaining to him, as succinctly as we can, why it is that he might not want to do...

Only thing truly warming is rhetoric David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen Published: Wednesday, February 07, 2007 For Sunday, I wrote metaphorically about the absurdity of last week's global warming warning from the United Nations ("IPCC/2007," as it will henceforth be known in bureaucratic legend). This was my own warning to my reader, never to take entirely seriously any proclamation that claims to be rocket science, and is endorsed by everyone in sight who has relevant credentials. A look through history will quickly confirm that while a mere majority may sometimes be right, the unanimous agreement of every available expert...

I was rewriting history, while walking along some cold lakeshore the other day. My thought was: if Churchill had only come to power in 1937, Chamberlain would have been installed to replace him in 1940. Had Churchill been in power, and refused to sign Munich, he would have been blamed for the outbreak of war. I can just hear the prattle in an English pub, circa 1950. "He pushed Hitler to it! Had it not been for Churchill, Hitler would have been satisfied with the Sudetenland, and England would never have had to surrender. Everything was Churchill's fault!" Today, everything...

SUNDAY SPECTATOR October 15, 2006 Desolations When I filed this, the United States was still trying to get a limp resolution through the United Nations, condemning North Korea for its claim to have tested a nuclear device, in defiance of all its international agreements. The Americans wanted something like “the full chapter seven” -- which would not merely impose, but enforce a general embargo on all shipments of military equipment to the rogue state, and could lead to a naval blockade to isolate it. Instead, to please not only its enemies such as China, but its nominal allies such as...

When a madman, holding hostages, says his gun is loaded -- it is time for the police to shoot him. No need to establish whether he’s telling the truth. (Or, whatever the equivalent in international relations.)In our analogy the madman is North Korea. I would personalize it to Kim Jong-Il -- “Sun of the 21st Century, Guardian Deity of the Planet, Sun of Socialism, Eternal Sun, and Ever-Victorious General” -- except there is good reason to believe he’s only a semi-retarded dynastic figurehead (like Syria’s Bashir Assad), and the real madmen people his Politburo. The hostages they’re holding are South...

It is alleged, by former Lt. Gen. Mike DeLong, that Donald Rumsfeld once interrupted a briefing of his with the remark: "General, there was no verb in the last sentence." The retired general gave this to CNN as evidence of Mr Rumsfeld's obsession with trivial details. Let me explain the U.S. defence secretary's curious remark. A sentence without a verb has no meaning. It is a waste not only of the speaker's breath, but of his auditor's time. As Harry Truman once said, being stupid "is hardly against the law for a general"; but it is an inconvenience. And the...

The positives of powerful thinking We rely on public intellectuals to rise above academics and journaliststo give issues the analysis they deserve THE WESTERN STANDARD David Warren - September 11, 2006 Rory Leishman should be a major figure in this country. He is a public journalist in the best tradition of Walter Lippmann et al.--learned, penetrating, and yet broad in his interests and accessible in his style. We have George Jonas in Toronto (whom I consider the doyen) and Barry Cooper in Calgary (somewhat encumbered by a professorship, but he can write). Alberta's Ted Byfield is such a character,...

Contrary to generally received opinion, the West is not today under siege from Muslim fanatics because of a resurgence of Islam, but because of the West's own moral and intellectual decline. Even Osama bin Laden knows this. The West invites attack, and the enemy's strategy in attacking is paradoxically to hide his own weakness.If you look at the enemy, even where he has concentrated his best forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Lebanon, you see something unimpressive. Everything that enemy has to fight with, is a by-product of Western industry and invention. The adaptations are sometimes clever, in a psychopathic...

Gabriel Range is a documentary filmmaker, of whom few had heard until this week. His 2003 television production, The Day Britain Stopped, was a pioneering essay in the “fake documentary”, in which imaginary future events are synthesized in fine detail. He has now achieved fame, even before anyone has seen his new essay in that genre, Death of a President. It will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, Sept. 10th, and then show on the British TV channel, More4. The fame, or more properly, infamy, is for his audacity in making a film about the assassination of a U.S. President...

Chestlessness - August 30, 2006 The case of the two Fox News journalists, held hostage in Gaza, is worth dwelling upon. They were released after their captors had made tapes of them dressed as Arabs and announcing they had changed their names and converted to Islam. Lately I have been looking at the large -- at how the West is proving unable to cope with a threat from a fanatical Islamic movement, that it ought to be able to snuff out with fair ease. (See my column last Sunday.) But the large is often most visible in the small. The...

Both sides in this, just the latest of several Middle East wars – always started by Muslims dedicated to the extermination of Israel, are claiming victory, and Condy Rice is trying to put the best face she can on the cease-fire agreement. There is no question in my mind, though, that Israel’s incompetence placed the United States in an untenable position

I’ve touched upon “just war” several times in this space, during the last few weeks. I will continue touching it today. The issue is already an urgent one; its significance can only grow in the foreseeable future, as the encounter between fanatical Islam and the West spreads from mere terror incidents to open guerrilla warfare on various fronts.We see in the Middle East just now, how the conflagration is spreading. Hezbollah enjoyed little support in the Arab world, when it kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, and began firing rockets at an unprecedented rate into northern Israel. The Arabs feared Hezbollah’s aggressive...

George Friedman, the well-informed if often too-clever-by-half mind behind Stratfor, the American intelligence consultants, was told by several of his Israeli contacts to "expect some surprises". So was I by mine. And Mr Friedman has spent this last week admitting that he is, indeed, surprised. For he can make no sense of Israel's battle plan against Hezbollah. Neither can I. It made perfect sense this time last week. It appeared the Israelis were closing all exit routes to Hezbollah, in preparation for a large invasion to wipe them out. The number of troops the Israelis had called up suggested a...

The task set before the Israeli ground forces -- to remove Hezbollah from southern Lebanon, if not from the world, while hurting as few Lebanese as possible -- is huge. I should expect it to begin in the next few days; there are signs it is already beginning as I write. There will be tactical surprises on both sides. Hezbollah has shown itself to be armed with weapons, and entrenched in ways, that Israeli intelligence had not discerned. The scale on which they have (literally) dug into the south Lebanese countryside is impressive. As the Israelis discovered in one special-operations...

Traditionally, at this point in her response to terror attacks, the world diplomatic community persuades Israel to agree a ceasefire, and the terrorists are saved to fight another day. This is what happened in 1982. The Israelis were in a position to annihilate Yasser Arafat's PLO, whom they had surrounded in Beirut. Instead, they agreed to let them escape to Tunisia. The rest is history: recurring again and again. Kofi Annan is trying to do the same thing over: to save Hezbollah (this time) with a ceasefire, by promising Israel that a large force of international "peacekeepers" will take their...

The latest grand Islamist atrocity was directed against the huge city of Mumbai, Tuesday. At least seven big explosions ripped through rush-hour commuter trains, along a string of stations on the principal north-south rail artery -- temporarily disabling the city's principal economic lifeline. It was a reprise of the Islamist attacks on Madrid's rail system, 28 months ago.As we must surely realize from recent arrests around Toronto, New York, Miami, London, Beirut, and elsewhere, the menace is hardly receding. For each Islamist cell police break up, they are dimly aware of several others. In Mumbai, the police anti-terrorist squad...

The Americans went into Afghanistan and Iraq with my blessings, as my reader may recall. I thought both decisions to invade were right, before either had been taken. But I thought this for reasons I never fully explained, that were never quite George Bush’s reasons — more those of Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938). I was, for instance, sceptical about the project of bringing Western-style, bourgeois democracy — and everything needed to support that — to countries where politics by violence had so long prevailed. But if anyone could do it, I thought the Americans could, with their own history of heroic...

Sometimes I am brought up short by the clarity and courage with which someone else -- with more to lose than I have -- states a truth. I am a Catholic Christian, who often dismisses “secular humanists”. But I’m in awe of people like Canada’s Irshad Manji, the “Muslim refusenik”, who had the courage in her book The Trouble with Islam to directly confront the horrors done in Allah’s name -- in, as she put it, “Pick a country, any Muslim country.” Another is Wafa Sultan, an Arab woman practising psychology, now living in the States. A self-professed “disbeliever in...

This will be my 11th consecutive column, directly or indirectly on the “Danish cartoons” issue. The cartoons themselves were a red herring from the start -- a fake issue, trumped up by fanatical Muslims seeking grievances to abet a confrontation, and thereby extract concessions from the West. It is a fire, still being stoked around the world by radical “Islamists”, using shameless lies and misrepresentations. (See my previous columns.)The reason I have written so copiously on this subject -- not the cartoons themselves, but what I have called the “organized apoplexy” in response to them -- is because it is...