I'll be on vacation through the 18th.

FOXNews.com

Former President Clinton says an anti-terrorism military invasion of Afghanistan during his administration might have been logistically impossible and would have drawn international condemnation.

This doesn't even begin to wash. The logistics this time were the same as during the Clinton administration. And, lest he forget, this one drew "international condemnation" as well.

The international community will always condemn the actions of the United States in defending itself, just as it similarly condemns Israel. Both Clinton and Bush were elected president by the citizenry of the United States, not the international community, in order to serve the United States, not the international community.

Something that Bill Clinton manifestly has yet to recognize.

Matthew Miller is worried that Bush is going to shaft California.

How? By failing to step in and protect the California Democrats from facing the consequences of their ill-considered actions wrt California energy policy and health care.

Ok. He doesn't quite put it like that, of course. What he really says is:

The Clinton administration helped plug previous such gaps with federal cash. If Bush shuns such funding, as officials now fear, primary care clinics and hospitals could be shuttered. The region's entire trauma care system could melt down, with fatal consequences.

That'll teach the state for voting Democratic!

The real worry is that this will teach the state that their democratic leadership has failed badly, repeatedly, over the last decade. Unless Bush intervenes and saves California from the "fatal consequences" of their leadership's actions, moderate California voters will begin to see the truth. And that is Miller's real worry.

Glenn Reynolds takes on Al Qaeda's "stupidity" in tackling the west.

Victor Hanson argues in "The Western Way of War" that one legacy that we have received from the Greeks is a concept of war as annihilation. I'm not sure that I entirely agree with him, but I'm unaware of the level of destructiveness that has been a staple of Western warfare occurring elsewhere in the world. Genocide against their own people, sure, that has been pretty regularly practiced by non-Western cultures throughout history. Nazi Germany was such a shock because the West hadn't experienced it firsthand before.

Historically, democracies have been surprisingly good at waging brutal wars, IMO because the simple fact that war provides an excellent lens for focusing the moblike tendencies that characterize democracy at its worst onto the destructive task at hand. Couple that with the freewheeling inventiveness that true democracy brings, the discipline that we inherited from the hoplite, and the belief that war is nothing more or less than an organized way of killing the enemy, and you've got a volatile mixture that can swat Islam from the face of the earth given sufficient provocation.

To our credit, I'm sure we'll feel bad about it later, not that they'll be around to care.

ABCNEWS.com : Silicon Insights: Mac Attacks PC Users Tim Bajarin's not the only one who appreciates the appeal of the new Macintosh to PC users.

After years of random lockups, corrupted registries, conflicts between the palm cradle, the mp3 cradle, and the printer, and an HP printer driver that tended to crash during bootup, the last straw when when it took my wife nearly a week to get her PC to recognize her new digital camera.

The new iMac had just been announced, and on the basis of its "digital hub" claims, we went to apple's website and placed our order. We've been using it now alongside the PC now for several months.

I have to say, it's fulfilled Apple's promise as a digital hub quite nicely. In addition, OS X has been roughly as solid as any other Unix system I've used, with the ease-of-use that Mac has always been famous for. I'm a longtime PC fan (my day job is writing C++ under NT), and I've found that even for me the PC has become a second-class option. I use it when I need to (I've got some expensive commitments to the PC platform in the way of development tools), but for music and web-related activities, the Mac is now my platform of choice.

And I want my own. Badly.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Martin Jacques: The new barbarism

Martin Jaques delivers the sort of anti-american, anti-western rant that seems to be europe's main contribution to global discourse lately. Here's a one of his gems:

The war against terrorism has, from the outset, worn a distinctly racist colouration, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab. And western (above all, American) collusion in subsequent brutal Israeli aggression - all in the name of race and ethnicity...

For some reason, Mr. Jaques seems unaware that neither "Muslim" or "Arab" denote human races. "Semite", on the other hand, does denote a race, but it inconveniently for his purposes it encompasses both Jews and Arabs.

He also conveniently ignores that the majority of terrorists in the world to day are Muslim, and that Arabs have been particularly heavily represented in terrorist attacks against the U.S. By his logic, perhaps the Allies were incorrect in waging their "Racist" aggression against Germany and Japan?

This is exactly the sort of moral blindness has increasingly rendered the European nations irrelevant. As Jaques himself admits "The continent, barring the integration project, has little to boast about". Unfortunately for him, the "integration project" is a manifest failure as the european people are coming to realize. That Jaques blames these failures on the U.S. and the newly-emerging european right reveals the willful blindness afflicting the euro-left. That he equates the european right with fascism simply reveals how tired european communist has become, that even after all these years they still cannot find another flag to wave to rally their people.

Keep quiet or face arrest Europe's liberals once again demonstrate their commitment to free speech.

If the european left feels this threatened by a simple placard-wielding nut, imagine how they'd react to serious criticism? Oh, wait. They've already shown us in Holland.

Gee, do ya think? Accused Mailbox Bomber's Friends Worry He's Gone Crazy

The best way to avoid saying anything foolish is to say nothing. Speaking of which, there's this headline from FOXNews.com:

The White House is not saying much about a European proposal to establish a Palestinian governing system that would leave Yasser Arafat as president...

Any proposal that leaves such a noted terrorist anywhere in a position of honor within a future Palestinian government is so manifestly devoid of moral integrity as to rightly put it beyond consideration by anyone sincerely interested in a lasting middle east peace.

The Independent has decided the mourning period is over. The European left has finally start speaking their mind about Pim Fortuyn. How about this headline associating Fortuyn with Hitler: "It's true that Le Pen didn't like Fortuyn, but then Mussolini didn't like Hitler". Or how about this bit

The murder is further complicated by the fact that only the Dutch could have a fascist leader who was a gay sociologist. Maybe he was trying to build a liberal, inclusive fascism, dreaming of the day he could announce to his followers "and now, after a hard afternoon's goose-stepping, let's relax, massage each other's shoulders and get rid off all that tension before invading a neighbouring country."

The only facts in that paragraph are the words "gay sociologist", the rest is merely deranged rantings of a european left that sees its lock on power slipping away in the harsh reality of generations of failed policies.

Victor Davis Hanson takes on Occidentalism. Chock full of gems like this one: "Politically, our officials must at last realize that Israelis tell the truth more often than Palestinians do — not because of genes or superior morality, but because their system of a free press, informed citizenry, and vocal opposition requires them to."

FOXNews.com

...local law enforcement officials admit the college student from Minnesota accused in a string of pipe bombings doesn't strike them as the typical terrorist.

Of course not. Most terrorists in recent memory have been middle-eastern. OTOH, the Washoe County Sheriff's description of Helder as "quiet, polite, well-behaved, well-mannered" has a high degree of correlation with the usual neighbor's description of a serial killer. This particular one just happened to be incompetent.

FOXNews.com

The CIA wants to kill a renegade Afghan warlord who it sees as a major threat to the interim government of President Hamid Karzai and U.S. troops, and has already fired a missile from an unmanned Predator plane at the man, defense officials said Thursday.

Hasn't the Bush administration noticed that these sorts of potshots didn't work when the Clinton administration tried them? Cruise missiles have their uses, but they have repeatedly failed at this sort of task, succeeding only in irritating their intended target.

The quality of discourse on Kuro5hin never ceases to amaze me.

Based on the english translation of his platform it looks like assassinated Dutch candidate Pim Fortuyn was indeed a right-winger, at least it certainly looks like the sort of platform that this Nader-voting right-winger would support.

That the European left felt it necessary to kill him in order to silence his criticisms shows hollow their beliefs are, and how fragile their muzzle on reasoned european thought is becoming.

Adam Curry of MTV fame is a Fortuyn supporter and currently living in Holland, and has a lot more information on Fortuyn and the assassination.

John Derbyshire doesn't like the Palestinians, and isn't afraid to say so.

Michelle Cottle Wants the Democrats to Blame the Wilson case on Jeb Bush.

Let's see, the grandmother couldn't be bothered to actually find the child, the caseworker repeatedly falsified documents before the judge, and it's Jeb's fault???

Now may be precisely the time for a little political hardball--not because Jeb is necessarily a bad guy, but because the threat of high-profile scandal and partisan finger-pointing is often what it takes

As for Jeb's protestations that "government can't handle everything" and "To expect the goverment to fill that void in a perfect fashion is impossible", Ms Cottle describes this as "pathetic", and an "extraordinary cop-out"

To her credit, she does admit the long-running failure of government intervention in this area:

...Bush announced the formation of a "blue-ribbon panel" that will determine if "systemic problems" exist within DCF. That may sound admirably proactive, until you consider that this is the eighth such panel assembled in the last 17 years. Every one of them has found persistent, widespread performance failures...

From which she infers that the program simply needs more reform, by Democrats of course, ignoring that the problems in this department were created by Democrats long before Bush took office, and that the "apathetic" and "incompetent" caseworker and grandmother were themselves likely Democrats.

But for Ms Cottle, such considerations are minor compared to the opportunity to add some mud to the election.

Went to see Houston Grand Opera's production of Saint-Saens' Sampson and Delilah last night. Denyce Graves (who's apparently fairly famous) as Delilah, Sergei something-or-other (apparently not quite as famous) as Sampson. Gorgeous costumes and sets, and a pretty impressive job with the special effects at the end when S. yanks a goodly chunk of the set down to the ground. Wasn't quite as impressive as Pink Floyd's The Wall, but impressive nonetheless.

In the best French tradition, there was a fair bit of ballet spooned into the last act, which meant plenty of lithe young ballerinas cavorting around in skimpy outfits. Sampson managed to lose his shirt for the ladies, in the best Cpt Kirk tradition.

Good show overall. Actually, this whole season's been uniformly good.

The story has some surprising parallels to the current events in the middle east. The story takes place in Palestine, in and around the city of Gaza. The Israelites are slaves under Palestinian occupation, and Sampson manages to free them. The climactic ending comes when, in response to his prayer, God gives him the strength to commit suicide and kill all the Palestinians with him, by pulling down the pillars of the temple where they were celebrating.

The parallels between this venerated Biblical story and the current conflict in the middle east are obvious, and certainly the Palestinians have tossed this story at the Christian world as evidence that suicide bombings are not necessarily evil, and can in fact be justified.

According to ABC News, the Justice Dept's current interpretation of the 2nd amendment is a "180-Degree Change in Policy". Nice to see that the art of hyperbole is still going strong.

It's also interesting to note that the "180-degree change in policy" text that ABC used in their link is a line from Ashcroft's unnamed critics:

Critics accused him of kowtowing to the NRA and of undermining federal prosecutors by endorsing a legal view 180 degrees from what has been official Justice Department policy for some 40 years.

Give War a Chance

Frank Gaffney, Jr gets it. I just wish George Bush Jr would discover a clue.

Podhoretz on the Middle East

He's got more faith in Bush that I do, but the second half of his article is dead on the money:

But in truth, where the Israeli-Palestinian problem is concerned, the Iraq invasion is not the problem. It is the solution.

It's a shame that Bush has forgotten his own "War on Terror".

Maybe it's time for Congress to remind him. They do still have the power to declare war, as I recall. Iraq and Iran certainly, Saudi maybe. Maybe France as well, everybody else has at one time or another :-)

FOXNews.com

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat said Wednesday he is willing to wage "war on terrorism" and has directed his security forces to work to foil Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians.

Oops, that's a misprint. Should be "terrorist war".

Israel is pissed (cont)

Bush may have his rose-colored-shades on, but Sharon at least sees the issue clearly:

He who rises up to kill us, we will pre-empt and kill him first

And about time too. Bush needs to stop interfering with Israel, and get cracking on his war on terror. The interference of the Iranians and Iraqis must not distract him from the job at hand, especially since solving those two problems, by eliminating the streams of weapons and explosives coming into the Palestinian groups will greatly ease the situation there.

Let Israel get rid of Arafat and Hamas, while we get rid of Iraq and Iran, and we might finally have a reasonable prospect of peace in the middle east.

Israel is pissed

Sharon's a man with a plan:

"Our work is not done," he said. "The battle continues and will continue until all those who believe that they can make gains through the use of terrorism will cease to exist."

This Time article has an interesting line that is at the heart of the current Middle East crisis:

But while the Bush administration is sympathetic to Sharon's loathing of Arafat, it is also aware that there are no alternative interlocutors with whom the fate of the Palestinians can be credibly negotiated.

The problem with this statement is its implicit assumption, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that Arafat is a credible negotiator. He is not. He is a thug, a terrorist. And as long as we keep insisting that he is the only Palestinian "leader" that can be dealt with, and as long as he can maintain his ruthless grip on power, there will be no other credible alternative among the Palestinians.

Suicide Blast Kills 15 in Israel

Should've never let that terrorist Arafat out.

So what's with sudden rise in militant veganism lately? First came the evidence coming in from europe that Fortuyn's assassin was a vegan activist, and now we have circumstantial evidence that the midwest pipe bombing suspect Luke Helder is associated with them as well. Although his band's website is down, this quote is from a friend of the band (snarfed from Jonas Cord's blog).

ok, listen here all you cock sucking weasels that think animal abuse is no big deal, don’t you dare ever fucking come near me. i will kill you. there is no question in my mind that i am capable of such a task. you deserve it. there are not even words to adequitely discribe my hate for you. i loathe you, the air you breath, and even the ground you walk on.

Note the exquisitely crafted grammatical structure and admire the conscientious spelling. Clearly someone as committed to higher education as Mr. Helder. I'm confused, though. Killing animals is bad, but killing humans is good? Does it make it better or worse if you eat them? :-)

Here in the states it's been difficult to sift through all the chatter about assassinated Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, with most of the articles referring to him as an anti-islamic far-right-wing reactionary. But then there's this ray of truth, from the very bottom of the Times obituary:

Startlingly, in one Rotterdam mosque with voting booths, some 20 per cent of the ballot went his way.

Which doesn't really square with the whole anti-islamic line.

My instinct is that while this event is a major disaster for the Netherlands today, it portends much deeper problems in the european culture. The riots and demonstrations by French leftists over le Pen's success in a democratic election and the murder of Fortuyn by a leftist assassin are eerily reminiscent of the brownshirt's techniques in overthrowing the Weimar republic. The years of failed promises has run headlong into the harsh reality of continual european decay, and by suppressing open and free debate the european elites have merely locked down the lid on a european pressure cooker. When the result is a crude, brutish leader like le Pen, the left riots in the streets in a thinly veiled threat. But when it produces a smooth, erudite, charismatic leader like Pim Fortuyn who is undeterred by urine-soaked threats, the european left reveals both its true nature and the emptiness of its ideology in the barrel of a gun.

With writing this bad, how did this kid graduate high school, much less gain admission to college?

Brainless twits on parade.

Victor Davis Hanson on Israel on National Review Online

Mr. Hanson hits the nail on the head, as usual, demolishing the Islamists' claims against Israel, and exposing the anti-Israeli movement here and Europe as the callow, self-serving, cowardly utilitarianism that it is.

Buffett thinks a nuclear attack is coming.

He's quiet on solutions, but IMO cleaning out Iraq, Iran, N. Koria and Saudi Arabia would substantially reduce the risk. Sitting around whining about it just makes things worse.

The National ID card bill is now in Congress. But will it run Windows (tm)?

TNR's oblivious to the dangers of the ICC.

Yet another reason to clean up our own backyard.

Thucydides via Hanson on post-9/11

One of the books on my list, that I haven't gotten around to reading is Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. Kagan of course mentions its importance to the development of the Wilhelmine Navy, and implies that the book links the navy to "great power" status because it can enable and protect commercial development, in which case it seems like he missed the concept of force projection as a political tool that has been so important in cold war maneuvering, and even in ancient times as Thucycides clearly shows.

The development of the long-range bomber and ballistic missile during WWII marked the beginning of the end of the navy's dominant role in force projection, as the great naval warships of the cold war have been the aircraft carrier and ICBM submarine. While the carrier groups could move a large chunk of power around the globe, their speed was still limited to low-double-digit knots, and they had limited projection range beyond the coast. ICBMs could of course project power anywhere in the globe in a few moments, but their use was not the sort of thing one contemplated short of impending catastrophe. The marines were capable of augmenting the Navy's power, by enabling it to temporarily hold coastal territory under protection of the naval guns and planes, but long-term campaigns required the heavier armaments the Army could bring to bear.

Gradually, the Air Force has gained in prominence as a tool of force projection, really starting with Reagan's bombing of Libya. This role has expanded through the years as the development of stealth fighters made it possible to safely shut down hostile radar defences, which made it safe for the heavy B52's to take off from Louisiana air bases and, flying nonstop, drop their bombs on Iraq before landing at closer bases. The development of cheap effective GPS and laser guidance systems compatible with dumb bombs has saved the heavy bomber from the post-cold-war scrapheap, and made them a primary instrument of force projection, as Afghanistan has clearly shown.

Which leads us to the Army. Of all the services, the Army has paradoxically been the most powerful of the services, and the least capable of usefully projecting that power. The same developments that have transformed that other cold war relic, the heavy bomber, is also capable of transforming the Army by reducing its reliance on heavy artillery and armor and replacing it with the stealth bomber, its racks loaded with precision bombs a lethal surrogate for tanks and artillery, as was shown in Operation Anaconda and the operations at Tora Bora. The same applies to the Marines, who were able to establish a "beachhead" deep inside Afghanistan, far away from the coasts, under the protection of the flying battleships. For this sort of role the stealth bomber is a wonderfully flexible weapon, since unlike the B52 it can perform this role very early in a campaign while the enemy's defences are still functioning.

The more I think about it, those Stealth Bombers are looking like as critical a development as the tank or aircraft carrier. The tank the tank was an impressive bit of offensive capability by itself, but it was critical to the transformation of warfare from the static warfare of the trenches to the fast, deep-penetrating warfare of the blitzkrieg. The aircraft carrier was certainly a more potent force than the battleship it replaced, but its true power was shown in enabling local air superiority in the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific. By freeing the army from its dependence on heavy weaponry, it can not not only insert itself, but function successfully for a time far away from naval carriers, away from friendly bases, and away from the haven of friendly nations.

I wonder what Alfred T. Mahan would think.

I'm in the middle of Book V of Herodotus' history, he's still blathering on like a drunk that won't shut up. Clearly they didn't have editors back then. I'm still amazed at the difference between him and Thucydides. Even after several readings, T. still feels amazingly modern in his sensibilities. Herodotus, although only a generation older than Thucydides, feels practically medieval, reeking of superstition, myth, and openmouthed credulity.

Lewis was ok, nowhere up to the standard of his virtuoso performance on Charlie Rose though. As he mentions in the book, it is basically a rehash of some old lectures, and it feels like it. He really needs to write a book analysing the current problems in the Middle East. As his Charlie Rose interview showed, he's awfully qualified to do it, and he has a knack for cutting through the BS.

Kagan OTOH was great. It is a monumental volume, bring Thucydides' theory that wars are caused by "fear, honor, and self-interest" to bear on the causes of war. His pairing of ancient and modern conflicts helps to lend his analysis credibility; indeed, when I read Thucydides a few months ago the similarities to the start of WWI gave me shivers -- the same system of entangling alliances, and of weaker powers embroiling themselves in conflicts that gradually drags the great powers themselves into a devastating war. Kagan's analysis of these events makes the point explicitly, although he analyses the two wars independently, the parallels (as well as the differences) of these events nearly 2,500 years apart help strengthen his theses that (a) honor is the most important of the Thucycidean triad and (b) peace doesn't keep itself.

His coverage of the Cuban missile crisis shows it to be the exception that illustrates the rule. Recently released transcripts from that period reveal that Kruschev backed down only because he believed that Kennedy, as a weak and inexperienced leader who could be safely pushed around, was in imminent danger of being overthrown by a military coup that he (Kennedy) was too weak to prevent. Kennedy responded to Kruschev's offer to withdraw the missiles in exchange for a promise not to invade Cuba by offering additionally to remove the NATO missiles from Turkey, thus reinforcing Kruschev's (correct) assessment of Kennedy as weak and ineffective, as well as his belief that Kennedy must be desperate because of the imminent coup. Needless to say, Kruschev jumped at the chance and they agreed to a deal.

Between work and reading, it was a busy weekend. Mostly catching up on stuff I should have read a long time ago, but hadn't for some reason or another.

1. Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. Finally gave in after seeing him on Charlie Rose.
2. Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of the Peace.
3. Herodotus, Histories. As a comparison to Thucydides. It's hard to believe these two men were contemporaries.