Category Archives: War Commentary

Shut Up, He Explained

That’s what the head of Hezbollah says that President Bush and SecState Rice should do:

In Beirut, Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah urged Muslims worldwide to keep demonstrating until there is an apology over the drawings and Europe passes laws forbidding insults to the prophet.

The head of the guerrilla group, which is backed by Iran and Syria, spoke before a mass Ashoura procession. Whipping up the crowds on the most solemn day for Shiites worldwide, Nasrallah declared:

“Defending the prophet should continue all over the world. Let Condoleezza Rice and Bush and all the tyrants shut up. We are an Islamic nation that cannot tolerate, be silent or be lax when they insult our prophet and sanctities.”

“We will uphold the messenger of God not only by our voices but also by our blood,” he told the crowds, estimated by organizers at about 700,000. Police had no final estimates but said the figure was likely to be even higher.

You know, people who talk about upholding things with their blood often get an opportunity to do so (and often futilely).

I Never Imagined

…that I’d live to see (and, well…hear) the day that a news announcer said the words, “…the cartoon death toll is up to nine.”

Only in an Islamist world.

[Wednesday morning update]

Judith Weiss says (yes, yes, I know…I was shocked, too) that these demonstrations are not spontaneous. And here’s more from the WSJ.

While there are people bleeding and dying in Iraq, this is, more than anything, a propaganda war. And unfortunately, our own press is largely, knowingly or not, working on the side of the enemy.

[Another update about 8:30 AM EST]

The problem is spreading to the strife-torn Midwest. Iowahawk (who’s been missing in action since Christmas) has the scoop:

…outside of the Dells and a handful of violent outposts near its western Mississippi River border, Wisconsin remained a relatively calm exception to the Midwestern maelstrom surrounding it — a fact that experts attribute to subtle differences in culture and religion.

“Unlike the ultra-extreme, radical Lutheran sectarians of Iowa and Minnesota, most ethnic Wisconsinites belong to the Wisconsin Lutheran Synod,” said Joseph Killian, a Midwestern Studies professor at Emory University in Atlanta. “And if you add in three Super Bowl titles, easier access to beer, and walleye fishing, and you’re going to have a much calmer and more stable culture.”

All that would change in November with the publication of four cartoons in a Texas office newsletter — cartoons that today have brought this once happily beer-goggled society to the precipice of all-out culture war.

[One more update]

Amir Tehari writes about the bonfire of the pieties.

[Update late morning]

Meryl Yourish notes some rhetorical slight of hand and subject changing at AP:

Notice how the AP explains why the cartoons are offensive to Muslims. They do not bother to explain a similarly important fact

Surreality

Victor Davis Hanson:

All this lunacy is understood only in a larger surreal landscape. Tibet is swallowed by China. Much of Greek Cyprus is gobbled up by Turkish forces. Germany is 10-percent smaller today than in 1945. Yet only in the Middle East is there even a term “occupied land,” one that derived from the military defeat of an aggressive power.

Over a half-million Jews were forcibly cleansed from Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, and other Arab cities after the 1967 war; but only on the West Bank are there still refugees who lost their homes. Over a million people were butchered in Rwanda; thousands die each month in Darfur. The world snoozes. Yet less than 60 are killed in a running battle in Jenin, and suddenly the 1.5 million lost in Stalingrad and Leningrad are evoked as the moral objects of comparison, as the globe is lectured about “Jeningrad.”

Now the Islamic world is organizing boycotts of Denmark because one of its newspapers chose to run a cartoon supposedly lampooning the prophet Mohammed. We are supposed to forget that it is de rigueur in raucous Scandinavian popular culture to attack Christianity with impunity. Much less are we to remember that Hamas terrorists occupied and desecrated the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in a globally televised charade.

Instead, Danish officials are threatened, boycotts organized, ambassadors recalled

Listen to This

In today’s New York Times, Philip Bobbitt says in “Why We Listen”:

In the debate over whether the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, we must not lose sight of the fact that the world we entered on 9/11 will require rewriting that statute and other laws. The tiresome pas de deux between rigid civil libertarians in denial of reality and an overaggressive executive branch seemingly heedless of the law, while comforting to partisans of both groups, is not in the national interest.

Who watches the watchmen? On one hand, it’s tricky to safeguard the data and trust the users of a vast database to stay narrowly focused. On the other hand, users do very little to secure their cordless and cell phone and internet traffic and send out email messages as plain text. Should they enjoy any privacy protection at all?

Root Causes

Joe Katzman has a thought-provoking and depressing post on the source of Islamic terrorism.

There was supposedly an old saying in the wild West: “There ain’t room in this town for the both of us.” Unfortunately, there’s not room on this planet for classical liberal western cultures and radical Islamism. This will be a battle to the death of one of those cultures, and Islam itself won’t survive without a dramatic reformation, even if some people think that’s not possible.

[Update at 9:25 AM PST]

Diane West writes about the silence that speaks volumes.

Minimizing Collateral Damage to Civil Liberties

Rand makes a compelling case in The Scope of Collateral Damage discussed at Collateral Damage for Whom? that good intelligence can save lives. The questions I want to address is, “How much does it cost to save those lives in terms of liberty?” Left unaddressed will be “How do we define ‘good intelligence’ so the benefits outweigh the cost?”

We decided not too long ago that butter knives and toenail clippers in an airplane have more benefits and costs avoided than the security value of blocking them. The calculus was that the time and annoyance of the security procedures combined with the slight indignities of plastic silverware and long toe nails outweighed the slight increase in security from not having them.

For roving wiretaps on our enemies who may talk to US citizens we may get valuable information to stop an attack. We may abuse the wiretaps to gather information on domestic political opponents. Who gets to designate who is an enemy?

A start to protect civil liberties would be to bar information gathered in warrantless searches from being used as evidence in a criminal prosecution. But it may still be too much power to concentrate into the hands of the executive branch.

Millions of people die in the United States every year. Al Qaeda action is not yet a leading cause of death in the US. Our war was triggered more by the novelty of the attack than its threat to national security. The flu kills 36,000. Heart attack many times more. Those deaths don’t rankle as much because they are common and expected.

It is not necessary to use unusual counterespionage techniques in this war to win it. There may be a cost in blood of both US soldiers and the Iraqis and Afghanis we have dragged into our struggle if we insist on keeping to pristine methods of intelligence gathering at home.

The lost liberty in the event we embrace the blurred lines between domestic and foreign spying may be far more costly than the lives that can be saved by prompt intelligence. If we embrace wiretaps, it is a step on the road toward any means necessary.

Patrick Henry said, “Give me Liberty or give me death.” The soldiers in the Revolutionary war were prepared to die at a time when life was viewed much more cheaply. Now life is so dear that matters of war and peace turn on atrocities and combat deaths that kill far fewer than infant mortality (62500 or 50% of births at about 50 per thousand) in an America that had less than 1% as many people as it does today (2.5 million vs 300 million).

But let us not elevate the value of life so highly that we empower an unchecked executive to use war powers such as espionage on citizens. That is a step toward the tyranny that eighteenth century Americans died to vanquish. Perhaps we should be willing to give up a few of our much more dear lives as the price to pay for continuing liberty.