Category ►►► Scaley Classics

December 7, 2006

Blast From the Past Repost: Remembering Pearl Harbor

Sachi wrote this piece last year on Pearl Harbor Day. Since the post is, alas, even more true today than it was 365 days ago, we decided it was worth revisiting. Once again, we're in danger of forgetting who lurks beyond the gates...

When 9/11 happened, many people compared it to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 64 years ago today. We Americans of Japanese ancestry felt a little bit uncomfortable with the comparison. My father, who still lives in Japan, thought “remember Pearl Harbor” meant “never forgive the Japanese.” But I know better. "No Dad," I told him, "that’s not what it means."

The commonality between the Pearl Harbor attack and 9/11 is its unexpectedness. Both attacks happened when our (American) world was seemingly at peace. What angered us was the enemy’s cowardly and dishonorable attack, the savage disregard for innocent lives. But we were more angry with ourselves for letting our guard down. We were angry at the enemy, sad for our loss, but worse yet, humiliated.

How could mighty America, my adopted country, which has the strongest military and economy in the world and is the most moral nation on the planet, let an enemy attack on our own soil? How could we miss the signs that militant Islamists had been plotting against us for years? How could we have been so complacent?

“Never again,” Americans of 64 years ago swore, “will we allow a savage enemy to attack us on our own soil.” And yet 60 years later, we made exactly the same mistake. Why?

For exactly the same reason: because we forgot. We forgot who was out there beyond the pale. And we forgot how we felt that day December 7th, 1941.

The enemy are not the Japanese. The enemy are not the Moslems. The enemy are the faceless, cowardly savages who are always lurking in the shadows around us, looking for an opportunity to strike at our most vulnerable spot, which usually means innocent women, children, and other civilians. We must never forget that such an enemy exists.

So when we say “remember Pearl Harbor,” Dad, we're really saying "remember that, even when there are no bullets or bombs flying, we are always at war against evil. We have to become like Terminators against barbarity. To paraphrase James Cameron, we can't reason with it, we can't bargain with it, we can't feel pity or remorse or fear... and we absolutely must not stop, ever, until it is dead.”

So, let’s not forget what we felt on Dec 7th and Sept. 11th. Because the minute we forget, it will surely happen again... and another terrible disaster will be forever known only by a date.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, December 7, 2006, at the time of 1:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 4, 2006

Ten Thousand Armies of One

My second post on Patterico's. (Yeah, like you couldn't see that coming!) Originally heaved at the roiling masses on May 28th, 2005.

That slogan of the U.S. Army -- “an Army of one!” -- has always set me to pondering. What do they mean? On the one hand, they extol teamwork; but on the other hand, the brass seem to want recruits to feel like individuals, cardinal numbers instead of merely ordinal numbers. It seems confused, to say the least.

But what if it were literally true? What if one man (or woman) could be the hyperpowered equivalent of an entire army back in the days of the so-called “greatest generation?” What if the United States had ten thousand “armies of one?” To explore this intriguing idea, do the obvious....

This may seem a diversion, but it actually drives into my point from an oblique angle.

Wretchard, over on Belmont Club, had an interesting post a while back:

Wretchard contemplated what it would take actually to carry out the mission we seem to have chosen for ourselves: to institute regime changes around the globe, casting out the most repulsive, venomous dictatorships, the ones that test the will of civilization, in favor of democracies that allow the people of those lands the greatest expression of individual liberty they have ever known. Wretchard noted the obvious: the United States is ill-equipped for what we would really need: a “Colonial Corps” specifically designed for long term occupation of hostile nations, rather like the British army of the nineteenth century.

We have always shied away from the imperial hubris of dedicating multiple armies to occupying other people’s countries; instead, we focus on the blitzkrieg, as in Iraq -- the lightning strike, the disabling blow. We have an army of combat, not occupation. But if we plan to protect ourselves by civilizing the worst hellholes on the planet (probably a good idea), we’ll have to get over our squeamishness.

This Colonian Corps would not be entirely military; it would include administrators, engineers, diplomats, jurists, politicians -- everything needed to tear down the repugnant elements of a terrorist state and build on the ashes the foundations of a modern democratic, liberal state. One presumes it would not be hamstrung by the rampant racism that infested the Raj and other European colonial institutions.

What it would be, however, is hideously expensive, requiring a tremendous amount of manpower and resources. It would, in fact, cost at least as much as our entire armed forces today; thus, most military analysts argue it would have to be created in place of our current military force. And for that reason, almost nobody supports the idea because of the danger to our republic.

As Wretchard notes, the British Army, so focused on supporting and enforcing colonialism, simply crumbled the first time they ran into a military force that was their equal: the Boers in South Africa, and later, the Germans and Austrio-Hungarians in World War One. Clearly, in today's world, we dare not sacrifice our ability actually to fight for the strange and foreign idea of "colonialism."

Although there is no military our equal, there are militaries at least in our ballpark -- the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, for example, which is modern enough that its massive size would make war between them and us a dicey affair. Also, many countries have nuclear weapons and other WMDs; if we had only a Colonial Corps and suddenly found ourselves facing off against the PLA, we might be in as serious trouble as the Brits were in 1914.

So the question arises: is it possible for a military to be both a Colonial Corps and also a Blitzkrieg Batallion?

Conventional wisdom says no: it would require two entirely separate armed forces, one for colonial occupation, the other for warfighting against technologically sophisticated enemies... and no country could afford both at the same time.

And this is exactly where, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, the “army of one” trendline comes into play. Where is the empowerment of the individual American soldier headed? What is the omega? It is possible in theory that a single, “hyperpowered” soldier of the realistic future could defeat an entire army of today?

The theory has already been set forth. The scenario above should ring a very loud bell with those who have read Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Starship Troopers (1959). (It will not ring any bells with those who only watched the movie, which is as curious as the dog that did not bark.) Heinlein, writing long before the current trend towards more individually adept and technologically armed and armored soldiers, postulates the ultimate extension of the individualization of combat: the “mobile infantry,” or MI, where every man wears an armored “power suit” that gives him fantastic strength, mobility, and survivability, along with weapons that range all the way up to tactical nuclear weapons at the MI’s individual discretion to use.

But here in the real world, we’re edging closer to that astonishing, science fictional world every day. DARPA is indeed working on crude versions of a “power suit;” C³I piped from overhead AWACs funneled through battlefield simulators give our soldiers the vision of Superman and the ESP of Doctor Strange; and there are even programs to develop “smart ammunition” that can shoot over cover, around corners, and distinguish between friend and foe.

Imagine an army with just one of these soldiers a scant twenty years from now. Now imagine ten of them. Imagine ten thousand “armies of one.”

Ten thousand soldiers is not a lot. It’s a single division. And one extra division of Mobile Infantry would hardly break the bank, leaving plenty of money left over for the Colonial Corps. If we were to go this route, we would end up the first “empire” in the world that conquered only to liberate, colonized only to build independence, and yet still could shake the Earth with our thunderbolts.

With such a numerically small strike force, however, the biggest problem would be transportation: how to quickly move your lone MI division from wherever they happen to be to wherever they happen to be needed. The only possibility that would be fast enough would be a fleet of hypersonic transport vehicles -- like the National Aerospace Plane (NASP), the “Orient Express” as Ronald Reagan called it, but much bigger. Suborbital hops could carry the MI into combat anywhere in the world in a mere hour or two of flight time. Logistics would have to evolve to the point where the entire MI division (if necessary) could be mobilized in a day or two... they would literally have to be packed and ready, “locked and loaded” at all times.

They would have to be professional Soldiers, career men (and possibly women) all. With such small numbers, it would be tedious and time-consuming to have to destroy entire enemy armies, as we did in the World War II-style wars (we fought WWII six times: in Kosovo, Bosnia, Desert Storm, Vietnam, Korea, and of course during WWII itself). Instead, the MI would focus on the terrifying demonstration: moving in so quickly and devastatingly, albeit in a small area, that tyrants and terrorists alike would walk in fear and lie sleepless at night.

I’m not sure of the international ramifications of such a combination of forces -- the unbeatable Mobile Infantry coupled with the Colonial Corps to utterly transform the conquered. Certainly we would have to inure ourselves to hysterical cries of “imperialism”... but since we hear that every day anyway, what would be the difference?

It would require a much stronger willed national government than we have now or have had since the 1940s; and that in turn means a greater risk of the national government overreaching and seizing too much power from the states. But that, too, is nothing new; we have a lot of experience finding that precise balance. Even if it tilts too far towards nationalism today, it is nowhere near as bad as in nearly every other country on Earth.

Still, it certainly would depend upon American exceptionalism to pull off; nobody but us could do it.

Ten thousand independent armies of one -- how American!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 4, 2006, at the time of 1:40 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

August 3, 2006

Sneaking Apples From the Great Wealth Tree

My v-e-r-y f-i-r-s-t entry into the world of blogging, courtesy a surprise invitation from blogger extraordinaire Patterico to help him out by posting something "interesting" on his site while he was on holiday. Fortunately for Patterico, he also invited other bloggers with a somewhat tighter grip on reality....

This post first appeared on May 27th, 2005, with about as much anticipation and (frustrated letdown on the part of readers) as the last North Korean missile launch.

Hello, and welcome to words from the Lizard’s Tongue. My name is Dafydd ab Hugh, and I’m one of the guest bloggers who will be tormenting you until Patterico returns.

I am not a blogger in the strictest sense. I am guilty of publishing fiction, but I’m still (still!) working on my web site, which will contain a blog. And articles, columns, movie reviews, fiction, two partners in crime (Brad Linaweaver and my wife Sachiko), and bilingual contributions (English and Japanese), a streaming internet radio show, and, and.... well, “good enough is enemy of the best,” I always say.

Because I’m only a guest here, I will mostly not blog about current events; there is plenty of that. When my own blog is up (when the best gives way and lets good enough have a clean shot), I will write about issues both eternal and temporal. But for now, I will focus on metablogging about more fundamental issues; and to make things easy, I’ll hide most of my posts behind the magic “more” button.

Fundamental issues -- such as the topic at hand: stealing apples from the Great Wealth Tree.

The greatest economic divide is not between rich and poor; it’s between those who believe that only the creators of wealth have the right to distribute it, and those who believe that wealth is intrinsically part of “the commons,” and that everybody has at least some stake in deciding how it is spent, even those who had nothing to do with making it. We can roughly label these two philosophies capitalism and socialism.

Most people believe a mix of the two, but that’s not my point. I want to peek behind the impulse towards socialism (however weak or distilled) to the fundamental worldview it requires.

The base claim socialism relies upon is “fairness”: it isn’t fair, they say, that some are so rich while others are mired in poverty. But this makes no sense if you believe that people create their own wealth; if you build a house, few would claim as a matter of principle that you have to let everyone else live in it. The only way the “fairness” argument works is if socialists believe that wealth is a natural resource.

But more than just that. After all, oil is a natural resource; but it requires intelligence and effort to extract it from the ground: crude oil is not created, but oil-in-the-barrel is. The “fairness” doctrine requires you to believe not only that wealth is a natural resource, it’s one that simply falls like manna from heaven equally upon the just and unjust alike.

Socialists must believe that each person is born with a Great Wealth Tree. Each man or woman can reach up and pluck wealth-apples from his Wealth Tree. And each Wealth Tree is the same size -- otherwise wealth disparity could still be a natural phenomenon unrelated to human endeavor, and as fruitless to correct as it would be to pass laws to equalize everyone’s height, weight, and IQ (cf. “Harrison Bergeron,” by intelligent socialist Kurt Vonnegut, jr.)

So if each person has his own Great Wealth Tree, and if every Wealth Tree is the same size... then why is there a disparity in wealth between people and nations? Simple: according to the only worldview that can support socialism, if one person has a bigger pile of wealth-apples than his neighbors -- he must be leaning over and plucking apples from his neighbor’s tree.

And at last, we understand why socialists consider all the rich to be “robber barons” and demand re-distribution of wealth “from each according to his ability to each according to his need”: because they can’t believe that intelligent gardening can grow a bigger Wealth Tree, and the only way one man gets rich is by sneaking his neighbor’s apples. This crabapple view of the world is the logical root of all socialist ideas.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 3, 2006, at the time of 2:40 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

August 2, 2006

A Pro-Christian Jewish Agnostic Speaks Out

Another CQ post (did I ever mention I once had a book reviewed in GQ, not CQ? It was compared to Tolstoy, but Tolstoy won). This one from July 21st, 2005.

Hm... July 7th, 14th, 21st... do I detect a pattern here?

I could have more provacatively titled this post "Are Atheists Actually Demented?" because that is the impression I get from the founder and head of the premier anti-religion organization in the country, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State -- or United Separators, as I call them for short.

Up on their website, the United Separators have come out swinging against Judge John. G. Roberts, who the president named as his nominee to the Supreme Court a couple of days ago. In "Senate Should Reject Confirmation Of John G. Roberts To Supreme Court, Says Americans United," an unsigned article posted yesterday, founder and chief anti-religion guru Barry Lynn draws his line in the sand (hat tip to Michael Medved, who mentioned this on his radio show today):

“John Roberts has long been a faithful soldier in the right wing’s war on the Bill of Rights,” said Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United. “He does not support personal liberties and should not receive a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land.”

He cites only one example of Roberts' "war on the Bill of Rights": his brief, while serving as deputy solicitor general for Bush-41 (that is the say, the position of the first Bush administration, which Roberts, as their attorney, faithfully argued to the Court), which Lynn describes as follows:

Lynn noted that Roberts, as deputy solicitor general in the first Bush White House, drafted a key legal brief urging the Supreme Court to scrap decades of settled church-state law and uphold school-sponsored prayer at public school graduation ceremonies and other forms of government-endorsed religion. (At the time, Roberts was serving as political deputy in charge of crafting policy under then Solicitor General Kenneth Starr.)

“Roberts will work to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state and open the door to majority rule on religious matters,” Lynn said. “In a game with such high stakes, this unwise crusade should disqualify him.”

What? You mean -- Roberts actually supported enforced prayer in the schools, where young tots would be forced to their knees under penalty of physical brutality and forced to mouth words against their own religious faith? Yep, that's exactly what Mr. Lynn would like you to believe. (And note the reverse name-dropping, guilt-by-employment of noting that Roberts' boss was... Kenneth Starr, gasp!)

However, the New York Times, at the end of a lengthy and surprisingly flattering bio-piece [link no longer free] on Roberts, went into somewhat more detail on this case:

The government had asked the Supreme Court to discard an earlier test and overturn a lower court ruling that held a clergyman could not give an official address at a junior high school graduation in Providence, R.I. It asked the court to rule that "civic acknowledgments of religion in public life do not offend the establishment clause" of the Constitution "as long as they neither threaten the establishment of an official religion nor coerce participation in religious activities."

At the time, officials in the first Bush administration told reporters that the reason for intervening was a tactical decision to try to draw out Justice David H. Souter, then the court's newest member, and get him on the side of the administration, which was hoping eventually to change the approach to religion in public settings.

In the end, the court voted 5 to 4 against the administration and upheld the lower court's decision. Among those in the majority were Justice Souter and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, whose seat Judge Roberts has been nominated to fill.

Barry W. Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said Wednesday that Judge Roberts's participation in the case makes him "unsuited for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court." He said that if confirmed to the court, Judge Roberts would "open the door to majority rule on religious matters."

So the case was actually about allowing a clergyman to speak at a junior-high graduation. Great Scott, it's a theocracy!

The hair-on-fire hysteria on the part of the United Separators at the mere idea of a guy with a backwards collar being allowed to say a word at a graduation is only marginally less irrational than the ACLU threatening to sue the County of Los Angeles unless they removed the teeny, tiny cross atop a mission in the county seal, lest some unsuspecting and easily influenced Hindu or Buddhist see it and spontaneously combust.

Full disclosure: the "Jewish agnostic" of the title is myself; I'm Jewish on my parents' side, coming from a long tradition of secular American Jews stretching back to about the 1830s. But far from sharing Mr. Lynn's frothing hatred of anyone who believes in God, I myself love widespread Christianity and Judaism in society.

I absolutely believe that it is vital for a free and civilized society that the huge majority of people believe in what Dennis Prager calls "ethical monotheism." Prager defines ethical monotheism (as I understand it) as the belief in one omniscient God who demands that human beings behave towards each other with both decency and justice. Unless ethical monotheism is at the very core of a culture, that culture will retreat from justice and mock decency, and it will become a hellish place to live.

So I hope you're forgive my bluntness, but Barry Lynn and his United Separators can just go to the Hell that I don't believe in!

For the rest of this crabby, pro-Christian, pro-Jewish rant by a secular agnostic, read on.

The necessity is clear: all of our concepts of freedom and liberty derive from belief in the divinity of the human soul, found in both Judaism and Christianity. The rule of law derives from the idea of universal right and wrong -- which derives ultimately from Judaism's belief (even before Jesus) that the law is for all, king and shepherd alike. Even the scientific method also derives from the idea of universal right and wrong: gravity in the United States in 2005 is the same as gravity in Napoleonic France, Mediæval Germany, and the Roman Empire, whether it was recognized or not... which means not only the eternal values of Western civilization and the United States but even the material benefits that derive from modernity all depend upon ethical monotheism.

Which is why the farther you stray from that societal religious belief, the more tyrannical, backwards, and poverty-stricken that society becomes. Europe has turned its back on religion, and not coincidentally, on self defense, on economic growth, and on justice and decency (examples available upon request). But they sure love their anti-American grandstanding!

We may pass lightly over economic basket-cases like Tibet, horrific "atheist" dictatorships such as the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Mao's China, and the Latin American thugocracies (now new and improved in Venezuela!), and... well, the less said about the recent history of sub-Saharan Africa, the less likely I'll get my mug shot up on the wall of the Daily Kos: Wanted, dead or even deader, for crimes against progressivism!

(Note that just claiming to be a Christian does not make one an ethical monotheist; it depends upon one's actual beliefs, not the label.)

And I think it also succinctly answers Professor Bernard Lewis's question, "what went wrong" with Islam? Islam is monotheistic; but it is not, in my opinion, an "ethical monotheism." This is because in Islam, the most important duty that believers owe to other men is not to treat them with decency and justice, but rather to convert them to Islam, by force if necessary; and if they will not convert, to enslave them -- or kill them.

Ethical monotheisms very often behave unethically; this goes all the way back to the reign of King Saul in ancient Israel. But for every King Saul there is a Prophet Samuel who can step up to point out that the Law is for all. Throughout the long and evil history of slavery in the Christian West, for but one example, there were always opponents, some clergy and some lay, who argued that the institution was inherently unjust and wicked, for all men and women had divine souls that could not be herded like cattle. For centuries, the arguments fell on ears deafened by greed and inertia... but the arguments were there, ready to be used, when civilization finally matured to the point where it became the majority view in the nineteenth century.

Those arguments were never made in other cultures, for they made no sense: they did not have the concept of universal right and wrong. And they still don't, even today; I have never heard any deep or heartfelt rejection of slavery within Islam, for example; the arguments are merely of practicality, if they are even made at all.

The highest ideal of Buddhism appears to be acceptance of one's fate, from my reading; this is the ideal of perpetual victimhood. And the highest ideal of Communism and Naziism is obedience to the current party line. As I said supra, I believe the greatest ideal of Islam is conversion by any means necessary.

Only in Judeo-Christianity is the greatest ideal justice. For this reason, hostility towards mainstream Judeo-Christianity deeply offends me as a civilized Westerner, as an American, and especially as a secularist.

I want mainstream Catholics, Protestants, and Jews on the Supreme Court. I want the president and members of Congress to be mainstream Jews or Christians of some specific and heartfelt sect. Not some vague "Christian" who changes his religion over a bicycle path (if you know what I mean, and I think you do); but somebody who actually has a firm belief in some specific religion that actually sets ethical boundaries on his decisions and behavior. To quote my favorite TV show, "no man should be allwed to govern others until he has first learned to govern himself."

To repeat myself (because I like the phrase and because I'm basically too lazy to think of a different ending)... unless ethical monotheism is at the very core of a culture, that culture will retreat from justice and mock decency, and it will become a hellish place to live.

So I hope you're forgive my bluntness, but Barry Lynn and his United Separators can just go to the Hell that I don't believe in!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 2, 2006, at the time of 3:40 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

August 1, 2006

Cold Water on Hot Blood

Originally lobbed into the blogosphere via Captain's Quarters seven days after Future Shock & Awe.

It's not that I didn't post anything in between those two... just nothing worth bringing up again. (Of course, there are those who retort that "nothing worth bringing up again" pretty much describes my entire oeuvre. But those are just lies spread by my competitors.)

A new paradigm is sweeping the blogosphere -- well, that portion of it that I view in between my frequent naps, experiments in animal husbandry, and trips to the taxidermist. The global war on terrorism, or GWOT, is really not a war at all but more akin to a "blood feud." The idea has been discussed by Hugh Hewitt, both online and on the air; by Wretchard (Richard Fernandez) at The Belmont Club; at Free Republic; NoLeftTurns; a Canadian blog called ThePolitic; and many other sites.

I think the originator of this new simile is one Lee Harris. Writing in Tech Central Station on July 8th, "War in Pieces: The Blood Feud," Harris opined:

After the London bombing, I feel more than ever that the war model is deeply flawed, and that a truer picture of the present conflict may be gained by studying another, culturally distinct form of violent conflict, namely the blood feud.

The problem with this simile (which has become an endlessly extending metaphor) is that it both directly contradicts his earlier, far more convincing insight that saw the terrorist acts in a very different way and also contradicts the actual pattern of jihadist attacks we see on the ground. I much prefer his earlier paradigm, which fits the current pattern far better than this new one does (I fear Harris suffers from the need writers all feel to constantly reinvent ourselves). Alas, it hasn’t gotten nearly as much blogplay as the blood-feud article.

Let me explain why I think his first idea was more powerful, why the blood feud is not really a good explanation for the death obsession of jihad -- and then offer what I think is a better metaphor that can actually lead to a real plan for the philosophical war that parallels the military one.

This is long; continue reading at your own risk. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!

Harris's early musings appeared in the somewhat more prestigious Stanford University magazine Policy Review, in August of 2002. In "Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology," Harris penned a far more robust analysis of the mass psychology of jihadism.

He first discussed the case of a university friend of his in the mid-1960s who planned to attend a particularly unpleasant and violent anti-Vietnam-War protest. Harris, who shared his friend's politics back then, tried to argue him out of it; he pointed out that the protest would not only not gain the anti-war cause any converts, it was more than likely to drive potential allies away, to infuriate the people, and to be all in all massively counterproductive to the political goals of the protesters.

But his friend said that would not matter... for his real purpose in attending was that the protest would be "good for his soul." (All emphasis below is added by me.)

[W]hat it did for him was to provide him with a fantasy — a fantasy, namely, of taking part in the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors. By participating in a violent anti-war demonstration, he was in no sense aiming at coercing conformity with his view — for that would still have been a political objective. Instead, he took his part in order to confirm his ideological fantasy of marching on the right side of history, of feeling himself among the elect few who stood with the angels of historical inevitability. Thus, when he lay down in front of hapless commuters on the bridges over the Potomac, he had no interest in changing the minds of these commuters, no concern over whether they became angry at the protesters or not. They were there merely as props, as so many supernumeraries in his private psychodrama. The protest for him was not politics, but theater; and the significance of his role lay not in the political ends his actions might achieve, but rather in their symbolic value as ritual. In short, he was acting out a fantasy....

For want of a better term, call the phenomenon in question a fantasy ideology — by which I mean, political and ideological symbols and tropes used not for political purposes, but entirely for the benefit of furthering a specific personal or collective fantasy.

He lists several "fantasy ideologies" from earlier eras -- the French Revolution, Mussolini's Fascism, and Hitler's Naziism -- each of which self-consciously evoked great historical empires. Harris argues that the backward look is essential to the fantasy ideology:

This theme of reviving ancient glory is an important key to understanding fantasy ideologies, for it suggests that fantasy ideologies tend to be the domain of those groups that history has passed by or rejected — groups that feel that they are under attack from forces which, while more powerful perhaps than they are, are nonetheless inferior in terms of true virtue.

So what is the backward look that underpins the "fantasy ideology" of jihadism? Professor Bernard Lewis provides the missing clue here. In his seminal work What Went Wrong?, Lewis ably chronicles the angst and befuddlement that Arabs feel at the loss of Arab Moslem preeminence in world civilization.

At one time, during the Dark Ages, Islam, and particularly Arab and Turkish Islam, were the apex of human civilization. Although what they had came mostly from Western sources (Greece and Rome, primarily), at least the Middle East still had it, while Europe had lost virtually everything refined and byzantine. Europeans were reduced to living in mud and wattle huts, while the East languored in pleasure domes and palaces, swimming in clear water above intricate geometrical mosaics.

Militant Islamism provides a backward look to this Islamic golden age, when "God's in His heaven— / All's right with the world!" (to wrench Browning utterly out of all context). The terrible theater of blood that began, for the West, in the 1979 Iranian revolution seems deliberately designed to enchant that epoch back into existence... just as Mussolini conjured Italy into a conquering empire by invading Ethiopia in 1935. Harris uses that absurdist invasion to illustrate the true horror of a fantasy-ideology war:

Any attempt to see this adventure in Clausewitzian terms is doomed to fail: There was no political or economic advantage whatsoever to be gained from the invasion of Ethiopia....

Why invade, then? The answer is quite simple. Ethiopia was a prop — a prop in the fantasy pageant of the new Italian Empire — that and nothing else. And the war waged in order to win Ethiopia as a colony was not a war in the Clausewitzian sense — that is to say, it was not an instrument of political policy designed to induce concessions from Ethiopia, or to get Ethiopia to alter its policies, or even to get Ethiopia to surrender. Ethiopia had to be conquered not because it was worth conquering, but because the fascist fantasy ideology required Italy to conquer something — and Ethiopia fit the bill. The conquest was not the means to an end, as in Clausewitzian war; it was an end in itself. Or, more correctly, its true purpose was to bolster the fascist collective fantasy that insisted on casting the Italians as a conquering race, the heirs of Imperial Rome.

Harris's insight into the theater of the "fantasy ideology" perfectly describes what we can see of the jihadists' attacks: they fit no pattern of rational warfare, but are rather a series of ritualized rains of destruction upon targets deemed symbols of "wickedness"... that is, symbols of Islam's loss of cultural dominance over the world. (I'm only discussing here the grand theatrical attacks or series of attacks, not ordinary acts of terrorism, such as the attack on the U.S.S. Cole.)

• The forces of jihad struck Iran -- Persia -- which had become modernist and more secular under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.
• They struck repeatedly at the Jews in Israel who were threatening to revive the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem, but under Jewish control (a double-whammy to militant Islamists!)
• The forces of Persia (still leading the attack) struck the Great Satan in Beirut, driving us from the field -- which served to convince great masses of Moslems that Allah had lifted his hand in support of these holy warriors.
• They struck us again in 2001, according to Osama bin Laden (Sunni Wahhabism now seizing the lead from Shi'ite Persians) to punish us for defiling the land of Mecca with our "crusader" boots.
• Then they struck various Moslem nations (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia) that were also venturing into modernity, thus becoming apostate.
• And they struck at the symbol of the greatest reach of the ummah, the Realm of the Faithful, and consequently the greatest pain for many militant Islamists when they contemplate its loss: Spain. The jihadists still call Spain al-Andalus, the name used while Spain was controlled by Moslem "Moors" for seven hundred and eighty-one years, until King Ferdinand finally expelled the last of them in 1492 -- not coincidentally the same year he and Queen Isabella finally agreed to finance Christopher Columbus's expedition to sail west to find the East Indies.

Each of these grand targets was chosen for its symbolic value to Moslems around the world, making them believe that the ummah was just about to be restored with Allah's direct divine help. So long as there was little response from the West but surprise and shock, it would seem like an unbroken line of great "victories" for the jihad.

But Harris's theory of the fantasy ideology could not explain why this particular fantasy seemed to be about blood, death, and destruction alone. After all, other fantasy ideologies were about conquest and military victory, not simple butchery, including the three Harris mentions in his Policy Review article: the French revolution, Italian Fascism, and Naziism. All three had their massacres, especially the last; but in addition to the destruction, there was a sense of the modern in the attempted construction of something that would take the place of that which was torn apart: liberty, equality, and fraternity, perhaps, or the Aryan ubermensch who would be "beyond good and evil." Other fantasy ideologies, such as the Soviet Union, also thought they were creating as well as destroying... creating the New Soviet Man and the "dictatorship of the proletariat." None claimed destruction for its own sake. Shouldn't the jihad be trying more actively to restore the glory of ancient Islam?

I think that is just what Harris is trying to explain, this difference from all previous fantasy ideologies, when he develops his metaphor of the world-wide blood feud.

In the blood feud, unlike war, you have no interest in bringing your enemy to his knees. You are not looking for your enemy to surrender to you; you are simply interested in killing some of his people in revenge for past injuries, real or imaginary -- nor does it matter in the least whether the people you kill today were the ones guilty of the past injuries that you claim to be avenging. In a blood feud, every member of the enemy tribe is a perfectly valid target for revenge. What is important is that some of their guys must be killed -- not necessarily anyone of any standing in their community. Just kill someone on the other side, and you have done what the logic of the blood feud commands you to do.

In the blood feud there is no concept of decisive victory because there is no desire to end the blood feud. Rather the blood feud functions as a permanent "ethical" institution -- it is the way of life for those who participate in it; it is how they keep score and how they maintain their own rights and privileges. You don't feud to win, you feud to keep your enemy from winning -- and that is why the anthropologist of the Bedouin feud, Emrys Peters, has written the disturbing words: The feud is eternal.

Clearly, this is an attempt to explain the mindless, senseless murders, mostly of the "faithful" who were perhaps not quite faithful enough, uncoupled from any serious attempt to create or even conquer. But the problem with Harris's "blood feud" analogy is that it necessarily provokes the reader into visualizing a "tit for tat" scenario -- a cycle of violence, if we must -- that is neither in synch with the concept of a "fantasy ideology" nor even descriptive of the reality we see.

Why would a millennarian, militant religious fantasy ideology await a blow before striking a counterblow? The whole point of the fantasy ideology is that it does not concern itself with the outside reality. Rather, everything outside itself, including its enemies, is merely a "prop" in its global Grand Guignol Theatre.

Nor do we see any such tit-for-tat in the actual operations of jihadist terrorism, outside of Israel. While it may be true that in a blood feud, "every member of the enemy tribe is a perfectly valid target for revenge," Harris must also admit that there is little feeling of tribal solidarity within Islam. Do Indonesian Moslems think they are the same "tribe" as Iranians, Turks, Saudis, or British jihadis like failed shoe-bomber Richard Reid?

In fact, Islam is highly factionalized, from the macro (Shi'a vs. Sunni) to the micro (the tribes in the Sunni Triangle vs. the tribes on the Iraq/Syrian border); and if the West strikes a blow in Baghdad, it's a bit thick to point to an attack months later in Spain or London, carried out by people with no significant contact with jihadis in Iraq, and call it a "counterblow."

I think Harris hit it out of the park the first time: he is correct that this is not a war in the Clausewitzian sense, not a struggle between nations trying to advance political ends by military means. But neither are the terrorists engaged in a simple "blood feud" with the West. To the extent jihadis use that language, they are simply reading their lines in the passion play. We must look elsewhere to understand why this fantasy ideology, apart from all the others, concerns itself only with chaos and destruction, rather than creation and construction -- evil though that construction typically is.

Here is where I have my own ideas. I have long thought that the central organizing principle behind militant Islamism, or jihadism if you prefer, is the death cult. There have been death cults in the past. The most extreme was probably the Aztecs, and estimates of the number of human sacrifices they performed annually range from the tens of thousands up to 250,000. Although various researchers offer "explanations" of the staggering number of human sacrifices more prosaic than religious worship, it's hard to argue that religion was not at least one of the top motivating factors.

Human sacrifice is typically justified by the belief that there is some sort of energy or force found within life, strongest in human beings; sacrificing the man, woman, or child releases this energy somehow, allowing the gods to feed on death, their natural food. Blood and souls for Huitzilopochtli!

I think it quite possible that the leaders of the jihadis are actually death cultists; perhaps they believe that their bizarre version of Allah grew weak from hunger, and that is "what went wrong," to respond to Lewis. In this scenario, by sacrificing mass numbers of people, the militant Islamist leaders believe they feed Allah, and he grows strong. Perhaps he will then respond by reaching forth his hand to crush the infidels, restore the Caliphate, and expand the ummah to blanket the world. Alternatively, perhaps the leaders believe that Allah is angry that they have not been killing infidels and apostates, as he ordered them to do... and if they kill enough, Allah will be mollified and again lead them to supernatural victory.

In either case, I highly doubt the rank and file believe this or that they even wonder why they are asked to kill and kill and kill for no apparent reason; being told by a trusted cleric to do so is probably all they need. It is the leaders of the worldwide jihad that I am trying to understand... because you cannot defeat what you do not comprehend.

But even if the leaders do not literally believe that they are releasing life-energy for their demonic version of Allah, their actions are functionally identical to death cultists. There certainly is more of a match both with what we see on the ground and with Harris's insightful metaphor of the fantasy ideology than we find with his recent blood-feud hypothesis.

A fantasy ideology coupled with a millennarian death-cult fantasy would actually explain both the theater and the obsession with destruction over creation. It also points the way to two natural points of attack by the West.

First, Harris notes that some fantasy ideologies arise from Democracies, such as Naziism, which arose from the Weimar Republic. But he wrongly concludes that establishing democracy is therefore ineffectual at fighting against the fantasy ideology:

[T]o hope that democratic reform would discourage radical Islam ignores the fact that previous fantasy ideologies have historically arisen in a democratic context; as the student of European fascism, Ernst Nolte, has observed, parliamentary democracy was an essential precondition for the rise of both Mussolini and Hitler.

But here, Harris misses the point. Naziism did not arise from democracy, it arose from the collapse of democracy due to economic catastrophe. The collapse of the Weimar Republic had a negative transformative effect on German society, tilting it away from the intolerable reality and towards the grandiose fantasy ideology of Naziism.

Might not the establishment of a new democracy have a mirror transformative effect, from the fantasy of jihadism to the reality of modernity? It certainly seems to be working that way in Iraq and Afghanistan and to some extent in Lebanon. The establishment of democracy where it never existed before allows people to take control of their lives and environment, converting an otherwise intolerable reality -- which could lead a people into fantasy as an escape -- into a manageable and indeed exciting and dramatic reality, where they will feel less need to escape into dreams of empires past.

Second, although Harris primarily considers evil fantasy ideologies, the theory itself seems relatively open to good and positive fantasy ideologies. The precursor to the fantasy ideology is William James's philosophy of "the will to believe," where humans believe in something against all evidence to the contrary; and Harris recognizes that this can be good as well as evil:

Yet the fact that such beliefs cannot be justified by science does not mean that they may not be useful or beneficial to the individual or to the society that holds them. For James, this meant primarily the religious beliefs of individuals: Did a man’s religious beliefs improve the quality of his personal life? For Pareto, however, the same argument was extended to all beliefs: religious, cultural, and political.

He also accepts that such transformative beliefs or "myths" can be deliberately manufactured (or "artificially inseminated"), an idea he attributes to socialist/syndicalist Georges Sorel. But why shouldn't Moslem clerics who oppose jihadism deliberately construct a new "myth" of restoring the greatness of Islam of the past by re-constructing it in the modern world -- rather than by tearing down all of modernity itself, flinging the world back into the Dark Ages, when the ummah was comparatively better off than Christendom?

Why not construct a competing fantasy ideology to combat the evil jihadist fantasy ideology?

Combining Western military power with the transformative democratization of Islam and with a new and powerful myth of rebuilding greatness within, not instead of, modernity could be exactly the key we seek to eradicate the disease of jihadism once and for all time.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 1, 2006, at the time of 1:40 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

July 31, 2006

Future Shock & Awe

This piece was originally posted at Captain's Quarters on July 7th, 2005; I subsequently reposted it here on Big Lizards -- the future is in the past! I'm posting it a third time because it fits the theme of the next post, which is new.

Extree, extree, getcha red-hot future combat today!

As has been the case for, oh, a few thousand years, the violent tendencies of human beings are leading the way to tomorrow's technology. War is not only good for business, it's good for science. Here are just a few of the goodies that await us in future battlefields.

Warning! This is a very long post, nearly all of which is tucked into the "slither-on" section. Forwarned is forlorned!

Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation

The weak link in the combat chain is often the human body. We run slower than horses; we carry less cargo than a camel; our skin is more fragile than a rhinoceros; we can't even jump like a gazelle.

But all that is going to change, if DARPA has any say in it. Joe Pappalardo of National Defense Magazine writes that the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has been hard at work for several years now on the Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation (EHPA) program. The idea is to create a tough and powerful exoskeleton that would surround the soldier's body and augment his own native abilities.

At the moment, political correctness rules. Ever since the public-relations fiasco of the Terrorism Information Awareness futures market, DARPA has been almost paranoid about bad publicity... which can lead to investigations, budget cuts, and in a pinch, mass firings. So all they will admit at this point is the utility of exoskeletons for loading and unloading cargo:

“This is a fairly boring transportation program,” [DARPA project manager John] Main said, with a small grin. “We’re not jumping over buildings. We’re getting into rough terrain that is denied to Humvees.”

But the combat implications are obvious: a man who can carry 200 lbs of fuel or MREs can also carry 200 lbs of body armor or a 200 lb weapon (or a mix: a hundred devoted to armor, and the other hundred to weaponry). Although they're not really willing to speculate, it's hard to see, once you have the basic idea of exoskeletal augmentation, how you can fail to think of putting jets in the boots, heavy weapons that can be fired by merely pointing the hand, or all the other accoutrements of Robert Heinlein's 1959 novel Starship Troopers.

Stepping way, way out on a limb, the head of the UC Berkeley robotics engineering lab, which is working on a DARPA grant, Homi Kazerooni, reluctantly admitted the possibility:

Kazerooni conceded that robotic enhancements worthy of combat were feasible, given a system design that could keep up with soldiers’ reflexes. “Can the machine shadow our reflexes? These are not voluntary, and sometimes 200 microseconds is not fast enough.”

The first key is acceleration: no matter how well a soldier is armored, a fall from 100 feet is a fall from 100 feet, with the same sudden stop at the end. But if DARPA can control the acceleration -- for example, by using boot-mounted, gyro-controlled attitude jets -- the soldier can "leap" high into the air, then "land" safely.

The second key is psychological: will the American people accept Starship Troopers style "Mobile Infantry?" Or will the princes of the Senate strangle the technology in its cradle? As the song says, only time will tell.

Brain Machine Interface

But perhaps we don't need anybody in those suits at all -- if the human can stay safe several miles away, controlling the empty suit by a direct brain-machine interface.

Thoughts are not ghostly apparitions made out of ectoplasm, it turns out; they are electrocolloidal impulses that travel from neuron to neuron across the synaptic gap. And that slight spark is readable... if you have the code.

That, not coincidentally, is exactly what another DARPA project aims to do: crack that neural code, so that machines -- or weapons -- can be controlled by thought alone.

Some research projects funded by DARPA have already achieved significant success, according to a 2003 article in the National Journal, written by Bruce Falconer. Duke University neurobiologist Miguel Nicolelis headed a team that planted "100 hair-like sensors" in a South American owl monkey (coincidentally, the same owl monkey that has been directing the recent reactionary political reaponses by the Democratic Party). As the monkey used a joystick, the scientists could monitor its neural activity and program the impulses into a computer-readable code.

The monkey repeated the motion - only this time, two robotic arms (one in an adjacent room and another 600 miles away in a Boston laboratory) also moved in response to the wireless signals sent straight from the monkey's brain.

In a similar, more recent experiment, the same scientists taught a macaque to direct a cursor to illuminated targets on a computer monitor. When scientists disabled the joystick, the monkey gradually stopped moving its arm altogether and learned to do the experiment just by thinking.

The article in the National Journal notes some of the uses. Right now, the biggest limitation on military aviation is the inability of the human body to take stresses much greater than about nine Gs, nine times the force of gravity. A typical 185-lb pilot in a 9-G turn feels as if he tops the scales at a cool 1,665 lbs. At that force, it's so difficult even to raise his hand that modern jets use fly-by-wire systems that require only slight finger movements for the pilot to guide the craft. Grayouts and blackouts are commonplace -- and can lead to death.

But if a pilot could sit on the ground and control the plane by his thoughts, then the rest of the airplane could withstand far greater stresses; this means an aircraft that could outmaneuver any plane in the sky that carried human cargo, such as a pilot and flight officer.

The same is true with a tank. Rather than relying upon a true "ogre" tank, which is completely artificially intelligent (a daunting computational task, considering that we cannot even design an AI car), a gigantic, solid tank can be controlled by a full crew... who sit safely back behind the lines in a simulator, their thoughts controlling the tank via a satellite uplink. With the absence of the most vulnerable part of the weapon, the human crew, the tank itself would be virtually unstoppable, short of dropping a tactical nuclear weapon on top of it.

There are civilian uses too, of course, notably in the area of prostheses for amputees and paraplegics. But the subject of civilian spinoffs from military research is big enough to warrant its own post. Or article. Or multi-floor library.

Smart Bullets

We have smart missiles that find their targets by several methods. Some are literally connected to a wire that trails out behind them, allowing the missileer to guide the bomb to its target. Others home in on a laser dot "painted" on the target by a forward spotter. Cruise missiles actually have topographic maps programmed into their brains, so they can swoop and swerve through gullies and across mountains to find a target by its GPS coordinates.

So why can't we do the same with rifle and pistol ammunition? Imagine bullets that can literally chase the target, racing around corners and over obstacles to hit the poor terrorist in his own trench, as in the 1984 Tom Selleck movie Runaway.

Well, it turns out that United States Air Force (and likely other branches of the service -- and I wouldn't rule out DARPA) has not only been imagining such a thing, it has been actively trying to develop them for more than eight years, according to the 1997 article "You Can Run, But You Can't Hide...", by Justin Mullins, published in New Scientist (reproduced here by snipercountry.com).

The Air Force calls the program Barrel Launched Adaptive Munitions, or BLAM, in an unusual display of wit. The researchers agree that the guidance technology is the easy part; it's already available for missile systems and only needs to be made smaller. The difficult part is designing a bullet that can turn in mid air and can become aerodynamic to prevent falling towards the ground as it moves towards the target, in accordance with our ancient enemy, gravity.

Some programs have experimented with tiny attitude jets on the bullet to steer it. But BLAM uses a more exotic, science-fictiony method: the front of the bullet actually flexes to create lift in various directions. Lift on the bottom keeps the bullet flying at the same altitude it was fired, without dropping; lift on the right steers the bullet left, and so forth.

The mechanism is simple. The nose is connected to the body by a ball-and-socket joint, and held in place by a number of piezoceramic rods, or tendons, which change length when a voltage is applied to them. Increasing the length of a rod on one side of the bullet while shortening its opposite number changes the angle of the nose (see Diagram). The nose can move by up to 0.1° in any direction.

Snipers are the ideal persons to use smart bullets; slithering into enemy territory on their bellies, becoming invisible via ghillie suits, then drawing a bead on the target enemy personnel are pretty much the same skills needed to paint a target with a laser dot (which can be invisible to the naked eye, preventing premature target panic). The invisible dot would guide a smart bullet for a targetted assassination from an astonishing distance -- several kilometers, for example. Unless every bad guy spends all day, every day, in a room with no windows (or wears American power armor), he will be vulnerable to just such a "bolt from the blue."

In another arena, the New Scientist article notes that airplanes fitted with smart bullets can bring down bogies with just one or two well-directed shots, rather than the hundreds typically used to destroy a target. This can lead to cost savings, even though smart bullets would not be cheap:

Aircraft bullets cost more than $30 each. [Ron] Barrett [who tested the BLAM system] says the piezoceramic materials would add $10 to this while the microelectronics would cost another $100. But he argues that the increased strike rate would lead to cost savings. "You'd only fire one when otherwise you'd fire hundreds."

Smart bullets would also lead to less collateral damage, because there would be less lead (or depleted Uranium) flying around.

But I'm still holding out for small, man-portable and firable rail guns!

Heat Rays

Finally, bringing us up to today's technology, we have a "phaser" -- American style, not that touchy-feelie stuff you see on Star Trek, where the target just falls over unconscious. This version is actually more of a heat ray, manufacturing fake feelings of searing agony, like "touching a hot frying pan or the intense radiant heat from a fire," except it does no actual damage. The pain is all in the target's neurons.

In "US aims Star Trek ray guns at nuclear sites" on Vnunet.com, Robert Jaques writes that the Department of Energy has teamed with the Department of Defense to create a milimeter-wave directed-energy weapon system with the catchy title of Active Denial Technology (ADT). The first use will be to protect critical sites, such as nuclear power plants, from terrorist (or protester) intrusion.

ADT emits a 95GHz non-ionizing electromagnetic beam of energy that penetrates approximately 1/64 of an inch into human skin tissue, where nerve receptors are concentrated.

Within seconds, the beam will heat the exposed skin tissue to a level where intolerable pain is experienced and natural defence mechanisms take over....

The sensation caused by the system has been described by test subjects as feeling like touching a hot frying pan or the intense radiant heat from a fire. Burn injury is prevented by limiting the beam's intensity and duration.

Sandia labs have already tested a prototype, and they believe a smaller model will be ready to deploy by 2008. Perhaps it can be used in the White House briefing room whenever an MSM feeding frenzy erupts during the next presidential campaign.

So there you have it -- the three of you who managed to make it all the way to the end of this excruciating post: four windows into the brave new world of continued American military dominance over the rest of the world. And if you think that is a bad thing, well I suspect you're reading the wrong blog!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 31, 2006, at the time of 2:52 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

July 13, 2006

Words of Wall

This is a Scaley Classic from the most ancient of Lizardly days, back when I was blogging on Patterico's Pontifications, my first actual guest-blogging post; it dates from more than a year ago... but it has suddenly become highly relevant today. (You can read it in its pristine originality at Words of Wall.)

This is the post where I first laid out the Lizard Doctrine: Israel should withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank, not because it will pacify the Palestinians (which I correctly predicted it would not), but because it would allow Israel at last to "give war a chance."

One link (to Haaretz) is no longer active, so I have replaced it with a cached version at the Jewish Agency for Israel's website; and I cleaned up a few infelicities here and there. Explanatory comments in brackets and italics are written today, not in the original; and I've added by usual boldface emphasis to create "inline headers," as I am wont to do.

Without any more alarums and excursions, we go...

Over on Power Line, another of my favorite blogs, Scott, who used to be Big Trunk, posted a lengthy segment from a Ha'aretz interview with Moshe Ya'alon, outgoing chief of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Scott clearly worries that the unilateral pull-out of Israel from Gaza and the West Bank will be disasterous for that country.

Scott's argument is serious and deserves response. Since nobody else seems to be willing to look at the other side of it from a pro-Israel perspective, I'll expend whatever "political capital" my recent election as junior sub-altern of the Politically Non-Euclidean Guild affords me.

The essence of the argument is, as always with Scott, quite intellectually sound, as far as it goes:

The coming Israeli pullout from Gaza seems destined to relegate the area to Hamas. Despite the resurrection of the "road map" to the creation of a Palestinian state, neither the Bush administration nor the Israeli government seems to have a road map to the cessation of the Palestinian war on Israel or the removal of the terror gangs from Palestinian territory.

Scott goes on to quote Ya'alon:

In the interview, Ya'alon said that recent statements by Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas show that Abbas "has not given up the right of return. And this is not a symbolic right of return, but the right of return as a claim to be realized. To return to the houses, to return to the villages. The implication of this is that there will not be a Jewish state here."

Therefore, he said, the establishment of a Palestinian state will lead to war "at some stage," and such a war could be dangerous for Israel. The idea that a Palestinian state can be established by 2008, and will then produce stability, is "divorced from reality" and "dangerous," as any such state "will be a state that will try to undermine Israel."

There is no blinking this, of course. War will probably result; it has several times in Israel's existence, starting in 1948, hours after the British lowered their flag and even before the Israelis raised theirs. [Prediction 100% correct -- the Mgt.]

Théoden: But I would not bring further death to my people. I will not risk open war.

Aragorn: Open war is upon you, whether would risk it or not.

I feel like Aragorn, trying to convince Théoden King [in the Lord of the Rings trilogy -- the Mgt.]. The hidden assumption here is that such open warfare would be worse for Israel than the covert terrorist war they're already fighting now... and thereby hangs the flaw with this entire line of reasoning.

As far as open war, there is no nation adjacent to Israel that would join today in such a jihad by the Palestinian Authority (if controlled by Hamas), and the war would be an unmitigated disaster for the Palestinians. [Prediction still open -- the Mgt.]

The only nearby country that might even consider it would be Iran under the Mad Mullahs; but if they did, the Israeli (and American) response would (a) take care of our fears about an Iranian nuclear program, and (b) almost certainly spark a revolution within Iran itself by the people, who despise the Mullahs. Iran could only attack using missiles, since they obviously could not march through or fly across Iraq, Syria, and Jordan to get to Israel; and missiles can be shot down -- by us and by the Israelis, that is; not by Iran when the retaliatory strike is launched.

(There is the possibility that Iran would be able to launch a nuclear attack on Israel; we cannot rule this out. But if the ayatollahs are mad enough to do this in response to a Palestinian war, they would be equally willing to do it following any other provocation... suicide-bombing on a national scale. They do not need Hamas to lead them into such "martyrdom," if that is what they have decided.)

I've argued [in e-mail and comments] in support of the pull-out of Israel from Gaza and the West Bank (of the Jordan River) for some time; but my reasoning seems to be lost in the excitement of proving the above (fairly obvious) point over on Power Line, Captain's Quarters, BeldarBlog, and other sites where I've tried to have this discussion. A great deal of energy was expended trying to convince me of one of my own starting positions, that the Palestinian people hate the Jews and have never given up their intention of driving them into the sea, the reconquista of what they see as Greater Palestine. I think the gents at Power Line are still convinced that I dispute this point; in fact, it is exactly why I support the pull-out... that, coupled with two facts on the ground.

Here are my starting premises. Everyone making an argument should always start thus:

• Israel absolutely has the right to exist as a Jewish state, right where it is now... including in the West Bank and Gaza. They were attacked; they won those territories fair and square; they have the right to keep them and even settle them. It's just not good policy for Israel to do so.
• Nearly all Palestinians in the PA hate Jews with a passion nearly unequaled on the planet. They will probably never like the Jews; the best Israel can get is for them to forget that the Jews exist.
• When Israel pulls out of Gaza, the region will be taken over by Hamas. This is probably also true about the West Bank, although Hamas is not as overwhelmingly strong there. But if Hamas doesn't take over in the West Bank, then some other terrorist gang will do so, or there will be civil war (say -- perhaps they'll kill each other off!)
• Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Al Aqsa, Fatah, Hezbollah, and all other terrorist groups in the West Bank and Gaza have every intention of destroying Israel, and they will never give up that dream. They will never be honest brokers of peace.

I don't think Scott and I disagree on any of these points. This should clear up some of the confusion about my position: I do not believe that land is illegally occupied, nor do I support Bush's ridiculous "road map to peace," nor do I imagine that any deal with the Palestinians would be kept, except in one circumstance: if the Palestinians have no choice but to keep it or be annihilated. And thereby hangs my point.

There are three urgent responses to Palestinian intransigence that Israel must undertake; thankfully, they are doing exactly these. First, they must complete work on the wall, or "security fence," separating them from the Palestinians; second, they must maintain the power of the IDF and Mossad and the willingness to go after the leaders of the various Palestinian terrorist groups directly by assassination; finally, they must remove the settlers from the occupied territories.

I will assume the first two receive widespread agreement here; let's talk about the third.

Hate is a curious emotion. Although one of the prime movers of Mankind throughout history, it is actually very enervating. Governments have throughout history used hate to channel the energy of people who would otherwise oppose the rule of the regime, a fact recognized by George Orwell, among others: see the chapter "Goldstein Two-Minutes Hate" from Nineteen Eighty-Four.

But because it is so draining, it requires a constant irritant to maintain it, a constant, in-your-face reminder of the object of hatred. Without such irritant, the hate will still exist, but only in theory; it will have none of the energy needed to obsess the mind and be used to distract the hater from all else. Thus, Indonesian Islamists certainly hate the Jews, but only in the abstract; they do not expend a lot of time or effort trying to find a Jew so they can attack him. This is because the Jewish population of Indonesia is considerably less than 1%... most Indonesians do not know any Jews and may never even have met one in their entire lives. Constant propinquity is necessary for active, action-driving hatred -- which is why Big Brother staged those Two-Minutes Hate videos: he knew that without them, without constantly "knocking elbows," so to speak, with the supposed enemy, the people would soon forget Goldstein even existed. [Yes, of course I know; I'm talking about the "reality" of Winston Smith. -- the Mgt.]

The Jewish settlers in Gaza and the West Bank have become exactly such irritants, alas. They may have some cosmic "right" to be there; but the reality is that those territories are overwhelmingly populated by Arab Moslems. The tiny number of settlers, in their armed and economically successful compounds -- little Israeli gardens in the vast sea of sand that is the erstwhile British Mandatory Palestine -- are constant reminders not only that Jews exist but that they're far more powerful than the Moslems... and also better capitalists, in despite of Israel's socialist beginnings. Because the settlers need constant protection from the IDF, that means that everywhere Palestinians go, they have to pass through checkpoints in the land that, rightly or wrongly, they consider their homeland. They are made to feel weak and powerless; their destiny is beyond their control.

This gives every Palestinian in the West Bank and Gaza his own, personal Two-Minutes Hate, often multiple times per day. And it is exactly that hate that Hamas, et al, feed upon and use to whip the people into a froth of rage and fury such that they will send their own sons and daughters to death, just in order to take some Jews with them.

Remove the settlers, hence the Israeli troops required to defend them, and the only irritant left will be the wall itself. Most Palestinians will not have to suffer the evidently unbearable daily fate of having actually to see a Jew, giving them the vapors. As absurd as this may seem to us, who live in a pluralistic society where "the Faithful" seem, by and large, to get along fairly well surrounded by "Zionists and Crusaders," it is a very real agony to the Moslems living in the PA. Remove the irritant, remove the agony, and you remove, not the abstract hatred, but its projection into the day-to-day world of those Palestinians.

It is that projection that gives the hate its power. Remove it, and you begin to starve Hamas and their murderous brethren. "Oh, yes, of course I hate the Zionist entity," Achmed will say; "but do you not see? They are gone! I can travel from Jenin to Hebron and see not a single Jew!"

Of course, if Achmed wanted to go from Ramallah to Gaza International Airport, he would have to travel through Israel; it's not a perfect disengagement; still, it reduces the contact to a tiny fraction of what it is today. With that relief, I believe it will be virtually impossible to persuade Achmed to give up his sons just to go off and kill Israelis he cannot even see, over on the other side of the wall. [Prediction accurate so far: these attacks were not suicide bombings but rather military assaults. -- the Mgt.]

All of the terror gangs will be crippled; Lebanese Hezbollah will still get support from Syria and Iran, but they're about to start having problems of their own. Terrorist groups will begin to be resented, even hated themselves, for their vicious bullying of the Palestinian people and their utter incompetence at running a country... revolutionary emotions that are at the very core of the incitement to hatred and violence by Hamas and the PA: they need scapegoats to distract their own people from the natural desire to fight back against such tyranny. Plus, without the ready-made targets in the settlements, to be perfectly blunt about it, all of Gaza and the West Bank will become targets for IDF response to the inevitable terrorist attacks. When such retaliatory strikes come, the Palestinian people -- who are not being constantly irritated by the presence of non-Moslems in their neighborhoods -- will blame the terrorists for "bringing trouble." [Hasn't happened yet, but I was talking about the long haul: the Palestinian people have not yet really been hurt. Give it some time. -- the Mgt.]

There is another advantage to the pull-out. Right now, there are still many Israeli Jews harboring the secret belief that they can cut some sort of deal with the Palestinian Authority; "road-map-ism," I'll call it. It's not as bad as in 1999, when Ehud Barak was elected; but it's still strong. The doves do not understand that the moment the Palestinians get Gaza and the West Bank, they will demand Israel itself... Palestinian maps of the region often do not even include Israel as a separate nation.

Israel gets nothing out of the settlements except illusion: they promote the illusion that the only reason the Palestinians make war on Israel is because Israel "occupies" those territories. Remove the settlements, and when the Palestinians shift seamlessly from demanding Ramallah and Bethlehem to demanding Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv, all illusions will be shattered. Even the doves will be forced to accept reality. "Open war is upon you, whether would risk it or not."

I absolutely believe that even Avram Mitzna would fight to save Israel proper, and Ehud Barak spent his entire military career doing so. Not only will Hamas, PIJ, and Al Aqsa be terribly weakened by an Israeli pull-out from the territories, so too will be the Israeli Left. The Israeli Labor Party will be politically devastated when Ariel Sharon actually implements what they have only agitated for but never achieved. [Prediction 100% accurate: both Labor and Likud are relegated to "also rans" behind Kadima. -- the Mgt.] All of this will make Israel safer, not more perilous.

Summing up, the Sharon plan of removing the settlers (disengagement) while maintaining the strength and resolve of the IDF and Mossad and finishing the security fence will achieve three goals, each of which adds to Israel's security:

1. Weakening the Palestinian terrorists by removing the Two-Minutes Hate that allows them to recruit so-called "martyrs" to kill Jews;
2. Increasing the freedom of action of the IDF by removing unhelpful and difficult-to-defend Israeli targets from the enemy's territory;
3. Forcing the Israeli Left to face reality and recognize that the two states will always be enemies, living at best in an uneasy calm, shattering the dangerous illusion that the lack of "open war" means they are at peace.

Israel must guard the borders, be vigilant against attack and ruthless in response, and at all times recognize the "facts on the ground;" only then will she be truly safe.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 13, 2006, at the time of 3:17 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 13, 2006

The 18½ Minute Gap

Originally posted on Patterico's Pontifications, May 30th, 2005 -- a blast from the past! Now reprinted here courtesy the Big Lizards Scaley Classics series. Collect the whole set!

Interesting note: while researching my earlier post, I noticed that my very first blogpost anywhere was on Patterico: Sneaking Apples From the Great Wealth Tree, May 27th, 2005. That means my (Dafydd's) first blogospheric anniversary is coming up in only twelve days! In celebration, I will repost that first post of mine here on Big Lizards, for all to see.

(And how many readers will swiftly comment, "say, you've sure gone downhill in the last twelvemonth... what happened?")

The first anniversary of Big Lizards itself is not until September 16th.

Without further uninteresting ado....

If you enjoy arguing with Democrats about the validity of the Iraq War (do you also like to dart in front of a bull wearing long, red, flannel underwear?), you will discover that every such discussion always ends the same way: because we didn't find pyramids of carefully labeled nuclear missiles from the Acme WMD Warehouse, the whole war was a "complete fraud"... we had "no reason at all" for going into Iraq; consequently, the exercise was utterly "futile" and a "miserable failure."

(And how did that bull get into red, flannel underwear in the first place?)

It does little good to point out what nobody now denies: that Hussein had many ongoing programs to develop such chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons; they just weren't as advanced as we were afraid they were. Given how little intelligence we had about that secretive country, the choice was to trust in Saddam Hussein's restraint and good judgment, or trust in the United States military. "You should have just waited a few more months," the lib invariably intones; "maybe a year. Then we would have known for sure."

In other words, they wanted us to wait until two minutes to midnight. Then we could have moved... unless it turned out our watch was slow.

But now we know that it was not just on WMD that the clock was ticking. As Claudia Rosett, George Russell, and others pointed out, the oil-for-fraud program was already starting to produce the nightmare scenario of terrorist groups with their own revenue streams, independent of individual donors and fundraisers. Articles written for Fox News and National Review Online revealed that at least one company linked to al-Qaeda was already involved in kickback schemes to make millions in profits from the U.N. program -- money that would be directly available to fund al-Qaeda operations, now that Osama bin Laden's personal fortune is long since spent. And it was not just al-Qaeda; several other terrorist organizations also wound up with oil leases, right under the noses of Benon Sevan, Executive Director of the Iraq Programme (Oil for Food), Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and his spawn-of-the-devil Kojo (or is that Cujo?)

Had we waited just a few more months -- waited until two minutes before midnight -- even more high officials in Security-Council governments would have been corrupted; it's entirely possible that, in the end, even Britain would have bowed to international pressure and pulled out of the Operation Iraqi Freedom. Would we still have gone to war, then? I don't think anyone can really say for sure.

So the Left is actually right, for a change: we miserably failed to wait until two minutes to midnight to strike against the tyrant. We struck at twenty till, instead. Maybe even twenty and a half minutes before the witching hour.

Which would make it the second time in history that an 18½ minute gap saved the presidency... and this time, possibly the entire Global War on Terrorism as well.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 13, 2006, at the time of 7:02 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 27, 2006

It Ain't Even the Quarter

The following is the follow-up post to our previous Scaley Classic, this one posted on Captain's Quarters on July 5th, 2005.

A few days ago, when July was fresh and new, I argued in That Ain't the Half of It that it really doesn't matter whether Iran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was or was not a leader of the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Teheran, because the enormity of his undisputed post-revolutionary career as an assassin for the Revolutionary Guard -- during which he murdered hundreds of Iranian dissidents living abroad -- simply overwhelmed the question of whether he was also a student radical.

The only objection that could reasonably be raised (apart from dredging up some evidence to contradict the biography at GlobalSecurity.org) is that Ahmadinejad's homidical vocation, as horrific as it was, was not directed at us, and that we should only be concerned with attacks on America -- which moves the embassy-seizure question back to front and center.

Now I argue that if that is your standard, then again, there are far more serious attacks that Iran has committed against the United States... including the murder of 2,985 people on American soil (mostly Americans) in the World Trade Centers, the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania.

Wait -- hold on -- don't turn into a mob! Yes, of course I know that the attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda, which is primarily a Sunni organization, not Shi'ite, like Iran. But I thoroughly support the judgment of the president himself when he said:

And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.

Evidence has begun to emerge that the violent and secretive regime in the Islamic Republic of Iran not only applauded the 9/11 attacks, not only gave safe haven to terrorists, but actively collaborated with al-Qaeda on the attacks themselves.

Granted, none of this implicates Mr. Ahmadinejad; but his new boss, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is involved right up to his turbin.

Some of this evidence is detailed in the new book by Kenneth Timmerman, Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown With Iran, which I have just begun reading.

Fair warning: If you are one of those -- and I know you're out there -- who reject anything written by Timmerman or any other "right wing" author, then gird yourself; I'm going to be discussing several things from this book in future posts as well. Forwarned is four-armed!

Timmerman begins the bombshells in the very first chapter, in which he discusses the testimony from an Iranian defector, Hamid Reza Zakeri, who says he gave (or tried to give) critical information to the CIA, back in July of 2001, of an impending terrorist attack on the United States in September... an attack in which Iran had been closely involved with al-Qaeda in the planning phase. Timmerman says that the CIA refused to listen and did not pass the intel up the chain.

Now of course, much of this is he-said, she-said; you are either with Timmerman, or you are with the CIA. But given the track record of the latter, as thoroughly deconstructed by the 9/11 Commission Report on the intelligence failures that led up to 9/11, I know where I'm placing my flutter.

Bear one important note in mind: this entire chapter derives from several interviews that Timmerman conducted with Zakeri. Wherever possible, when Zakeri gave specific information -- such as the descriptions of various top-secret facilities in Iran, the presence of certain personnel in Iran at specific times, and specific documents that Zakeri claimed to have smuggled out of Iran -- Timmerman tested the claims against all publicly available and classified information he was able to obtain, including with American and foreign intelligence agents, with other Iranian defectors, with document examiners, and with prosecutors in Germany who evaluated Zakeri for a terrorism case in which they called him as witness. In each case that Timmerman checked up on Zakeri's specific claims, they were borne out; not a single claim made to Timmerman by Zakeri was contradicted by any specific counter-evidence.

The central claim of this chapter is, in Timmerman's words:

The 9/11 hijackers and al-Qaeda planners had been in constant contact with senior Iranian officials and intelligence officers before September 11. It was not a casual relationship or a chance encounter here and there, but a steady stream of contacts.

These "contacts" began in January 2001, when Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is the founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Osama bin Laden's personal physician, and widely regarded as the number-two man in al-Qaeda, journeyed from Afghanistan to Iran with several other al-Qaeda capos. Zakeri's connection was that he was in charge of the security detail protecting the visitors; he picked them up at the airport and conveyed them to the meeting at a "mountain guesthouse near the town of Varamin, just sough of Tehran", which normally was used by senior officials of Iran.

According to what an Iranian official present at the meeting told his friend Zakeri, Zawahiri was in Iran to seek equipment, forged travel documents, and help in laundering money. I am presuming this meant money collected by various Islamic charities, then laundered to al-Qaeda, a practice we have established, through many successful prosecutions, was the normal way that AQ was funded.

One of Zawahiri's men present was Saif al-Adel, who had worked in the past with Lebanese-born Imad Fayez Mugniyeh. Mugniyeh was a high-ranking official with the Revolutionary Guard's Qods Force, which controlled foreign terrorist operations... and a man well-known personally to Zakeri. Al-Adel and eleven other AQ members stayed on after the meeting to continue working with the Iranians.

The Iranians present were not low-level flunkies, either. The Iranian delegation to this conference included Hojjat-ol eslam Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, the chief inspector of the Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS), a clandestine intelligence organization that reports directly to the Supreme Leader of Iran, who was at the time (and still is) Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the successor of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Also present, Ali Akbar Parvaresh, one of the top officers in Section 43 of MOIS; Section 43 is in charge of terrorist operations outside the Middle East and also runs the Varamin safe house. Parvaresh was wanted by the Argentinian government for a bombing in 1994 that killed eighty-six people. Mugniyeh was also in attendance, which is how Zakeri found out what was discussed.

A few months later, in May 2001, another delegation arrived from al-Qaeda... this one led by none other than Osama bin Laden's eldest son, Saad. Saad bin Laden met with all of the members of the Iranian leadership, including Supreme Leader Khamenei, Hashemi Rafsanjani (head of the Expediency Council), Mohammed Yazdi (head of the Guardians Council), Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi (chief of Judiciary), and Ali Meshkini (head of the Assembly of Experts).

Zakeri believes it was at this meeting, on May 4, 2001, that Iran's leaders learned the specifics of bon Laden's plans for the September 11 attack and decided to provide operational assistance. "Everything changed after this," he told me.

Nateq-Nouri subsequently sent a memo to Mustafa Pourghanad, the director of Section 43, conveying Khamenei's orders for "joint operations" with al-Qaeda; this is one of the memos that Zakeri carried with him from Iran when he defected.

Timmerman closes the chapter with the CIA's reaction to all this information from Zakeri:

A female intelligence officer returned my call with a shaking voice. "This man is a serial fabricator," she said, more nervous than indignant. "I have to warn you off of this story."

A few hours later, I received another call, this one from a higher-ranking official. When I asked him to comment on the veracity of Zakeri's warning, he replied angrily, "We have no record that he made any such claim. And he is a fabricator of monumental proportions." But when I asked him whether Zaker was lying about meeting with U.S. officials in Baku on July 26, 2001, this senior official pointedly refused to answer.

Now of course, I can certainly understand the CIA refusing to comment upon the specifics of CIA meetings with defectors from hostile powers. But on the other hand, they repeatedly characterized Zakeri as a "fabricator," yet never once pointed Timmerman to any sources, even public sources, that would tend to discredit Zakeri. So take it for what you will.

But at the very least, the Iranian connection to al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attack -- and whether the CIA dropped this particular ball in 2001 -- deserves at least as much exploration as that other well-known ball they dropped: the extent of Saddam Hussein's own interaction with al-Qaeda, which the CIA refused to admit for literally years, but which is now thoroughly documented in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's report on the intelligence failures in Iraq, as well as by recent revelations from Jordan about another high-level Zawahiri meeting, this one in Baghdad.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 27, 2006, at the time of 5:26 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

That Ain't the Half of It

The following is a Scaley Classic about Iran, first posted on Captain's Quarters on July 1st, 2005. This was Dafydd's first post as a guest blogger on Captain's Quarters.

In a blogpost that the Captain slapped up a few days ago --

Oh. Wait, let me introduce myself: this is Dafydd ab Hugh, guest-blogging for Captain Ed while he recuperates from winning $2.8 million in the World Series of Poker finale, playing (as is his wont for FEC reasons) under the name Tuan Le. If someone posts here under the name "Captain Ed" (including the quotation marks) in the next few weeks, it's actually the nom de plume du jour of well-known labor leader and founder of the Socialist Party of America, Eugene Debs.

I may be the most well-known blogger in the blogosphere who doesn't actually have a blog (yet; shortly). You may remember me from my high-school filmstrip series "It's All About Adhesives."

Getting back to the point at hand, in this post, Captain Ed (the original) noted that evidence is mounting that the recently elected president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was in fact one of the ringleaders of the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Teheran, where embassy personnel and Marines were held captive for 444 days.

But it turns out, that's just the tip of the sandberg.

Last night (30 June 2005) on Special Report With Brit Hume, Brit's guest was Rob Sobhani, adjunct professor at Georgetown University and frequent contributor to National Review and the Wall Street Journal; Sobhani discussed several questions related to Iran, including the elfin Mr. President Ahmadinejad.

Sobhani did not personally know whether Ahmadinejad was one of the hostage takers; but he did know something about his background. After university, Ahmadinejad joined the Revolutionary Guard and was assigned to a special unit whose mission was to hunt down and assassinate Iranian dissidents and defectors. He was sent on a number of such missions.

If this has gotten any other recent airplay, I've missed it. GlobalSecurity.org has had this information up on its website for several days now:

Ahmadinejad was a senior officer in the Special Brigade of the Revolutionary Guards, stationed at Ramazan Garrison near Kermanshah in western Iran. This was the headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards’ "Extra-territorial Operations" -- mounting attacks beyond Iran’s borders. His work in the Revolutionary Guards was related to suppression of dissidents in Iran and abroad. He personally participated in covert operations around the Iraqi city of Kirkuk.

With the formation of the elite Qods (Jerusalem) Force of the IRGC, Ahmadinejad became one of its senior commanders. He directed assassinations in the Middle East and Europe, including the assassination of Iranian Kurdish leader Abdorrahman Qassemlou, who was shot dead by senior officers of the Revolutionary Guards in a Vienna flat in July 1989. Ahmadinejad was a key planner of the attack. He was reported to have been involved in planning an attempt on the life of Salman Rushdie....

Ahmadinejad, an unabashed conservative, resurrected the fervor of the 1979 Islamic Revolution during the campaign by saying Iran "did not have a revolution in order to have democracy, but to have an Islamic government." Ahmadinejad had a bloody background. He was responsible for the execution of hundreds of dissidents after the war.

[Emphasis added because my jaw is dropping]

Considering the help Ahmadinejad received from the Guardians Council in this election (vote rigging, ballot stuffing, candidate intimidation, dissident assassination), one wonders whether his job is actually to order the Iranian nuclear attacks on Israel, America, Iraq, the UK, and France (well, probably not France) that the Mullahs see getting less hazy all the time in their Magic 8-Balls.

Perhaps they worried that Rafsanjani, that unreliable fellow, might balk at obliterating half the world in the name of Allah. Considering how many heads Ahmadinejad already has hanging from his belt, he likely wouldn't hesitate any longer than it takes to say "Rumplestiltskin."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 27, 2006, at the time of 5:22 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 24, 2006

Hillary Will Never Be the Presidential Nominee

...Not in 2008, not ever.

[Special: note that my emphasis has changed; the main argument here is that Hillary won't be nominated because she is not particularly electable, due to her baggage, her position as a senator, and because she cannot rally the leftist base. Today, I emphasis the base part: she is not likely to be nominated even more directly because the base has steadily soured on her and the "co-presidency" with her husband.

[Everything here is still operative: Democrats have actually come to believe that progressives are more electable these days than moderates. But today, I would reverse the priority order, putting her conflict with the leftist base first.

[Without further comment, here we go, reposted from July 11, 2005, on Captain's Quarters. -- The Mgt.]

I absolutely believe, conventional wisdom notwithstanding, that Hillary Rodham Clinton Rodham will never be the Democratic nominee for president. (She might not even be a candidate, if she thinks she's going to lose; but her ego may compel her to try, just as John Kerry's did.)

The reason is fairly simple: because she simply cannot win election, and she will be tainted by the Kerry Kurse. Bluntly put, senators are simply not elected president unless they have achieved a position closer to the idea of a chief executive of the country... such as a governorship or the vice presidency.

There have been only two exceptions since 1900: Warren Harding, and of course, John F. Kennedy. And at least in the case of the latter, the election was razor-thin, even against Richard Nixon, a man who was violently hated by half the country even as early as 1960 (due to his work on the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities and to his outing of Helen Gahagan Douglas as a Red). Harding was the last convincing senatorial win, crushing the former governor of Ohio, James M. Cox, in 1920.

This is not an accident. A senator is simply one of a bunch of people (currently 100), not single-handedly responsible for "governing" any large governmental organization... and Americans, by and large, do not see the presidency as an entry-level job. Would it make sense for a Fortune-500 company to hire a CEO who had never even been a high-level manager?

But there is an even more basic reason senators tend not to get elected: by the very nature of the job, a senator is a deal-maker... that is, a compromiser. They do not decide, they debate; they do not govern, they negotiate, they cut deals, they sacrifice one principle for another.

Senators are not leaders; even the so-called leadership is not what most folks think of as leading: it's more like herding cats, or trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.

A senator inevitably votes for a bill that is anathema to his constituents -- in exchange for a colleague's vote on a bill that the first senator's constituents want; and both senators pray nobody finds out until after re-election.

But during a presidential campaign, at least in recent years, every least controversial vote of a candidate when he was in the House or Senate is pored over, dissected, deconstructed, and vacuum-molded into an attack ad by his opponents, first in his own party's primaries, then in the general by the even more brutal nominee of the opposite party. You must remember... we saw this exact dynamic in both the 2000 and the 2004 elections: in 2000, Gore was able to rise above his Senate past by pointing to his eight-year stint (seems like eighty) as vice president. He nearly won!

But in 2004, JFK was utterly and irrevocably defined by his Senate career: a mediocre hack who grandstanded his way through the decades, lurching from one outrageous statement to another, and never actually running anything in his entire life... not even his own finances, since his fortune came from inheritance and then a pair of fortuitous marriages. The only things he ever did apart from legislative politics was a very brief stint as a prosecutor, and of course his even briefer stint as a Swift-Boat commander.

Aside from that last, everything I wrote above applies equally to Hillary Rodham... except, of course, that it isn't "decades" in her case but, by 2008, less than a single decade. Other than that, during which she has done nothing of any significance (also like Kerry), her only important jobs were as head of the Legal Services Corporation... and as Bill Clinton's wife.

Every position she obtain after that marriage was "inherited" from her husband, from her disasterous foray into socialized medicine (the Mussolini-esque "Task Force on National Health Care Reform") to her election as a senator from a state she had never lived in her life, procurred for her by her hubby's election team.

Amazingly, she managed, during this period, to rack up the highest negatives that any first lady has ever suffered... another reason she will never be the Democratic presidential nominee. Her nomination would be catastrophic for the party, as it would galvanize Republican voters against her like nothing before, eclipsing even 2004 -- and especially Republican women, who Hillary has scorned and dissed from Day-1. This at a time when the only way the Democrats can hope to win the presidency is if Republican voters are apathetic and fail to turn out; for Ken Mehlman has already proven that when both sides turn out heavy, the Republican wins.

It might be different if there were absolutely nobody to carry the banner of the Democratic Left. She might be nominated then, though she would still lose the general election. But that simply is not the case; there are any number of better-qualified liberals willing to run, starting right at the top with Howard the Dean. Despite his promise not to run if he were chosen as chairman of the DNC, there is actually no law against it. And he is a governor and a former presidential candidate with a proven base of support. Then there is also Gephardt, Biden, Gore, and possibly even Tom Daschle. Slightly more moderate Dems like Mark Warner will probably appeal to the crossover constituency that Hillary is comically trying to woo at the moment.

I believe that Hillary will end up being the forgotten women in 2008. Her borrowed cloak of power will be moth-ridden and threadbare, and she will be "just another senator," one of a hundred, and not a very powerful one at that.

And she will not be the Democratic nominee -- then or ever.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 24, 2006, at the time of 4:18 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

December 5, 2005

A Climate Pact Even I Can Applaud

Scaley Classic first posted July 28th, 2005, on Captain's Quarters.

This one caught me totally by surprise: China, India, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the United States (we led the effort) have just signed an international agreement, the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, to "keep climate-changing chemicals out of the atmosphere, especially carbon from fossil fuels." But rather than the Kyoto-Protocol method of setting target goals for emissions reductions that force de-industrialization among complying nations (of which there are actually very few among the Kyoto signers), this new pact aims to reduce emissions by jointly developing new pollutant-control technologies. (Power Line's John Hinderaker, the only "SuperLawyer" cur