Well, at least Reuters (of all people) managed to figure out the significance of the test, even if the Boeing PR people couldn’t. Here’s the lead of their story:
The U.S. military shot down a target ballistic missile over the Pacific Friday in the widest test of its emerging antimissile shield in 18 months, the Defense Department announced.
…what would they say at Turtle Bay if Iran offered up “peacekeeping troops” in south Lebanon? Since they don’t formally recognize Iran’s role in the war, how would they refuse? For that matter, why wouldn’t they accept an offer from Syria to help “police” its border with Lebanon?
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Friday that Syria has pledged to step up border patrols and work with the Lebanese army to stop the flow of weapons to Hezbollah.
If you want to see some really ignorant and moronic commentary on space policy, check out the public thoughts on this BBC bulletin board. I couldn’t make myself click past the first page of it.
The report goes out of its way to clear up any silly confusion about self-defense for States, including totalitarian regimes, as somehow also applying to lowly individual human beings:
“Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations applies to the States acting in self-defence against armed attacks against their State sovereignty. It does not apply to situations of self-defence for individual persons.”
How ironic, that the preeminent human rights organization in the world, the UN, gives the full panoply of protections and immunities under international law to someone like Kim Jong-Il, whereas if you engage in self-defense you are ‘violating the rights of another.’ This goes to the heart of an entire belief system rampant in the world today that thinks that all violence is bad regardless of circumstances and context, and that the problems of violence are caused by weapons and not those that wield them.
Mark Steyn, on a nation that seems willing to fight Islamism everywhere except on its own soil:
But, in a world in which the prospects for the Anglosphere are better than almost anybody else’s, there is one bleak exception. At some point soon, we’re going to be asking: Who lost Britain? In the weeks after last year’s tube bombing, I doubted that the clarion call for a reassertion of “British identity” would last, and so it proved. By the first anniversary, Britain was back in its peculiarly resistant multiculti mush in which the proper reaction to such unfortunate events is to abase oneself ever more abjectly before the gods of cultural relativism. What matters after mass slaughter on the Underground is not the wound to the nation but the potential for hurt feelings of certain minorities. Had the latest disrupted terrorist plot to take down up to ten UK-US airplanes actually succeeded, I’m sure it would have gone much the same–BBC discussion panels on which representatives of Muslim lobby groups warn of outbreaks of Islamophobia. Even as Heathrow and all other British airports were shut down, Shahid Malik, MP for Dewsbury, the neighborhood that produced the July 7th bombers, explained the situation: “The action of Israel and the inaction of the West is contributing to the difficult task of tackling extremism.” Deconstruct that–because it’s the most artful extension of Jew-blaming in centuries: even Hitler never thought to complain that those bloody Jews were provoking Germans into blowing up their fellow Germans. Of course, it’s ludicrous. This plot was well advanced long before the first Israeli strike against Hezbollah–despite the truly contemptible way Reuters, the BBC and other British media outlets inserted reflexively a causal connection.
But suppose Mr. Malik’s words were true–that the actions of the Zionist Entity are so repellent they drive British subjects to plot mass murder against their fellow British subjects. What does that imply? That, well before push comes to shove, the primary identity of those nominal “Britons” is not British and never will be.
…On the broader cultural front, where this war in the end will be won, there’s little evidence of any kind of will. When one considers the impunity with which the country’s incendiary imams incite treason, it requires a perverse genius on the part of Tony Blair to have found the political courage to fight an unpopular war on a distant shore but not the political courage to wage it closer to home where it would have commanded far more support. That’s the sad lesson of the July 7th bombings: the British government has a strategy for southern Iraq but not southern England.
…it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming — falsely, as it turned out — that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.
Indeed.
No doubt the fever swampers on the left will see this as more evidence of the right-wing agenda of the paper…
[Update in the afternoon]
To use an old phrase, I find the timing suspicious, as does a commenter over at Roger Simon’s place (and Roger’s post on the mental state of the left is worth reading, too):
I wish that the WaPo editorial would not have been published on a Friday before a long, holiday weekend. I hope it was not an intentional attempt to bury the message.
Intentional or otherwise, it could certainly have that effect.
Mark Whittington continues his delusion that private industry cannot get to LEO without NASA money. Elon has been planning to get to orbit all along, and funding the development of vehicles to do so. People would be planning and funding private orbital trips in the absence of ISS. COTS has the potential to accelerate the schedule, but it’s not necessary. It will happen with or without it.