Category Archives: War Commentary

Political Commentary, War Commentary

Remember

4 Comments

A video tribute.

I was in San Juan, getting ready for a flight back to LA, watching Fox’n’Friends before going to the airport. When I saw the second plane hit the towers in real time, I knew there was no point in going to the airport. I also knew we were at war. That war hasn’t ended — the enemy still wages it against us. BUt the current administration doesn’t really seem to believe it. They can’t even bring themselves to call it a war, and they seem to gag on the word “victory,” or “win.” All they know how to and want to do with wars is “end” them.

[Update a few minutes later]

Reflections from Lileks:

It’s all so far in the past, isn’t it? The ten-year-old you had to sit down and console and reassure is off to college. The President is retired – seems like he left two years ago. The wars grind on, but as far as the front pages are concerned, they’re like TV shows that lost their popularity but pull enough viewers to avoid cancellation. (The video store doesn’t even carry the DVD of the first two seasons anymore.) We’re used to the hole in the ground where the towers used to be, and if they announced they won’t rebuild, but will pave it over and use it for parking, people would shrug. We haven’t forgotten that the towers fell, but no one remembers what they planned to replace them with. The towers they planned looked empty in in the pictures – shiny, contorted, as if twisting away to avoid a blow.

Right after the towers fell, people who’d never liked them as architecture wanted them back just as they were. Get back up in the sky! But it hasn’t happened. Even if they build the replacement towers, there’s still a space in the sky where no one will ever stand again. We could stand there once. That we couldn’t stand there eight years ago was their fault. That we cannot stand there today is ours.

Back to normal. I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

[Update a few minutes later]

Michael Yon has a report from Helmand Province in Afghanistan, eight years later. Hit his tip jar.

Political Commentary, War Commentary

America’s Chamberlain?

10 Comments

Has President Obama already sold out eastern Europe to the Russians?

Ellison thinks that “Obama’s people believe that many global problems will be more easily solved together with Moscow.” In particular, nuclear disarmament. Ellison says that Obama will “sacrifice a lot” to get it. You know, the way Czechoslovakia was “sacrificed” to a certain mustachioed German house painter several decades ago.

Is Barack Obama going to become America’s Chamberlain? Is he going to ignore the horrific spate of obviously political murders the Kremlin has been committing ever since Putin arrived? The invasion of Georgia? The relentless anti-American rhetoric? The nuclear bombers buzzing Alaska with metronomic regularity?

Is he going to eliminate nuclear deterrence in Europe and leave its eastern regions helplessly vulnerable to Russian tanks, just as Georgia was left vulnerable?

It seems so. As blindly as Chamberlain, Obama appears to believe that our foes can be appeased into becoming friends and that we can rightly sacrifice smaller nations to our noble vision.

I wonder if people thought they were voting for this last fall?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Warm Welcome

13 Comments

What does it say when someone who engineered the murder of hundreds of innocent civilians in an American airliner is given one in Libya?

What it says to me is that we, and the West (even if we and they don’t recognize it) are in a de facto war with that nation. Of course, that’s really been the case for over two-hundred years — it’s just been a prolonged (and often faked) truce.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

If I Forget Thee

9 Comments

Jerusalem. Next thing I expect they’ll have one of those maps of “Palestine,” that doesn’t include Israel, on the State Department web site. And then there’s this:

Robinson’s record is well known to most Jews with even a passing familiarity with the Jewish media. It cannot be a surprise that honoring Robinson in this way would be anathema to the Jewish community. In addition, I know from having worked in the White House that these selections go through extremely careful vetting of public and non-public databases to make sure that they would not embarrass the president in any way. The staff secretary’s office, which clears all paperwork that goes to the president, would also make sure that all of the relevant offices sign off on important selections before they happen. The two most important sign offs on something like the Medal of Freedom would be the chief of staff’s office, now headed by Rahm Emanuel, and the senior advisor’s office, now run by David Axelrod. For the Obama White House to have made this selection could mean one of only two possibilities: that they did not vet and clear the candidates, which suggests a level of incompetence beyond even missing tax evasions by cabinet nominees. Uncaught tax evasion does not come up on Google; Robinson’s record does. The other, more likely, possibility is that they knew and did not care.

It’s almost like they’re on the other side. And American Jews continue to play the sucker.

[Update a few minuts later]

But wait! There’s more:

Israel has a less favorable view of the United States now than it did in 2007 — by 6 points. Aren’t you glad we’ve appeased places like Syria and Venezuela and Cuba and Burma, though?

But a few other interesting data points come from the Pew survey as well: The Palestinian territories — run by Hamas and Fatah — do have a better opinion of the United States. So our chief ally in the Middle East is more nervous, and Yasser Arafat’s legatees are more happy.

But now get this from the survey: There is little evidence that support for suicide bombing in the Muslim world has decreased.

You don’t say.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Saving The Mullahs

2 Comments

Obama continues to throw them a life line:

…even as the Iranian people are casting doubt on the legitimacy of the regime (and are being brutalized for doing so) and even as the regime continues trying to kill Americans in Iraq and elsewhere, Obama is giving the mullahs the three things they most need: confidence in their security, international legitimacy, and time.

As I’ve been saying for a month, there is nothing complicated about this: Obama wants the mullahs to win. That seems impossible to believe for many well-intentioned people, but once you accept it — and everything it implies — life starts to make much sense. It isn’t any better, mind you, but at least it makes sense.

Sadly, yes. It’s hard to show how persuasive you are in negotiating with your fellow dictators if they get inconveniently thrown out of office.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Is Zelaya The Next To Go Under The Bus?

2 Comments

Hugo Chavez seems to have given up on him. He probably figured that he had enough problems of his own. And of course, that means that their good bud Barack Obama has probably given up on him as well, since he never had a good case to make to support him in the first place, and he also has enough problems of his own. Good for the Honduran people, if not for him.

And note how the issue has fallen out of the news…