Some Iraqis say they won’t forget how France has behaved, first in doing everything possible to keep Saddam in power, and now in stiffing them on aid. I think that Chirac has forgotten how long peoples’ memories can be in that part of the world.
And these folks are supposed to be experts on diplomacy?
I suspect that when it comes to having contracts honored and getting debt repaid, the French (and Germans) just went to the back of the bus. In fact, I hope that Iraq explicitly repudiates Saddam’s odious debt to France. I doubt if it would damage their ability to get loans anywhere else.
…accidentally slipped a screed, dripping with fury at the hypocrisy of the war whiners, into a bleat.
In short: the same people who chide America for its short-attention span think we should have stopped military operations after the Taliban was routed. (And they quite probably opposed that, for the usual reasons.) The people who think it’s all about oil like to snark that we should go after Saudi Arabia. The people who complain that the current administration is unable to act with nuance and diplomacy cannot admit that we have completely different approaches for Iraq, for Iran, for North Korea. The same people who insist we need the UN deride the Administration when it gives the UN a chance to do something other than throw rotten fruit.
The same people who accuse America of coddling dictators are sputtering with bilious fury because we actually deposed one.
Complain, yes! Carp! Criticize! Bitch! Moan! But there’s a difference between criticizing the particulars of the Normandy invasion, and insisting that Hitler can be contained with bauxite sanctions. (Imagine if these people had been running papers in the 40s: enough troops? Supply line problems? Plans in place for getting the Berlin power grid up? Oh no! Battle of the Bulge! Quagmire! Bastogne is a mess! Roosevelt lied, Private Ryan died!) To those who sniff ‘this isn’t World War Two,’ I’ll agree: it’s worse. It’s going to be longer, meaner, and it sprawls across every map. Its ultimate severity won’t be apparent to some people until a band of god-bothering raisin seekers sneaks a nuke into Baltimore on a cargo container.
The Evil Jews (TM) are going to kill Arafat with poisonous death rays beamed into his brain, according to the loons.
I think they’d better tighten up their own foil hats–the poisonous death rays, emanating in the form of photons from their lunatic screeds into their brain via their ocular nerves, and phonons reverberating across the air of the mosques, have driven them so far around the bend, they can’t see the bend from there.
I love this headline at the New York Post. A paper that’s not afraid to tell it like it is.
It’s a shame for the Iraqi people, but I suspect that most would think that it’s still better to be on the front line of the war against Islamofascism than to be under Saddam’s thumb.
Michael Ledeen has a disturbing article over at NRO, which points out the foolishness and irrelevance of the statement by the anti-war types that “there’s no proof that Saddam had anything to do with September 11.”
Many of our analysts are currently falling into one of those linguistic traps that Ludwig Wittgenstein used to warn us about. They constantly ask, “which organization do these terrorists come from?” But they should be asking the empirical question: “Does it still make sense to talk about separate terrorist organizations?” I have been arguing for the better part of two years that we should think of the terrorists as a group of mafia families that have united around a single war plan. The divisions and distinctions of the past no longer make sense; the terror mafias are working together, and their missions are defined by the states that protect, arm, fund, and assist them: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.
Michael Ledeen has a disturbing article over at NRO, which points out the foolishness and irrelevance of the statement by the anti-war types that “there’s no proof that Saddam had anything to do with September 11.”
Many of our analysts are currently falling into one of those linguistic traps that Ludwig Wittgenstein used to warn us about. They constantly ask, “which organization do these terrorists come from?” But they should be asking the empirical question: “Does it still make sense to talk about separate terrorist organizations?” I have been arguing for the better part of two years that we should think of the terrorists as a group of mafia families that have united around a single war plan. The divisions and distinctions of the past no longer make sense; the terror mafias are working together, and their missions are defined by the states that protect, arm, fund, and assist them: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.
Michael Ledeen has a disturbing article over at NRO, which points out the foolishness and irrelevance of the statement by the anti-war types that “there’s no proof that Saddam had anything to do with September 11.”
Many of our analysts are currently falling into one of those linguistic traps that Ludwig Wittgenstein used to warn us about. They constantly ask, “which organization do these terrorists come from?” But they should be asking the empirical question: “Does it still make sense to talk about separate terrorist organizations?” I have been arguing for the better part of two years that we should think of the terrorists as a group of mafia families that have united around a single war plan. The divisions and distinctions of the past no longer make sense; the terror mafias are working together, and their missions are defined by the states that protect, arm, fund, and assist them: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.
Glenn’s already noted it, but it’s worth broadcasting this far and wide. Here’s an insider’s view of the “peace” movement and how it made itself an unwitting dupe for one of the most brutal dictators in the last few decades, all for the hatred of Amerikkka.
To be perfectly frank, we were less concerned with the suffering of the Iraqi people than we were in maintaining our moral challenge to U.S. foreign policy. We did not agitate for an end to sanctions for purely humanitarian reasons; it was more important to us to maintain our moral challenge to “violent” U.S. foreign policy, regardless of what happened in Iraq. For example, had we been truly interested in alleviating the suffering in Iraq, we might have considered pushing for an expanded Oil-for-Food program. Nothing could have interested us less. Indeed, we even regarded the paltry amounts of aid that we did bring to Iraq as a logistical hassle. When it suited us, we portrayed ourselves as a humanitarian nongovernmental organization and at other times as a political group lobbying for a policy change. In our attempt to have it both ways, we failed in both of these missions.
We were so preoccupied with our own agenda that we didn’t notice or care that the regime made use of us. When critics asked us whether the group was being exploited by the Iraqi regime, we obfuscated, and in so doing put Saddam and his minions on the same level as the U.S. government…
Tonight, I caught a portion of one of the HBO series “Band of Brothers.” It was the one in which the troops come across one of the camps (I didn’t see the whole thing, so I don’t know which it was–I think that it was Dachau).
Hitler’s problem was that he was over-invested in ideology. He’d invented a universal theory — the wickedness of the international Jewish conspiracy — and he persisted in fitting every square peg of cold hard reality into that theory’s round hole. Thus, Churchill must be a “puppet of Jewry.” As a general rule, when it’s reality versus delusion, bet on reality. That held true in the Cold War. Moral equivalists like Harold Pinter insisted that America and the Soviet Union were both equally bad. But the traffic across the Berlin Wall was all one way. East German guards were not unduly overworked trying to keep people from getting in. The Eastern bloc collapsed because it was a lie, and the alternative wasn’t…
…The new Universal Theory, to which 99% of Saturday’s speakers and placards enthusiastically subscribed, is that, whatever the problem, American imperialist cowboy aggression is to blame. In fact, it’s not so different from the old Universal Theory, in that the international Zionist conspiracy is assumed to be behind the scenes controlling the cowboys: Bush is a “puppet of Jewry,” just like Churchill was — notwithstanding the fact that America’s Jews voted overwhelmingly for Gore. But, if you believe that the first non-imperialist great power in modern history is the source of all the world’s woes, then logic is irrelevant. “It’s all about oil”? Yes, for the French, whose stake in Iraqi oil is far more of a determining factor than America’s ever has been or will be. “America created Saddam”? No, not really, the French and Germans and Russians have sold him far more stuff, and Paris built him that reactor which would have made him a nuclear power by now, if the Israelis hadn’t destroyed it in the Eighties.
