The Real Global Test: Moral Courage

With the election approaching I could not help the impulse to reflect on how we got to this day. Most would cite September 11, 2001 as the day that defined the times in which we live. I say it is the day on which the people of this nation learned to take our times seriously. In fact the challenge we face today is essentially the same as those we have faced throughout my lifetime and well before.

Pearl Harbor was the event by which we entered this phase of our nation's history. That day marked the beginning of an era when technology encroached on the advantage of our geography. The beginning of the space age sealed the deal. Henceforth, enemies of democracy would seek us out and test us, because we were now and forever more within their reach. Over and over Americans have been asked to face this challenge or run from it.

With the cold war over and won, many felt that we were done. We had defeated the largest totalitarian state yet to threaten us, what else could there be? The trouble is, totalitarian philosophies know no borders, nor are they limited to the philosophies of the west.

Now we are tested again. We are faced with the same challenge as ever: do we meet those who revile the principles of Jeffersonian democracy and would destroy any government founded on them or do we cower before such tyrants? Do we believe in the principles of our system of government, and the rights we enjoy because of it, enough to fight for them or do we bow before barbarians?

Throughout the 70's the political dialogue in this country was one of temporising moral cowardice. Do we bear any burden and pay any price? No, said the popular culture. According to such as the self-proclaimed war hero John Kerry, and his sponsors in the Senate we were the barbarians, and we had to be humbled.

America failed the test of moral courage in the 70's and entered in to a period of self-absorbtion and self-flagellation. The result? Slaughter in Viet Nam, slaughter in Laos, genocide in Cambodia, millions under the totalitarian boot all over the world. Marxist goverments, some of them quite new, exist on every continent today because America wavered. In addition, jihadism returned to life after nearly a century of dormance.

For a time we found the heart to fight, and we won the cold war. We won it only because we found a man willing to lead us who never doubted this nation, its principles nor its people, and who never failed to pass that moral courage on to others. After he had done his work and passed from the scene, many in our nation felt the need to return to self-absorption and self-loathing, as though that were the more natural condition of a free people. September 11 was a cold slap in the face to that thinking. We live in a world where we can either be both brave and free, or neither.

Don't Fire Until You See Their Membership Cards?

Call this the week of the videotapes. Before the Bin Laden tape came out there was another piece of jihadist propoganda to examine. Especially telling is this little gem, "allah willing, the streets of America will run red with blood, matching drop for drop the blood..." The various news agencies were all in a dither when it first came out in that they could not verify whether it was from al-Quaeda.

Um... why does that matter? When some people produce a tape threatening to kill us in the name of islam, why should we care whether they belong to al-Quaeda? If they don't, should we not seek them out? Do we only care if people with al-Quaeda membership cards want to kill us? Al-Quaeda is a convenient shorthand for our enemies, but the jihad is certainly not limited to al-Quaeda.

I can hear the crickets chirping. I can hear the coyotes yipping. I cannot hear the "peaceful muslims" denouncing this garbage.

The USPS and Good Government Don't Mix

Yesterday I dropped my early ballot in the mail. I have always been uneasy about letting any unionized federal employee handle ballots, but for some reason I let myself be pursuaded about the convenience. Then I see this:

The Broward County Supervisor of Elections Office pointed a finger at the U.S. Postal Service on Tuesday for nearly 60,000 missing absentee ballots

Arrrgh!

Alright I am solidly back to the "never let the USPS touch your ballot" philosophy. Postal employees are too easily corrupted to be trusted. I might be willing to change my mind if the USPS and the Postal Workers' union were ever held responsible for any of this. They aren't.

How much do you want to bet the Broward county reports more votes counted then registered voters?

One, two, three, fourteen! ....huh?

Perhaps it's an inside joke that only U2 fans will get. At the start of their latest pop release Bono counts out in Spanish, "Uno, dos, tres, catorce!" He's also hawking iTunes on TV, but I still don't get it.

I don't know much Spanish, but I learned to count to 20 when I was in first grade.

How Do I Explain?

This comic strip gave me pause.

I have lately wondered how I would explain to certain acquaintances how I feel about their home country (France). It's a tough one. Without much effort I could probably write 10,000 words about what's wrong with the nation of France.

It's a shame really; I'm thankful for their chefs, their wine and their hunting dogs. From where I stand however, they seem determined to allow all that to be destroyed in order to remain not-Americans. Pride in your culture is one thing. Allowing your civil society to be destroyed from within because you can only see enemies when they are in the northern half of the Western Hemisphere isn't a way to preserve your culture.

I've run in to this before. When I was a gymnasium student in Sweden people wanted to know why we Americans thought the People's Republic of China was our enemy. I told them that it is because they openly declare their hostility and they act accordingly. The nation of France is very much the same, right down to selling advanced weapons to dictators with whom we are on the verge of war.

Aquila Non Capit Bin Ladens?

The best column I read this weekend is from Mark Steyn in the Chicago Sun-Times. He sets up our choices well and denies the popular myths about Canadian health care as only a Canadian can. He also attacks one of the left's bigger foreign-policy myths:

As for this Bush-failed-to-get-bin-Laden business, 2-1/2 years ago I declared that Osama was dead and he's never written to complain. There's no more evidence for his present existence than there is for the Loch Ness monster, which at least does us the courtesy of showing up as a indistinct gray blur on a photograph every now and again. Osama is lying low because he's in no condition to get up.

I concur. I will be more than a little surprised if anyone can produce any of the man's living tissue ever again.

Do read No time for Kerry's Europhile delusions.

What's the Difference Between a "Journalist" and a Catfish?

Chrenkoff gives us a portrait of one of Australia's more vocal moral relativists and speculates as to what he must advocate.

Martinkus stops just short of shilling for jihad.

A Textbook Example of Having Read Too Many Modern Textbooks

Boo-yeah! I've been offered "help". One of blogosphere's many arrogant Trolls has set himself about the task of helping us poor, unsophisticated participants in Vox Bloguli IV.

http://satp.blogspot.com/ What have I been doing?

Well, one of the real (National Review, Weekly Standard, Al-Qaeda=Terrorists=Saddam) nutters is Hugh Hewitt . However, he has hit on an idea that I think other people who like to think "meta" have missed. Namely, what he calls Symposia. It's a bad name, since there is little-or-no give-or-take, but I bet Joi Ito , who is a savvy technobabbler, would like the idea.
What have I been doing? I've been going to all the blogs listed here http://www.hughhewitt.com/, and commented, where possible, trying to debunk their mysterious, and always misinformed notions about why Bush would make a good crackhead, I mean President.

You might want to read Josh's profile at this point.

...and compare for yourself my submission and his comment thereto.

There are four sections to his comment [supposedly debunking my thesis, let me know what you think -CR] each requiring separate treatment.

I'd go in order, but the most important matter is that the second section of his comment is a series of questions which deserve answers:

JN: Do the terrorists hate Japan?
CR: Yes!

JN: Do the terrorists hate France [?]
CR: Yes!

JN: and Germany?
CR: Yes!

JN: Are they slave countries?
CR: In those areas where the French police dare not go anymore, yes!

I'm grateful for the chance to further clarify my position on those points.


Unfortunately the rest of his commentary is not at all to the point. Take the first paragraph:

America has been brutal in the Middle East. We stopped the Syrian democracy in 1949. The Iranian democracy in 1953. We overthrew the Iraqi government in 1960 (the British invaded and conquered Iraq in WWI and WII).

Perhaps this is an attempt to establish credibility, but it is quite the straw man. First he asserts that America "has been brutal" in the Middle East and then goes on to cite wrongs of the waning British Empire.

What I think Josh most misses is that the fatwas against America seldom mention any of the wrongs he cites [so seldom I've never seen one -CR]. Nor does the doctrine of jihad specify that you attack only those who have previously wronged you. No, jihadists believe that all infidels are fair game for bloody conquest. Another problem I have with this litany is that it seems to ignore that the Soviet Union was ever a bad actor in the Middle East.

I'm not about to defend our pre-911 Middle East policy [I take it that baiting me to do so is the purpose of his setting up that particular straw man -CR]. Yet to deny that that policy was driven by the Cold War and the actions of the Soviet Union, as Josh seems to, is tantamount to insanity. It is a familiar form of insanity.

American neo-Marxists indulge in this particular insanity all the time. It would be hard for them to justify Marxism if they were forced to acknowledge its effects in real-world practice. I suppose I could also go in to my complete lack of guilt over policies for which I was not alive to vote on nor argue against, but we'll pass on that. The 20 years post WWII are really quite irrelevant to the modern jihadist.

In paragraph 3 we move on to some familiar clichés:

Bush lied and lied and lied about the threat from Iraq.

I hear this a lot, but before I will stipulate to it someone is going to have to supply at least one example of an actual lie.

Josh, are any of these statements lies?

Earlier today, I ordered America's armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. They are joined by British forces. Their mission is to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors.

Their purpose is to protect the national interest of the United States, and indeed the interests of people throughout the Middle East and around the world. "

President WJ Clinton, 16-Dec-98
full text here

We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.

Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.

Al Gore, 23-Sept-02
full text here

There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein's regime is a serious danger, that he is a tyrant, and that his pursuit of lethal weapons of mass destruction cannot be tolerated. He must be disarmed.

Sen. Ted Kennedy (D, MA), 27-Sep-02
full text here

It would be naive to the point of grave danger not to believe that, left to his own devices, Saddam Hussein will provoke, misjudge, or stumble into a future, more dangerous confrontation with the civilized world. He has as much as promised it.

Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), 9-Oct-02
full text here

Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation ... And now he is miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destructionSo the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real

Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), 23-Jan-03
full text here

Josh's follow-up to that cliché is:

You, apparently, don't care about being lied to.

[Trolling par excellence! -CR]

Au contraire mon ami. When a man lies before the Senate accusing American servicemen of being war criminals, and when he meets with enemy delegations while holding a commission in the US Navy, and later claims to have done no wrong in so doing I care very much indeed.

Josh, do you not care that you are supporting a man who is a self-admitted war criminal?

Look, when people want to say "My tax cut will make the gov't richer!" (Reagan and Bush II, based on Supply-Side Economics), it is hard to prove them wrong in the first place.

There are more straw men here than at a scarecrow convention. I'll give you a hint though: The intermediate value theorem.

Paragraph 4 is yet more of the same. Every sentence of it is disconnected from my post, so it's not a response. I suspect it is boilerplate with which he trolls blogs. It is very telling about what he has allowed himself to believe a priori about the person to whom he is responding. I am forced to the suspicion that his mind is just addled with assorted vitriol.

What I find most amusing is his apparent assertion that the real war is about protecting the "right" to engage in some unspecified ancient sexual practice. I'm utterly at a loss about how the supposed private practices of individual Athenians is related to my post. However, I am quite aware "Athens" is a favorite battlecry of isolationists.

The lesson of ancient Athens is not "never act outside your own borders". If you think it is then you need to re-read Thucydides. [perhaps several times -CR] Carter-ism has been tried. We have the festering wound on civilization known as the Islamic Republic of Iran in part because of that philosophy.

The underlying irony of this "Athens" reference, is that the left in this country was quite obsessed, throughout the cold war, with comparing ancient Athens to the US. Yet in the end, it was the Soviet Empire which collapsed due to having adventurously and arrogantly over-extended itself.

I suppose a person who's blogging (and slinging clichés harder than hosts of daytime TV talkshows do) and yet believes he is engaged in some sort of underground paleo-leftist revolutionary movement can't be expected to understand that.

UPDATE: Eh Hugh, is no one on your end is reading the entries to the symposium now? Your Thursday 4:20 PM batch includes the blog of the above described and liberally quoted leftist troll: RemainCalm. Dare I hope you are going to comment on this silliness?

Does this mean you support the President?

I recently heard audiotape of Cameron Diaz on some television sob-show warning that all who do not want rape to become legal in this country had better get out and vote.

I agree wholeheartedly.

Myself and other like-minded people would crawl over broken glass, if necessary, in order to vote to keep this from happening. Re-electing President Bush is crucial to this goal. For, if we lose to the jihadists, if they achieve their ultimate goal of bringing Shari'a to America, then rape will indeed be effectively lawful here as it is in countries which currently observe Shari'a.

How is this so? It is devilishly simple: In a Shari'a court, only the testimony of muslim men is admissible. As such, in any case involving illicit sex between a muslim man and a woman (muslim or not), the outcome of the case will depend entirely on the testimony of men. If the woman happens to be muslim then her husband or father may testify on her behalf, otherwise she has no voice at all in the proceedings. So unless the man confesses, or there are muslim men who can and will testify to guilt, there is no possibility whatever of a guilty verdict in a rape case.

Given these rules of evidence, and the severity of the penalties, how often do you believe that men are convicted of rape and the women are found innocent of wrongdoing in a Shari'a court? Do you also believe in the tooth fairy? More typically the result is like this.

When a muslim man has sex with a woman, she is, under Shari'a, unable to withhold consent because she cannot offer testimony in court to that effect. This is, in function, the same as making rape legal. There is effectively no rape under Shari'a, but only because every act which would be considered rape under English common law and under American case law is not recognized as a criminal act in a Shari'a court.

As if that is not enough. In any such case under Shari'a, the woman (or girl) involved can expect to get a death sentence, if not from the court, then from her family. You see, having apparently consented to such things, the woman (or girl) brings dishonor upon her family which can only be expunged by her death. This is called honor killing and muslims practice it everywhere there is Shari'a and many places where there is not.

Clash of civilizations? No. Anything which operates under the above rules cannot rightly be called civilization.

So yes, Cameron, it is vital that we vote.... for the man who is determined to take this war to the enemy and not John Kerry: a man who doesn't possess sufficient strategic vision to win at parchesi.

...but do you have a plan that does not involve surrendering?

Call me skeptical, but to hear a man proclaim over and over about having a plan, while never once describing any actions contained therein causes me to doubt that that man really has anything other than an overblown sense of himself. This is compounded by the man's history of contributing nothing to the public debate except endless criticism of this nation as though we are the primary villian in the world.

John Kerry wants to have a summit, but he will never act pre-emptively. The bridge player in me says: you will lose with that attitude, mister Kerry. In fact, you may never even win a bid. Don't take up chess either. In fact, you'd need to be quite lucky to win so much as a game of parchesi with an attitude like that.

It is at this point that the summiteers would assert that we are not playing a game and that we shouldn't be talking about winners and losers. Those who are making war on us clearly do not agree. They have defined victory as the annhilation of anything we might recognise as liberty. They have asserted that it's "on" and acted on this assertion.

At the very least even a summiteer must acknowledge that if we wish something more than surrender for ourselves then we are indeed engaged in a competitive enterprise. Perhaps the semantics are just too much for some, but if someone declares that they are at war with you and acts accordingly, are you not necessarily at war with them? Why is it even necessary to ask such a thing? [The math student in me would call this the reflexive property of war ]

Jimmy Carter had a summit with Leonid Breshnev and kissed him on the cheek not long before Breshnev's army invaded Afghanistan. What did that summit accomplish? Ok, not fair, how about, "what did that summit accomplish which was to the benefit of any free people anywhere in the world?" Oh, I have one: it showed us the utter vacuity and unrealism of Carter's dictator-smooching realpolitik.

Carter-ism has been tried mister Kerry. I don't know who you think you are going to kiss to get the jihadists to stop murdering innocent people, but it's a non-starter.

Why Bush? Why not Kerry?

The two major party candidates in this election offer us fundamentally different worldviews. On the one hand we have a man who believes that bad actors in the world target America because America acts “provocatively”. The other is a man who believes that bad actors in the world target America because we are a free people, and as such, the obvious enemy of all to which they aspire.

Kerry is, of course, a proponent of the former view. This worldview is a fantasy. The reality throughout history is that nations which maintain a strong capability of and willingness for preemptive self-defense survive while those which do not vanish. Today the bad actors in the world target our citizens for death because they have received decades of affirmation of their belief that Americans, despite our material might, do not possess the strength of will to persist in the face of atrocities committed against us and others.

The only merit in the Kerry worldview is that we Americans do indeed provoke the jihadists. What Kerry and the holders of this view fail to understand is that we provoke them merely by existing as a free people, that is, by existing outside of their domination. For this the jihadists have very openly declared war on us, both by word and by deed.

The jihadists offer us the options fight or submit. Those who possess John Kerry’s worldview see Americans fighting in self-defense as provacative and so they choose submission.

Tomorrow I Stop Procrastinating

So, I finally started a new blog. I could probably get away without mentioning that fact; no one seems to have read my previous attmepts.

This is the blog of two Armchair Generals living in Arizona. I would like to have named the blog accordingly but someone already got the more obvious name.

Instead I picked my favorite quote from the war on the Taliban. At one point the sympathizers of the anti-American cause had gotten all excercised that our cluster bombs were close in color to the humanitarian meals we were dropping about Afghanistan. Hugh Hewitt read an article about this on his program and came up with this line. It's stuck with me ever since.

Is this a war blog? Well, no, not really. Neither myself or my counterpart are participants. We are students of war, which is why I would have gone for a more indicative name, but for now, this will have to do.

UPDATE: No posts in 2 years at one site I found, but I suspect that if they believe what they posted back then, they are probably still upset about it.