A review of a chilling movie.
As a commenter notes, one reason that the left is blind to this danger is that it views the world through a narrow prism of class and wealth, and doesn’t really understand religion or religious fanaticism.
Category Archives: War Commentary
The Professor’s War
Dr. K isn’t impressed with the president’s foreign policy:
Well, let’s see how that paper multilateralism is doing. The Arab League is already reversing itself, criticizing the use of force it had just authorized. Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, is shocked — shocked! — to find that people are being killed by allied airstrikes. This reaction was dubbed mystifying by one commentator, apparently born yesterday and thus unaware that the Arab League has forever been a collection of cynical, warring, unreliable dictatorships of ever-shifting loyalties. A British soccer mob has more unity and moral purpose. Yet Obama deemed it a great diplomatic success that the League deigned to permit others to fight and die to save fellow Arabs for whom 19 of 21 Arab states have yet to lift a finger. And what about that brilliant U.N. resolution?
Pathetic.
[Afternoon update]
The Libya farce gets turned up all the way to eleven:
Even though an American sits at the apex of NATO, it appears as though the command decisions involving American military forces will be coming from a NATO committee rather than from the commander-in-chief. This is almost certainly an unconstitutional delegation of the President’s command responsibilities; it is incompatible with the “commander-in-chief” clause of Article II of the Constitution. Among other things, it dilutes Obama’s accountability for the results. This may well be Obama’s strongest innermost desire, of course. He clearly has no stomach for his duties as commander-in-chief, and in handing over to NATO is voting “present” once again.
As I wrote, pathetic.
[Update a few minutes later]
Hard thoughts on Libya:
Fairly or not, Obama almost single-handedly is rewriting the history of dissent between 2003 and 2008 — from Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, Predators, Iraq, and preventative detention to now-optional war-making in the Middle East — and proving that prior loud protests were more partisan attacks than matters of principle. More than any other individual in recent history, the career of Obama (2002–2011) will be a historical touchstone for understanding the nature of protest in the war-on-terror years.
Second, much of this mess hinges on a number of puerile assumptions: that a bunch of televised rebels swarming a Libyan city equals the birth of democracy, as if an unknown group of dissidents could be assumed to be competent and well-intentioned; and that a monster like Qaddafi — with a four-decade pedigree of near-constant violence — could be expected to simply step down. Apparently, we were to believe that he would follow the example of Mubarak’s tail-between-the-legs flight; or that he would depart because Barack Hussein Obama ordered him to, or because there was some chance of serious violence if he did not; or that he would find exile a preferable alternative to a stormy continuance of his rule. I think most adolescents in the real world would know that the above assumptions were all fantasies.
A ruler like Qaddafi is part Milosevic, part Saddam, part Noriega, and part Kim Jong Il. They stay in power for years through killing and more killing (to paraphrase Dirty Harry, “They like it”), and they do not leave, ever, unless the U.S. military either bombs them to smithereens or physically goes into their countries and yanks them out of their palaces. Period. They most certainly do not care much for the concern of the Arab League, the U.N., or a contingent from Europe, or a grand verbal televised threat from a U.S. president — again, even if his name is Barack Hussein Obama and he is not George Bush.
I hope the country can survive another couple years of this.
You Don’t Say
Few Americans see Barack Obama as a strong military leader. Well, admittedly, it’s one of the few things that he didn’t lie about to get elected. Like many Democrats, he can’t bring himself to use the word “win” in conjunction with “war” time-limited, scope-limited military action.
Obviously, he has studied Sun Tzu’s “The Art Of Time-Limited, Scope-Limited Military Action.”
“Half-Assed Bushism”
Some thoughts on the lack of leadership from the White House on Libya.
[Update a while later]
Foreign policy in a ditch.
Thoughts On Islamism
The first commenter is correct. It is impossible to have an intelligent discussion about this due to political correctness and multi-culturalism.
What Next After Libya
Victor Davis Hanson asks for a little foresight and planning from this administration of which, I suspect, they are utterly incapable, and in which they are not even disposed to engage.
My Goals For Our Libyan Adventure
They’re pretty limited, really.
I don’t really care who wins, as long as Colonel Whathisname loses. I think that attempting to influence the outcome of events beyond that are far too problematic, with poor prospects for success, and large prospects for quagmire.
But we need to remove this carbuncle from the backside of humanity once and for all, after more than four decades of his insanity and warmaking, particularly now that the president foolishly told him that his time was up, and that his behavior was “unacceptable.” To leave him in power after that pusillanimous action, with no plan to actually make it happen, would weaken us tremendously, in both the Arab world and the globe at large.
He needs to be reminded that actions have consequences — something that he seemed to have forgotten in the transition from Bush to Obama — and if he doesn’t live long enough to learn the lesson, then his successor(s) needs to know it. If we are to rid the world of tyranny, we have to get the proper incentives in place, and one of those lessons should be, if you want to enjoy a comfortable retirement, you don’t slaughter your own people when your rule is challenged.
[Update later morning]
Stephen Green: We seem to have gotten into this war without a strategy. Do we even have an objective?
What A Difference A President Makes
Thoughts on the new rush to war:
Just pointing out the obvious –
Like the comments in the BBC news section right now where you’d think no one had ever tried to put together a coalition of western democracies to depose an Arab tyrant who was abusing his population. And this one hasn’t even bothered to invade anyone recently.
From those comments one thing is clear – that was one well deserved Peace Prize!
Did these people never hear of Saddam gassing the Kurds, running over Shia with tanks to quell their uprising, or throwing his opponents in chippers?
Guess not.
I suppose that means my support for getting Saddam was “blood for oil” but my support for “Lyberation” is virtuous.
I just can’t figure myself out sometimes.
They told me if I voted for John McCain, we’d be bombing Arab countries while the supporters of the bombing promised that we’d be greeted as liberators. And they were right!
Yup.
“Overpowering Horror”
Some thoughts on what it takes to slit the throat of a baby:
…to live under the rule of Jews! This is a matter of great shame, an “overpowering horror” that justifies baby-killing in the minds of many (I’d wager most) Palestinians to expiate that shame. I suspect that part of the loathing other Arabs feel for the Palestinians stems from their view that the Jews made the Palestinians their bitches, to be vulgar about it, and no Muslim worthy of the name would permit such an inversion of the natural order to happen. The very notion that a Jew should command and a Muslim obey, that a Jew should ride while a Muslim walks, that a Jew should be armed while a Muslim is weaponless is simply an abomination — an “overpowering horror.”
Not that most would be able to do such a thing — human beings are hard-wired to recoil from slitting throats of three-month-old babies. But while in other circumstances the inability to kill babies would be seen as a good thing, in this case those Palestinians who can’t bring themselves to do that see it as a weakness — they wish they could muster the courage to murder Jewish babies, but unfortunately they can’t. So the second best is to lionize those heroes who do have the cojones to wipe away the shame of being subject to Jewish overlordship.
We underestimate the cultural war in which we are engaged at our extreme peril. I’m not sure I agree that it’s “most,” but it’s enough that it’s as big a problem as the Nazis were, in terms of having to break the back of a racist totalitarian ideology. And we’re not doing much along those lines. Instead, we pretend it doesn’t exist, or that it’s just a few “extremists,” and that we should give equal time to the KKK and murderers of abortion providers.
Iran Lies About Its Space Program
…and the AP buys it uncritically:
Iran says it has sent the country’s first space capsule that is able to sustain life into orbit as a test for a future mission that may carry a live animal.
The state IRNA news agency says the capsule was carried by a rocket dubbed Kavoshgar-4 – or Explorer-4 in Farsi – some 75 miles (120 kilometers) into orbit.
There is no such thing as a 75-mile orbit. That’s barely into space (the official altitude is a hundred kilometers, or about 63 miles), and there is too much drag to sustain it. If they have enough velocity to get to orbit, they’d also have enough to get to a decent altitude (at least a hundred fifty miles or so). This was probably a suborbit. If there was a launch at all.
I wonder if they bothered to confirm with the JSPOC? Maybe I will.