Michael Laprarie has an essay related to mine over at Wizbang.
[Via email from Paul Spudis, who must be thrilled that “Moon” was capitalized throughout my essay]
Category Archives: War Commentary
Saving The Mullahs
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.
Is Zelaya The Next To Go Under The Bus?
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…
The “Chavez News Network”
A report from Roger Simon, on what’s happening in Honduras. And US reportage.
Girl With No Future
A gloomy dispatch from Michael Yon, in Afghanistan.
A Crack In The Regime?
There seems to be a civil war brewing among the Iranian clerics:
“This crack in the clerical establishment, and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi, in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic,” said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. “Remember, they are going against an election verified and sanctified by Khamenei.”
The president will be very disappointed. He was so looking forward to discussing nuclear weapons with Ahmadinejad and demonstrating the power of his silver tongue. What will he do if he doesn’t have a comfortable, familiar dictator to prostrate himself before? These damned people, wanting their freedom. They’re so inconvenient.
Lionesses
An interesting story on American women soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Iran And Honduras
Is President Obama objectively pro-fascist?
Sure looks like it.
Also, thoughts from Ron Bailey on energy Leninism.
It’s a tragedy (though perhaps it’s a plan, going back to Thomas Dewey) that the voters understand neither history or economics.
[Mid-morning update]
Everything inside the state, nothing outside the state.
Selective Meddling
Some questions:
Now that the president has decided it’s okay to meddle in Honduras (where they are fighting to keep preserve their democracy against the Chávez-style thug who Obama wants to re-install) but not Iran (where thousands of Iranians who seek democracy are being killed, maimed and jailed by a regime which has been at war with the United States for 30 years), the president’s tack is to say that Honduras’s action in removing Zelaya is “not legal.”
What on earth makes Obama think he knows better about what is legal under the law of Honduras than the Supreme Court of Honduras and the law-writing legislature of Honduras? The Honduran military acted after Zelaya defied an order by that nation’s highest court which pronounced his coup attempt illegal; he has been replaced under a Honduran legal process by that nation’s Congress, which essentially impeached him and democratically voted in a successor. That sounds pretty legal to me. I am the first to admit I am not an expert in Honduran law, but I’d bet the Honduran Supreme Court has a better grasp on it than President Obama. On the issue of what is legal in Honduras, as between Hugo Chávez and the Honduran Supreme Court, our president has decided to go with Chávez.
Secondly, as IBD notes, the Obama administration is now “threatening to halt its $200 million in U.S. aid, immigration accords and a free-trade treaty if it doesn’t put the criminal Zelaya back into office.” Can someone explain to me how it is that Obama is willingly giving $900M to Hamastan (i.e., the jihadist-controlled Gaza strip) but would pull back a comparative pittance of aid in order to penalize a poor country in our own hemisphere for trying to preserve its democracy against a would-be left-wing dictator?
Also, as Charles Krauthammer said last night on Special Report:
…our decision ought to be: Yes, a coup isn’t a nice thing, but it’s preferable to having Zelaya dismantle the democracy. And we should insist on the elections of a president as scheduled in November, so it is a temporary situation.
Look, a rule of thumb here is whenever you find yourself on the side of Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and the Castro twins, you ought to reexamine your assumptions.
Hey, left-wing dictators have to stick together.
[Update early evening]
Zelaya’s operatives did their dirt all the way through. First they got signatures to launch the “citizen’s power” survey through threats — warning those who didn’t sign that they’d be denied medical care and worse. Zelaya then had the ballots flown to Tegucigalpa on Venezuelan planes. After his move was declared illegal by the Supreme Court, he tried to do it anyway.
As a result of his brazen disregard for the law, Zelaya found himself escorted from office by the military Sunday morning, and into exile. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro rushed to blame the U.S., calling it a “yanqui coup.”
President Obama on Monday called the action “not legal,” and claimed that Zelaya is still the legitimate president.
There was a coup all right, but it wasn’t committed by the U.S. or the Honduran court. It was committed by Zelaya himself. He brazenly defied the law, and Hondurans overwhelmingly supported his removal (a pro-Zelaya rally Monday drew a mere 200 acolytes).
Yet the U.S. administration stood with Chavez and Castro, calling Zelaya’s lawful removal “a coup.” Obama called the action a “terrible precedent,” and said Zelaya remains president.
In doing this, the U.S. condemned democrats who stood up to save their democracy, a move that should have been hailed as a historic turning of the tide against the false democracies of the region.
They only like democracy when it gives them the right (in this case “left”) result.
Optimism On Iran
From Amir Tehari.
All that Iranians want the U.S. to do is to be true to its own principles, not to kowtow to the Khomeinist regime, and not to help it restore its shattered legitimacy. We want Obama to condemn the shooting of demonstrators in Iranian streets and the rigging of the election, and to make it clear that he would not shake Ahmadinejad’s bloodstained hand. We want Obama not to organize a strategic retreat from the Middle East, which would create a vacuum that the Khomeinists would fill. We want him not to leave the region’s new and fragile democracies alone and defenseless against the Islamofascists.
We also want him not to flatter the Islamists by pretending that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were bred in an Islamic theological college. Don’t claim that Islam invented the pen and the printing press along with poetry and architecture — as if the Hellenic, Byzantine, Persian, Indian, and Chinese civilizations could be scripted out of history. Today, the U.S. has a choice: It can side with the Iranian people and invest in a future democratic Iran, or it can beg for a dialogue with the Islamofacists gathered around Ali Khamenei.
And from here:
…one thing is now certain: The oxymoron “Islamic Republic” has been exposed as a sham.
The regime in Iran has become an Islamic emirate, or imamate if you prefer, like the one that existed in Yemen until 1961 and in Afghanistan under the Taliban until 2002.
In Iran we have reached a moment of clarity. And, believe me, that is priceless.
In my humble way I have fought for three decades to help bring about that clarity, to show my people, and the world at large, the true nature of the regime created by Khomeini, and I am happy.
To be sure, I hope to be even happier a year from now.
I hope so, too.