PrairiePundit

The war between democracy and terror Clifford D. May: When the Army of Ansar al Sunna – a group tied to al Qaeda – attacks an American base near Mosul it should be apparent that Iraq is the front line in the War on Terrorism. When Christian churches are bombed – as they were on the same day and in the same part of Iraq – and Shia mosques in Karbala and Najaf are targeted as well, it should be clear that the bombers are waging a most unholy war. When Iraqi election workers are shot dead in the streets, as they were last weekend, the murderers' hatred for democracy ought to be obvious. Yet somehow the debate goes on about whether those fighting us are really enemies of freedom, about whether or not it is imperative they be defeated. The charge that Americans came to Iraq to steal oil is not much heard these days. Instead, the suicide bombers and throat slitters are romanticized as “militants” -- or even “nationalists” and “patriots” -- who are “resisting A...

The UK's Armageddon Agency The Independent: Ministers are secretly establishing an "Armageddon agency" to respond to devastating terrorist attacks on Britain, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. Neither Parliament nor the public have been told how far the Government has gone to put the service - which will deal with chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear attacks - into operation over the course of 2004. The body, called the Government Decontamination and Recovery Service, is such a sensitive topic even within Whitehall that it is deliberately known only by its initials - GDRS. Even then it is hardly mentioned, even in official documents. It is based in Margaret Beckett's Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), and, according to a top official, it has been ready to respond to an attack since last April. It has appointed specialist contractors to tackle incidents, has a senior Defra civil servant directing it, and...

Rumsfeld's Christmas greetings Scrappleface parody: In another act that raised questions about whether Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is sensitive enough to lead U.S. war efforts, the embattled Pentagon chief visited troops in Iraq today in order to wish them a so-called " Merry Christmas ." "This is like salt in the wound," said an unnamed senate aide. "Rumsfeld clearly doesn't want our troops to have 'happy holidays' or even 'lucky winter.' He insists on bludgeoning them, in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, with 'Merry Christmas' greetings. It's a bigoted attempt to impose his religious views on his subordinates." The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said a suit may be filed as early as Monday against Mr. Rumsfeld by its subsidiary, the American Military Liberties Union (AMLU), claiming that he used taxpayer funds in the 'Merry Christmas' wishing, thereby violating the establishm...

Rewriting history forthe Palestinians Powerline: We've been beating up on the Associated Press lately, and rightly so, but let's not forget those miscreants at AFP, the French news service. Today they had a brief picture story on a visit by actress Angelina Jolie and her young son to "Palestinian orphans living in refugee camps in Lebanon." AFP explains that Jolie "wanted to meet refugee children and introduce her Cambodian-born son, Maddox, to those less advantaged than himself." Fair enough. But the AFP's account ends with this history lesson: About 400,000 Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon deprived of basic rights in squalid camps -- a legacy of the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel that caused a mass exodus of Palestinians to neighbouring countries. What a contemptible rewriting of history! The Israeli Jews had a vision of a multicultural society that would include Arabs, and they provided for full civil rights for Ar...

A Christmas to remember George Will: ... Among the many things that "everyone knows" that just are not so is that the 2,400 men of the Continental Army won the Battle of Trenton, an operation that began on the night of Dec. 25, 1776, because the Hessian mercenaries had partaken too vigorously of Christmas drink. According to David Hackett Fischer, whose "Washington's Crossing" was a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award, the Hessians were weary from a week of constant vigilance against attacks by local insurgents, but they fought well. Not well enough, however, to prevent a triumph that Fischer, a Brandeis historian, says was -- combined, over the next eight days, with a second Battle of Trenton and the Battle of Princeton -- the most important victory in U.S. military history. Since the Declaration of Independence on July 4, the Americans had lost every battle fought to make independence a fact. The military disasters inflicted by ...

No need to be homeless in Bethleham Washington Times: There's plenty of room at the inn this year. Bethlehem's inns, which had no vacancies for the birth of Jesus about 2,000 years ago, are largely empty this Christmas season, according to a United Nations report that found tourism to the West Bank town has fallen 92 percent in the past four years. While liberals like to pretend that Jesus was born homeless, Mary and Joseph's real problem was that the inns were over subscribed, which is a very different problem from not being able to afford to rent a room while you are out of town. If the liberals wre right, homelessness could be solved by letting the terrorist scare away most of the visitors to cities.

Rusfeld's visit to hospital in Iraq Captain Dan Mattson:l ... Well, the timing worked out well, because I was taking my patient to the recovery room when we wheeled the stretcher through a mob of dignitaries, to include 3 and 4 star generals. I knew the Secretary was nearby, and it turns out he was in the ICU. The patient drew enough attention because of his bruised, banged up face that the 4 star came over to get his story from the surgeon. I was doing some charting by the bedside when Mr. Rumsfeld came over and heard the kid's story from the 4-star. Rumsfeld looked concerned and kind of kept his distance from the gruesome site. He said something like "bless his heart", as if talking around him. That is when I, without any thought, piped in with "Sir, you can talk to him, he's awake." He told the soldier, named Rob, how proud he was of his service. The soldier was in a bit of disbelief, because he couldn't see with one eye patched ...

Syrian sanctuary may be attacked Jerusalem Post: The US is contemplating incursions into Syrian territory in an attempt to kill or capture Iraqi Ba'athists who, it believes, are directing at least part of the attacks against US targets in Iraq, a senior administration official told The Jerusalem Post . The official said that fresh sanctions are likely to be implemented, but added that the US needs to be more "aggressive" after Tuesday's deadly attack on a US base in Mosul. The comment suggested that the US believes the attack on the mess tent, in which 22 people were killed, may have been coordinated from inside Syrian territory. "I think the sanctions are one thing. But I think the other thing [the Syrians] have got to start worrying about is whether we would take cross-border military action in hot pursuit or something like that. In other words, nothing like full-scale military hostilities. But when you're being attacked from safe haven...

The 2004 Goebbels Award Thomas Sowell: Events of this past year have shown the need for a special award in journalism for those who think that the purpose of reporting news is to cause the public to adopt the political views of those who do the reporting. Therefore this column announces the first annual Joseph Goebbels award for that journalist who best exemplifies the spirit and the practice that Dr. Goebbels pioneered. For people too young to remember or too unschooled in history to know, Dr. Joseph Goebbels was the minister of propaganda in the Nazi regime back in the 1930s and 1940s. Facts never distracted him from his mission nor did a lack of facts inhibit his zeal. Had there been such an award in 2003, "Baghdad Bob" would have been the clear winner for his repeated bold assurances that American troops were nowhere near Baghdad and never would be. That man could have had a great career in advertising. Holding the same official position as Dr. ...

Terrorist not chatting as much AP via NY Times: In stark contrast to last year's holiday season, when the nation was under heightened alert, counterterrorism officials say there is precious little intelligence ``chatter'' being picked up about any new plot this year. U.S. and foreign intelligence and law enforcement services report a continuing stream of vague, lower-level threats from al-Qaida and other Islamic extremist groups against American interests at home and abroad. But officials say nothing specific and credible has emerged in recent months that would require the government to raise the risk level above yellow, or ``elevated,'' the midpoint on the five-level threat scale. There are too possible reasons for the lack of chatter. The first is that the enemy is doing a better job of "operational security," i.e. they are not discussing their plans as openly. The second possibility is that their organization has been so crippled that there...

The Christmas Carol grinches Charles Krauthammer: It is Christmas time, and what would Christmas be without the usual platoon of annoying pettifoggers rising annually to strip Christmas of any Christian content. With some success: School districts in New Jersey and Florida ban Christmas carols. The mayor of Somerville, Mass., apologizes for "mistakenly" referring to the town's "holiday party" as a "Christmas party." The Broward and Fashion malls in South Florida put up a Hanukkah menorah but no nativity scene. The manager of one of the malls explains: Hanukkah commemorates a battle and not a religious event, although he hastens to add "I really don't know a lot about it." He does not. Hanukkah commemorates a miracle, and there is no event more "religious" than a miracle. The attempts to de-Christianize Christmas are as absurd as they are relentless. The United States today is the most tolerant and diverse ...

The AP insurgency Belmont Club: The execution of Iraqi election workers on Baghdad's Haifa street was probably not, properly speaking, a murder. It was a political act. There has been no suggestion that the killers of the electoral workers had any personal grudge against them. Probably any electoral workers would have done. While most killers seek to hide their faces and plan their attacks so no one can see them, these killers scorned masks and chose a busy street in Baghdad to carry out their work because they wanted to send a message. According to Abdul Hussein Al-Obedi of the Associated Press : In Baghdad, dozens of gunmen-- unmasked and apparently unafraid to show their faces-- executed three election officials on Sunday, part of their campaign to disrupt next month's parliamentary ballot. ... The deadly strikes Sunday highlighted the apparent ability of the insurgents to launch attacks almost at will, despite confident assessments by U.S. military...

Politicizing Mosul attack at the NY Times Hugh Hewitt: EVEN BEFORE THE DOCTORS had completed their evacuation of the wounded to Germany in the aftermath of the attack on the Mosul dining hall, and certainly before all the next of kin of the dead had been notified, New York Times reporter Richard Stevenson had sat down at his word processor to manufacture a story on how the attack would cripple George W. Bush's second term domestic agenda. It wasn't Tet, of course, and not even the Beirut bombing, and decent people might have allowed the dead to be buried before politicizing the Mosul massacre, but Stevenson wasn't going to let taste or facts get in the way of his story. Under the headline Bush's New Problem: More Carnage in Iraq Could Eclipse His Ambitious Domestic Agenda --the headline was changed after I blogged about it yesterday--Stevenson began his article this way: "The deadly attack on a United States military base in northern Iraq on ...

Caring for the wounded Simone Ledeen: W hen I returned from Iraq earlier this year, I discovered my family had been doing volunteer work at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where many of our wounded troops go for treatment and rehabilitation. I was so moved that they had begun doing this and that they didn't tell anyone about it — didn't brag — they just went and did their part. A little-reported fact is that many Americans have been doing exactly that. Every month, patients newly well enough to travel are loaded, along with their families, into buses that take them from Walter Reed to the Pentagon. They are treated like VIPs — given police escorts through the city and across the bridge to their disembarkation point. They are met by carefully chosen escorts from whichever office is sponsoring that month's visit, and brought up to one of the entrances where there is a band waiting for them along with several thousand Pentagon employees. The troops walk/hobble...

Who is really behind the insurgency in Iraq? Michael Ledeen: T he notion that we are fighting an "insurgency" largely organized and staffed by former elements of Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime is now fully enshrined as an integral piece of the conventional wisdom. Like earlier bits of the learned consensus — to which it is closely linked — it is factually wrong and strategically dangerous. That it is factually wrong is easily demonstrated, for the man invariably branded the most powerful leader of the terrorist assault against Iraq — Abu Musab al Zarqawi — is not a Baathist, and indeed is not even an Iraqi. He is a Palestinian Arab from Jordan who was based in Iran for several years, and who — when the West Europeans found he was creating a terror network in their countries (primarily Germany and Italy) and protested to the Iranians — moved into Iraqi Kurdistan with Iranian protection and support, as the moving force in Ansar al Islam. You cannot ha...

The Orwellian logic of the libs Victor Davis Hanson: ... Let us not forget either all the Orwellian logic: Clinton's past deleterious military slashes that nevertheless explained the present win in Afghanistan, or his former appeasement of bin Laden that now accounts for the successful doctrine of fighting terror. Or recall the harebrained schemes we should have adopted — the uninvited automatic airlifting of an entire division into the high peaks of Islamic, nuclear Pakistan to cut off the tribal fugitives from Tora Bora? Or have we put out of our memories the brilliant trial balloons of a Taliban coalition government and the all Islamic post-Taliban occupation forces? So it is with the latest feeding-frenzy over Donald Rumsfeld. His recent spur-of-the-moment — but historically plausible — remarks to the effect that one goes to war with the army one has rather than the army one wishes for angered even conservatives. The demands for his head are to be laughed off ...

Fighting breaks out in Fallujah AP via Houston Chronicle: U.S. Marines battled insurgents in Fallujah today with warplanes dropping bombs and tanks shelling suspected guerrilla positions, causing deaths on both sides, as the first 200 residents returned to the battered city. The fighting comes as the U.S. military began re-examining security measures at bases across Iraq. On Wednesday, top Pentagon officials admitted that an attack that killed 22 people — mostly Americans — at a camp near Mosul was likely carried out by a suicide bomber who infiltrated the camp's dining tent as soldiers ate lunch. In Fallujah, U.S. F-18 fighter-bombers were seen striking at targets in the city's outskirts. Tank and artillery fire was also heard. Officials said U.S. Marines were killed but would not specify the number. Several insurgents were also killed, they said. Authorities had planned today to allow the return of 2,000 residents — the first wave of tens of thousands wh...

The al Qaeda affiliates Strategy Page: The war on terrorist organizations gets a lot less media attention than does the war with terrorists. The terrorist violence in Iraq, Israel, Chechnya, Kashmir, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Indonesia and a few other places gets a reporters attention. But there are more important developments, with the terrorist organizations, that we hear little about. There’s a good reason for that, as the war against the terrorist organizations is an intelligence operation. Espionage agents, informants, spy satellites and electronic eavesdropping are the principal weapons. The action, such as it is, takes place in the shadows, and doesn’t make much noise. Because of the secret war against al Qaeda, a lot is known about the organization. This is mainly because most of the members are not very well educated in areas like OPSEC (operational security, keeping the enemy from observing your activities). Email and phone messages are caught and ...

The auto-pen wars Ann Coulter: Since the attack of 9-11, we've won two wars, liberated millions of people from monstrous regimes, presided over one election in Afghanistan and are about to see elections in Iraq and among the Palestinian people. Focusing like a laser beam on the big picture, liberals are upset that, during this period, the secretary of defense used an autopen. An autopen is a mechanical arm that actually holds a pen and is programmed to sign letters with a particular person's precise signature. Imagine a President Al Gore, with slightly more personality, signing all official government letters – that's an autopen. (You can relax now, there will be no more exercises imagining a President Al Gore.) There are 300 million Americans who have a constitutional right – an actual right, not a phony one invented by Harry Blackmun – to write to government officials. Every government office you've ever heard of in Washington, D.C., uses autopens...

The crazed soldier syndrone Mackubin Owens: ALMOST from the very beginning of the American counteroffensive against the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11, the specter of Vietnam has hovered over U.S. military action. Two weeks into the Afghanistan campaign, critics of the war had dusted off "quagmire," a sturdy favorite of those who criticized the Vietnam War. The term reappears every time there is a setback in Iraq, despite the fact that even the most successful wars are frequently characterized by plans gone awry. In fact, most people who draw Vietnam like a pistol understand neither Vietnam nor the current war. The Vietnam analogy has now begun to encompass the soldiers fighting the war. "A Flood Of Troubled Soldiers Is In The Offing, Experts Predict" blared the front page of The New York Times of Dec. 16. "An Army study shows that about one in six soldiers in Iraq report symptoms of major depression, serious anxiety or post-traumatic stress di...