It’s The Sex, Stupid

Charles Krauthammer explains why what happened at Abu Ghraib was such a huge setback (hopefully not permanent) to our cause.

…the torture pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib prison could not have hit a more neuralgic point. We think of torture as the kind that Saddam practiced: pain, mutilation, maiming and ultimately death. We think of it as having a political purpose: intimidation, political control, confession and subjugation. What happened at Abu Ghraib was entirely different. It was gratuitous sexual abuse, perversion for its own sake.

That is what made it, ironically and disastrously, a pictorial representation of precisely the lunatic fantasies that the jihadists believe — and that cynical secular regimes such as Egypt and the Palestinian Authority peddle to pacify their populations and deflect their anger and frustrations. Through this lens, Abu Ghraib is an “I told you so” played out in an Arab capital, recorded on film.

Jihadists, like all totalitarians, oppose many kinds of freedom. What makes them unique, however, is their particular hatred of freedom for women.

I continue to be amazed that the left, so supposedly solicitous of women’s rights, continues to support these people. It brings to mind the idiocy spouted by Sunera Thobani during the Afghan war. Apparently there are no evil acts unless they’re acts by the United States, and then they’re evil simply by dint of the fact that we commit them.

And of course, to repeat what I said last week, it’s hard to imagine how the morons in that prison could have done more harm to our prospects for a free Iraq than what they did. The sad thing is that it looks as though a lot of them were simply carrying over business-as-usual habits from being prison guards stateside, which is a devastating commentary on our own penal system.

[Update on Friday morning]

As I said, morons. I don’t know if Rumsfeld should resign over this, but somebody should.

Thoughts on the War

A grab bag of thoughts and observations on the news of the past week or so:

(1) The administration still doesn’t seem to fully grasp the seriousness of the damage done by the revelations of abuse in Iraq. For one thing, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya have been on the case since last year, while administration spokesmen have been denying that anything bad was happening. These revelations give credibility to news sources we are trying to undermine, quite apart from the direct damage of pushing literally hundreds of millions of muslims further into the arms of the islamists. Bush has finally said the word “sorry” but it’s not clear he’s taking any other effective action to undo the damage.

Continue reading Thoughts on the War

Depressing

Joanne Jacobs has a bunch of testimonials from her readers as to just how worthless high-school, and even college diplomas have become. Particularly dismaying was the inability of young people to do computation without a calculator, or to recognize that an answer was absurd.

Many college students hang on to their calculators much as a young child hangs on to a blanket for security. In my first calculus test, when the professor wouldn’t let calculators used, five of 25 students walked out and 10 other students never came back to class. We ended up with nine students at the end of the semester. I have seen the same problem in chemistry, physics and other courses. When courses get hard, most students just drop instead of studying harder.

Who We Fight

Michael Totten has an interesting and clarifying essay about who the enemy is. It’s a restorative for those tired of arguing with people who mistakenly think that Iraq was a “distraction” from the “war on Al Qaeda.”

There is no Christian counterpart to what Saudi Arabia does. Imagine if the white supremacist “Christian Identity” movement (which includes David Duke among its adherents) made billions of dollars a year and founded churches throughout the Christian parts of the world to spread its hateful, racist, xenophobic ideology. Imagine if their brand of Christianity were the fastest growing on Earth, that they had also seized nation-states and used their powers to massacre millions. Whole swaths of the Christian world would look much like 1990s Yugoslavia, where Serbian Orthodox Christian supremacists did their worst to put the Muslim population of Europe to the sword.

On a related note, Steven den Beste says that we’re fighting a two-front war, some parts hot and some parts cold, and some of Europe (and indeed, many within the US itself) are on the other side. It’s long (as is often the case) but worth reading.

Music To My Ears

The Aldridge Commission is at least singing the right tune:

In many cases, the experts found the modern space agency too wedded to the agency founded at the height of the Cold War to overtake the former Soviet Union’s technical prowess…

…The changes envisioned by the panel would transform NASA into an agency working alongside an industrial partner, academia and parts of other Cabinet-level agencies to expand the nation’s economy into space as a means of creating new wealth and strengthening national security as well as advancing science.

“Creating new wealth.” What a concept.

Let’s hope that they can stay on key. I’ll be looking forward to hearing their recommendations. I do wonder at the use of the singular, though. Why not “alongside industrial partners”? Here’s hoping it’s a misstatement–I hope they’re not intending to set up a monopoly of some kind.

[Via Mark Whittington, from his home-town paper]

[Update at 9 AM PDT]

The administrator agrees.

“Business as usual, if we simply try to overlay this [vision] on top of an existing structure, isn’t going to work,” O’Keefe said. “There is no way that the present organizational structure, and how we do business today, will be the most appropriate way to go about doing this.”

I don’t agree with him on this, though.

O’Keefe also told commissioners that the space infrastructure required to push the new space effort forward is already in place, and stressed that international cooperation will play a vital role in missions to come. The cooperation needed for the International Space Station (ISS), for example, has led to the necessary political relationships, communication networks and engineering teams – among others – to take on such a project, he added.

As I wrote yesterday, international cooperation may be useful, but it shouldn’t be a goal, and it’s certainly not essential, except perhaps from a political standpoint. But more importantly, I disagree that the “space infrastructure required to push the new space effort forward is already in place.”

It remains much too costly to get to orbit, on far too unreliable launchers. The tragedy is that the agency has given up on the goal of improving this situation (not that it was really capable of doing so–it wasted billions over the past couple decades proving that it wasn’t). But the government should be doing more in terms of policy to achieve this goal, even if NASA can’t.

What He Said

Andrew Sullivan has an appalling summary of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and a suggestion for the president. He should take the advice.

And on a slightly different but related topic, how is “Ghraib” pronounced, anyway? I keep hearing people (including NPR people, who are usually sticklers about pronunciation, at least if it’s some trendy lefty country) saying “Grayb,” with a single syllable. I’m no Arabic expert, but I’d think that it should be “Grah-eeb.” Anyone know?

The Outrage Worsens

Iowahawk has the latest American atrocities against Iraqi prisoners.

In the newly released photos, masked Iraqi prisoners are shown forming human pyramids, stuffing Volkswagens, eating live goldfish and pounding ‘beer bongs,’ all under the supervision of laughing US guards.

You won’t read it anywhere else. I wish I knew how he gets these scoops.

More On The “Fingernail Scrape”

Kerry’s first Purple Heart is looking increasingly bogus, and part of a plan for an early ticket home, having gotten his tickets punched and establishing his JFK creds. According to the attending physician:

Some of his crew confided that they did not receive any fire from shore, but that Kerry had fired a mortar round at close range to some rocks on shore. The crewman thought that the injury was caused by a fragment ricocheting from that mortar round when it struck the rocks.

That seemed to fit the injury which I treated.

What I saw was a small piece of metal sticking very superficially in the skin of Kerry’s arm. The metal fragment measured about 1 cm. in length and was about 2 or 3 mm in diameter. It certainly did not look like a round from a rifle.

I simply removed the piece of metal by lifting it out of the skin with forceps. I doubt that it penetrated more than 3 or 4 mm. It did not require probing to find it, did not require any anesthesia to remove it, and did not require any sutures to close the wound.

The wound was covered with a bandaid.

Emphasis mine. Even ignoring the unsubstantialness of the wound, if it occurred as his boatmates claimed, it wasn’t the result of enemy fire, which would make him ineligible for the medal. In fact, if he really did that, it should have resulted in discipline.

That may be just a tip of an iceberg of self-aggrandizement that resulted in this morning’s press conference (click on the “Media” link), in which many of his band of former brothers declared him unfit to be Commander-in-Chief. A press conference which, by the way, the media seems to be studiously ignoring. The only mention of it that I can find with a quick Google is in the Boston Herald.

And no, before anyone asks, I’m not saying that he fired the mortar round deliberately to injure himself. I rarely attribute an act to conspiracy that is as easily explained by incompetence. I’m just saying that it strongly appears that he was looking for every wound he could to get to his magic three.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s the letter that the other Swift Boat vets sent to Kerry.

[Wednesday morning update]

The Globe has covered it now. Interestingly, the supposedly right-wing Fox News doesn’t seem to have any web coverage of it, at least not on their politics page.

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