Asked recently by Gallup whether "the United States should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along as best they can on their own", nearly half of Americans (46 per cent) said it should - compared with just 20 per cent 40 years ago. A clear majority of Americans (56 per cent) now say it was a mistake for the US to go into Iraq. Another poll, conducted earlier this year on behalf of National Geographic, found that 63 per cent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 could not find Iraq on a map, while 75 per cent could locate neither Israel nor Iran.
Unfortunately for Mr Blair, the rest of the world has a diametrically different view of the USA. According to the latest Pew Global Attitudes survey, even we Britons regard the American presence in Iraq as a bigger danger to world peace than either Iran or North Korea. A third of British voters think the US invaded Iraq "to control Middle Eastern oil". A quarter think America aims "to dominate the world". In short, we - in common with most Europeans - increasingly regard the United States not as Superman but as Lex Luthor.
Conventional wisdom has it that the American government is in a position to dictate to the Israeli government because of the latter's dependence on economic and military aid from the United States. Thus, when Condoleezza Rice opposed a joint Arab-European call for an immediate ceasefire at last week's Rome summit, most commentators interpreted this as an American green light for continued Israeli attacks on Lebanese targets. From both ends of the political spectrum I heard the same anti-American refrain: "If they really wanted to stop the fighting, they could."
I asked a few people last week what share of Israel's GDP they thought was accounted for by American aid. The estimates went as high as 40 per cent. In fact, US aid to Israel was equivalent to just 3.2 per cent of Israel's gross domestic product in 2004, compared with 14 per cent in 1986. American aid today is much more important for Jordan (14 per cent of GDP) and the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza (5.6 per cent) than it is for Israel.
It is therefore a complete fantasy to think that Washington can somehow force Tel Aviv to stop fighting when rockets fired by an Iranian-backed terrorist organisation are raining down daily on Israeli territory.
The unpalatable truth about the present crisis in the Middle East is that it is a symptom of American weakness rather than American dominance. Consider, too, just how few troops the White House has at its disposal in the region as a whole. The United States has a population in excess of 290 million, of whom nearly 75 million are men aged between 15 and 49. Yet the number of military personnel on active duty in all overseas theatres is little more than a quarter of a million - roughly 0.1 per cent of the American population. When Britain was the global colossus in the 1880s, that figure was six times higher. It is all very well calling for yet another peacekeeping force. But the United States patently cannot man it.
Like Superman, the US has vast potential strength. If it wants to be, it really can be "faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound". It is richer by far than the other countries in the world. It has mind-boggling firepower - enough to incinerate Iran in an afternoon. And yet, as Mr Blair understands, this Superman would really rather revert to being Clark Kent.
Of course, the moral of Superman Returns is that when the messianic Man of Steel retreats into provincial isolation, Metropolis descends into anarchy. Tragically, the same fate may now lie in store for the Middle East as the American superpower heads back to Smallville.
And Dean/Reid/Pelosi are setting the donks up to run on an isolationist platform in 2008. We may get a choice, not an echo. That would make for an interesting election.
#1
Thanks for the post NS. My late father always said, "we'd be much better off to stay on our own shores and the hell out of other folk's business. If they violate you, say nothing but take a big stick and whack the living hell outta them and come back home." He always said "they'd been fighting it out over there for thousands of years and they would never be peaceful like our neighbors across the Wabash in Indiana." Simple country logic, but he older I get, the more truth I see in it.
#2
I've got to admit that my default position is to agree with your father. My problem is we've been violated but the right people haven't been whacked. When I see Abrams cruising through Tehran and Mecca, I'll be ready to come home.
#5
I begining to think Americans are getting tired of nation building and I am going to feel real sorry for the next country that makes us mad enough to invade. That country going to get the no holds bar version of war and the MSM going to see what a real war looks like.
#6
I'm an old-style isolationist. But, the sad truth today is that America has long since stopped being self-sufficient. Back in the 70s, decisons were made with far-reaching consequences. We are now dependent on foreign products for our livelihood. Telling the rest of the world to suck it simply won't work. The plutocrats that give money to the politicians won't allow such a thing to pass - they might lose money!
#7
The US has two long-term 'enemies' worthy of concern in the world; Islam and China. We're fighting Islam in Iraq and Afghanistan with our own forces; fighting via Special Ops, proxies, and allies is going on other places. I think the decision was made some time ago to take a different path with China - and also different than was taken with the USSR. Still MAD, but with China the 'D' is for dependence. We are dependent on each other with our trade, and with our financial markets, to the point where the economic failure of either country severely hurts both. So we dance around the fringes, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, India - more shadow-boxing than sparring.
I think we should give the average American more credit. It would mean some changes, but I think we could become "self sufficient" rather quickly if we had to. You're spot on about the politicians however, they're globalist millionaires who could care less about Peoria.
#9
Isolationism no longer works in the age of nuclear weapons. Anyone who thinks so is merely inviting terrorist nuclear attacks on American soil. In the name of our own national security, we are obliged to go out and whack every single potential threat we have the time and patience to smack down.
At the same time that we perform these pre-emptive strikes, we should also be doing our d@mnedest to bring the Internet to every single country imaginable. If it requires setting up dedicated satellite downlinks for the entire Mid-East and Islamic regions, so be it. Just as the information age brought about the downfall of Soviet dictatorship, so will the Internet (help) bring an end to Islamic fascism.
Folks hereabout who jokingly say we should bombard the Arabic countries with endless pronography, male enhancement ads, farmgirls gone wild and breast augmentation spam have just about got it right. Only the free flow of information is going to have anywhere near the effect of sustained bombing campaigns. And I'll leave it to you to guess which choice is less expensive.
In news accounts she's been called "the pregnant lady."
People close to her say she would be a bit miffed by such a clipped, if apropos, moniker.
Let's call Dayna Klein something else: Seattle hero.
Klein, who survived being shot by a gunman who forced his way into the downtown offices of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle on Friday, is actually a hero twice over.
When the gunman, identified as Naveed Afzal Haq, fired a semi-automatic her way, Klein moved her arm toward her womb in an act of maternal defense.The bullet struck her arm, authorities say, likely preventing possible harm from coming to her unborn child.
That was the first heroic act.
Her second came when Klein defied Haq. As Haq scanned the office space he warned terrified people not to call 911. But "that's what she did," Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske said, referring to Klein.
Klein, 37, crawled back to an office in the building. She got on a phone. She dialed emergency dispatchers.
Haq caught up with her -- and saw her on the phone. Klein didn't panic.
With amazing presence of mind she handed Haq the phone so that he could speak with two 911 dispatchers. The dispatchers took the handoff smoothly and handled a tense situation with aplomb.
"I listened to the tape," Kerlikowske said Saturday afternoon. "I was absolutely stunned by their level of calmness and coolness."
The actions of the dispatchers are being credited with influencing Haq, who had expressed anger about Israel's involvement in the Middle East and about American military support of the country.
The volley of bullets he loosed inside the Jewish Federation killed one person -- Pam Waechter -- and injured five others, including Klein. His terrible act could have exacted a worse toll. Eighteen people were inside the building when Haq burst in.
The names of the emergency dispatchers should be made public when the timing is right. Their soothing professionalism eased Haq's rage.
Haq told the dispatchers he would surrender. He put down his weapon and walked out of the building. The dispatchers are heroes, too, as Kerlikowske acknowledged.
But they would not have gotten the chance to do their jobs had it not been for the bravery of Klein, who heads up major gifts and development for the federation.
She saved lives.
That's one miracle to emerge from this mayhem.
Another is around the corner, when Klein brings a new life into the world.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/30/2006 00:00 ||
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#1
Deserves its own post, but Haq hid behind a potted plant and then held his gun to the head of a 13-year old girl to force his way in.
#5
Fabrizio Quattrocchi is the Italian hero who told the Iraqi/Al Qaeda headchoppers he would show them how a real man dies, and did so well they never showed the video, 2b.
#6
Wells Crowther worked in the twin towers and made 3 trips back in to help rescue victims from the 78th floor skylobby in Tower 2 on September 11th. A trained firefighter, Crowther was still assisting the evacuation when the tower collapsed.
Given events in the Middle East and the near certainty of escalation, its time to name our enemy, because Israel is our canary in the mine of world events. And the canary is singing.
Ever since Thomas Jeffersons replied to the Danbury Baptists with the phrase wall of separation between church and state and James Madison penned Strongly guarded . . . is the separation between religion and government in the Constitution of the United States. and Ulysses S Grant called for Americans to Keep the church and state forever separate the policy of America has been to rest upon a foundation of respect for authentic religion and to shun the disaster of making religion our government.
The Left in our nation, who make government their religion, have formed ranks around separation of church and state as a bedrock. A Google search of Separation Of Church And State yields 21,500,000 results. The larger percentage of those results are hardened secular positions, like Wall Builders, Suburban Guerillas and Americans United For Separation of Church and State. Many of these are not just Constitutional argument websites, but more secular and obdurate anti-Christian web sites. Fine. Were a big nation.
How does this relate to the current crisis between Israel and her enemies?
The conflagration breaking out around the world like a fever coming to the fore, is religious. Its not oil, its not haves and have-nots, its not Marxism versus Capitalism, its not Globalists versus independent free thinkers.
Its religion.
It is a war to the death between those who stand for Religion as State, and those who will not live under their rule of religion as state policy.
Oil is not that name. Oil is just a bargaining chip. Globalism is not that name. Globalism is only a sidebar. The virulent remnants of Marxism play a significant role in money and state-sponsored support, but Marxism is not the name. Our enemy, the enemy of civilization, and I dare say the enemy of Mankind itself is a religion which will kill, maim and terrorize any who will not accept religion as the State.
Islam is the name.
Islam was founded as a religion that is the state, where the state is the religion. The ultimate theocracy. There is no separation, no wall, no division. It is a seamless whole and any behavior is allowed to maintain that power. No crime is too gruesome, no argument too convoluted, no terror too shocking, and no theology too cancerous to be off limits in conquering the world for their god.
They mean to have government be religion, and for religion to be government. Jihad is the mechanism by which all of mankind will be brought into to ummah, the world community of Islam. And only then will we know peace.
I stand in shocked anger that those in America who work so hard for the separation of church and state are not horrified at the Islamist threat. Those who passionately insist on the separation of church and state ought to be on the front lines every day denouncing Islam and their global terror campaigns. making noise, agitating, pressing for Islam to be eradicated. But they arent denouncing Islam. Quite the opposite. They advocate eradicating George W Bush and the United States.
This is madness beyond my ken.
The very people inside our borders who work the hardest to see to it that America and Israel are ruined and kicked into the dust bin of history are the same people who take every opportunity to remind us about the separation of church and state. Are they not paying attention? Are they blind and deaf? Are they made dumb by their hate?
I am truly flabbergasted that these separation people seem to have no concept that if Israel is cast down and if America is driven to her knees, theyre going to get a church that is the State in such totality as to defy description. And it wont do for America to simply refrain from international affairs as if a disinterested observer. This is the kind of annihilating threat that must be stopped before it grows any larger. Acceptance and diversity are fine-sounding phrases, but not when were discussing the end of civilized man.
A word of warning to our citizens who live on the Left side of the aisle, the anti-war crowd, the anti-globalist crowd, the anti-America crowd . you say you are as separation of church and state as can be . but what youre going to reap is the soul crushing whirlwind of church as state and state as church if you dont get a grip and wise up. Youre rooting for the worst kind of theocracy the world has ever seen, the kind that treats women as less than objects, that kills dissenters, whose distaste for homosexuals is literally beyond polite discussion, and whose Friday afternoon schedule is not cocktails but beheadings of those who take drugs, have sex out of wedlock, have a taste for pornography or show too much skin in public. Among the many crimes you now take for granted as your liberties.
Islam is the zenith of religion as government, and government that is religion. Our friend Israel is on the front line of the war to determine the future of mankind. Religion as state, or secular freedom that guarantees religious freedom.
Do you really want to bring to pass a murderous medieval theocracy? Is that the future you think youll enjoy? Is that the outcome youre working for? Because if you keep tearing at our foundations and empowering this nations enemies, if you keep heaping scorn and invective on our President, if you insist that America is evil and must be radically assimilated into a metastasizing United Nations global plan, thats exactly what youre going to get and there will be no wall of separation. You will have torn it down.
Standing, cheering, clapping.
Bravo, bravo! Of course, he'll be called a hatemonger.
#1
This is hysterically funny. "Israel is our canary in the mine of world events. And the canary is singing."
When there is danger in the coal mine, the canary stops singing, and in fact, assumes room temperature. If the canary keeps singing, the mine is safe. (Methane gas is what silences the warbling winged one.)
I don't think the author is saying Israel is safe. Apparently, the author is clueless when it comes to the use of metaphors. With metaphors like this, who needs enemies?
#2
Dang. Beat me to it, Thoan. I had that clueless first line copied and ready. 'Journalism' is what you do when you can't cut it in the food service industry.
#4
He had some good points, but that was the first thing i thought of too about the birds. When the birds quit singing that is when the trouble begins. :)
#6
sorry, grom. But antisemitism is the canary. Not all canaries die, mind you, but when a canary dies in a coal mine, it's an indicator that a major problem needs to be dealt with immediately.... or else...
I don't know why...but when the cockroaches come from the baseboards and the worms crawl up from the ground to feast upon antisemitism, history has shown that we only have so much time left to act in order to avoid tragedy.
#7
Thoan and PBMcl,if you drop your overwhelming sense of grammatical and/or metophoric one up-man-ship, the overall sense of what Besoeker rings true.
#8
Sorry, my mistake.....that should be Michael Geer, not Besoeker. Also, please excuse the mistake(s) in syntax, last night is still catching up with me.
#10
It is not US policy to beat Islamofascism by any necessary means. The policy is to prop political-Islam. Is it working? Somebody recently posted pictures of Egypt's Cabinet Ministers of their wives, one of which was current and the other from over a decade ago. Prior to 9-11 the women wore regular street clothing. Now the wives were wearing Islamic dress. The Muslim countries are Islamising, while the West denies the jihad component of same.
#11
Jihad is their last desperate hope to keep their culture and societies from being overwhelmed. They are really stuck. Every attempt to graft modernism on the Muslim tree has failed. Colonialism and Arab nationalism went nowhere. A few concrete plants were built and a few wars were launched, but nothing much came of any of it. The Israelis actually tried pretty hard to break the mold in the occupied territories and the intifadas were their reward. Our current projects in Afghanistan and Iraq might work if we had three generations to dick around and we were willing to kill off 10-20% of the male population in those places. Neither of those will prolly happen.
So the Muslim's only hope is to either make us go away or to annihilate us. Making us go away won't work in a world of oil and satellite TV. I think that if they can overrun Europe, India, and SE Asia, they might be able to annihilate us. Get ready for Allah-dämerrung!
#12
Globalism is not that name. Globalism is only a sidebar.
Actually, globalism is exactly what Islam is afraid of. Keeping Middle East Muslims disconnected from the outside world is one of their few means of maintaining power.
#15
Mis-applied metaphors aside, Mr Geer has articulated exactly what I was wondering about the idiotic left, and add my plaudits.
This link is to the original letter from the Danbury Baptists to Jefferson, as well as his reply: It appears that they were being persecuted by the State established church, and were worried that the federal government would join in. Jefferson's reply has been partly taken out of context: the "wall" was not as much to protect the government from the church, but a wall to prevent the government from being taken over by a specific religious sect and used as a tool of persection of competing sects. This was the concern of many americans during the presidential candidacy of John F Kennedy.
Am excellent post, Besoeker: a link to this will eventually go on my blog, for the record.
Those of us old enough to remember World War II face many painful reminders of how things have changed in Americans' behavior during a war.
Back then, the president's defeated opponent in the 1940 election Wendell Wilkie not only supported the war, he became a personal envoy from President Roosevelt to Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
We were all in it together and we knew it. People who had been highly critical of American foreign policy before we were attacked at Pearl Harbor now fell silent and devoted themselves to winning the war.
What if the people, institutions, and attitudes of today were somehow taken back in time to World War II? What would have been the result? Would we have ended up winning or losing that war?
What about the great cry of the hour, a cease-fire?
It so happens that World War II had the biggest cease-fire in history. It was called the phony war because, although France was officially at war with Germany, the French did very little fighting for months, while the bulk of the German army was in Poland and France had overwhelming military superiority on the western front.
Famed correspondent William L. Shirer reported on the unreal western front, with soldiers on both sides looking but not shooting. German soldiers bathed in the Rhine and waved to French soldiers on the other side, who waved back.
During this period Hitler offered to negotiate peace with France and England.
Kofi Anan would have loved it.
On November 19, 1939, Shirer's diary reported: For almost two months now there has been no military action on land, sea, or in the air. On January 1, 1940, he wrote, this phony kind of war cannot continue long. But it was now exactly four months since war was declared. How is that for a cease-fire?
Did this de facto cease-fire lead to peace? No. Like other cease-fires, it helped the aggressor.
It gave Hitler time to move his divisions from the eastern front, after they had conquered Poland, to the western front, facing France.
Now that military superiority along the Rhine had shifted in favor of the German armies, the war suddenly went from being phony to being devastatingly real.
Hitler attacked and France collapsed in six weeks.
Eventually, by 1945, allied armies had both Germany and Japan retreating. What would have happened if we had had Kofi Anan and the mushy mindset called world opinion at work then?
Kofi Anan would undoubtedly have called for a cease-fire.
He could have pointed out that the American response to Germany was wholly disproportionate because the Germans had never landed troops in America or bombed American cities, and were certainly no real threat to the United States at that point.
Much of the Japanese navy was at the bottom of the ocean by this time and most of their planes had been shot down. Why not a negotiated settlement, in order to spare innocent civilian lives?
And what if we had listened to such talk?
No doubt Germany and Japan would have signed some kind of negotiated agreement in order to get the allied armies off their backs and get some breathing room.
Both Germany and Japan had programs to try to build nuclear bombs. One of the Nazis' last acts before surrendering was to send material by submarine to Japan to help advance their nuclear program.
Any peace we might have negotiated with Japan would have given the Japanese time to develop not only nuclear technology but also war planes whose plans had been gotten from Germany, which had the most advanced planes in the world at that time.
There is not the slightest doubt that Japan would not have had the slightest hesitation to drop nuclear bombs on American cities. And they would not have come back in later years to wring their hands at what they had done, as too many American have done at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But we didn't cease firing until our enemies were defeated. Kofi Anan and today's world opinion would not have liked that.
Thomas Sowell is a Senior Fellow at The Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. He has published dozens of books on economics, education, race, and other topics. His most recent book is Black Rednecks and White Liberals, in which he argues that "internal" cultural habits of industriousness, thriftiness, family solidarity, and reverence for education often play a greater role in the success of ethnic minorities than do civil-rights laws or majority prejudices.
#2
in which he argues that "internal" cultural habits of industriousness, thriftiness, family solidarity, and reverence for education often play a greater role in the success of ethnic minorities than do civil-rights laws or majority prejudices.
A blindly flash of the obvious. Refreshing to see it in print however.
#3
Sowell is always good stuff. Like Walter Williams or Steyn or VDH
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/30/2006 16:09 Comments ||
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#4
"Is It Time for a Cease-Fire?"
No.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
07/30/2006 16:12 Comments ||
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#5
No cease-fire without concerted, substantial commitments by Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, al Aqsa martyr's Brigade and the Palestinian Authority regarding actual progress towards lasting peace. And we all know how likely that is.
BAGHDAD--"How was Afghanistan?" asks an aide to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. "Dusty," I reply, pointing at my shoes, which show every evidence of having been in Kandahar hours earlier. "And remarkably stable," I add: The press corps following Donald Rumsfeld drove from Kabul airport to the U.S. Embassy compound with no significant security, a sharp contrast to the helicopter ride that prudence dictated we take into Baghdad's Green Zone. "We'd sure like to have that kind of situation," my interlocutor says. So why does he think the U.S. mission here has been so much harder? Maybe, he says, because the Taliban didn't have 35 years to create the infrastructure of a totalitarian state, with millions of party apparatchiks and a KGB-trained intelligence service--"the same people who are still killing us today."
It's the best answer I heard to a question that nagged me on a recent visit to two of the hottest battlefronts in the war on terror. Iraq, a cosmopolitan civilization, actually knew something of representative democracy before the Baath rose to power in the 1960s. It has an educated middle class, and at least 80% of its population hated the regime when we liberated it. It seemed as fertile ground as any to test the idea that the force of U.S. arms could help improve political evolution in the Muslim world. Iraqis have vindicated that idea by bravely turning out for two elections and a constitutional referendum; but the security situation in Baghdad continues to deteriorate. And the middle class--upon whom so much depends--is fleeing Iraq in numbers.
By contrast, Afghanistan seemed to pose more daunting challenges. It is larger, more populous and largely illiterate, with a history of being the "graveyard of empires." It was the actual home of an Islamist regime. And across the border in Pakistan, madrassas turn out a seemingly endless supply of holy warriors. Yet Afghanistan was liberated with only a token U.S. ground force and stabilized with barely more than 20,000. It still has decades to go before basic education levels will allow it to be anything approaching modern democracy. But don't believe the reports of a significant Taliban resurgence; they're greatly exaggerated.
Go read the rest of it; it's quite insightful.
Posted by: Mike ||
07/30/2006 09:07 ||
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#1
The situations are not that different. There are Sunni-Shiite divides in both entities. I believe that the difference with Iraq, is that weaponry and explosives were already close to front lines that were later established after the liberation. Wababi - Taliban is a Wahabi sect - terrorists in Afghanistan aren't as well stocked. However this is changing, with rising sympathy - at least in Pashto areas - for the return of Taliban. Now that Karzai is bringing back the Taliban version of the Muttawa, while allowing clerics to declare jihad in Kandahar mosques, one has to wonder why we bother remaining in that rat hole.
#2
one has to wonder why we bother remaining in that rat hole.
Either we stay, or we have to go back again to root out Al Qaeda a second time after the next 9/11. That's why Oldspook is running ragged doing mysterious support thingies for his lads, and why we have Special Forces and Marines and such all over the trouble spots in Africa.
I think infrastructure is only one of the answers. The other answer is money - Saddam had more ammo (bullets, artillery and mortar rounds) stockpiled and hidden than the entire US military. He is suspected to have billions stashed away. That's probably enough to cover his payroll for the rest of the decade. At an average of $5000 per person per year, it costs him $50m a year to pay 10,000 guerrillas every year. The standard AK rifle costs $500 tops. Ammo is dirt cheap - $0.10 per round. Say the average guerrilla uses $10000 worth of ammo a year. That's 100,000 rounds of ammo, or about 300 rounds per day. For about $150m a year, Saddam can field a full-time army of 10,000, with each guerrilla shooting off 300 rounds of 7.62mm ammo daily. If he has $5b in cash lying around, he can put the money in CD's and fund a guerrilla movement for the rest of eternity. The only question is whether he can get enough recruits. For that kind of money, I bet you can get any number of recruits from Muslim countries. The only problem they face is getting there, and the rough treatment they get from Iraqis.
#4
Logistics. Its just has hard for the bad guys to get their equipment into country as for us. Only we have modern technology, an effective logistics structure to get it there, and the treasury to make it happen. Iraq is pretty much close to infrastructure drop off points in the region for easy movement of men and material from the bankers [Saudis and Iranians].
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
