In My Opinion – by Bob Fogarty
It appears that those wondrous folks who brought you the big hole in the side of the USS Cole, the blown-up Bamyan statues in Afghanistan, and the 9-11 attack in New York, are at it again. Now it seems that an Al-Qaeda inspired mob of Syrians are threatening to begin terrorist attacks on Lebanon’s interests in Syria, if the government of Lebanon doesn’t stop attacking the Palestinian terrorists hiding out in a Lebanese refugee camp. In a Web statement, the group “Tawhid and Jihad in Syria” promised its support for Fatah Islam, the militant group holed up in the camp. "We warn the Lebanese government that its vital interests, officials, and sons living in Syria will be moving targets for us if it does not lift its siege of the camp". The unauthenticated statement went further with; "Let the Lebanese government wait for the hell of kidnapping, shooting and chopping of heads if it does not respond to the demand". "Tawhid and Jihad", Arabic for "monotheism and holy war", is a name used by several groups apparently inspired by Al Qaeda, though their actual links to Osama bin Laden are unknown. The most prominent militant group in Syria is known as Jund al-Sham, but it is sometimes called the Jund al-Sham for Jihad and Tawhid. The warning said that the groups current leader, al-Dimashqi allegedly met with Fatah Islam's representative, who "explained the ideology of the group, its aims to support Islam and the establishment of the State of Islam, which is a dream for every Muslim." Tawhid and Jihad promised to support Fatah Islam, saying "Jews, Christians and the malevolent Crusaders in Lebanon and in Europe ... (and) Lebanese officials — France and America's dogs, weaned on the breast of treason — have all rushed to help against the brothers of Fatah Islam." I can understand the extremists being mad at the United States, in the aftermath of 9-11 the US actually has the effrontery to oppose the march of militant Islam! Why that’s nothing less than anti-Moslem Sacrilege!! But now they’re accusing FRANCE of opposing Muslim extremism!?
These folks do have some strange ways of fighting their wars though; An American journalist was in Zarqa, Jordan, was trying to interview two heavily bearded Islamic militants when he asked one too many questions. "He's American?" one of the militants growled. "Let's kidnap and kill him." But before anyone could act on that idea the rules of jihadi etiquette kicked in. Apparently you can't just slaughter a visitor, as the militants are taught by Islamic scholars that you need permission from whoever arranges the meeting. And in this case, the arranger declined to sign off.
During the late unlamented war in Vietnam, the United States had a quite extensive set of orders, the “Rules of Engagement”, telling us when, where, how (or even if), we could shoot back. From talking to some of our local veterans of the Iraq war, I understand they also have rules of engagement, but nothing as extensive, exasperating, and “enemy friendly” and the RoE in Vietnam. Now I find that the Sunni insurgents have their own set of rules.
Jihadi etiquette is unwritten, and apparently varies in interpretation and practice almost as much as the extremist groups vary in their stated goals. But the rules do have some generalized guidelines. Some are rooted in Middle Eastern culture, and some are based on the Koran, which generally prohibits the slaying of children, women, the elderly, and the infirm. However, an Egyptian Islamic scholar, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, has argued it is fine to kill Israeli citizens because Israeli compulsory military service means they are not truly civilians. Apparently you can also kill innocent bystanders without feeling guilt. Fatah Al Islam in Lebanon claims that government officials are proper targets, claiming that "Any person that comes to our region with a military, security, or political aim, then he is a legitimate target." Considering that Kassam rockets aren’t all that accurate, nor very particular about who or how many they kill, I guess it’s a good thing the collateral damage is incidental and acceptable under Islam. ‘Course a “Crusader” bomb or artillery shell is a different story.
The Iraqi war is changing things too. Suicide bombers from radical Muslim groups have long been called martyrs, a word that apparently bypasses the Koran's ban on killing oneself, in favor of the honor it accords death in battle against the infidel. But now you can kill children too, without concern. It seems the extremists in Jordan who embrace Al Qaeda's ideology teach their recruits that children receive special consideration in death. They are not held accountable for any sins until puberty, and if they are killed in a jihad operation, they will go straight to heaven. There, they will instantly age to their late 20s and enjoy the same access to virgins and other occupational benefits of martyrdom.
Sometimes you can single out civilians for killing; bankers are an example. In Islamic theory noncombatants cannot be the target of a militant operation, but the list of exceptions is long and rapidly growing. A Briton of Cypriot descent awaiting trial in England on terrorism charges claims "It would be legitimate to attack banks because they charge interest, and this is in violation of Islamic law." And then he came up with this additional tidbit; "We have a voting system here in Britain, so anyone who is voting for Tony Blair is not a civilian and therefore would be a legitimate target." With this, perhaps Homeland Security will cancel our next presidential election, in order to “protect” us from a perceived terrorist threat?
You’re not supposed to kill in the country where you reside unless you were born there. Militants who go to Iraq apparently get a free pass on this as they’re “expeditionary warriors”. And the 9-11 attack did not violate this rule either, since the hijackers originally came from outside the United States. Huh… and all this time I thought they’d been living here for quite some time. Then to, you can lie or hide your religion if you do this for jihad. Muslims are instructed by the Koran to be true to their religion, but lying about it is allowed when it is deemed a necessity - for example, when deception serves a good purpose, such as posing as a passenger on an airliner perhaps?
Militant Islamists interpret the Koran and the separate teachings of Muhammad that are known as the “Sunna” as laying out five criteria to be met by people wanting to be jihadis. They must be Muslim, at least 15 years of age and mature, of sound mind and debt-free, and they must have parental permission. The parental rule is currently waived inside Iraq, where Islamists say it is every Muslim's duty to fight the Americans. The rule is optional for residents of nearby countries like Jordan.
Rules of Engagement in the sandbox, based on inescapable Islamic religious logic… I think I kinda prefer “Bob’s one rule of engagement”, something that dates back to what seemed like a lifetime spent in a gawd forsaken jungle… “Shoot at ME you dumba- - , and you’d better not miss!”
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Monday, June 18, 2007
Immigration
16 June 2007
Apparently I’ll have to take the position on immigration reform that we must deport all 12 million illegal aliens immediately, as this is claimed to be the only alternative to immediate amnesty. The fact that we "can't deport them all" is supposed to lead to the conclusion that we must grant amnesty to all illegal aliens. Well, we can’t catch all the murderers either, so I guess we need a "comprehensive murder reform bill” as well. It's not "amnesty" I guess, if we ask them to pay a small fine. But if it's "impossible" to find and deport illegal aliens, how come we know so much about them? I keep hearing they are Catholic, pro-life, hardworking, just dying to become American citizens, and will take jobs other Americans won't. How do we even know there are 12 or so million of them? Why not only 1 million, or perhaps 25 million? Since Ted Kennedy's 1965 Immigration Act, more than half of all legal immigrants have been unskilled and non-English-speaking Mexicans. America takes in roughly 1 million legal immigrants each year, and only about 30,000 of them have Ph.D.s. Why would any rational immigration policy discriminate against immigrants with Ph.D.s in favor of unskilled, non-English-speaking people? Notably, the biggest proponents of the government's policy of importing a huge underclass of unskilled workers are not themselves unskilled workers. The great bounty of cheap labor by unskilled immigrants isn't going to Americans who hang drywall or clean hotel rooms… and who are having trouble getting jobs now that they're forced to compete with the vast influx of unskilled workers who don't pay taxes. The people who make arguments about "jobs Americans won't do" never seem to be in a line of work where unskilled immigrants can compete with them.
Perhaps the immigration debate would be different if we were importing millions of politicians. At present, it’s a case of “you lose your job, while I keep my Senate seat, and I get a low cost maid as well!” If immigrants were to threatened Senate seats… The only beneficiaries of these famed hardworking immigrants -- unlike the rest of us lazy Americans, are the wealthy, who want the cheap labor while making the rest of us pay for the immigrants' schooling and health care. These great lovers of the downtrodden (the downtrodden trimming their hedge that is), pretend to believe that their gardeners' children will be graduating from Harvard and curing cancer someday, but 1) they don't believe that; and 2) if it happened, they'd lose their gardeners.
According to "Alien Nation" author Peter Brimelow, "There is recent evidence that, even after four generations, fewer than 10% of Mexican-Americans have post-high school degrees, as opposed to nearly half of non-Mexican Americans." So this means you'll always have the gardener and maid I guess. As New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently said, our golf fairways would suffer without illegal immigrants: "…who takes care of the greens and the fairways on your golf course?" Another job that Americans won’t take perhaps? Well, mowing a lawn that size wouldn’t rate real high on my “things I’d like to do” list, but I’ve done worse.In Samuel P. Huntington's book "Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity," he asks: "Would America be the America it is today if in the 17th and 18th centuries it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is no it would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico or Brazil", and I don't particularly want to live in Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil either. But now I guess I have no choice, since our open border immigration policy means they’re coming here instead.
Yes, this country has absorbed huge migrations of illiterate peasants in the past, most notably the wave of Irish immigrants (my great-grand-parents included) during and after the Great Famine, then the influx of German (more of my great-grand-parents) and Italian immigrants at the turn of the last century. But they came here legally, and worked hard at becoming Americans. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, immigrant and first Jewish member of the Supreme Court, said that Americanization required that the immigrant adopt "the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here" and that he adopt "the English language as the common medium of speech." Brandeis also said "We properly demand of the immigrant even more than this -- he must be brought into complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations and cooperate with us for their attainment. Only when this has been done will he possess the national consciousness of an American." Or, in view of the politically correct “cultural diversity” beloved by so many liberals, is this merely "empty rhetoric" and "racist" speech?Until our culture is again capable of Americanizing immigrants, it's ridiculous to talk about a massive influx of Hispanic immigrants accomplishing anything other than turning America into yet another Latin American banana republic. And it is a fact that no one is trying to turn these immigrants into Americans, witness the expanding barrios and ghettos in so many of our larger cities. To the contrary, Democrats are trying to turn new immigrants into wards of the state (apparently with considerable success), so that they will become permanent Democratic voters, while Republicans in Washington are seemingly trying to turn immigrants into a permanent servant class. In the meantime, as politics rage on, Central Americans migrate to the United States in great numbers, bringing with them an assortment of criminal drug organizations, along with some of the world's most brutal gangs -- including the notorious and rapidly growing MS-13's (Mara Salvatrucha), an extremely violent group with close to 10,000 members in thirty-three states.I can well understand why so many people would like to immigrate to this country. As stated above, my own ancestors came to the new world to escape any number of cultural and economic difficulties. (A dedicated Feinian, and having a slight difference of opinion with the British occupation forces, great grandpa Fogarty [as the story goes] left Ireland one step ahead of the hangman.) However, he came to this country, legally. He became an American citizen, legally. He worked and paid taxes, legally. He became a comparatively wealthy man, legally. And he stayed out of trouble (except with his Priest probably) while doing all this. Is it asking to much of today’s immigrants to do things legally as well? We’re supposed to be a nation of law abiding people, and breaking our laws in getting here is a poor way to start on the road to citizenship. Most people immigrate to the United States to gain the standard of living they would like to have as Americans… Well, OK, if they want to come to this country and be Americans, perhaps they should start behaving like Americans, beginning with obeying our immigration laws.
With my deadline rapidly approaching, I’ve just learned that Teddy Kennedy’s compromise immigration bill (S.2611) failed a Senate test vote by a 45-50 margin, somewhat short of the 60 votes needed, and has now been withdrawn. But never fear, it’ll soon be back, in an only slightly modified form I’m sure.
Apparently I’ll have to take the position on immigration reform that we must deport all 12 million illegal aliens immediately, as this is claimed to be the only alternative to immediate amnesty. The fact that we "can't deport them all" is supposed to lead to the conclusion that we must grant amnesty to all illegal aliens. Well, we can’t catch all the murderers either, so I guess we need a "comprehensive murder reform bill” as well. It's not "amnesty" I guess, if we ask them to pay a small fine. But if it's "impossible" to find and deport illegal aliens, how come we know so much about them? I keep hearing they are Catholic, pro-life, hardworking, just dying to become American citizens, and will take jobs other Americans won't. How do we even know there are 12 or so million of them? Why not only 1 million, or perhaps 25 million? Since Ted Kennedy's 1965 Immigration Act, more than half of all legal immigrants have been unskilled and non-English-speaking Mexicans. America takes in roughly 1 million legal immigrants each year, and only about 30,000 of them have Ph.D.s. Why would any rational immigration policy discriminate against immigrants with Ph.D.s in favor of unskilled, non-English-speaking people? Notably, the biggest proponents of the government's policy of importing a huge underclass of unskilled workers are not themselves unskilled workers. The great bounty of cheap labor by unskilled immigrants isn't going to Americans who hang drywall or clean hotel rooms… and who are having trouble getting jobs now that they're forced to compete with the vast influx of unskilled workers who don't pay taxes. The people who make arguments about "jobs Americans won't do" never seem to be in a line of work where unskilled immigrants can compete with them.
Perhaps the immigration debate would be different if we were importing millions of politicians. At present, it’s a case of “you lose your job, while I keep my Senate seat, and I get a low cost maid as well!” If immigrants were to threatened Senate seats… The only beneficiaries of these famed hardworking immigrants -- unlike the rest of us lazy Americans, are the wealthy, who want the cheap labor while making the rest of us pay for the immigrants' schooling and health care. These great lovers of the downtrodden (the downtrodden trimming their hedge that is), pretend to believe that their gardeners' children will be graduating from Harvard and curing cancer someday, but 1) they don't believe that; and 2) if it happened, they'd lose their gardeners.
According to "Alien Nation" author Peter Brimelow, "There is recent evidence that, even after four generations, fewer than 10% of Mexican-Americans have post-high school degrees, as opposed to nearly half of non-Mexican Americans." So this means you'll always have the gardener and maid I guess. As New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently said, our golf fairways would suffer without illegal immigrants: "…who takes care of the greens and the fairways on your golf course?" Another job that Americans won’t take perhaps? Well, mowing a lawn that size wouldn’t rate real high on my “things I’d like to do” list, but I’ve done worse.In Samuel P. Huntington's book "Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity," he asks: "Would America be the America it is today if in the 17th and 18th centuries it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is no it would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico or Brazil", and I don't particularly want to live in Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil either. But now I guess I have no choice, since our open border immigration policy means they’re coming here instead.
Yes, this country has absorbed huge migrations of illiterate peasants in the past, most notably the wave of Irish immigrants (my great-grand-parents included) during and after the Great Famine, then the influx of German (more of my great-grand-parents) and Italian immigrants at the turn of the last century. But they came here legally, and worked hard at becoming Americans. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, immigrant and first Jewish member of the Supreme Court, said that Americanization required that the immigrant adopt "the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here" and that he adopt "the English language as the common medium of speech." Brandeis also said "We properly demand of the immigrant even more than this -- he must be brought into complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations and cooperate with us for their attainment. Only when this has been done will he possess the national consciousness of an American." Or, in view of the politically correct “cultural diversity” beloved by so many liberals, is this merely "empty rhetoric" and "racist" speech?Until our culture is again capable of Americanizing immigrants, it's ridiculous to talk about a massive influx of Hispanic immigrants accomplishing anything other than turning America into yet another Latin American banana republic. And it is a fact that no one is trying to turn these immigrants into Americans, witness the expanding barrios and ghettos in so many of our larger cities. To the contrary, Democrats are trying to turn new immigrants into wards of the state (apparently with considerable success), so that they will become permanent Democratic voters, while Republicans in Washington are seemingly trying to turn immigrants into a permanent servant class. In the meantime, as politics rage on, Central Americans migrate to the United States in great numbers, bringing with them an assortment of criminal drug organizations, along with some of the world's most brutal gangs -- including the notorious and rapidly growing MS-13's (Mara Salvatrucha), an extremely violent group with close to 10,000 members in thirty-three states.I can well understand why so many people would like to immigrate to this country. As stated above, my own ancestors came to the new world to escape any number of cultural and economic difficulties. (A dedicated Feinian, and having a slight difference of opinion with the British occupation forces, great grandpa Fogarty [as the story goes] left Ireland one step ahead of the hangman.) However, he came to this country, legally. He became an American citizen, legally. He worked and paid taxes, legally. He became a comparatively wealthy man, legally. And he stayed out of trouble (except with his Priest probably) while doing all this. Is it asking to much of today’s immigrants to do things legally as well? We’re supposed to be a nation of law abiding people, and breaking our laws in getting here is a poor way to start on the road to citizenship. Most people immigrate to the United States to gain the standard of living they would like to have as Americans… Well, OK, if they want to come to this country and be Americans, perhaps they should start behaving like Americans, beginning with obeying our immigration laws.
With my deadline rapidly approaching, I’ve just learned that Teddy Kennedy’s compromise immigration bill (S.2611) failed a Senate test vote by a 45-50 margin, somewhat short of the 60 votes needed, and has now been withdrawn. But never fear, it’ll soon be back, in an only slightly modified form I’m sure.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Who Lost Iraq
8 June, ‘07
A question being batted about by the media today is “Who Lost Iraq”? Strangely enough, I wasn’t aware that it had been lost… if they’ll look on a world map, it’s still right there, jammed in between Saudi Arabia and Turkey, with Iran to the northeast. Irregardless, the rabid and bloodthirsty liberal search for a scapegoat to blame for a somewhat raggedy war continues in the media, in Congress, and in the minds of the American people. There seems to be no shortage of culprits either.
The Defense Department is blaming the State Department, and State is blaming Defense, as usual. The Generals are quoted as saying "there is no military solution to this conflict" (meaning "don't blame us if we fail"). Diplomats, for their part, argue that they’ve seen to the drafting of a constitution, organized elections, and have installed a new Iraqi government. They complain that the military has failed to establish a secure environment in which these institutions can function. Defense apparently fails to remember that historically one guerrilla usually ties down eight to ten regular troops. Thus General Sherman, when asked how many men he would need to control Georgia (during the Civil War), responded that he’d need about 200,000 Union soldiers. Typically, the resulting press hysteria nearly cost him his job. To control South Vietnam, General Westmorland would have needed well over a million soldiers! State, for their part, seems to forget that all the laws, Constitutions, and elections in the world mean absolutely nothing if the combatants are ignoring them.
In Congress the Democrats are blaming the Republicans, the Republicans are running for cover, and the media is having a field day slinging mud at everyone involved. In Europe, the current thing to do is blame everything on the United States, as they usually do whenever we fail to handle a situation in whatever way they think best. In Iraq the Shia blame the Sunni, the Sunni are returning the favor in spades, and the Kurds are seemingly getting shot at by everyone. Meanwhile the Iraqi civil war goes on, and Iraqi civilians that didn’t get killed or crippled by the last car bomb continue to live in the US media’s favorite shooting gallery.
Actually there’s more than enough blame to go around. Congress authorized the war by an overwhelming majority, something that hasn’t occurred since WW II. A good many Democratic political leaders also thought intervention was a good idea. The press was uncritical, and the American people were generally supportive. So now we have a rather messy war going on, with apparently no way out. Although responsibility for this war is widely shared, the temptation to blame the Iraqis may become irresistible to everybody involved. We gave the Iraqis a chance, so the argument goes, and if they failed to build a peaceful state, whose fault is that? Yet if the Iraqis failed to live up to American expectations, do we blame their reality, or our own illusions?
Among the Democrats, antiwar activists criticize those who voted for the war, as well as those who continue to resist legislating an end to it all. Among Republicans, the neoconservatives blame the conservatives, in particular former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, but also President George W. Bush, for not committing adequate manpower and money to the task. Well, they didn’t, actually. What’s needed I’d think, is about four more US divisions, preferably divisions of well trained and combat experienced military police.
What most people completely fail to realize is that the “War” was won (with minimal American casualties) when the statues of Saddam started to topple. What followed, and continues today, isn’t a war, but a policing action carried out by an army of occupation. Granted that to the troops on the ground, or to the families of the casualties, there’s little difference between the two terms.
Before we give up and run for home, perhaps we should have some sort of idea just who we’re fighting. Approximately 90% of the insurgents are Iraqis, Sunnis who are embittered at the toppling of the Sunni Arab government of Saddam Hussein, and are often members of Saddam’s old security services. Former Iraqi military personnel are providing the technical know-how for all those roadside bombs. Former Iraqi military ammunition dumps are providing the explosives and detonators. The AK-47s and RPGs used to terrorize or kill other Iraqis are also formerly the property of the Iraqi armed forces. Certainly there are a few out-of-town recruits arriving every day, but who are they? They’re even more Sunni Arabs, youth for the most part with no combat experience, supercharged with Islamic fundamentalism and looking for a chance to die for Islam. (The Arabic version of the wartime Japanese Kamikaze pilot I presume.) So far, the Iraqi government and the US military have been helping quite a few of them find their way to paradise. The Iraqi terrorists are killing Iraqis with the expectation that this will get Sunni Arabs back in control of Iraq once more. They are encouraged by European support, noting that most Europeans were against the American invasion that removed Saddam Hussein, and Sunni Arabs, from power. The current squabble in the US Congress (and press) is encouraging to them as well. What isn’t reported in the worlds press (it doesn’t make good headlines), is that the majority of Iraq is comparatively quiet. The “war” is going on in those few predominately Sunni areas where the population is either pro-terrorist, or terrorized into silence. Islamic terrorists who tried to do it “Iraqi style” in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, found that fewer sympathizers, and more police, made it impossible for them to do much. In both countries, terrorist cells were unable to do much damage before being hunted down and arrested or killed. Currently most terrorist cells are being caught before they can carry out any attacks at all. Those that escaped have apparently been too busy staying escaped to create more mayhem. But if you still think the Iraqi insurgency is a bloodbath now, just wait until our Democratic Congress forces an American withdrawal, and the whole place blows up!
The Bush administration, like the American public, now recognizes that the occupation of Iraq was mismanaged, and they’ve learned that nation building cannot be done on the cheap. The surge of troops into Baghdad is a belated admission that rebuilding a failed state takes an enormous commitment of manpower, money and time. Unfortunately this realization probably comes too late to rescue the American venture in Iraq.
No, Iraq and the rest of the mid-east isn’t lost yet, but, like the war in Vietnam, it’s rapidly being lost in our Congress, and in the US media.
A question being batted about by the media today is “Who Lost Iraq”? Strangely enough, I wasn’t aware that it had been lost… if they’ll look on a world map, it’s still right there, jammed in between Saudi Arabia and Turkey, with Iran to the northeast. Irregardless, the rabid and bloodthirsty liberal search for a scapegoat to blame for a somewhat raggedy war continues in the media, in Congress, and in the minds of the American people. There seems to be no shortage of culprits either.
The Defense Department is blaming the State Department, and State is blaming Defense, as usual. The Generals are quoted as saying "there is no military solution to this conflict" (meaning "don't blame us if we fail"). Diplomats, for their part, argue that they’ve seen to the drafting of a constitution, organized elections, and have installed a new Iraqi government. They complain that the military has failed to establish a secure environment in which these institutions can function. Defense apparently fails to remember that historically one guerrilla usually ties down eight to ten regular troops. Thus General Sherman, when asked how many men he would need to control Georgia (during the Civil War), responded that he’d need about 200,000 Union soldiers. Typically, the resulting press hysteria nearly cost him his job. To control South Vietnam, General Westmorland would have needed well over a million soldiers! State, for their part, seems to forget that all the laws, Constitutions, and elections in the world mean absolutely nothing if the combatants are ignoring them.
In Congress the Democrats are blaming the Republicans, the Republicans are running for cover, and the media is having a field day slinging mud at everyone involved. In Europe, the current thing to do is blame everything on the United States, as they usually do whenever we fail to handle a situation in whatever way they think best. In Iraq the Shia blame the Sunni, the Sunni are returning the favor in spades, and the Kurds are seemingly getting shot at by everyone. Meanwhile the Iraqi civil war goes on, and Iraqi civilians that didn’t get killed or crippled by the last car bomb continue to live in the US media’s favorite shooting gallery.
Actually there’s more than enough blame to go around. Congress authorized the war by an overwhelming majority, something that hasn’t occurred since WW II. A good many Democratic political leaders also thought intervention was a good idea. The press was uncritical, and the American people were generally supportive. So now we have a rather messy war going on, with apparently no way out. Although responsibility for this war is widely shared, the temptation to blame the Iraqis may become irresistible to everybody involved. We gave the Iraqis a chance, so the argument goes, and if they failed to build a peaceful state, whose fault is that? Yet if the Iraqis failed to live up to American expectations, do we blame their reality, or our own illusions?
Among the Democrats, antiwar activists criticize those who voted for the war, as well as those who continue to resist legislating an end to it all. Among Republicans, the neoconservatives blame the conservatives, in particular former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, but also President George W. Bush, for not committing adequate manpower and money to the task. Well, they didn’t, actually. What’s needed I’d think, is about four more US divisions, preferably divisions of well trained and combat experienced military police.
What most people completely fail to realize is that the “War” was won (with minimal American casualties) when the statues of Saddam started to topple. What followed, and continues today, isn’t a war, but a policing action carried out by an army of occupation. Granted that to the troops on the ground, or to the families of the casualties, there’s little difference between the two terms.
Before we give up and run for home, perhaps we should have some sort of idea just who we’re fighting. Approximately 90% of the insurgents are Iraqis, Sunnis who are embittered at the toppling of the Sunni Arab government of Saddam Hussein, and are often members of Saddam’s old security services. Former Iraqi military personnel are providing the technical know-how for all those roadside bombs. Former Iraqi military ammunition dumps are providing the explosives and detonators. The AK-47s and RPGs used to terrorize or kill other Iraqis are also formerly the property of the Iraqi armed forces. Certainly there are a few out-of-town recruits arriving every day, but who are they? They’re even more Sunni Arabs, youth for the most part with no combat experience, supercharged with Islamic fundamentalism and looking for a chance to die for Islam. (The Arabic version of the wartime Japanese Kamikaze pilot I presume.) So far, the Iraqi government and the US military have been helping quite a few of them find their way to paradise. The Iraqi terrorists are killing Iraqis with the expectation that this will get Sunni Arabs back in control of Iraq once more. They are encouraged by European support, noting that most Europeans were against the American invasion that removed Saddam Hussein, and Sunni Arabs, from power. The current squabble in the US Congress (and press) is encouraging to them as well. What isn’t reported in the worlds press (it doesn’t make good headlines), is that the majority of Iraq is comparatively quiet. The “war” is going on in those few predominately Sunni areas where the population is either pro-terrorist, or terrorized into silence. Islamic terrorists who tried to do it “Iraqi style” in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, found that fewer sympathizers, and more police, made it impossible for them to do much. In both countries, terrorist cells were unable to do much damage before being hunted down and arrested or killed. Currently most terrorist cells are being caught before they can carry out any attacks at all. Those that escaped have apparently been too busy staying escaped to create more mayhem. But if you still think the Iraqi insurgency is a bloodbath now, just wait until our Democratic Congress forces an American withdrawal, and the whole place blows up!
The Bush administration, like the American public, now recognizes that the occupation of Iraq was mismanaged, and they’ve learned that nation building cannot be done on the cheap. The surge of troops into Baghdad is a belated admission that rebuilding a failed state takes an enormous commitment of manpower, money and time. Unfortunately this realization probably comes too late to rescue the American venture in Iraq.
No, Iraq and the rest of the mid-east isn’t lost yet, but, like the war in Vietnam, it’s rapidly being lost in our Congress, and in the US media.
Saturday, June 2, 2007
Another Vietnam
In My Opinion – by Bob Fogarty
We made a great mistake in the beginning of our struggle, and I fear, in spite of all we can do, it will prove to be a fatal mistake. We appointed all our worst generals to command our armies, and all our best generals to edit the newspapers.
We made a great mistake in the beginning of our struggle, and I fear, in spite of all we can do, it will prove to be a fatal mistake. We appointed all our worst generals to command our armies, and all our best generals to edit the newspapers.
Robert E. Lee
For people of a certain age or political views, the Vietnam War is something like Elvis, it’s everywhere. One of the many consequences of the American political defeat in Vietnam has been the uncontrolled proliferation of “Vietnams” in the political mind ever since. Nicaragua threatened to become another Vietnam, Lebanon nearly became another Vietnam. Had Grenada been only slightly larger than a manhole cover and lasted a bit longer, it would have been another Vietnam I suppose. The invasion of Panama was rapidly degenerating into another Vietnam, right up until we won. Likewise, the First Gulf War was certainly becoming another Vietnam, but then sadly, it ended quickly, with victory and few casualties. No country today is more prepared to fight a long unconventional war against a few grubby little terrorists in a far away sandbox than America, who learned how to lose in Vietnam. Thus, it is with considerable joy that those who are ready to teach us the lesson of Vietnam find that they finally have another war that has lasted longer than John Kerry’s campaign. “Obviously” they say, “the best course of action is to withdraw from Iraq immediately, and allow the country to become an oil-producing Al-Qaeda super-state”. Oh yes, and begin the political posturing to win the 2008 election on an “I KNEW IT WAS VIETNAM RIGHT AWAY!” platform. And that would probably be the smart thing, because the lesson apparently learned by the Looney Left is, “It’s best to lose quickly, so as to avoid a quagmire”. For example, it’s said that during a long wait at a Chinese Buffet in Georgetown in 1987, Ted Kennedy reportedly yelled “QUAGMIRE!” and thinking quickly, attempted to surrender to a Spanish-speaking busboy. Unfortunately, other than peacenik rallies and the American media preparing to report an Iraqi “Tet offensive,” the similarities to Vietnam are pretty sparse. It could be reasonably argued that the real lesson of Vietnam is that it seriously damages a country’s reputation, and character, to lose at all.
The differences in the two conflicts are obvious, but that’s no reason to interrupt a good “IT’S ANOTHER VIETNAM!” flashback from the political left. Unless of course you want America to win in Iraq, rather than lose “another Vietnam” all over again. For the minority of the population that do think we should win, I’ll mention a few minor differences between Iraq and Vietnam, ranging from the material to philosophical.
First off, the Iraqi insurgency has no universal philosophy to attract Iraq’s population. The Viet Cong were communists I believe, and Communism was a worldwide political movement with a following on every Continent. The Iraqi insurgency however is primarily a religious affair among the Arabs. Shiites and Sunnis are not converting one another, and haven’t for the last few hundred years. In Iraq, the Sunni are fighting to continue dominating the local Kurds and Shiites, leaving this a cause that the Shiites and Kurds are highly unlikely to join, as it’s difficult to recruit from a Shiite and Kurdish majority while preaching Sunni religious supremacy. Even with no other difference, this alone would completely eliminate any comparison of the two situations.
The Iraqi insurgency has no country in which to organize the population. North Vietnam had a border that we could not cross for assorted political reasons. Inside that border the Communists could train, rest, and work at an assortment of warlike pursuits. They controlled the media broadcasts, recruiting centers, schools, the police, the courts, the roads, and ports full of supply ships. Every week they sent more troops down the Ho Chi Minh trail to invade South Vietnam. And every week we sat outside the border and played left tackle against those troops and supplies. The Sunni insurgents have no such refuge, as we’re already in their towns, fields, roads, and skies. They have no country anymore; we already took it away from them. They have holes in the ground to hide in, and a few basement bomb factories. The North Vietnamese fielded a modern military with tanks, artillery, and jet aircraft. The Sunni insurgents carry rifles, while strapping bombs to donkey carts and worn out taxicabs. They cannot openly recruit or train, because “their” country is full of assorted Shiites, Kurds and other Sunni Arabs that arrest them, shoot at them, and bomb them, quite regularly. The insurgency has no Soviet or Chinese material support either. A few truckloads of ordinance from Syria and Iran can in no way compare to the massive material support that the Vietnamese Communists received from the USSR and Red China.
Additionally, there were no free elections in Hanoi during the war. The effect of the Iraqi elections changed the nature of the war completely. Now, the issue is no longer Sunni rebels fighting an infidel occupier. It’s now an Iraqi majority vs. an Iraqi minority, with the US Army assisting the majority to get their feet on the ground. The Communists had never ruled South Vietnam either. By contrast, the Sunni Baathists have ruled Iraq. The Iraqi people know who they are, and how they will really rule. Saddam Hussein had been recruiting allies for us for the last twenty years, with his mass graves, prisons and rape rooms. No one really believes the Sunni are fighting for a worker’s paradise. Besides, who is Iraq’s Ho Chi Minh? This war is strictly a local religious and tribal affair remember. The closest thing to a grand leader is Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, and he’s on Democracy’s side. Nor was Ho Chi Minh at any point during the Vietnam War, sitting in a cell awaiting trial and execution by his vengeful former victims.
But despite all that, “Iraq is just Vietnam all over again”, according to the media, and brought to us in glorious living color on the six-o’clock news. The only similarities I see to the Vietnam War are in the minds of our liberal media, a few left wing politicians, and a wobbly population.
Now, consider one more reason why the two wars are not alike. A loss in Vietnam was not going to bring hordes of freshly inspired Viet Cong into New York or San Francisco with truck-bombs or an Iranian supplied suitcase nuke to finish us off. A loss in Iraq, regardless of why the war was begun, or how badly we want to go home, will greatly strengthen our enemies, as only a victory on the world stage can do. You’ll just love what a surrender, as espoused by Kennedy, Reid, Pelosi, and their followers, will do for us.
If we surrender in Iraq, it just might be a good idea to refurbish Grandpa’s old cold war bomb shelter…
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Memorial Day
Monday, May 28th, is Memorial Day, a day that the people of our nation have set aside to remember our fallen warriors. Well over a million American service members have died in the wars and conflicts this nation has fought since the first colonial soldiers took up arms in 1775 to fight for our independence. They’ve died on American soil and on foreign soil, they’ve died at sea, and they’ve died in the air. Every one of them gave his life for this country, for our people, and our way of life. They gave their lives so that generations yet unborn could live in a free nation. Each was a loved one cherished by family and friends. Each and every death was a loss to their family, to the community, and to the nation.
The observance of this day was born of compassion in 1863. As the Civil War raged on, mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, and other loved ones were cleaning Confederate soldiers' graves in Columbus, Mississippi, placing flowers on them. They noticed nearby Union soldiers' graves, overgrown with weeds. Grieving for their own fallen soldiers, the Confederate women understood that the dead Union soldiers buried nearby were the loved ones of families and communities far away. Laying aside the deep hatreds of the bloodiest and most fearsome war this nation ever fought, they cleared the tangled brush and weeds from those Union graves as well as their own soldiers' graves, and laid flowers on them all.
Soon the tradition of a "Decoration Day" for the graves of fallen soldiers spread. On May 5,1866, when the Civil War was over, Mr. Henry Welles of Waterloo, New York, closed his drugstore and suggested that all other shops in town also close up for a day to honor all soldiers killed in the Civil War, union and confederate alike. It was a gesture of healing and reconciliation in a land ripped apart by conflict.
For decades, Memorial Day has been a holiday when stores closed and communities gathered together for parades and other celebrations with a patriotic theme. Memorial Day meant ceremonies at cemeteries, speeches honoring those who gave their lives in the service of our nation, the laying of wreaths and the playing of Taps for our dead. A day for remembering the ideals and values those soldiers stood for, and died defending. Sadly, many Americans have lost this connection with our nation’s history. All too many Americans today view military service as little more than images seen on television and in movies. It seems fashionable to accuse the soldier of being a warmonger, forgetting for a moment that the soldier hates and fears war more than anyone, for it is he who must ultimately pay the butchers bill. But inevitably he goes where our government sends him, suffers privation, hardship, and mortal danger, to do battle with those who would destroy our country.
For a growing number of the American people, Memorial Day has come to mean simply a three-day weekend, a camping trip, barbecue, or a major shopping day. Families might still gather for picnics, and old soldiers still salute the final resting place of a friend or relative, but for many Americans, the spirit of remembrance…is absent. Americans owe a great debt to those who sacrificed their lives so that we could live in a free nation. We can only begin to repay that debt, by not forgetting them, by remembering what they did, and honoring what they stood for. It has been American soldiers, with their courage, strength, and their blood, that have given us our nation, and have since kept it safe. In the words of Charles M. Province:
"It is the Soldier, not the reporter,
who has given us Freedom of the Press.
It is the Soldier, not the poet,
who has given us Freedom of Speech.
It is the Soldier, not the campus organizer,
who has given us the Freedom to demonstrate.
It is the Soldier, not the lawyer,
who has given us the right to a fair trial;
and it is the Soldier--
who salutes the flag,
who serves the flag,
and whose coffin is draped by the flag--
Who allows the protester to burn the flag."
Several years ago, at our Memorial Day ceremony here in Grangeville, the keynote speaker pronounced one particularly meaningful sentence that has burned itself into my mind. As he handed a young lady in the audience a small American flag, he said: “Always remember, that it was an old soldier who gave you that flag.”
On Memorial Day, please join me in remembering those who made the ultimate sacrifice for this nation and our people. And perhaps you’ll also join me in a silent prayer for the well-being of those young Americans who once again go in harms way on foreign battlefields.
And thank God that we still have the few who are willing to risk all... defending our country.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Flight of Fancy
18 May, ‘07
I’m going to wander far afield from my usual ranting about politics and instead take a short flight of fancy about the future. Consider a few science fiction subjects for a moment, whence they came, and where they might take us. I don’t know of anyone who isn’t at least somewhat familiar with the TV show “Star Trek”, its assorted spin-offs, and the various movies. Generally they’re easy to follow, entertaining, and they don’t really try to present some deep social message, being just the kind of TV program I’ll watch on occasion. To make their story lines plausible, the writers have developed quite a line of “Star Trek Physics”, including all sorts of futuristic gadgets that perform miraculous feats, such as faster than light travel via the “Warp Engines”, along with an endless source of power by way of anti-matter and “Dilithium crystals”. Then we have the “Transporter” that beams people all over whatever planet we’re visiting this episode, they have voice addressed computers, a “Replicator” that can instantly manufacture a new uniform (or a hot cup of coffee) on command, and of course that wondrous replacement for six-shooters or Buck Rogers ray guns, the “Phaser”.
I often talk to people all over the world by way of the Internet. Many of those folks are educators, scientists, engineers and technicians from a wide assortment of fields having to do with spaceflight and some rather futuristic scientific investigation as well. Generally they enjoy Star Trek for many of the same reasons I do, but I’m very cautious in speaking to them about the science and physics of Star Trek, as some of them get really upset when you compare their pet theories, or mainstream scientific beliefs, to “crackpot science” and “impossible” doings.
Back at the turn of the twentieth century it was generally accepted by scientists that Physics research was a dead field, as we had already learned “all there was to know about the physical world”. The Wright brothers were belittled in the press, as it was a well known fact that it’s physically impossible for man to fly. It was also believed physiologically impossible for the human body to withstand the stress of travel at speeds of over a hundred miles an hour. (At one time it was speeds of over five miles an hour!) In the early twentieth century everyone “knew” that rockets couldn’t fly in space because there was nothing for them to push against. I suspect those were the same people who insisted the world was flat, despite Columbus’s little yacht trip. That the Moon is made of green cheese was still believed by many people until Apollo 11 brought back a box of moon rocks. In the late 1940’s, President Truman’s science advisor insisted that it was impossible to put anything into Earth orbit, as no rocket imaginable could possibly carry that much fuel. A very few years later Sputnik was flying over our heads every ninety minutes or so.
Enter the world of Science Fiction, before it became the realm of dungeons and dragons, witches and warlocks, and a few hyperactive vampires. The first artificial Earth satellite was described in a science fiction story titled “The Brick Moon”, written in the 1860’s. Shortly thereafter Jules Verne wrote about man’s first trip to the moon, and also mentioned nuclear power. Robert Heinlein did an excellent job of describing the technical difficulties of leaving the Earth, reaching the planets of our solar system, and living on them, in the early 1950’s. Later he described fully a functional nuclear powered rocket fifteen years before NASA began building and testing them. Isaac Asimov described a futuristic human society and the problems of living with intelligent machines. Arthur C. Clarke described communications satellites in the 1940’s. In the 1960’s he described a “Space Elevator”, which is today being developed by a Seattle based aerospace firm. Fantasy and wild dreams? Perhaps. Heinlein was a graduate of the US naval academy at Annapolis, and a highly trained engineer. Asimov was a professor of bio-chemistry at Boston College. Clarke was a British electrical engineer who was instrumental in developing radar during WW II.
Star Trek as Sci-Fi is a lot of fun, along with being the freely admitted inspiration to a lot of today’s scientists. And many of those gadgets, impossible as they are, may not be all that impossible, or that far in the future either! “Warp Drive” engines and faster-than-light travel? Well, in Einstein’s relativistic universe nothing can travel faster than light. But Quantum Mechanics indicates that it is quite possible to exceed light speed. NASA is presently doing laboratory experiments with a rotating magnetic field “warp drive” system that might make the stars accessible to us after all. I haven’t figured out just what a Dilithium crystal is, but anti-mater certainly exists, and many of the technical problems involved in its use as a power source have been solved. The problem is in gathering enough of it in one place to be usable, without an accident vaporizing half the planet!
Scotty’s transporter might be coming down the pike as well. The University of Vienna recently demonstrated the electromagnetic transmission of matter! On a sub-atomic scale of course, but apparently it did work. We’ve also got a “replicator” of sorts. A British company is marketing a computer printer that “prints” solid objects. Called a “Fabber”, its capabilities are somewhat limited at the moment, but are being rapidly developed. The couch potatoes dream… “Hey computer, whip me up a cigar and a bottle of beer.” And voice addressed computers are also on the market today. Those of us who were around in the 1950’s should remember many of the “Car of the future” and “Home of the future” predictions. Stop and think about it and you’ll see that nearly everything predicted back in those days are available to us right now, if we can afford them.
The twin worlds of science and technology are making tremendous strides in our modern times, and give every indication of producing a number of near miracles in the not so distant future. And it’s not just physics and spaceflight either. Medicine, communications, transportation, energy, and even manufacturing are all seeing tremendous strides forward. If the politicians don’t wreck things first, I’m quite optimistic about our grandkids inhabiting a wondrous world that we of today would be very hard pressed to recognize.
I grumble and growl a lot whenever learned people make pontifical declarations of this or that or the other thing being impossible. They of all people should well know that nothing is really impossible to the human mind, it’s just that we haven’t learned how to do it… yet.
I’m going to wander far afield from my usual ranting about politics and instead take a short flight of fancy about the future. Consider a few science fiction subjects for a moment, whence they came, and where they might take us. I don’t know of anyone who isn’t at least somewhat familiar with the TV show “Star Trek”, its assorted spin-offs, and the various movies. Generally they’re easy to follow, entertaining, and they don’t really try to present some deep social message, being just the kind of TV program I’ll watch on occasion. To make their story lines plausible, the writers have developed quite a line of “Star Trek Physics”, including all sorts of futuristic gadgets that perform miraculous feats, such as faster than light travel via the “Warp Engines”, along with an endless source of power by way of anti-matter and “Dilithium crystals”. Then we have the “Transporter” that beams people all over whatever planet we’re visiting this episode, they have voice addressed computers, a “Replicator” that can instantly manufacture a new uniform (or a hot cup of coffee) on command, and of course that wondrous replacement for six-shooters or Buck Rogers ray guns, the “Phaser”.
I often talk to people all over the world by way of the Internet. Many of those folks are educators, scientists, engineers and technicians from a wide assortment of fields having to do with spaceflight and some rather futuristic scientific investigation as well. Generally they enjoy Star Trek for many of the same reasons I do, but I’m very cautious in speaking to them about the science and physics of Star Trek, as some of them get really upset when you compare their pet theories, or mainstream scientific beliefs, to “crackpot science” and “impossible” doings.
Back at the turn of the twentieth century it was generally accepted by scientists that Physics research was a dead field, as we had already learned “all there was to know about the physical world”. The Wright brothers were belittled in the press, as it was a well known fact that it’s physically impossible for man to fly. It was also believed physiologically impossible for the human body to withstand the stress of travel at speeds of over a hundred miles an hour. (At one time it was speeds of over five miles an hour!) In the early twentieth century everyone “knew” that rockets couldn’t fly in space because there was nothing for them to push against. I suspect those were the same people who insisted the world was flat, despite Columbus’s little yacht trip. That the Moon is made of green cheese was still believed by many people until Apollo 11 brought back a box of moon rocks. In the late 1940’s, President Truman’s science advisor insisted that it was impossible to put anything into Earth orbit, as no rocket imaginable could possibly carry that much fuel. A very few years later Sputnik was flying over our heads every ninety minutes or so.
Enter the world of Science Fiction, before it became the realm of dungeons and dragons, witches and warlocks, and a few hyperactive vampires. The first artificial Earth satellite was described in a science fiction story titled “The Brick Moon”, written in the 1860’s. Shortly thereafter Jules Verne wrote about man’s first trip to the moon, and also mentioned nuclear power. Robert Heinlein did an excellent job of describing the technical difficulties of leaving the Earth, reaching the planets of our solar system, and living on them, in the early 1950’s. Later he described fully a functional nuclear powered rocket fifteen years before NASA began building and testing them. Isaac Asimov described a futuristic human society and the problems of living with intelligent machines. Arthur C. Clarke described communications satellites in the 1940’s. In the 1960’s he described a “Space Elevator”, which is today being developed by a Seattle based aerospace firm. Fantasy and wild dreams? Perhaps. Heinlein was a graduate of the US naval academy at Annapolis, and a highly trained engineer. Asimov was a professor of bio-chemistry at Boston College. Clarke was a British electrical engineer who was instrumental in developing radar during WW II.
Star Trek as Sci-Fi is a lot of fun, along with being the freely admitted inspiration to a lot of today’s scientists. And many of those gadgets, impossible as they are, may not be all that impossible, or that far in the future either! “Warp Drive” engines and faster-than-light travel? Well, in Einstein’s relativistic universe nothing can travel faster than light. But Quantum Mechanics indicates that it is quite possible to exceed light speed. NASA is presently doing laboratory experiments with a rotating magnetic field “warp drive” system that might make the stars accessible to us after all. I haven’t figured out just what a Dilithium crystal is, but anti-mater certainly exists, and many of the technical problems involved in its use as a power source have been solved. The problem is in gathering enough of it in one place to be usable, without an accident vaporizing half the planet!
Scotty’s transporter might be coming down the pike as well. The University of Vienna recently demonstrated the electromagnetic transmission of matter! On a sub-atomic scale of course, but apparently it did work. We’ve also got a “replicator” of sorts. A British company is marketing a computer printer that “prints” solid objects. Called a “Fabber”, its capabilities are somewhat limited at the moment, but are being rapidly developed. The couch potatoes dream… “Hey computer, whip me up a cigar and a bottle of beer.” And voice addressed computers are also on the market today. Those of us who were around in the 1950’s should remember many of the “Car of the future” and “Home of the future” predictions. Stop and think about it and you’ll see that nearly everything predicted back in those days are available to us right now, if we can afford them.
The twin worlds of science and technology are making tremendous strides in our modern times, and give every indication of producing a number of near miracles in the not so distant future. And it’s not just physics and spaceflight either. Medicine, communications, transportation, energy, and even manufacturing are all seeing tremendous strides forward. If the politicians don’t wreck things first, I’m quite optimistic about our grandkids inhabiting a wondrous world that we of today would be very hard pressed to recognize.
I grumble and growl a lot whenever learned people make pontifical declarations of this or that or the other thing being impossible. They of all people should well know that nothing is really impossible to the human mind, it’s just that we haven’t learned how to do it… yet.
Isolationism
11 May, 2007
The American concept of “Isolationism” dates back to our colonial days. The thirteen colonies were populated by people who had fled Europe, where there was religious persecution, economic privation, and constant war. Their new homeland was looked upon as a place to make things better than the old ways. The sheer distance and rigors of the voyage from Europe tended to accentuate the remoteness of the New World. The roots of isolationism were well established years before independence, notwithstanding the alliance with France during the War for Independence. Thomas Paine stressed isolationist ideals in his work “Common Sense”, which presents numerous arguments for avoiding foreign alliances. Paine's writings exerted so much political influence that the Continental Congress strove against an alliance with France and gave in only when it appeared highly probable that the war for independence would be lost without one. Thomas Jefferson, in his inaugural address, admonished the new nation; "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none." With this in mind, the United States remained politically isolated all through the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, an unusual feat in western history. Historians have attributed the fact to the geographical position of the United States, protected by the wide expanse of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
From every side, everyone knows that isolationism is obsolete and dead in this age of H-bombs, strategic bombers, and guided missiles, but is it really? It’s my contention that our national interests would be much better served by a return to an updated version of the isolationist policies that stood us in good stead for our first hundred and fifty years as a nation. However, I do not propose that we lock ourselves behind our borders and look at the world through rose colored glasses, but like everything else there are various degrees of isolationism, both political and economic. Certainly we belong, like it or not, to the world community, and we cannot escape the responsibilities that accompany that membership. And yes, it is in our best interest to see that the world is a peaceful community. But no one either expects, or wants, the United States to be the world communities self appointed policeman. That function properly belongs to the United Nations, and is the sole reason the UN was established in the first place!
It is not in our national interest to forcibly export our moralistic or political system on a world that neither understands nor “appreciates” the finer points of American life.
Quite literally we need to pull in our horns. We need to establish diplomatic relations with all countries, and explain in simple and no uncertain terms exactly what we feel our national interests are, and what our national policies will be. Once that is clearly understood, we should bring all the troops home, secure our borders, and build up our national defenses to a stage that no sane foreign politician has any desire to pose a threat to the United States, and expose himself to the inevitable outcome of armed conflict. Certainly we have several traditional and long standing allies whom we should invite under our defensive umbrella, but acceptance should be by their choice, not because of our demands.
We should further call for a program of world disarmament to the point where isolationism again becomes militarily practical. Specifically, America is threatened now by those weapons, H-bomb missiles, disease germs, and chemical gases, which can quickly span the old protection of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. We are not threatened by foreign tanks or machine guns or infantry. It is, therefore, the principal task of an American foreign policy devoted to American interests not to bring about further unrest and hatred, but rather a universal scuttling of these weapons. If we all returned to no more than the old "conventional" weapons, and preferably even to the muskets of yore, then America would no longer be endangered, and we could then be sitting, fat, dumb, and happy, on our side of the ocean. I do feel that threats to world peace, such as we experienced with Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, should be squashed by an overwhelming American military might as soon as they raise their ugly heads. But it is not our duty, and certainly not in our interest, to interfere in every regional or tribal conflict that troubles the world. Again, that is the mission of the UN, not the US.
If there is one thing I have learned through the years, leadership is best accomplished by setting a good example, not through force. We erroneously expect the rest of the world to jump on the bandwagon of “democracy” because that political system has served us well. We forget that few peoples in our modern world have any experience with freedom of choice, instead they are, and have for millennia, been ruled by everything from tribal leaders to kings to dictators. Their societies literally cannot function in a political atmosphere wherein the population is not constantly being told what to do by the “authorities”. (A system that is also rapidly developing in the “politically correct” American society today.)
In our rather simplistic worldview, we get all upset because the Russian experiment in democracy is faltering. Yet we refuse to understand that the Russian people have had absolutely no experience with any but dictatorial governance (Boyars, Tsars, and Party Secretaries) in their entire history. We expected Iraq to become an overnight democracy despite the simple fact that they, along with the rest of the mid-east, have had nothing but a theocratic political system for nearly fifteen-hundred years, a land where Kings, Sheiks, and Imans abound, jealously guarding their special privileges. Mexico and points south have for several hundred years labored under a political system based on patronage by the rich, not freedom of choice. We forget that nearly all of Africa and much of south-east Asia have tribal based cultures, where everyone other than the immediate tribe is viewed with suspicion, and generally considered to be evil, dangerous, and to be destroyed at first opportunity.
Democracy is after all a slow growing ideal, and is very fragile. So, rather than nurturing democratic governments around the world, we try to replace other political systems through covert political activities and big business dealings. Then, when that doesn’t work, we send in the Marines! Such a program certainly doesn’t seem to be winning us many friends around the world, or building many democracies. Perhaps the US should try leading by example for a change.
The American concept of “Isolationism” dates back to our colonial days. The thirteen colonies were populated by people who had fled Europe, where there was religious persecution, economic privation, and constant war. Their new homeland was looked upon as a place to make things better than the old ways. The sheer distance and rigors of the voyage from Europe tended to accentuate the remoteness of the New World. The roots of isolationism were well established years before independence, notwithstanding the alliance with France during the War for Independence. Thomas Paine stressed isolationist ideals in his work “Common Sense”, which presents numerous arguments for avoiding foreign alliances. Paine's writings exerted so much political influence that the Continental Congress strove against an alliance with France and gave in only when it appeared highly probable that the war for independence would be lost without one. Thomas Jefferson, in his inaugural address, admonished the new nation; "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none." With this in mind, the United States remained politically isolated all through the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, an unusual feat in western history. Historians have attributed the fact to the geographical position of the United States, protected by the wide expanse of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
From every side, everyone knows that isolationism is obsolete and dead in this age of H-bombs, strategic bombers, and guided missiles, but is it really? It’s my contention that our national interests would be much better served by a return to an updated version of the isolationist policies that stood us in good stead for our first hundred and fifty years as a nation. However, I do not propose that we lock ourselves behind our borders and look at the world through rose colored glasses, but like everything else there are various degrees of isolationism, both political and economic. Certainly we belong, like it or not, to the world community, and we cannot escape the responsibilities that accompany that membership. And yes, it is in our best interest to see that the world is a peaceful community. But no one either expects, or wants, the United States to be the world communities self appointed policeman. That function properly belongs to the United Nations, and is the sole reason the UN was established in the first place!
It is not in our national interest to forcibly export our moralistic or political system on a world that neither understands nor “appreciates” the finer points of American life.
Quite literally we need to pull in our horns. We need to establish diplomatic relations with all countries, and explain in simple and no uncertain terms exactly what we feel our national interests are, and what our national policies will be. Once that is clearly understood, we should bring all the troops home, secure our borders, and build up our national defenses to a stage that no sane foreign politician has any desire to pose a threat to the United States, and expose himself to the inevitable outcome of armed conflict. Certainly we have several traditional and long standing allies whom we should invite under our defensive umbrella, but acceptance should be by their choice, not because of our demands.
We should further call for a program of world disarmament to the point where isolationism again becomes militarily practical. Specifically, America is threatened now by those weapons, H-bomb missiles, disease germs, and chemical gases, which can quickly span the old protection of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. We are not threatened by foreign tanks or machine guns or infantry. It is, therefore, the principal task of an American foreign policy devoted to American interests not to bring about further unrest and hatred, but rather a universal scuttling of these weapons. If we all returned to no more than the old "conventional" weapons, and preferably even to the muskets of yore, then America would no longer be endangered, and we could then be sitting, fat, dumb, and happy, on our side of the ocean. I do feel that threats to world peace, such as we experienced with Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, should be squashed by an overwhelming American military might as soon as they raise their ugly heads. But it is not our duty, and certainly not in our interest, to interfere in every regional or tribal conflict that troubles the world. Again, that is the mission of the UN, not the US.
If there is one thing I have learned through the years, leadership is best accomplished by setting a good example, not through force. We erroneously expect the rest of the world to jump on the bandwagon of “democracy” because that political system has served us well. We forget that few peoples in our modern world have any experience with freedom of choice, instead they are, and have for millennia, been ruled by everything from tribal leaders to kings to dictators. Their societies literally cannot function in a political atmosphere wherein the population is not constantly being told what to do by the “authorities”. (A system that is also rapidly developing in the “politically correct” American society today.)
In our rather simplistic worldview, we get all upset because the Russian experiment in democracy is faltering. Yet we refuse to understand that the Russian people have had absolutely no experience with any but dictatorial governance (Boyars, Tsars, and Party Secretaries) in their entire history. We expected Iraq to become an overnight democracy despite the simple fact that they, along with the rest of the mid-east, have had nothing but a theocratic political system for nearly fifteen-hundred years, a land where Kings, Sheiks, and Imans abound, jealously guarding their special privileges. Mexico and points south have for several hundred years labored under a political system based on patronage by the rich, not freedom of choice. We forget that nearly all of Africa and much of south-east Asia have tribal based cultures, where everyone other than the immediate tribe is viewed with suspicion, and generally considered to be evil, dangerous, and to be destroyed at first opportunity.
Democracy is after all a slow growing ideal, and is very fragile. So, rather than nurturing democratic governments around the world, we try to replace other political systems through covert political activities and big business dealings. Then, when that doesn’t work, we send in the Marines! Such a program certainly doesn’t seem to be winning us many friends around the world, or building many democracies. Perhaps the US should try leading by example for a change.
Small Wars
4 May, 2007
Great powers often perform poorly in wars against weak enemies waging irregular warfare, the so-called guerrilla or “small” wars. America's defeat in Vietnam, the national humiliation in Lebanon and Somalia, and now the continuing problems in Iraq underscore the limits of U.S. conventional military superiority. Such “weak” enemies as we have faced in the last forty years generally have a greater will to win because they have a greater interest in the war's outcome. In Vietnam for example, the US waged a limited war while the North Vietnamese communists waged total war. The communists sacrificed the lives of 1,100,000 soldiers to win, whereas the United States gave up after losing 58,000 men. Irregular forces can employ superior strategies as well. In Vietnam, the communists fought against a politically impatient America, and a tactically inflexible US Army. They denied decisive targets to U.S. firepower and wore down America's will to fight. Our form of government also worked to the communists' advantage, considering that democracies have a quite limited tolerance for any war that the citizens do not regard as essential.
Another key factor in great power defeats in small wars is the insurgents’ access to foreign assistance, which can reduce or even eliminate the effect of material inferiority. External assistance may be the most common point that enables insurgent success, as few insurgencies win without it. French support clinched the American victory in the War of Independence, Soviet Bloc support allowed the North Vietnamese to continue fighting, and Iranian support may yet bring about American defeat in Iraq.
Americans are at a distinct disadvantage in wars against materially weaker enemies, because we tend to separate war and politics, normally seeing military victory as an end in itself, and because the higher levels of the U.S. military are strongly opposed to counterinsurgency warfare. The American way of war is, as British strategist Colin Gray observed, “apolitical, impatient, ahistorical, culturally ignorant, technology-infatuated, firepower-focused, profoundly conventional and sensitive to casualties. It is permeated by an unwillingness to accept the German war philosopher Carl von Clausewitz's dictum that war is a continuation of politics by other means.” Political policy is the guiding factor after all, and war the instrument of that policy.
For most Americans, the only goal of warfare is military victory, which forbids allowing external political considerations to influence military operations. Yet military victory is a beginning, not an end, because the object of war is to ensure a better peace. Approaching war as an apolitical enterprise encourages inattention to the challenges of converting a military victory into a following political victory. Insurgencies are, first and foremost, political struggles which cannot be won by military means alone. Pursuit of a purely military victory discourages planning for the second and by far most difficult half of war for a regime change (the “exit strategy”), and establishing the conditions for successful political reconstruction. Those who gave us the war in Iraq apparently (and rather naively) assumed that the politics of post-Saddam Iraq would somehow fall neatly into place once the Baathists were out of power. Perhaps they didn't want to think about the possibility of insurgent resistance, because they recognized the Pentagon's aversion to any counterinsurgency mission, an antipathy born of the lost war in Vietnam, and an obsession with America's post-Cold War conventional warfare supremacy.
The Pentagon that went to war in Iraq in 2003 expecting a short, cheap and politically decisive victory had long forgotten (if it had ever understood) the imperatives of successful counterinsurgency operations, which includes minimal use of force, primacy of political responses, integrated civil-military operations and separation of insurgents from the population. The result was a slow, excessively violent and politically empty response to the growing Iraqi insurgency. U.S. political/military actions in Iraq probably created more insurgents than it removed from the battlefield, and the American lack of a viable political policy may well have doomed the entire effort from the start, particularly so as the invasion force was far too small to secure more than a small part of the country after the Iraqi army was defeated.
America's military culture detests politically messy small wars. Counterinsurgency demands forbearance, personnel continuity, foreign language skills, cross-cultural understanding, historical knowledge, judicious force employment, and civil-military integration. None of these are virtues to the US military, or to the American approach to war. Americans view war as a suspension of politics and apparently think the politics will somehow sort themselves out once victory has been achieved. All of this raises the question: Why should the United States continue to enter wars it is not very good at winning (and for which sustained domestic political support is highly questionable)? A more realistic policy would be to abstain from small wars of choice, and place the protection of national interests ahead of moral crusades intended to export American political values. Such a policy would have spared the United States the agonies of Lebanon, Somalia, and now Iraq, all places where our national interests do not justify intervention.
Desert Storm could be politically justified, as the Iraqi military threat to mid-eastern oil supplies was a direct threat to the security and economic interests of both the United States and Europe. The current war in Iraq however is an entirely different situation. Saddam’s Iraq, like most other Arabic nations, was, either directly or indirectly, supporting Al-Qaeda. This however was a political problem that should have been approached through political rather than military means. If a bit of muscle was found to be needed, it could have been judiciously supplied by military Special Forces operatives rather than a full scale invasion. Instead, we found ourselves involved in a more or less conventional war, that we somehow managed to turn into a rather nasty and very expensive civil war through Republican political ineptitude! Now, to make matters even worse, we have a Democratic led Congress that apparently has no understanding of the threat posed to the western world by militant Islam, demanding an end to American involvement (basically yet another American surrender), no matter what the cost to American prestige, damage to our national policies, or the danger to our allies. Whatever happens next, the US has received a black eye that we’ll be a very long time recovering from.
Perhaps we really should “throw the scoundrels out”, as Politics as usual at Sodom-on-the-Potomac seem to be doing us a severe disservice.
Great powers often perform poorly in wars against weak enemies waging irregular warfare, the so-called guerrilla or “small” wars. America's defeat in Vietnam, the national humiliation in Lebanon and Somalia, and now the continuing problems in Iraq underscore the limits of U.S. conventional military superiority. Such “weak” enemies as we have faced in the last forty years generally have a greater will to win because they have a greater interest in the war's outcome. In Vietnam for example, the US waged a limited war while the North Vietnamese communists waged total war. The communists sacrificed the lives of 1,100,000 soldiers to win, whereas the United States gave up after losing 58,000 men. Irregular forces can employ superior strategies as well. In Vietnam, the communists fought against a politically impatient America, and a tactically inflexible US Army. They denied decisive targets to U.S. firepower and wore down America's will to fight. Our form of government also worked to the communists' advantage, considering that democracies have a quite limited tolerance for any war that the citizens do not regard as essential.
Another key factor in great power defeats in small wars is the insurgents’ access to foreign assistance, which can reduce or even eliminate the effect of material inferiority. External assistance may be the most common point that enables insurgent success, as few insurgencies win without it. French support clinched the American victory in the War of Independence, Soviet Bloc support allowed the North Vietnamese to continue fighting, and Iranian support may yet bring about American defeat in Iraq.
Americans are at a distinct disadvantage in wars against materially weaker enemies, because we tend to separate war and politics, normally seeing military victory as an end in itself, and because the higher levels of the U.S. military are strongly opposed to counterinsurgency warfare. The American way of war is, as British strategist Colin Gray observed, “apolitical, impatient, ahistorical, culturally ignorant, technology-infatuated, firepower-focused, profoundly conventional and sensitive to casualties. It is permeated by an unwillingness to accept the German war philosopher Carl von Clausewitz's dictum that war is a continuation of politics by other means.” Political policy is the guiding factor after all, and war the instrument of that policy.
For most Americans, the only goal of warfare is military victory, which forbids allowing external political considerations to influence military operations. Yet military victory is a beginning, not an end, because the object of war is to ensure a better peace. Approaching war as an apolitical enterprise encourages inattention to the challenges of converting a military victory into a following political victory. Insurgencies are, first and foremost, political struggles which cannot be won by military means alone. Pursuit of a purely military victory discourages planning for the second and by far most difficult half of war for a regime change (the “exit strategy”), and establishing the conditions for successful political reconstruction. Those who gave us the war in Iraq apparently (and rather naively) assumed that the politics of post-Saddam Iraq would somehow fall neatly into place once the Baathists were out of power. Perhaps they didn't want to think about the possibility of insurgent resistance, because they recognized the Pentagon's aversion to any counterinsurgency mission, an antipathy born of the lost war in Vietnam, and an obsession with America's post-Cold War conventional warfare supremacy.
The Pentagon that went to war in Iraq in 2003 expecting a short, cheap and politically decisive victory had long forgotten (if it had ever understood) the imperatives of successful counterinsurgency operations, which includes minimal use of force, primacy of political responses, integrated civil-military operations and separation of insurgents from the population. The result was a slow, excessively violent and politically empty response to the growing Iraqi insurgency. U.S. political/military actions in Iraq probably created more insurgents than it removed from the battlefield, and the American lack of a viable political policy may well have doomed the entire effort from the start, particularly so as the invasion force was far too small to secure more than a small part of the country after the Iraqi army was defeated.
America's military culture detests politically messy small wars. Counterinsurgency demands forbearance, personnel continuity, foreign language skills, cross-cultural understanding, historical knowledge, judicious force employment, and civil-military integration. None of these are virtues to the US military, or to the American approach to war. Americans view war as a suspension of politics and apparently think the politics will somehow sort themselves out once victory has been achieved. All of this raises the question: Why should the United States continue to enter wars it is not very good at winning (and for which sustained domestic political support is highly questionable)? A more realistic policy would be to abstain from small wars of choice, and place the protection of national interests ahead of moral crusades intended to export American political values. Such a policy would have spared the United States the agonies of Lebanon, Somalia, and now Iraq, all places where our national interests do not justify intervention.
Desert Storm could be politically justified, as the Iraqi military threat to mid-eastern oil supplies was a direct threat to the security and economic interests of both the United States and Europe. The current war in Iraq however is an entirely different situation. Saddam’s Iraq, like most other Arabic nations, was, either directly or indirectly, supporting Al-Qaeda. This however was a political problem that should have been approached through political rather than military means. If a bit of muscle was found to be needed, it could have been judiciously supplied by military Special Forces operatives rather than a full scale invasion. Instead, we found ourselves involved in a more or less conventional war, that we somehow managed to turn into a rather nasty and very expensive civil war through Republican political ineptitude! Now, to make matters even worse, we have a Democratic led Congress that apparently has no understanding of the threat posed to the western world by militant Islam, demanding an end to American involvement (basically yet another American surrender), no matter what the cost to American prestige, damage to our national policies, or the danger to our allies. Whatever happens next, the US has received a black eye that we’ll be a very long time recovering from.
Perhaps we really should “throw the scoundrels out”, as Politics as usual at Sodom-on-the-Potomac seem to be doing us a severe disservice.
Castle Doctrine
27 April ‘07
There is an old saying that we’ve all heard numerous times, “Every mans home is his castle”. That saying, and the logic behind it, has it’s roots in the provisions of the ancient Roman legal codes. In essence it claims the right, for every person, to defend their home, family, and possesions from criminal attack, with whatever force or violence is necessary or appropreiate. Generally refered to as the “Castle Doctrine”, it simply states that in any place legally occupied, such as one's home, car, or place of work, one may stand their ground against an assailant without fear of legal prosecution by the state.
The opposite of a "castle" principle is the “Duty to Retreat”, which is the case in most U.S. Northeastern states, such as Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. A duty to retreat infers that you must immediately leave the area when faced with violence, even if it means you will be abandoning your family to whatever fate. Castle Doctrine laws in the U.S. are sometimes referred to as the "use of deadly force" or "no retreat" laws, merely confirm that the individual does have the right self defense. Depending on the state, this right may extend to the automobile or the business or any place where one has a legal right to be (a campground or park, for example).
Opponents of this Castle Doctrine law have referred to it as a "shoot first" law, implying that it allows people to "shoot first, ask questions later" any time they feel threatened. However, even with the Castle Doctrine in effect, all laws pertaining to the use of deadly force still apply. The law still requires the citizen to prove the ability, opportunity and intent of an attacker to do grave bodily harm to the person exercising his or her right to self-defense. Critics now acuse the “radical right” of distorting a principle in which they claim “A thousand years ago our ancestors realized that if civilization was to move forward, the obligation was on everyone to retreat.” (I’ll bet that idea was cheered on by the barbarians!) Their concept of civilization is quite simple, when confronted with violence; the person being attacked is always expected to retreat from any threat. When faced with a home invasion, rapist, mugger, carjacking, armed robbery, whatever, retreat or surrender is the rule, not the exception.
Those opponents apparently fail to understand the problem, or the reasoning behind Castle Laws. First, they claim such laws mean a return to the “Wild West”, and that more guns would put more people in harm's way, effectively saying that legal gun owners are always the aggressors. For all their bad advice, a couple of things the anti-gun folks cannot deny; 1. Police have no duty, and in many cases no legal right, to protect the individual before a crime has been committed. Nor are there nearly enough police officers available to even consider posting a cop at everyone’s front door. In all fifty states, the police don't really have to come when called, much less arrive in time. Certainly we can expect them to try (that’s why we pay taxes for police protection), and they usually do, but they have no real legal requirement to do so, as the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that we have no constitutional right to police protection. 2. Citizens in this country already possess the legal authority to use deadly force when facing grave danger. This fact is often denied by those folks who encourage you to turn around and run, or to dial 9-1-1 and do nothing until the police get there. That’s really not good advice to give the person who’s responsible for the safety and well-being of his wife, children, and his own life, when abruptly faced by an armed and violent criminal. Self defense is a civil right, so the anti-gun activists try to get us to forego that right with the emotionally hysterical language of “Wild West”, “easy access to guns”, “illegal guns” and “Harm's Way” instead. As if our average American citizen is completely irresponsible, or a criminal himself. In the case of a home invasion, burglary, carjacking, or even simple assault, the illegal weapon is much more likely to be found in the possession of the criminal, not the aggrieved property owner. In criticizing the Castle Doctrine, anti-gun activists are handing out advice that gets people killed by turning their backs on aggressors (walking away), by waiting for the police while the aggressors carry on as they wish (call 9-1-1 instead), and by being talked out of their quite legal authority (don't resist violence), basically it attempts to con the citizens into voluntarily giving up their civil rights and legal authority.
An argument often used against self defense is the wail “but it might be a kid!” OK, it might be. But is there any real difference between a violent, armed juvenile intent on doing grievous bodily harm, and a violent, armed adult intent on doing the same? If anything, the juvenile criminal is all the more likely to panic and kill somebody than is an adult. Certainly it’s not going to make the least bit of difference to the unarmed and undefended family that’s being massacred while politely waiting for the police to arrive. Personally I’d much rather be feeling sorry for that kid’s family after the fact, than to be burying my wife or grandkids while the cops try to catch him. If somebody forces his way into my home and points a gun at my wife, I certainly have no intention of politely offering him tea and crumpets!
As the nations press debates whether more guns or less can prevent tragedies like the Virginia Tech massacre, a notable anniversary passed last month in Kennesaw, Georgia, a town that witnessed a dramatic plunge in crime and violence after mandating residents to own firearms. 25 years ago, responding to a handgun ban in Morton Grove, Ill, Kennesaw unanimously passed an ordinance requiring each head of household to own and maintain a gun. Since then, despite predictions of "Wild West" shootouts and increased violence and accidents, not a single resident has been involved in a fatal shooting, as a victim, attacker or defender. The crime rate dropped for several years after the passage of the ordinance, and today is significantly lower than it was the year before passage of the law.
The States with Castle Doctrine Laws currently in effect include; Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington.
Humm… strangely enough Idaho’s not on that list. Maybe our state legislators need a nudge to remedy that oversight.
There is an old saying that we’ve all heard numerous times, “Every mans home is his castle”. That saying, and the logic behind it, has it’s roots in the provisions of the ancient Roman legal codes. In essence it claims the right, for every person, to defend their home, family, and possesions from criminal attack, with whatever force or violence is necessary or appropreiate. Generally refered to as the “Castle Doctrine”, it simply states that in any place legally occupied, such as one's home, car, or place of work, one may stand their ground against an assailant without fear of legal prosecution by the state.
The opposite of a "castle" principle is the “Duty to Retreat”, which is the case in most U.S. Northeastern states, such as Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. A duty to retreat infers that you must immediately leave the area when faced with violence, even if it means you will be abandoning your family to whatever fate. Castle Doctrine laws in the U.S. are sometimes referred to as the "use of deadly force" or "no retreat" laws, merely confirm that the individual does have the right self defense. Depending on the state, this right may extend to the automobile or the business or any place where one has a legal right to be (a campground or park, for example).
Opponents of this Castle Doctrine law have referred to it as a "shoot first" law, implying that it allows people to "shoot first, ask questions later" any time they feel threatened. However, even with the Castle Doctrine in effect, all laws pertaining to the use of deadly force still apply. The law still requires the citizen to prove the ability, opportunity and intent of an attacker to do grave bodily harm to the person exercising his or her right to self-defense. Critics now acuse the “radical right” of distorting a principle in which they claim “A thousand years ago our ancestors realized that if civilization was to move forward, the obligation was on everyone to retreat.” (I’ll bet that idea was cheered on by the barbarians!) Their concept of civilization is quite simple, when confronted with violence; the person being attacked is always expected to retreat from any threat. When faced with a home invasion, rapist, mugger, carjacking, armed robbery, whatever, retreat or surrender is the rule, not the exception.
Those opponents apparently fail to understand the problem, or the reasoning behind Castle Laws. First, they claim such laws mean a return to the “Wild West”, and that more guns would put more people in harm's way, effectively saying that legal gun owners are always the aggressors. For all their bad advice, a couple of things the anti-gun folks cannot deny; 1. Police have no duty, and in many cases no legal right, to protect the individual before a crime has been committed. Nor are there nearly enough police officers available to even consider posting a cop at everyone’s front door. In all fifty states, the police don't really have to come when called, much less arrive in time. Certainly we can expect them to try (that’s why we pay taxes for police protection), and they usually do, but they have no real legal requirement to do so, as the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that we have no constitutional right to police protection. 2. Citizens in this country already possess the legal authority to use deadly force when facing grave danger. This fact is often denied by those folks who encourage you to turn around and run, or to dial 9-1-1 and do nothing until the police get there. That’s really not good advice to give the person who’s responsible for the safety and well-being of his wife, children, and his own life, when abruptly faced by an armed and violent criminal. Self defense is a civil right, so the anti-gun activists try to get us to forego that right with the emotionally hysterical language of “Wild West”, “easy access to guns”, “illegal guns” and “Harm's Way” instead. As if our average American citizen is completely irresponsible, or a criminal himself. In the case of a home invasion, burglary, carjacking, or even simple assault, the illegal weapon is much more likely to be found in the possession of the criminal, not the aggrieved property owner. In criticizing the Castle Doctrine, anti-gun activists are handing out advice that gets people killed by turning their backs on aggressors (walking away), by waiting for the police while the aggressors carry on as they wish (call 9-1-1 instead), and by being talked out of their quite legal authority (don't resist violence), basically it attempts to con the citizens into voluntarily giving up their civil rights and legal authority.
An argument often used against self defense is the wail “but it might be a kid!” OK, it might be. But is there any real difference between a violent, armed juvenile intent on doing grievous bodily harm, and a violent, armed adult intent on doing the same? If anything, the juvenile criminal is all the more likely to panic and kill somebody than is an adult. Certainly it’s not going to make the least bit of difference to the unarmed and undefended family that’s being massacred while politely waiting for the police to arrive. Personally I’d much rather be feeling sorry for that kid’s family after the fact, than to be burying my wife or grandkids while the cops try to catch him. If somebody forces his way into my home and points a gun at my wife, I certainly have no intention of politely offering him tea and crumpets!
As the nations press debates whether more guns or less can prevent tragedies like the Virginia Tech massacre, a notable anniversary passed last month in Kennesaw, Georgia, a town that witnessed a dramatic plunge in crime and violence after mandating residents to own firearms. 25 years ago, responding to a handgun ban in Morton Grove, Ill, Kennesaw unanimously passed an ordinance requiring each head of household to own and maintain a gun. Since then, despite predictions of "Wild West" shootouts and increased violence and accidents, not a single resident has been involved in a fatal shooting, as a victim, attacker or defender. The crime rate dropped for several years after the passage of the ordinance, and today is significantly lower than it was the year before passage of the law.
The States with Castle Doctrine Laws currently in effect include; Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington.
Humm… strangely enough Idaho’s not on that list. Maybe our state legislators need a nudge to remedy that oversight.
Global Warming
20 April ‘07
I think I’ll spare the politicians this week, and instead discuss another subject that concerns us all, seems to have been in the news a lot lately, and has Al Gore climbing the walls. That subject is global warming. First off, yes, I do think global warming is real, and I do think it’s something that’s going to cause all of us a lot of discomfort for a long time to come. But I also question much of the stance taken by environmentalists concerning its causes, and particularly it’s “cures”. Admittedly I’m not an environmental scientist, nor do I know how to juggle statistics to substantiate whatever position I happen to support. However, I do think that common sense is a much more useful tool than what in many cases is turning out to be little more than well publicized junk science.
The global climate has shifted and varied widely for billions of year, perhaps since the Earth first had an atmosphere. The oldest geo-climatic records have allowed us to reconstruct climatic changes fairly reliably over the last 500 million years. During this time, the global climate has moved from extensive periods of warmth with tropical conditions extending nearly to the poles, to periods of extreme cold several times, each cycle lasting 100 million years or more. Although today we are concerned about global warming, we do in fact lie in the middle of an ice age, which began 40 million years ago when the permanent ice sheets formed over Antarctica. The change from the much warmer global climate which existed during the age of dinosaurs (when the global average temperature was perhaps 10°C higher than at present), is thought to have been caused by changes in the distribution of landmasses, and the associated changes to energy redistribution throughout the entire climatic system.
Within the present interglacial period, further fluctuations in the global climate can be seen in the climatic records, and more recently in the instrumental records. During the last 1000 years, the climate has moved from a period of comparative warmth to a "Little Ice Age" between the 16th and 19th centuries, with changes of between 0.5 and 1°C in the global average surface temperature. A one degree variation may not seem like much, but when considering the size of the planet, that’s a lot of heat energy! Although it is not clear what has caused these climatic shifts, variations in the Sun’s energy output, ocean circulation and the occurrence of major volcanic events are believed to play an important part. Most recently, since the beginning of the 20th century, we have entered a renewed period of warming that some scientists claim is the result of mankind's enhancement of the natural greenhouse effect, through pollution of the atmosphere. I don’t think that any intelligent person could deny that human activity does have a measurable effect on the Earth and its climate. But the question currently being battled over is just how much of this warming effect is actually due to human causes, and how much stems from natural causes. The global average temperature is now about the same as it was during the warm period about 1,500 years ago, although still much lower than it was during the age of the dinosaurs.
So what drives climate change? Solar energy is of course the prime mover. A third of the sun's energy is reflected back into space after hitting Earth's upper atmosphere, but two thirds gets through, driving Earth's weather engine. Consider the possible results of a small increase in the sun’s energy output, and the solar energy dose we receive each day. A balance of gases maintains Earths livable temperature. Known as "greenhouse" gases because they trap heat inside the atmosphere, and reflect a portion of that heat back to Earth's surface. These gases include water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. Covering two thirds of Earth, oceans are the planets primary heat sink and energy transport system. The oceans and marine life also consume huge amounts of carbon dioxide. While water vapor is the most potent greenhouse gas, clouds also affect evaporation, both cooling the Earth by reflecting solar energy, and warming the Earth by trapping heat being radiated up from the surface. The whiteness of polar ice and snow reflects solar heat, helping to cool the planet. A tropical forest will soak up huge amounts of carbon dioxide, but once that land is cleared for agriculture or new cities, that part of the CO2 “sink” is history.
Humans magnify warming to some extent by adding to the greenhouse gases naturally present in the atmosphere. Fossil fuel usage is usually blamed for rising carbon dioxide levels rather that the mega-tons of CO2 released annually by volcanoes. On the other hand, humans create temporary, localized cooling effects through the use of aerosols such as smoke and sulfates from industry, which reflect sunlight away from Earth. A recent scientific study has, with considerable fanfare, determined that New York City is responsible for 1% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. So what are we expected to do with that little detail, ban New York City? The environmentalists have been ranting and raging for years about the human causes, and now, at the start of the 21st century, the political left is making it their newest electioneering cause as well. Al Gore, inventor of the Internet and the famed “hanging chads” of Florida’s elections (who I understand is also known as the “Goracle” among his Hollywierd friends), is busily promoting himself as the Guru of global warming, and apparently has a yet unannounced plan to save the world from it’s Republican ways.
A few years back, I inadvertently got myself into an on-line global warming “discussion” with a few somewhat rabid environmentalists. You can probably imagine what they had to say when they found out that I was a rotten, nasty, evil wildland firefighter, and thus interfering with natures plan to renew the forests. Their idea of saving the planet was that all humans (with the exception of environmentalists of course) should immediately run out and commit mass suicide, leaving those with the proper appreciation of nature to stick around and “repair the damages”. I won’t get into my response to that idea… although my computer didn’t melt down, it was kinda singed around the edges.
As an interesting side note, European spacecraft have recently shown that the climate of Mars is warming nearly as much as Earths for some unknown reason. I suspect Mr. Gore will shortly discover that the Mars rovers “Spirit” and “Opportunity” are the sole cause, and in yet another Hollywood release demand that NASA immediately withdraw the robot vehicles from Mars.
I think I’ll spare the politicians this week, and instead discuss another subject that concerns us all, seems to have been in the news a lot lately, and has Al Gore climbing the walls. That subject is global warming. First off, yes, I do think global warming is real, and I do think it’s something that’s going to cause all of us a lot of discomfort for a long time to come. But I also question much of the stance taken by environmentalists concerning its causes, and particularly it’s “cures”. Admittedly I’m not an environmental scientist, nor do I know how to juggle statistics to substantiate whatever position I happen to support. However, I do think that common sense is a much more useful tool than what in many cases is turning out to be little more than well publicized junk science.
The global climate has shifted and varied widely for billions of year, perhaps since the Earth first had an atmosphere. The oldest geo-climatic records have allowed us to reconstruct climatic changes fairly reliably over the last 500 million years. During this time, the global climate has moved from extensive periods of warmth with tropical conditions extending nearly to the poles, to periods of extreme cold several times, each cycle lasting 100 million years or more. Although today we are concerned about global warming, we do in fact lie in the middle of an ice age, which began 40 million years ago when the permanent ice sheets formed over Antarctica. The change from the much warmer global climate which existed during the age of dinosaurs (when the global average temperature was perhaps 10°C higher than at present), is thought to have been caused by changes in the distribution of landmasses, and the associated changes to energy redistribution throughout the entire climatic system.
Within the present interglacial period, further fluctuations in the global climate can be seen in the climatic records, and more recently in the instrumental records. During the last 1000 years, the climate has moved from a period of comparative warmth to a "Little Ice Age" between the 16th and 19th centuries, with changes of between 0.5 and 1°C in the global average surface temperature. A one degree variation may not seem like much, but when considering the size of the planet, that’s a lot of heat energy! Although it is not clear what has caused these climatic shifts, variations in the Sun’s energy output, ocean circulation and the occurrence of major volcanic events are believed to play an important part. Most recently, since the beginning of the 20th century, we have entered a renewed period of warming that some scientists claim is the result of mankind's enhancement of the natural greenhouse effect, through pollution of the atmosphere. I don’t think that any intelligent person could deny that human activity does have a measurable effect on the Earth and its climate. But the question currently being battled over is just how much of this warming effect is actually due to human causes, and how much stems from natural causes. The global average temperature is now about the same as it was during the warm period about 1,500 years ago, although still much lower than it was during the age of the dinosaurs.
So what drives climate change? Solar energy is of course the prime mover. A third of the sun's energy is reflected back into space after hitting Earth's upper atmosphere, but two thirds gets through, driving Earth's weather engine. Consider the possible results of a small increase in the sun’s energy output, and the solar energy dose we receive each day. A balance of gases maintains Earths livable temperature. Known as "greenhouse" gases because they trap heat inside the atmosphere, and reflect a portion of that heat back to Earth's surface. These gases include water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. Covering two thirds of Earth, oceans are the planets primary heat sink and energy transport system. The oceans and marine life also consume huge amounts of carbon dioxide. While water vapor is the most potent greenhouse gas, clouds also affect evaporation, both cooling the Earth by reflecting solar energy, and warming the Earth by trapping heat being radiated up from the surface. The whiteness of polar ice and snow reflects solar heat, helping to cool the planet. A tropical forest will soak up huge amounts of carbon dioxide, but once that land is cleared for agriculture or new cities, that part of the CO2 “sink” is history.
Humans magnify warming to some extent by adding to the greenhouse gases naturally present in the atmosphere. Fossil fuel usage is usually blamed for rising carbon dioxide levels rather that the mega-tons of CO2 released annually by volcanoes. On the other hand, humans create temporary, localized cooling effects through the use of aerosols such as smoke and sulfates from industry, which reflect sunlight away from Earth. A recent scientific study has, with considerable fanfare, determined that New York City is responsible for 1% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. So what are we expected to do with that little detail, ban New York City? The environmentalists have been ranting and raging for years about the human causes, and now, at the start of the 21st century, the political left is making it their newest electioneering cause as well. Al Gore, inventor of the Internet and the famed “hanging chads” of Florida’s elections (who I understand is also known as the “Goracle” among his Hollywierd friends), is busily promoting himself as the Guru of global warming, and apparently has a yet unannounced plan to save the world from it’s Republican ways.
A few years back, I inadvertently got myself into an on-line global warming “discussion” with a few somewhat rabid environmentalists. You can probably imagine what they had to say when they found out that I was a rotten, nasty, evil wildland firefighter, and thus interfering with natures plan to renew the forests. Their idea of saving the planet was that all humans (with the exception of environmentalists of course) should immediately run out and commit mass suicide, leaving those with the proper appreciation of nature to stick around and “repair the damages”. I won’t get into my response to that idea… although my computer didn’t melt down, it was kinda singed around the edges.
As an interesting side note, European spacecraft have recently shown that the climate of Mars is warming nearly as much as Earths for some unknown reason. I suspect Mr. Gore will shortly discover that the Mars rovers “Spirit” and “Opportunity” are the sole cause, and in yet another Hollywood release demand that NASA immediately withdraw the robot vehicles from Mars.
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