JunkYardBlog

TOM BARNETT IS RIGHT (SO FAR)

In his book The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century, military futurist Thomas Barnett predicts that one consequence of the global war on terrorism will be the bifurcation of the US military into two distinct forces with two distinct roles. One force, which Barnett calls "Leviathan," will be the warfighting force. Its job will be to defeat enemies rapidly via overwhelming and unstoppable force. The Air Force's globally projectable power, the Navy's carrier strike forces and the Army's heavy armor divisions will comprise the Leviathan force. The second force, which he calls the "System Administrator," will then come into theatre and pick up the pieces. Sys Admin will be made up of light infantry and Marine expeditionary units, or their future equivalents, augmented with culturally relevant components--translators and so forth. What Leviathan destroys, Sys Admin will repair. What Leviathan crushes, Sys Admin will replace. This isn't to say that Sys Admin will be some kind of Peace Corp. It will provide security and rapid reaction capabilities even while it nation builds to bring Gap states--failed or failing states, or states that have hosted terrorists and thereby necessitated our intervention--into the functioning Core of viable economic, democratic and peaceful nations.

Seem far-fetched? Only if you're not paying attention. I've been watching with keen interest the way the military is training units destined for Iraq. At Ft. Polk, units are undergoing urban training in which they interact with civilian populations even while terrorist forces snipe at them from buildings and bombs detonate in parked cars by the side of the road. Hairy stuff, but the kind of stuff a Sys Admin force will be expected to do and is now doing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Belmont Club links to further proof that Barnett is right, and the bifurcation of the US military is probably already underway:

In addition to the familiar tactical issues described above, the urban warrior must deal with refugees, media, curfews, crowd control, municipal government, street gangs, schools, armed citizens, disease, mass casualties, police, cultural sites, billions of dollars of private property, infrastructure and religion, to name but a few factors. In this context, the brigade combat team that dominates the central corridor is woefully inadequate; likewise, the doctrine and force structure behind it.

I have previously tried to demonstrate ("Factors of Conflict in the Early 21st Century," ARMY, January) that the operational level of war is becoming an anachronism because the idea of a theater military campaign is no longer relevant. Theater operations have become so intertwined with global considerations, and military factors have become so integrated with diplomatic, economic and cultural factors, that theater warfare is becoming indistinguishable from global grand strategy. In a similar manner, the challenge of urban operations will serve to redefine the tactical level of war.

That's from an article in Army Magazine, written by Lt. Col. Robert R. Leonhard, U.S.A. (ret). Relating this thinking to Iraq, the military on the ground there has already reorganized along the new paradigm:

Kimmitt explained that Multinational Corps Iraq will focus on the tactical fight -- the day-to-day military operations and the maneuvering of the six multinational divisions on the ground. Army Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz will command the corps. Meanwhile, Multinational Force Iraq will focus on more strategic aspects of the military presence in Iraq, such as talking with sheiks and political leaders, and on training, equipping and fielding Iraqi security forces.

Read that last sentence again--"talking with sheiks and political leaders, and on training, equipping and fielding Iraqi security forces." If that's not a Sys Admin, I don't know what is.

Now, relate these high-level moves to the battle against Muqtada al-Sadr's militia. Sadr, nephew of Iran's president, had until recently believed he could lead an open revolt against US forces in Iraq. He believed he could use his family and tribal associations to foment a revolution against the approaching new Iraqi government. He likely counted on a ham-handed US response flipping average Iraqis to his side.

He miscaculated. Rather than go in with guns blazing a la the Leviathan force, Sadr has found himself dealing with a much more patient Sys Admin force. The Sys Admin is more interested in cobbling Iraq togther than it is in destroying a city to beat down one terrorist-connected militia. Destroying the militia is important, but can wait until the Sys Admin has helped establish an indigenous force to deal with it.

That force, the reconstituted Iraqi Army, is on the way. Its Special Forces, trained under US supervision in Jordan, have already scored victories against insurgents and are on the way to proving their mettle in combat alongside American troops. Regular Iraqi troops are also on the way, and along with the new Iraqi police will soon become the front-line force to repel and subdue the terrorists.

Will it work? Will the Sys Admin's patience pay off, or will it allow another menace to slink away only to fight us another day? At this point, it's impossible to say. We are working in a new type of war, a post-modern war requiring far more wisdom than Sun Tzu could dream up. What we have done thus far is marginalize a potential popular threat while at the same time preserving sites that the very people we are supposed to be helping deem holy. Those can't be bad things.

To offer a bit of hope, as Barnett appears to be right about the future face of the US military, it's worth summarizing what he has to say about the war in Iraq. Barnett says that in 10 years' time, Americans and most of the world will come to see the invasion of Iraq and the installation of a representative government there as the catalyst of a "Big Bang" that could transform the Middle East for the better. The war to depose Saddam will be as uncontroversial then as World War II is today.

I hope he's right. So far, his track record is pretty good.

AL GORE AND THE DEMOCRATS--A JYB WEB AD

The JYB has entered the political ad fray. Below is our first effort. It's an avi file and about 2.3 megs. Here are a few screenshots:

Set your connection on its highest setting, and commence downloading:

UPDATE: Here's the QuickTime version. You'll need at least QT3 and it's 6.3 megs. Also, it's re-cut to tighten it up a bit. Enjoy!

If anyone is interested in hosting additional versions, email me and let me know. I'd like to put RealMedia and Windows Media versions up somewhere but don't have space on my server.

And, a broadcast quality version is available if any media are interested. Serious inquiries only, please.

MORE: How serious can the inquiries get if Jonah Goldberg is making fun of our soundtrack...?

WAR STORIES

America is currently at war with an implacable foe bent on subduing her. No, I'm not just referring to the increasingly delusional, amoral, repugnant and infantile left, but to the actual terrorists for whom the Western left is serving as a propaganda arm. But even in the middle of that war, our troops charged with defending us still have time for humanitarian assistance:

FOND VERRETTES, Haiti (AP) - U.S. and Canadian troops on Thursday rushed to a town left completely submerged by flooding, and health officials feared 1,000 people could be dead in that town alone, a figure that would nearly double the toll from storms that hit Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Why are American and Canadian troops in Haiti of all places? Is there some secret oil reserve there that they're guarding? No. They're there because Haiti is a failed state, a Gap state in Tom Barnett's parlance, and needs our help. We sent troops there to restore order. Not for oil. Not for conquest, and not even to advance some larger goal in the war we are fighting and must win. Our troops, as well as those of Canada and other nations, are just there to help out. Today they're ferrying water and supplies and looking for anyone who may have survived the terrible flooding in Haiti and the Dominican Republican, flooding which in a couple of days has already killed far more people than the number of troops we have lost in the entire war. Our troops will save people's lives, probably already have. Some day those same people will, like much of Europe, probably hate us. But our troops will have saved them anyway, and done good.

On the other side of the world, another Gap state is developing nuclear weapons at a pace that we can only guess at. Iran is a hellhole, a fetid swamp of backward mullahcracy and terrorist fever. If Iran gets its hands on nuclear weapons, the world will immediately become a much more dangerous place.

Occupied heavily in two shooting wars and working a blockade against another rogue state on the other end of Asia, America has her hands full and has requested that her allies in Europe tend to the Iranian business. It's a reasonable request, and the Europeans claim to be so much better than we are at such things. They claim to be so much more thoughtful and circumspect, so much less arrogant and militant than we Americans tend to be, so you'd think that their nuanced approach might yield results if they're correct.

You'd be wrong. The Europeans are failing us, both in military terms and in diplomatic terms. Iran has decided to thumb its nose at the world, and continue its chase for the Big One. Some think-tank calling itself the International Institute for Strategic Studies--most famous recently for its proclamation that al Qaeda still has 18,000 operatives in the field--blames it all on the US. Doesn't everyone?

The IISS said that since October 2003 – when Iran reached agreement with Britain, France and Germany to accept a more rigorous international inspections regime – Iran has refused to suspend its nuclear fuel cycle program.

"Instead, Teheran appears to be taking a harder line, perhaps believing that the U.S. is sidelined by Iraq and the presidential elections and that the Europeans are reluctant to press for sanctions in the Security Council," the institute said.

"For now, the challenge for the EU-3 is whether they can deter Iran from resuming work on its enrichment plant while the IAEA continues efforts to verify Iran’s nuclear declarations. Also unclear is whether the U.S. will eventually enter into nuclear negotiations with Iran, as it has done with Libya and North Korea."

As I said, the IISI places blame not on the Iranian mullahs but on the US government. Why? Why is it America's job to wade into all of these difficult situations and save the world from yet another menace?

Because no one else can, or will.

We saved Europe from itself twice last century, only to have to defend it from itself for 50 years thereafter. Had we left Europe to its own devices it probably would have collapsed into something resembling the Middle East by now--mired in some tyrannical ideology or another, factionalized, backward and hostile, a well-armed menace to the rest of the world. But we didn't leave Europe to its own fate, just as we aren't leaving Haiti and the Dominican Republic to theirs. We help, because we can and because no one else will.

Returning to the IISI's paragraphs, they blame America. But an alternative opinion, based entirely on the facts they present, is handy. Iran knows that the only state it need fear is the US. No other nation fields a credible force capable of dealing with them if it comes to blows. With our domestic politics embroiled in "Bush LIED" and all the rest, and with our troops turning Iraq into something resembling a decent place one dead terrorist at a time only to have our media turn it all into a colossal failure, Iran knows that we aren't going to be in a position to deal with them by force for some time. It also knows that Europe, increasingly dhimmi Eurabia, won't make good on any threats, and probably won't even bother to make any threats in the first place. The UN? The International Atomic Energy Agency, like the rest of the United Nations, is only capable of action to the extent that America supplies the blood and treasure to fuel it.

In other words, rather than blaming the US, the IISI could just have easily blamed Europe for being so unserious about Iran's nuclear programs and could just as easily have blamed the toothless IAEA with its hapless director, for Iran's nuclear advance. But blaming them is little like blaming a half-wit for saying something dumb. Isn't it just sort of what you'd reasonably expect them to do?

Europe has lived on American goodwill for half a century, and is as ungrateful for it as a people has ever been. The majority of that darkening continent hates us now, and for no good reason. Have we ever needed Europe's help to defend us from anyone? Have we ever needed Europe to lend us materiel because some internicine squabble had triggered some war on our side of the ocean? Of course not. Maybe that's why they hate us. They look at us and they see what they could be, but are not.

So in the middle of a war, we by turns fight terrorists and defend ourselves, we try the impossible in turning a Middle Eastern sinkhole into a responsible state, keep the peace in Europe's own backyard, and distribute food in flood-stricken Haiti. We try to keep a lid on North Korea's nuclear ambitions, and all we ask of Europe is to take Iran's nuclear programs seriously enough to do something about them. And we don't even get that much help from them.

AN IRAQI'S POINT OF VIEW

Today's must-read comes courtesy Mohammed over at Iraq the Model.

SADDAM AND 9-11 LINKED

The Wall Street Journal reports that a solid link between Saddam and 9-11 has been tentatively established:

Newly uncovered files examined by U.S. military investigators in Baghdad show what is being described as "a direct link" between Saddam Hussein's elite Fedayeen military unit and the terrorist attacks on America on Sept. 11, 2001.

Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, who attended a January 2000 al Qaida summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where the 9/11 attacks were planned, is listed among the officers on three Fedayeen rosters reviewed by U.S. probers, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

"Our government sources, who have seen translations of the documents, say Shakir is listed with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel," the paper said.

Though the Journal doesn't mention it, Saddam's Fedayeen has been identified in previous reports as the group that conducted 9/11-style hijack training drills on a parked Boeing 707 airliner at the south Baghdad terrorist camp Salman Pak.

---
When Shakir was arrested in Qatar on Sept. 17, 2001, he was carrying phone numbers of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers' safe houses and contacts, as well as information relating to Operation Bojinka, a plot devised by trade center bomber Ramzi Yousef that became the blueprint for the 9/11 attacks.

The Qataris released Shakir after a brief detention and he fled to Jordan, where he was re-arrested. Inexplicably, however, the CIA signed off on his release after Amnesty International complained.

"He was last seen heading home to Baghdad," the Journal says.

Will this story reverse the left's brain rot? Unlikely. Cynicism even has the leftist media questioning whether the summer terror alert is real or just a wag the dog effort to boost Bush's poll numbers.

So just to review for you cynics out there, terrorists attacked Spain on 3-11 of this year and changed Spain's role from anti-terror ally to critic in the space of a week. That attack came on the heels of a terrorist-leftist get together in Tehran in which European leftwing activists apparently advised the terrorists as to how and when to strike to make maximum political effect. They took the advice to heart, and Spain ends up driven from Iraq. An alleged al Qaeda activist has been arrested in Japan attempting to set up a terror cell there in advance of national elections next year, and the the threat in the UK and around Europe is on the rise as well as several allied states approach elections that could do in them what was done in Spain.

Against this entire backdrop, the dedication of the World War II monument, the political conventions and the fall presidential election as well as the Iraq sovereignty handoff, it makes all the sense in the world that the terrorists would try and attack us. Yet from ABC "News" we get this line:

The sudden warning returns the nation's attention to terrorism, the issue that President Bush has highlighted as a central theme of his re-election campaign, after intense focus on other subjects like Iraq and prisoner abuses in Iraq. Bush has lost ground in the polls, falling in approval ratings to the lowest point of his presidency.

Ugh. Everything is political, even in "news" reports.

MORE: Here's the WSJ story.

MORE: More confirmation, from a 9-11 court case settled more than a year ago.

THE FIRST JYB GOLDEN BOMBBELT AWARD

I don't have the graphics together yet to make a proper presentation, but couldn't sit for long after hearing about a certain former politician's remarks today. So without further wait, the JunkYardBlog awards its first Golden Bombbelt Award.

What do you think would happen if, over the course of a day or a week or even a few weeks, several principle American officials with grave responsibilities in the ongoing war against terrorism were to resign? What would happen if, one after the other, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, and the CIA Director all walked off the job? In the middle of a war, and at a time when the threat to America is spiking?

This summer as we approach national political conventions, the handoff of Iraqi sovereignty and a presidential election, we face an increased terror threat. Al Qaeda and its allies would love nothing better than to mount a gigantic act of mass murder on American soil on the eve of our elections, in the hope that it might do here what such an attack did in Spain: Take us out of the war. As we approach that threat, what would happen if we suddenly lost several of our leaders who are closest to the anti-terror effort?

For starters, we would be facing the threat with hobbled leadership for several months. Given the composition of the US Senate and its willingness in recent years to filibuster nearly all Bush nominees, it’s reasonable to believe that no replacements for Secretary of Defense or CIA Director would be confirmed between now and the election. Our war effort would flounder, for several critical months.

That scenario—the mass resignation of several core members of our nation’s current anti-terror team—is precisely what former Vice President Al Gore wants. He wants us to approach the coming potential summer of terror hemorrhaging from self-inflicted political wounds.

Why would he want this? Why would Al Gore want America’s anti-terror team gravely wounded? I’ll let him answer that question himself:

"The unpleasant truth is that President Bush's utter incompetence has made the world a far more dangerous place and dramatically increased the threat of terrorist attacks against the United States," said Gore, Bush's Democratic rival in the 2000 election.

"He planted the seeds of war. He harvested a whirlwind," Gore added. "And now the corrupt tree of a war waged on false premises has brought us the evil fruit of Americans torturing and sexually humiliating prisoners who are helpless in their care."

The unpleasant truth is that Al Gore is nuts, or that he is on the take from terrorists. How much does an itinerant professor and political has-been cost these days? Apparently al Qaeda knows the answer to that question. How else make any sense at all of Gore’s unbelievably reckless remarks? President Bush, eight months into his presidency, “planted the seeds of war?” How did he do that? Gore doesn’t offer an answer, because he has none. The United States had been repeatedly attacked by terrorists during Gore’s entire time as Vice President, yet it’s Bush who planted the seeds of war.

How about blaming the “seeds of war” on Osama bin Laden? He’s the one who ordered the mass murder of 3,000 innocents.

I would merely chalk up Gore’s rhetoric to a head injury, or maybe to being off his meds, but there’s something deeper going on here. There is a revolutionary air about Vice President Gore’s speech, about the MoveOn.org group with which he has aligned, and indeed with much of the Democrats’ left flank. We have an election less than six months away, an election that will give the American people the opportunity to either re-elect or reject Bush and therefore his administration and its approach to the war. Yet many on the left have been calling for Bush’s impeachment in recent weeks, and now Gore wants several principal administration officials to resign.

Yet he stopped short of calling for the President himself to resign. Why? Aren’t Rumsfeld, Rice and Tenet merely enacting Bush policies? Because Gore is, at his base, a coward. The man who supported a perjured President cannot bring himself to call for the resignation of a President who has taken an incredible amount of abuse for trying to do his number one job, which is providing for the defense of America.

Gore’s diatribe will probably (hopefully) go down as the single most unpatriotic and reckless political speech of this war, and perhaps this entire century. Never before has a former Vice President chosen a more dangerous moment to smear a sitting President in a time of war. Never before has a former Vice President given our enemies—enemies who want to kill Americans by the millions—more of a reason to believe that if they can hold out a while longer, we will give them the chance to kill us, defeat us and destroy us.

What do you think will lead all of Al Jazeera’s pro-terrorist newscasts tonight? What speech do you think will be played in every Arab capital city tonight, and for the next several weeks or even months? What lesson do you think the mullahs in Iran, and the Baathist in Damascus, and the death cult terrorists in Gaza, have taken from Gore’s speech? What clips do you think will show up in terrorist recruitment videos?

Clips of this speech will put additional targets on the backs of American troops, backs that have now felt the cold steel of a knife driven in by the former Vice President of the United States.

The lesson our enemies will take from this is that Americans are too stupid to defend themselves. They will believe that we cannot sustain a protracted war without coming apart at the seems and defeating ourselves.

By all rights, by all that is American, Al “Qaeda” Gore should be brought up on charges of treason. He has intentionally given aid and comfort to the enemy. He has nourished their propaganda efforts for years to come. He’s an irresponsible menace, and apparently supports hobbling our government in a time of war. The only way to make any rational sense of his remarks is that he wants us to lose this war.

I don’t have the power to bring charges against Gore, but I can award him the first Golden Bombbelt Award. And Al “Qaeda” Gore, the latest Democrat politician to turn on his country and proclaim the terrorists who beheaded Nick Berg and killed thousands on a sunny fall day “righteous,” deserves it and much, much worse.

He deserves censure, scorn and to be cast into the outer darkness for as long as he lives. For starters.

MORE: From FrontPage:

The latest front in the War on Terrorism was opened yesterday – by former Vice President Al Gore. At a critical juncture in the War on Terror, with the handover of sovereignty to the Iraqi Governing Council just weeks away, Gore appeared before the MoveOn.org, a radical group which had already compared Bush to Hitler. In a voice trembling with affected passion, Gore indicted the President for seeking world domination, referred to Abu Ghraib as Bush’s “gulag,” accused the President of “war crimes,” and intimated that he was a murderer. Gore also accused the war criminal of denying civil rights to terrorists and subverting American democracy, asserted there was no connection between the Saddam regime and terror, and declared for the third time this year the commander-in-chief had “betrayed” the American people.

And don't miss this 1998 Gore quote regarding Saddam:

If you allow someone like Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons, how many people is he going to kill with such weapons? He's already demonstrated a willingness to use these weapons. He poison-gassed his own people. He used poison gas and other weapons of mass destruction against his neighbors. This man has no compunction about killing lots and lots of people.

And this one from 2002:

Since the State of the Union there has been much discussion of whether Iraq, Iran and North Korea truly constitute an “Axis of Evil.” As far as I’m concerned, there really is something to be said for occasionally putting diplomacy aside and laying one’s cards on the table. There is value in calling evil by its name.

So you Democrats tell me, where and when did Bush lie about WMDs or the threat from Saddam? Or did the evil smirking chimp moron super genius time travel and plant those lies in Gore's own mouth before becoming president himself? I'm sorry, before working his mental mojo on the Supreme Court so he could steal the election. W must have been a busy time traveller, because just about every major member of the Clinton administration said the exact same things about the Saddamite threat back in '98. Gore even said explicitly that Saddam had to be driven from power. If Bush lied, so did all of them. Prehaps the difference is they manufactured the evidence against Saddam in 1998 to distract the American people from Zippergate? Maybe Bush led us into a war based on evidence manufactured by the Clinton administration?

Read the whole story. It's accurate and therefore damning. Gore has sided with the terrorists. There is just no other rational way to read his remarks.

MORE: Some nut case out there is going to act on Gore's outrageous filth and similar lefty tripe bubbling around out there--and this country will be royally screwed. If it remains a country at all.

Here's the problem in a nutshell: The left doesn't police itself. When a member of the right says something outrageous or over the line, we fellow righties take it upon ourselves to slap them down. Think Trent Lott. We forced him out of his SML post, and I and many others were even willing to lose control of the Senate if it meant taking him to task. And what he had said about Strom Thurmond was, in retrospect, much less vile than what Gore said yesterday.

With the left failing to police itself, the moonbats have figured out that in order to generate headlines they have to keep one-upping each other. A few months ago it was shocking to hear Howard Dean insinuate that Bush knew about 9-11 beforehand. Now that statement pales in comparison to what Gore screeched at his Nuremberg-style MoveOn rally. And we have idiotarian talk show hosts out there calling for the death penalty for Bush. And still the left fails to call any of this out of bounds and fails to do a thing about it. What, lefties, will finally get you to do something about the fever swamp on your flank?

There will be consequences at some point. You people on the left are drumming up a demon.

MORE: Priceless.

JYB GOLDEN BOMBBELT AWARD

At the suggestion of Chris R. and Ockham a few weeks back, I've been kicking around the idea of creating a new award that the JYB would bestow upon Americans or other Westerners, but mainly Americans, whose rhetoric and/or actions add up to giving a lift to our terrorist enemies. There will be many contenders for this award, as there have been over the past couple of years. But what to call it?

How about the Chucklehead Award, in honor of the World War II song that warned against listening to defeatists and conspiracy theorists?

Or the Tokyo Rose Award, in honor of the sultry female voice that tried to lure American troops into despair like a siren?

I finally settled on something a little more germane to our war, and a little more visual: The Golden Bombbelt. Golden, because it's an award, and Bombbelt, because the winner's actions or speech, or thoughts or latest commercial enterprise--whatever has made them noteworthy--is the non-suicide bomber's version of a terrorist attack.

The Golden Bombbelt will be awarded as frequently as is necessary, by which I mean that I hope never to have to award another one after the first one, which will go out this week. We at the JYB will accept nominations from the readers and from anyone who has a suggestion--our email addresses are on the right. Only those whose speech or actions can be best understood as an attempt to assist our enemies will win. We won't dole out the award just for the sake of ridiculing someone, and winners won't be limited to those on the left side of the political aisle. Any public figure whose actions make the most sense as an attempt to help our enemies and/or damage our own war morale is eligible.

So with those non-technical criteria in mind, whom do you think deserves the first ever JYB Golden Bombbelt Award?

FRANCE RAISES TERROR ALERT

UPDATE: If you build it, they will improve upon it.

AL QAEDA IN JAPAN

The Japanese government has turned over a rock, and found terrorists hiding underneath:

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese police arrested five foreigners on Wednesday after carrying out their first raids in a widening probe of suspected al Qaeda activities centering on a French national who spent over a year in Japan.

Police searched 10 locations following media reports last week that Lionel Dumont, who was arrested in Germany last December, was trying to build up a base in Japan to support al Qaeda among a network of foreigners in the country.

Dumont, a French national of Algerian descent, is suspected of being involved in delivering equipment and funds to al Qaeda during his stay in Japan after entering the country on a false passport in 2002, Japanese media said.

Japan is the anchor of US strategy in Asia. We have thousands of troops scattered in dozens of bases throughout Japan, from Misawa in the north to Okinawa in the south. In terms of the strength of bilateral alliances, the US-Japan alliance is second only to the US-UK alliance, and the relative weighting of those alliances is arguable. Japan's military is actually better funded even than the UK's--it just lacks any serious offensive capabilities thanks to its pacifist constitution. As a defensive force, Japan's Self-Defense Forces are very capable. Attacking Japan, especially close to an election, would be something we should expect al Qaeda to attempt. Al Qaeda may believe such an attack could peel Japan away from its alliance with us a la Spain. And there will be Japanese elections next year.

But the terrorists are miscalculating in trying to attack Japan. The Land of the Rising Sun is not Spain, and probably would not be cowed by an attack on its soil. A cult used sarin to attack a Japanese subway in 1995, and the government of Japan did not rest until it had hunted down every single cult member responsible. The cult's leader, Shoko Asahara, was recently sentenced to hang. And hang he will.

Japan has a long and rich martial tradition, one that has been dormant since the end of World War II. It would be a gigantic mistake for anyone--al Qaeda, North Korea, anyone--to rekindle that tradition.

(thanks to Chris)

HAPPY BLOGIVERSARY!

The View From the Core is two years old today! Head on over and wish Lane a happy b-day.

THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

It's every bit as much an accurate portrayal of science as any Michael Moore film about, well, anything. Which is to say it isn't accurate at all, in any respect.

But moonbat Al Gore thinks it's a swell flick:

The world premier in New York will be accompanied by a demonstration in favor of protecting the environment to be attended by former vice president Al Gore.

Gore said, "Millions of people will be coming out of theaters on Memorial Day weekend asking the question: 'Could this really happen?' I think we need to answer that question."

We can answer that question, and the answer is "No."

Oh, the plot. Global warming causes the Gulf Stream to shut down. This current normally brings tropical warmth northward and makes Europe much more comfortable than it should be at its northerly latitude. The heat stays stuck in the tropics, the polar regions get colder, and the atmosphere suddenly flips over in a "superstorm." The frigid stratosphere trades places with our habitable troposphere, and in a matter of days, an ice age ensues. Temperatures drop 100 degrees an hour in Canada. Hurricanes ravage Belfast. Folks in Japan are clobbered by bowling-ball-size hailstones. If we had only listened to concerned scientists and stopped global warming when we could.

Each one of these phenomena is physically impossible.

Start with the Gulf Stream. Carl Wunsch, a professor of physical oceanography at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, knows more about ocean currents than most anyone. He thinks the nonsense in The Day After Tomorrow detracts from the seriousness of the global-warming issue. So he recently wrote in the prestigious science journal Nature that the scenario depicted in the movie requires one to "turn off the wind system, or to stop the Earth's rotation, or both."

The stratosphere will become the troposphere when all three laws of thermodynamics are repealed. Hailstones can't reach bowling-ball size because their growth is limited by gravity. Hurricanes can't hit Belfast because the intervening island of Ireland would destroy them.

How do I know so much about a movie that isn't out yet? I've seen the promos, and I've read and reviewed the book upon which it is based, The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber. In Strieber's previous work, Communion, he explained that he was told of the Earth's upcoming apocalypse by aliens. And how this knowledge was communicated is much more the purview of an adult Web site than a family newspaper. What's on the movie's Web site is worse — nothing but out-and-out distortion.

I didn't know, until reading this story, that both Art Bell and Whitley Streiber had anything to do with The Day After Tomorrow. I read a couple of Streiber's alien books a while back, books touted as non-fictional accounts of encounters with, conversations with and abductions by space aliens. Gore probably isn't proud of Streiber's role in all this, and he shouldn't be. Bell and Streiber are, by themselves, purveyors of silliness. Together, they're wingnuts squared.

Bell is the more famous of the two. He hosts a radio show when he isn't claiming that the gubmint is out to get him, and his show is full of tales of alien abductions. Streiber takes all of that stuff a step further, and actually claims to have been visited by space aliens on numerous occassions at his cabin in upstate New York. He says they have taken him up in their spaceship and done dirty deeds to him. And they told him the future, apparently including the fact that some day the former Vice President of the United States, himself a moonbat of the first order, would turn his alien encounters into green agitprop. By themselves, Bell and Streiber are laughable but harmless fringe actors. Put these two together with Gore and you have idiotarianism on steroids.

As I said yesterday, what a truly $%#^@% up world.

JOHN KERRY'S INSPIRATION

Want further proof that the Democrats are the party of secular humanism and cloaked socialism? No? Well, you're here so you're going to get it anyway.

John Kerry, Democrat nominee for President, has chosen "Let America Be America Again" as his campaign slogan. What that's supposed to mean isn't clear, and it's certainly not as good as past campaign slogans like Reagan's "Morning in America." Even Clinton's Fleetwood Mac crap was better than Kerry's slogan.

As Chris noted a few days back, the inspiration of Kerry's slogan is poet Langston Hughes. Hughes was a Communist. Not a lefty, not a "liberal." An actual Red. A big fan of V. I. Lenin, etc. And he hated, hated, Christianity:

Goodbye, Christ Jesus Lord God Jehova, Beat it on away from here now. Make way for a new guy with no religion at all-- A real guy named Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin Worker ME-- I said, ME!

That's his poem, "Goodbye Christ." The man who wrote that wrote Kerry's campaign slogan.

Why would John Kerry choose a Communist's mantra as his campaign slogan?

Why would John Kerry help Communists win Vietnam, for that matter, and why would he help Communists fend off American-backed freedom fighters back in the 80s? The one thing that is consistent about flip-flopper John Kerry is that if there is a Communist in a fight against America or our allies, Kerry tends to instinctively take the Communist's side. He has even managed to cast a vote or two for Fidel Castro.

Kerry is the most liberal (meaning furthest to the left, therefore closest to the Reds) Senator we have. He draws inspiration from Communist Langston Hughes. To say that he's out of the political mainstream is to utter the understatement of this campaign year.

THE GREAT PUNT

Lefty blogger and all around anonymous annoyance Atrios is, apparently, not a man/woman/whatever of its word:

atrios,

Don't ask me why I remember such stuff, but I was reminded of a conversation we had over at Yglesias' site last October. I searched his archives and sure enough, you said this:

Ricky, Why should I give credit to the one quarter growth bump to the tax cuts? They may indeed be the cause, but if they are that's actually bad, not good news. I predicted high (though not this high) growth this quarter. I don't say that to credit my forecasting skills, but just to point out that I'm not always doom and glooming. On the other hand, watch out for the next two quarters. And, if come April 1 the economy is trucking I will write a long mea culpa about how it appears I have been wrong, at least so far, abut the bush economic policies. that won't necessarily make them good in the long run, but it will make me wrong about the short term. Posted by: Atrios at October 31, 2003 03:26 PM

http://www.matthewyglesias.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=1713

Well, the next two quarters have passed. I admit I didn't search your site to see if there was any follow-up, so forgive me if I'm rehashing a mea culpa that has already taking place, but.....any response?

The reply:

Date: Fri, 21 May 2004 17:56:52 -0400
To: "Ricky West" rjwest21@yahoo.com
From: "Atrios"
Subject: Re: As stated on Matt Y's site

haha. okay, will do over the weekend.

I guess it depends on the meaning of "weekend".
Or "mea culpa"?
Or "long"?
Or "trucking"?
Or "I"?

The economy is trucking right along, and has been for several straight quarters now. And it's Tuesday, so the weekend is done. So where's the "Bush is right" post, Atrios?

THE ENEMY'S PLANS

Now that we know more about what President Bush wants to do in Iraq, it's worth examining what experts believe al Qaeda wants to do to us:

The United States remains al-Qaida's prime target, the report said. An al-Qaida leader has said 4 million Americans will have to be killed "as a prerequisite to any Islamic victory," the survey said.

Four million American dead. That's a little over half the population of New York City. Or four times the population of Rhode Island. Or slightly less than the entire population of Maryland.

Put another way, al Qaeda wants to kill eight times as many Americans as died in the entire Civil War, or 20 times the number we lost in World War II. In some ways those numbers are abstractions, so look at it this way: 9-11 was a drop in the bucket. If it had its way, al Qaeda would repeat that feat but magnify it by roughly 1,333 times. And we aren't talking combat deaths here. Al Qaeda wants to kill you while you cut your grass, sit at your desk, take your child to the zoo or fly across the country to visit your grandparents. And it wants to kill your family, your children, your friends and neighbors and everyone else it can kill as long as they are Americans. And they won't stop at four million like it's some kind of magic number or bright red line: Four million is the minimum they believe they need to kill in order to defeat us. The minimum. They'll kill ten million or a hundred million or a billion if they can.

The point is, al Qaeda is a serious and deadly enemy. It's long past time we took them seriously. Well, it's long past time those who haven't yet taken them seriously start to do so. Many of us have taken them seriously longer than our government has.

How would al Qaeda try and kill so many Americans? They have thousands of operatives out there, willing to die to kill us:

The estimate of 18,000 fighters was based on intelligence estimates that al-Qaida trained at least 20,000 fighters in its training camps in Afghanistan before the United States and its allies ousted the Taliban regime. In the ensuing war on terror, some 2,000 al-Qaida fighters have been killed or captured, the survey said.

Put another way, while we allowed their camps to exist in Afghanistan they trained 20,000 killers and sent them on their way. Nineteen of those killers hit their targets on 9-11, and we have killed or captured another 2,000 since then. But 18,000 of them remain at large. They would not be out there and would not have been trained had we taken out al Qaeda's camps during the 1990s. It's also likely that those terrorists would not be out there and trained had the previous administration made good in the war it declared on terrorism in 1998, or if it had accepted Osama bin Laden in any of the deals in which the Sudanese government offered him up. In the 1990s our government failed us, and we're facing a terrorist army today as a direct result of that failure.

But how can 18,000 terrorists kill four million Americans? Weapons of mass destruction:

"Al-Qaida must be expected to keep trying to develop more promising plans for terrorist operations in North America and Europe, potentially involving weapons of mass destruction," institute director John Chipman told a news conference to launch the annual survey.

That's what the big picture war in Iraq and the Proliferation Security Initiative's efforts against North Korea are all about. We must keep terrorists and WMDs as far apart as possible. As a case in point, for years Libya was a true rogue state, supporting and funding terrorists that attacked Americans and other Westerners for decades. Libya lacked the means to develop nuclear weapons on its own, but it had found a uranium supplier in North Korea and was on its way to developing its own nuclear stockpile before the PSI caught shipments of missile components from Pyongyang to Libya last year. That capture combined with the Iraq war's demonstration effect led Libya to disband its WMD programs and renounce terrorism. But it has also led to speculation that Iran has likewise been buying up uranium from North Korea and is further along in its own nuclear weapons programs than we probably know. Both Libya and Iran have histories of creating terrorist groups and funding them, as did Iraq. Libya has turned away from that; Iran hasn't. Neither had Iraq, until we ousted Saddam Hussein last year. If we hadn't invaded Iraq and if we hadn't set up the PSI, Libya would still be terrorist state and would be well on its way to acquiring nuclear weapons which it might then have handed off to terrorists who want to kill four million Americans. Instead, today we're still facing down Iran, Syria and North Korea, but Iraq and Libya are off the table. And those Afghan camps that al Qaeda used to train its terrorists are no more. We haven't won, but we're making progress. We have to keep going.

I'd like to hear from the anti-war left what they would do about the terrorist threat. For a decade we essentially followed their logic and let al Qaeda have its way with Afghanistan. The result of that policy was to loose 20,000 killers on the world and increase the likelihood that at some point some of those killers would get their hands on WMDs. The result of that policy was 9-11 in New York, 10-11 in Bali and 3-11 in Madrid, along with dozens of other attacks and attempted attacks around the globe. The result of that policy is the war we are now fighting against a stronger and better organized enemy than we would have faced had we taken the threat more seriously earlier.

I know before even writing that paragraph that the anti-war left doesn't accept the premise of the war and doesn't accept the fact that we have a vicious enemy bent on killing us and destroying our way of life. The anti-war left simply doesn't accept reality. So it's up to the rest of us to deal with the problems, those created by the terrorists as well as those created by their anti-war lefty enablers. We have to beat down the terrorists while we face down the fifth column in our own country. Those fifth columnists are part of the enemy's plans, too, whether they realize it or not. The enemy is counting on the fifth column to beat down our morale and cause us to give up the fight. That fifth column includes most of the major media, the majority of Democrats and the hardened anti-war left in the US as well as our allied countries. Most of them don't realize they're in use by the enemy, but that doesn't make their actions any less harmful or reprehensible. In trying to destroy our war morale, they are objectively helping the terrorists win. It's that simple.

So we fight an enemy of 18,000 or thereabouts in a four dimensional post-modern war that includes media images and talking head bloviation and political talking points and "documentary" films as much as it includes bombs and tanks and planes. If we fail, millions will die and our children will grow up, if they grow up at all, under the burka, the scimitar and the mullah's harsh reign. That is what the enemy plans to do: Kill millions of us, and subjugate the rest to tyranny.

THE SPEECH

President Bush helped himself, his party, his country and the Iraqi people tonight, by laying out a specific plan for returning Iraq to sovereign rule after the end of tyranny and coalition occupation. He reminded us that we're at war, and Iraq is the central theatre of that war. He reassured the Iraqi people that we are liberators, not overlords. He reassured waverers that he isn't a prisoner of events.

One speech won't change the dynamics here at home that have enveloped his presidency during the past several weeks, but this speech was a good start. President Bush still has a chance to win the war and win re-election, and he made a good case for both tonight.

To some extent, he also put his critics on the defensive. If there is any justice left in the world, which is a huge if, Senator Kerry should now have to explain how his vision for Iraq and for the war would differ from President Bush's vision. It won't be good enough, for Kerry or anyone else, to brush it aside by saying if they had made the decision we would never have gone to Iraq in the first place. The reality is that we're there. What will Kerry and the Democrats do about it? That should become the focus of the presidential campaign, and Bush has established that he knows where he wants things to go. Do his critics? I doubt it. They're mostly interested in shredding Bush, even if they have to tear through the country to do it. With tonight's speech, President Bush made their task a little bit tougher.

Throughout the Iraq war and aftermath, there has always been the tension between the disclosure that democracy demands and the concealment of plans that war needs. Bush's critics have often wanted him to spell out more than he should, disclose more than is prudent, and reveal more than is sometimes wise, both because it will give them some angle to attack the president and because it will make the war that much harder to win. Face it, the left has hung its electoral prospects on two things this year--economic failure and war catastrophe. On the economy, they have been routed as we have seen several quarters of robust growth. On the war, the left has tried to create defeat out of the ashes of two stunning victories. They have largely succeeded, and at great price. Iraq's future now hangs in the balance, not because terrorists have won significant battles against us, but because the left has created the perception of failure because things haven't been perfect.

By his silence over the past few weeks, the President has largely left the field of rhetorical battle to his domestic enemies. Tonight he joined the fight, and acquitted himself well.

The gauntlet he laid down to his opponents is a simple question: What will you do that is different from what I have done and plan to do? By laying out a plan, he has marginalized the cut and run crowd who should never have been taken seriously anyway. He has forced his opponents to articulate something beyond "It's a failure!" And he has exposed the cruelty both of his political opponents and our nation's terrorist foes.

Allow me to explain. Whether you supported the Iraq war or not, the fact is that we are there. We have deposed a terrible tyrant and are on track to replace him with a representative government of some kind. We are fighting the Baathist bitter enders and foreign terrorists who want to take Iraq back to the dark ages. We are training Iraqis to continue that fight long after we pack up and leave their land in their hands. The cut and run crowd of the left would, in abandoning Iraq to those forces we're fighting now, allow the rule of fear to re-establish itself. That may not be what they want--they claim only to want to bring our troops home--but if we cut and run before the job is done, that will be the effect. Iraq will fall right back into the grip of whoever is brutal enough to rule it. And then Iraq will become a terrorist menace once more, will use its wealth against us and against our allies and will help our enemies. We will have expended our blood and treasure for nothing, and freedom will die in Iraq. Millions of people will have gone from under one bootheel to another. That will be cruelest outcome both for America and Iraq, and we must not let it happen. Cruelty converges in the terrorist mind and the anti-war left, whose interests are now one and the same.

We owe it to the dead, American and Iraqi, to finish the job we have started. President Bush made it clear tonight that, as long as he is our President, he will finish that job. If his opponents want to abandon that job, they had best explain why it's in America's interests to do it. If his opponents have a better idea, let's hear it. But if his opponents just want to continue tearing this country apart over a necessary, moral and right war, they will fail, because allowing them to succeed will be a catastrophe for the rest of us.

That was President Bush's message tonight, and I bought it. He needs to keep relaying that message over and over again until it sinks in. We Americans are a hard-headed people, short of memory and mostly interested in the here and now. We need reminders and reassurance of what we're doing and why. We need our President to lead, and he is apparently sure of where he is leading us.

STUPID FAT LIAR

I know this will come as a shock, but Michael Moore is a liar:

A FEW YEARS AGO Michael Moore, who's now promoting an anti-President Bush movie entitled Fahrenheit 9/11, announced he'd gotten the goods on me, indeed hung me out to dry on my own words. It was in his first bestselling book, Stupid White Men. Moore wrote he'd once been "forced" to listen to my comments on a TV chat show, The McLaughlin Group. I had whined "on and on about the sorry state of American education," Moore said, and wound up by bellowing: "These kids don't even know what The Iliad and The Odyssey are!"

Moore's interest was piqued, so the next day he said he called me. "Fred," he quoted himself as saying, "tell me what The Iliad and The Odyssey are." I started "hemming and hawing," Moore wrote. And then I said, according to Moore: "Well, they're . . . uh . . . you know . . . uh . . . okay, fine, you got me--I don't know what they're about. Happy now?" He'd smoked me out as a fraud, or maybe worse.

The only problem is none of this is true. It never happened. Moore is a liar. He made it up.

And don't forget the Fahrenheit 9-11 Disney distribution lie:

In publicizing the movie, Moore has been up to his old dishonest tricks. Just before the screening at Cannes, he charged that Disney had told him "officially" the day before that it would not distribute Fahrenheit 9/11. Moore said this was an attempt to kill the film. He indicated a newspaper article had the correct explanation of Disney's decision: "According to today's New York Times, it might 'endanger' millions of dollars of tax breaks Disney receives from the state of Florida because the film will 'anger' the governor of Florida, Jeb Bush."

Later, in a CNN interview, Moore admitted he'd learned nearly a year ago that Disney would not distribute the movie. By pretending he'd just gotten word of this, Moore was involved in a cheap publicity stunt.

Moore lies, makes crappy propaganda films for the enemy, denounces his country and generally makes an ass of himself on a daily basis.

Yet he wins accolades, becomes a millionaire, writes a string of best-sellers, and lefties have the gall to attack President Bush while they defend Moore.

What a seriously &**(%& up world.

A MUST-READ

Today's must-read rant comes from WBAL radio's Chip Franklin:

Who’d have known that Karl Rove wasn’t an “Everybody Loves Raymond” Fan? Here in the United states, we televise the 9/11 commission hearings, complete with election-year grandstanding, we show pictures from Iraq complete with crying Iraqis babies, who by the way are probably drinking formula delivered by philanthropic Americans, and then of course we show all of the prison photos, call it “soldiers gone wild," where the worst of the best are made out to be the standard, a lie that is probably going to cost thousands of American lives. We show it all, including the the season finales from ABC, NBC, and CIS-CBS. Yes, we show it all. Except for the president of the United States speaking on the war during the middle of the war.

That’s right. The networks will blow off the President of the United
States. For Raymond, The Swan, for Fear Factor? For ABC’s Two and A Half Men. Why? What am I missing?

---

It’s a standoff between the idiots in the White House who chose to battle on a night of finales, the greed of the soulless Hollywood executives, always searching for a way to make a buck off the world’s depravity, and of course the mindless Americans who allow it all to happen. So warm up the lazyboy and drop your fat bumpkus right into never, never land. Because the real world is just too much.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

MY BIG, FAT IRAQI WEDDING

Robert Moran reports that the "wedding party" that US airstrikes destroyed was most likely a halfway house for newly arrived terrorists:

At the site where a U.S. air strike killed 40 persons Wednesday, troops found “terrorist manuals,” machines for making fake IDs, and battery packs rigged for homemade bombs.

They found nothing to indicate a wedding party, as some witnesses have said, a senior military official said Saturday.

---

At a briefing Saturday, Kimmitt showed photographs of the interior of the targeted building that showed stacks of bedding — more than 300 sets — a table used for medical examinations, and medical supplies, including syringes with residue suspected of being cocaine. There were assorted firearms and a large number of packed sets of clothing.

He said the setup appeared to be a way station where foreign fighters slipping through the border could get bogus identification documents and clothes that would help them blend in with the Iraqi population.

Yet another victory that the media is helping turn into defeat. So it goes in post-modern war.

THE WITCHING HOUR

So we live in a world that chooses to honor liars and frauds. Michael Moore, Oscar winner a year ago for making a "documentary" full of half-truths, exaggerations and outright lies, this weekend won top honors (and I use that term very loosely) at the Cannes film festival for another "documentary" full of half-truths, exaggerations and outright lies.

Queried about the falsehoods in his films, Moore offers a knowing wink and says "How can satire be inaccurate?" The question is, how can inaccurate satire win best documentary awards?

The sad fact is that there was some documentary producer who last year deserved the Oscar, but Michael Moore stole it from him. This year some deserving filmmaker should have won Cannes, but Michael Moore lied his way into that award too.

The sadder fact is that Moore is both the Leni Reifenstahl and Joseph Goebbels of this war: He is using his skills as a filmmaker to create nothing less than enemy propaganda, and the enemy he aids is ideologically a twin of Goebbels' and Reifenstahl's boss--anti-Semitic, brutal, a cult both of personality and radical supremacist creed. Yet another sad fact is that Reifenstahl's Nazi flick Triumph of the Will also won top honors at a French film festival, in 1937. Does the European elite ever learn?

Moore travels about the world, especially Europe, giving the seething anti-American masses what they want. He is a media mullah, showing up as the embodiment of the ugly American, and telling those who hate America that they're right to hate America, that they should resist American anti-terror efforts, that America is the cause of all evil in the world. He says of the enemies that recently used a machete to saw a young American man's head off:

The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not "insurgents" or "terrorists" or "The Enemy." They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow -- and they will win.

So Abu Musad al-Zarqawi=Paul Revere, in Michael Moore's world. What is that if not enemy propaganda, typed by his own hands to his fawning followers? His next film project may well be producing another Zarqawi snuff flick in downtown New York City.

The revolution talk seems to be contagious on the left these days. Andrew Sullivan, or more accurately one of his readers, dug up a juicy quote from Susan Sontag. Remeber her? She came out on 9-12-01 or thereabouts and told America that we deserved 3,000 dead in the middle of New York, in Washington and rural Pennsylvania. Not surprisingly, Sontag has a soft spot in her heart for Reifenstahl's films, and she has been evidently waiting for Moore's Minutemen to attack America for quite a while now. Circa 1968, she wrote:

And the revolution that remains to be made in this country [the United States] must be made in American terms, not those of an Asian peasant society ... Life here [in America] looks both uglier and more promising ... Increasing numbers of [Americans] do realize that we must have a more generous, more humane way of being with each other; and great, probably convulsive, social changes are needed to create these psychic changes ... The wide prevalence of unfocused unhappiness in modern Western culture could be the beginning of real knowledge - by which I mean the knowing that leads simultaneously to action and to self-transcendence, the knowing that would lead to a new versions of human nature in this part of the world ... Just possibly, the process of recasting the particular historical form of our human nature prevalent in Europe and American can be hurried a little, by more people becoming aware of capacies for sentiments and behavior that this culture's values have obscured and slandered.

She wrote that in the context of a visit to Hanoi, hub of North Vietnam's Communist government. She was merely one of many who sided with Communists during that war, hoping that US defeat in faraway Vietnam could somehow translate into a Communist revolution right here at home.

And she's still pining for one, all these years later.

And she's not alone. Linked off that same Sulllivan post, read up on the debate he has been having with blogger and professor Juan Cole. I find Cole to be an obnoxious bore and therefore never read him, but others find him informative and credible. Cole's sensitive moral compass has led him to equate Paul Wolfowitz with Saddam Hussein. I don't remember Wolfowitzing ordering any troops to spray poison gas on anyone, and I don't remember Wolfowitz lobbing missiles at Israel or establishing rape rooms to punish political opponents, but it's all good anyway. We all know what Cole meant to say, don't we? That a mistake on Wolfowitz's part is the same thing as genocide on a scale not seen since Pol Pot's Communists ravaged Cambodia. I'm sure somewhere in Cole's office you'll find a portrait of President Bush with a funny little mustache painted on the upper lip. These lefties like to play games of moral equivalence, but never seem to figure out that Baathists literally are Nazis by another name, and never own up to the incredible campaigns of murder and mayhem launched in the name of their precious revolution. They would rather just cheer on terrorists from afar, couched in terms of circumspection and political criticism, as long as it hurts that oily bastard from Texas.

Then there's Ted Kennedy. He hasn't tossed up any pro-terrorist rhetoric lately, but give him time. That's all the old lush is good for nowadays--give aid and comfort to Nick Berg's killers. And that's exactly what most of his pronouncements, made from the well of the US Senate, are. Aid and comfort to terrorists targeting Americans and our troops.

I could go on, but I just don't feel like it. It's too depressing. Since 9-11, we have had the chance to do great good in the world, and we started out on the road to doing it. We smashed two terrible regimes, freed 50 million people, and sent the world's foremost and most ambitious terrorist outfit scurrying into the hills. Over a short time we had arrested or killed the majority of al Qaeda's leadership, we had broken their financial system, we had destroyed their training camps and we were turning the tide against them. Their nuclear fantasy seemed further from their reach than ever. From 9-11's spectacular attacks, we had reduced them to striking soft targets in Bali and to car bombings in their own backyard. Those terrorists we had drawn to Iraq, we were killing or capturing in heavy numbers. We had them on the ropes.

But we're about to throw it all away. We had the chance to do great good, but thanks to legions of terrorist sympathizers, cheerleaders and hangers-on--Moore, Kennedy, Sontag, Cole and the leftist intelligentsia, most of Europe's elites, most of the Hollywood elite, most of our media elite, etc--we are about to waste it all, make the deaths of our soldiers count for nothing. And they'll put the rest of us right back in the terrorists' crosshairs.

We are where the Union stood at about this point in 1864. As Lincoln approached his run for re-election, he found himself opposed by a former general, George McClellan. McClellan had been fired by Lincoln for his inept battlefield command, only to turn on Lincoln and run against him for the presidency as an anti-war candidate. He made for a powerful critic, and threatened to take the White House, sue the South for peace and thereby break the Union for good. Lincoln needed a battlefield victory to prove that his strategy was working, and the war many called his war was winnable. Eventually General Sherman delivered Atlanta, the voters responded and Lincoln won.

Shifting back to today, what kind of battlefield victory can President Bush possibly pin his hopes on? Discovery of a massive cache of Iraqi WMDs? If recent events are any guide, it won't matter much. A massive cache of WMDs, mostly likely Iraqi, was recently found in Jordan, yet the press buried the story and the White House has failed to make much of it. Two WMD-laden shells have recently turned up in Iraq, in use by terrorists, yet the press has managed to avoid that story even while it dribbles out more photos of naked Iraqi prisoners. How come no one criticizes the media for exploiting those Iraqi men, when they air photos that reveal their faces?

How about the capture or confirmed death of Osama bin Laden as a battlefield victory? That probably won't make much difference either, at least not for very long. Over a week or so Bush's poll numbers would bounce, but things would soon settle back as shameless Democrats and leftists would use the event to argue that the war is over and we have all the more reason now to cut and run from Iraq. Or they would argue that Bush captured bin Laden months ago but held on to him to use his "capture" as an October surprise. You say the cut and run angle is in illogical argument? So what. Every single argument against the war thus far is illogical, yet by the Chinese water torture method--drip, drip, drip--those illogical arguments are winning the day. And if not illogical arguments, outright lies--see Michael Moore for more details on that.

The fact is, we're at the witching hour. The President says he'll start a press offensive aimed at explaining the transition in Iraq and shoring up support for the war generally. He may have been waiting to rope-a-dope his opponents, but this time he probably miscalculated and has waited too long. The press smells blood now, and is touting every single incident in Iraq as some kind of proof that we went to war for the wrong reasons, that we're nothing but killers, that our troops are monsters, and that we're a gigantic rogue state. Members of his own party are starting to desert him. The President will have one hell of a time working all of this around to a positive. In not countering the barrage of lies as they flew his way, he has allowed them to strike him, and they have been bleeding him politically for months now. I figure he has one, maybe two more chances to chance the public's mind about the situation in Iraq, and he has a very short time to make that happen and will be fighting a press that knows it has him right where it wants him and an opposition party that has lost all sense of honor and patriotism. If he doesn't turn things around, it's all over. Michael Moore's Minutemen will win Iraq. And then they'll set their sights on attacking us again, right here.