Just dogs, over Afghanistan. I’d have like to have been at the meeting where this was first suggested.
Category Archives: War Commentary
Time To End The Bowing
Reflections on the disastrous foreign policy of this administration:
Khadafy can be forgiven, but there are transgressions that can’t. One such sin was perpetrated by Israel after the nation’s decision to allow a new housing project to be built in Jerusalem.
The White House became so agitated with the new housing project — and the ill-advised timing of the announcement, which came during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit — that the casual onlooker might have been led to believe the Jerusalem neighborhood in question was part of some unfinished negotiation with Palestinians, or even that it was one of those “settlements.” It was neither.
Still, according to The Jerusalem Post, Hillary Clinton telephoned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who, along with many other Israeli officials, apologized for the poor timing of the project’s announcement — to “berate,” “rebuke,” “warn” and “condemn” Israel. White House senior adviser David Axelrod used NBC’s “Meet the Press” to call the incident an “affront,” an “insult” and “very, very destructive.”
As the administration was manufacturing this anger, the Palestinian Authority was preparing the newly minted Dalal Mughrabi square. You know, just a place for folks to gather and commemorate the 32nd anniversary of 1978’s Coastal Road Massacre, in which 37 Israelis — 13 of them children — were murdered in a bus hijacking.
An American named Gail Rubin, who happened to be snapping some nature pictures in the area, was also gunned down.
No worries. No affront taken. That’s not “very, very destructive” to the process. We are above the fray. Above frivolous notions of “allies” or “friends.” History only matters when our enemies deem it important. We don’t want to tweak the fragile mood of the Arab street.
They had better start to worry about the American street. Especially if they continue to push health-care deform on us.
[Update a while later]
Some related thoughts from Michael Ledeen:
As he pushes Israel away from the American embrace, Obama has undertaken to make peace with Iran, whose genocidal hatred of America and Israel and bloody war against both requires a very different policy. Sensible Middle East experts understand that there cannot be peace between Israel and the Arabs as long as Iran exercises a decisive influence over the key terrorist organizations. But Obama has willfully ignored this connection in designing his Mideast plans.
You can’t even begin to address the Arab-Israeli thing until and unless you’ve defeated Iran.
Unfortunately, they don’t believe in winning wars, only in “ending” them.
Mark Thiessen Knows John Adams
Hope Is Not A Strategy Or Method
Unless you’re Barack Obama.
The Incompetence And Partisanship
…at the Justice Department. Some thoughts:
…if Holder can’t give up the pipe dream of running a war from the ACLU handbook and conducting witch hunts to please the MoveOn.org crowd, Obama should find an attorney general who will.
Don’t hold your breath on that one.
There Seems To Be A Step Missing
In all the media discussion over Iran’s incipient nuclear capabilities, two phrases seem to be intermingled. The headline on Fox News uses the word “warhead,” while Jamie Colby is talking to John Bolton, who continues to use the phrase “nuclear weapons.” While Iran having nuclear weapons is obviously nothing to sneeze at (though the White House seems to have a different view), nuclear weapons are not warheads. A warhead is a specific kind of nuclear weapon — one that not only works, but is light enough to be delivered on a missile, and has reentry and guidance systems to deliver it to its target. One does not go from enriching uranium to building warheads in a single step, but I hear no discussion of this. I wish I did.
New And Improved
The president has rebranded the Iraq war. As Jonah says, making it sound like a new dish detergent sounds better than “Operation Defend Biden’s Gaffe.” Besides, you don’t want to establish a precedent like that, otherwise you’d be renaming things a couple times a day.
A Tipping Point?
Massachusetts Republicans come out of the closet.
This is an excellent demonstration of how much politics is psychological, and band-wagon effect. Just as Obama’s election was. But the spell has been broken on that one. No doubt to the chagrin of the Koolaid drinkers.
Well, actually, they’re still in the tank (as demonstrated by die-hard commenters here), but the rest of the rubes have caught on. It’s going to be a bloody cycle or two for the Donkeys. Along with hope for the salvation of the Republic.
And You Thought Waterboarding Was Bad?
Terrorist aren’t going to be allowed to use iTunes.
Space Policy Thoughts
…from the head of the Space Policy Institute (who I should disclose is a good and long-time friend and former colleague):
Scott Pace: I am disappointed that they chose not to fund the Constellation program or add the additional funds that the Augustine committee said would be necessary for a robust human spaceflight program. I think the NASA [budget] increase is good, and there is some good science and technology spending in the program, but it really did not restore a lot of the reductions that had been made in the fiscal year 2010 budget, so it continues a pattern of reductions to exploration, even though the NASA top line did go up somewhat.
TR: Are these reductions going to have a significant effect on the U.S. space program?
SP: The real issue is the future of human spaceflight and the question is, what [is NASA] doing after the space station? Because that is not very clear. [The administration] has made a commitment to the space station through 2020, which really gives us an opportunity to use it as a research facility, but it’s not clear what, if anything, is to come after the space station. Right now, with the canceling [sic — rs] of the Constellation program, there are no announced plans for going beyond low Earth orbit. The deeper question is what NASA will be doing. What is it going to do when we rely on commercial rockets, and how is it going to maintain its skills as a good customer and overseer?
The new effort does not have an overall architecture yet; it may get one, but right now [the plan] has a heavy technology development effort, and there is a lot of new technology that one could do, but without an architecture, how efficient is that technology development going to be?
The question of how it’s going to maintain its skills as a good customer and overseer presupposes that it has now, or ever had such skills. NASA is a terrible customer, always has been, and is likely doomed to always be, but one step toward improving it is forcing it to buy services instead of labor by the yard.
As for the lack of architecture, it’s too early to expect that. They didn’t even know what their proposed budget was until a couple of weeks ago. I imagine that there will be studies over the next few months to come up with one, but the agency could do a lot worse than to dust off the CE&R results that Steidle commissioned, and Mike Griffin ignored, at least as a starting point. And there are some technologies that are fundamental, and independent of architecture (e.g., on-orbit propellant storage and transfer). I don’t see how the “efficiency” of their development will be impaired by a lack of one. As Charles Miller reportedly said today at the FAA event, NASA is going to do something that it’s needed to do since it absorbed NACA and became an operational agency half a century ago — get back to basics of supporting technology development that industry needs to thrive.
[Update a few minutes later]
I’m afraid that Scott has fallen into the trap of thinking only of SpaceX when he talks about the “risk” of commercial not being able to step up to the plate. Regretting the loss of Orion is one thing, but there was no risk reduction with Ares, at least none worth the cost. There would be much less risk in modifying an existing vehicle (e.g., Atlas) to carry the NASA capsule, and it’s not like ULA knows nothing about rockets. And of course, there is always a tradeoff of risk versus cost. The cost ratio between commercial and NASA-centric (at least an order of magnitude) justifies the “risk,” at least in my mind. Of course, I don’t think it’s very high.
[Update early evening]
I think that it’s a mischaracterization to say that there are no plans to go beyond LEO. The administrator has been quite vociferous in saying that the goal is Mars. I don’t necessarily agree with that, and he hasn’t laid out a timetable and goals to achieve it, but to say that there are no plans is to imply that we will be in LEO ad infinitum, which I’m quite sure is not what the administration intends. At least not the NASA administration.