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Never forget

Posted by Richard on September 11, 2008

Seven years ago today, barbarians with box cutters — primitive savages who could never build a World Trade Center or a 747, but whose insane ideology is dedicated to making the building of such things impossible — murdered 2,996 innocent people in pursuit of their war against Western Civilization.

Never forget that on September 10, 2001, Manhattan looked like this.

Lady Liberty watching over the twin towers before 9/11

Never forget that on September 11, 2001, Manhattan looked like this.

1st tower falls

Fleeing as the tower falls

Fleeing through the choking dust

Never forget that we watched people jump from hundred-story buildings to avoid an even worse fate.

Falling to his death

Never forget that we were wounded, but our spirit wasn’t broken. We’ve fought back. And we will win.

Raising the flag at Ground Zero

As I have each of the last two September 11ths, I offer you passage from Gerard Van der Leun’s Of a Fire in a Field — a passage that moves me beyond words every time I read it — in which he recalled 9/11 and its aftermath, when he lived in New York:

Inside the wire under the hole in the sky was, in time, a growing hole in the ground as the rubble was cleared away and, after many months, the last fire was put out. Often at first, but with slowly diminishing frequency, all the work to clear out the rubble and the wreckage would come to a halt.

The machinery would be shut down and it would become quiet. Across the site, tools would be laid down and the workers would straighten up and stand still. Then, from somewhere in the pile or the pit, a group of men would emerge carrying a stretcher covered with an American flag and holding, if they were fortunate, a body. If they were not so fortunate the flag covering over the stretcher would be lumpy, holding only portions of a body from which, across the river on the Jersey shore, a forensic lab would try to make an identification and then pass on to the victim’s survivors something that they could bury.

I’m not sure anymore about the final count, but I am pretty sure that most families, in the end, got nothing. Their loved ones had all gone into the smoke and the dust that covered the end of the island and blew, mostly, across the river into Brooklyn where I lived. What happened to most of the three thousand killed by the animals on that day? It is simple and ghastly. We breathed them until the rains came and washed clean what would never be clean again.

. . .

Read the whole thing — and think about the question he asks you at the end.

And never forget.

The flag still stands

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Fly the flag September 11

Posted by Richard on September 11, 2008

September 11 is the seventh anniversary of the worst attack ever on U.S. soil, when many of us finally realized that a dangerous and implacable enemy had declared war on us years earlier and wasn’t kidding.

September 11 is the seventh anniversary of the day that we watched in horror as people fell a hundred stories to the pavement and the skyline of Manhattan changed in a matter of hours.

September 11 is the seventh anniversary of the day that 2,996 innocent people were murdered by a small band of fanatical Islamofascists, and the world changed forever.

Remember September 11. Fly the flag.

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Rebutting the “torture narrative”

Posted by Richard on July 17, 2008

Former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith testified yesterday before the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and Power Line posted his opening statement in its entirety. If you think you know all about the Bush Administration's policy decisions regarding enemy combatants and the Geneva Conventions — especially if your information is based directly or indirectly on the allegations of Philippe Sands — you really should read this. Here's a bit from the beginning:

The history of war-on-terrorism detainee policy goes back nearly seven years. It involves many officials and both the law and the facts are enormously complex. Some critics of the administration have simplified and twisted that history into what has been called the “torture narrative,” which centers on the unproven allegation that top-level administration officials sanctioned or encouraged abuse and torture of detainees.

The “torture narrative” is grounded in the claim that the administration’s top leaders, including those at the Defense Department, were contemptuous of the Geneva Convention (which I refer to here as simply “Geneva.”) The claim is false, however. It is easy to grasp the political purposes of the “torture narrative” and to see why it is promoted. But these hearings are an opportunity to check the record – and the record refutes the “torture narrative”.

The book by Phillipe Sands is an important prop for that false narrative. Central to the book is its story about me and my work on the Geneva Convention. Though I’m not an authority on many points in Sands’s book, I do know that what he writes about me is fundamentally inaccurate – false not just in its detail, but in its essence. Sands builds that story, first, on the accusation that I was hostile to Geneva and, second, on the assertion that I devised the argument that detainees at GTMO should not receive any protections under Geneva – in particular, any protections under common Article 3. But the facts are (1) that I strongly championed a policy of respect for Geneva and (2) that I did not recommend that the President set aside common Article 3.

I will briefly review my role in this matter and then discuss Sands’s misreporting. As it becomes clear that the Sands book is not rigorous scholarship or reliable history, members of Congress and others may be persuaded to approach the entire “torture narrative” with more skepticism.

Read the whole thing. I think Feith's account hangs together well, seems to make sense, and is quite plausible — none of that proves it's true, of course, but I'm inclined to believe it.

Feith's discussion of the issue of POW status introduced me to something I wasn't aware of: During the Reagan Administration, the U.S. rejected a treaty to amend Geneva called "Protocol 1" because it would have granted POW status to terrorists. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post praised Reagan (uncharacteristically) for this decision. 

Like I said, read the whole thing. Then read something I posted three years ago, They aren't criminal suspects!  

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Another Haditha case dismissed

Posted by Richard on June 17, 2008

The government is now 0-for-7 on prosecuting the eight Haditha Marines:

In a move that prompted tears of joy from courtroom spectators, Military Judge Colonel Steven Folsom, USMC, this morning dismissed all charges against LtCol Jeffrey Chessani on the grounds of unlawful command influence. His opinion from the bench lasted an hour, and prosecutors were given 72 hours in which to notify him if they planned to appeal.

The charges were dismissed without prejudice.

Chessani was charged with dereliction of duty and orders violations for allegedly failing to investigate and report the "Haditha massacre" of November 19, 2005. He was the highest ranking officer to be charged in the well-publicized incident and would have faced dismissal from the service, loss of all retirement benefits and three years in prison had he been convicted.

LtCol Chessani's official 2006 Combat Fitness Report declared him "a superb leader, who knows his men, knows the enemy, knows his business," and recommended him for promotion.The reviewing Major General added, LtCol Chessani has "unlimited potential and value to the Marine Corps," and also recommended him for promotion.

The deaths of 24 Iraqis in the house-to-house, room-by-room battle created a firestorm of criticism both at home and abroad, including comments from Rep. John Murtha who claimed at the time that the Marines "killed innocent civilians in cold blood." Yet news that seven of eight original defendants have either been acquitted or have had the charges against them dropped has received scant attention.

Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Law Center that was representing Chessani, said, "We are all grateful for the judge's ruling today. He truly was the "last sentinel" to guard against unlawful command influence." He added, "Tragically, our own government eliminated one of its most effective combat commanders. The insurgents are laughing in their caves."

Only one defendant, squad leader Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, remains. Wuterich, who faces voluntary manslaughter charges, has pled not guilty.

I'm betting that Wuterich will be acquitted or the charges will be dismissed. Maybe after that happens, John Murtha, Dennis Kucinich, Madeline Albright, Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, CBS, etc., will apologize to these men.

But I won't bet on those apologies. 

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“Bush lied” is a lie

Posted by Richard on June 10, 2008

What's up with the WaPo? An epidemic of remorse about past sins? Just one editor having second thoughts? Hard to say. A week ago, I noted with surprise that The Washington Post had editorialized that the news from Iraq "ought to mandate an already-overdue rethinking by the 'this-war-is-lost' caucus in Washington, including Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.)."

Now, WaPo's Editorial Page Editor has declared that the most pervasive leftist meme, "Bush lied," is false. But don't jump right to the WaPo opinion piece by Fred Hiatt, read the analysis by Doug Ross first.

On issue after issue, Hiatt points out that Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, claimed to have evidence that "Bush lied," but in fact Rockefeller's report clearly shows that on issue after issue, the President's statements were "substantiated by the intelligence community."

After five years of WaPo (and the rest of the MSM) supporting and promoting the "Bush lied" meme, it's quite a change.

Fred Hiatt concluded (emphasis added):

Why does it matter, at this late date? The Rockefeller report will not cause a spike in "Bush Lied" mug sales, and the Bond dissent will not lead anyone to scrape the "Bush Lied" bumper sticker off his or her car.

But the phony "Bush lied" story line distracts from the biggest prewar failure: the fact that so much of the intelligence upon which Bush and Rockefeller and everyone else relied turned out to be tragically, catastrophically wrong.

And it trivializes a double dilemma that President Bill Clinton faced before Bush and that President Obama or McCain may well face after: when to act on a threat in the inevitable absence of perfect intelligence and how to mobilize popular support for such action, if deemed essential for national security, in a democracy that will always, and rightly, be reluctant.

For the next president, it may be Iran's nuclear program, or al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan, or, more likely, some potential horror that today no one even imagines. When that time comes, there will be plenty of warnings to heed from the Iraq experience, without the need to fictionalize more.

 Doug Ross concluded:

The Bush Lied meme, which was marketed incessantly by the Democrats and the mainstream media (but I repeat myself), was unadulterated partisan pap. Furthermore, it was dangerous pap, as it presents a future CINC with additional complexities and bickering even when the need to take military action is clear and present.

Yep. Thanks, Mr. Hiatt, for finally setting the record straight. Better late than never.

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Another Haditha Marine is exonerated

Posted by Richard on June 5, 2008

Charles Johnson aptly described the Haditha case as "The most ludicrous politically-motivated prosecution of US soldiers in the nation’s history…" I've blogged about the case before, most recently in March when Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum was cleared. Now, another defendant has been exonerated:

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. – A military jury acquitted a Marine intelligence officer Wednesday of charges that he tried to help cover up the killings of 24 Iraqis.

Cheers erupted as the seven-officer panel cleared 1st Lt. Andrew Grayson, who was the first of three Marines to be tried in the biggest U.S. criminal case involving Iraqi deaths linked to the war. The verdict came just five hours after deliberations began.
…

Grayson's attorney, Joseph Casas, said he believed the verdict could influence pending prosecutions.

"I think it sets the tone for the overall whirlwind Haditha has been. It's been a botched investigation from the get-go," he said. "I believe in the end all of the so-called Haditha Marines who still have to face trial will be exonerated."

Prosecutors did not make themselves available for comment.

That means six of the eight men originally charged have now been vindicated. As I said in March, "This travesty has already gone on far too long." The fools who continue to pursue this bad joke of a case ought to finally take the hint and drop the charges against the only remaining defendants, Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich of Meriden, Conn., and Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, of Rangely, Colo.

And I'm still waiting for Rep. John Murtha to apologize for calling his fellow Marines "cold-blooded murderers."

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Iraq news too good to report

Posted by Richard on June 3, 2008

American casualties in Iraq fell to a five-year low in May. Prime Minister al Maliki has united large portions of the population across all ethnic groups. The Iraqi army successfully pulled off al Maliki's bold plan to reclaim Basra from the Mahdi Army. And both al Qaeda and the Iranian-backed Shiite militias are on the run everywhere.

But there aren't many news stories about Iraq these days, and you'd be hard-pressed to find much information about these developments in the mainstream media. When the subject of the surge's success does come up, those invested in our defeat will say just about anything to explain it away. Case in point: Nancy Pelosi, in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, insisted that the positive developments in Iraq aren't due to the surge, but to Iran's "goodwill."

Bless their hearts, the editors of The Washington Post acknowledged the good news in a surprising (to me, at least) editorial Sunday (emphasis added):

THERE'S BEEN a relative lull in news coverage and debate about Iraq in recent weeks — which is odd, because May could turn out to have been one of the most important months of the war. [It's not odd to those of us who suspect there's an agenda behind the relentless coverage of bad news and ignoring of good.] While Washington's attention has been fixed elsewhere, military analysts have watched with astonishment as the Iraqi government and army have gained control for the first time of the port city of Basra and the sprawling Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, routing the Shiite militias that have ruled them for years and sending key militants scurrying to Iran. At the same time, Iraqi and U.S. forces have pushed forward with a long-promised offensive in Mosul, the last urban refuge of al-Qaeda. So many of its leaders have now been captured or killed that U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, renowned for his cautious assessments, said that the terrorists have "never been closer to defeat than they are now."

Iraq passed a turning point last fall when the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign launched in early 2007 produced a dramatic drop in violence and quelled the incipient sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites. Now, another tipping point may be near, one that sees the Iraqi government and army restoring order in almost all of the country, dispersing both rival militias and the Iranian-trained "special groups" that have used them as cover to wage war against Americans. It is — of course — too early to celebrate; though now in disarray, the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr could still regroup, and Iran will almost certainly seek to stir up new violence before the U.S. and Iraqi elections this fall. Still, the rapidly improving conditions should allow U.S. commanders to make some welcome adjustments — and it ought to mandate an already-overdue rethinking by the "this-war-is-lost" caucus in Washington, including Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

Read the whole thing. 

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Our hero dead

Posted by Richard on May 26, 2008

"Flags In" for Memorial Day, Arlington National Cemetary. Photo from Isaac Wankerl (www.iwankerl.com).
The grave of his father, Maj. Max W. Wankerl, is in the foreground.

  

Memorial Day

by Edgar A. Guest (1881-1959)

  
The finest tribute we can pay
Unto our hero dead to-day,
Is not a rose wreath, white and red,
In memory of the blood they shed;
It is to stand beside each mound,
Each couch of consecrated ground,
And pledge ourselves as warriors true
Unto the work they died to do.

Into God's valleys where they lie
At rest, beneath the open sky,
Triumphant now o'er every foe,
As living tributes let us go.
No wreath of rose or immortelles
Or spoken word or tolling bells
Will do to-day, unless we give
Our pledge that liberty shall live.

Our hearts must be the roses red
We place above our hero dead;
To-day beside their graves we must
Renew allegiance to their trust;
Must bare our heads and humbly say
We hold the Flag as dear as they,
And stand, as once they stood, to die
To keep the Stars and Stripes on high.

The finest tribute we can pay
Unto our hero dead to-day
Is not of speech or roses red,
But living, throbbing hearts instead,
That shall renew the pledge they sealed
With death upon the battlefield:
That freedom's flag shall bear no stain
And free men wear no tyrant's chain.

 

Today, please remember those who died "that liberty shall live." And if you have friends or relatives — or maybe an elderly neighbor down the street — who are veterans, thank them now. Don't wait until they have a marker over their head. 

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Olbermann unhinged

Posted by Richard on May 15, 2008

In a rant so over the top that he seemed to be channeling Howard Beal, Keith Olbermann on Wednesday night accused President Bush of creating "cold-blooded killers … who may yet be charged someday with war crimes" and who have "laid waste to Iraq." Of course, this was on MSNBC, so almost no one saw it.
(text | text with commentary | video)

They're lapping it up at Democratic Underground, Huffington Post, Pandagon, Crooks and Liars, etc.

But don't you dare say they don't support the troops.

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More Haditha charges dropped

Posted by Richard on March 29, 2008

The government has dropped all charges against yet another Marine accused of killing civilians at Haditha in 2005:

The case against Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum, 26, of Edmond, Okla., was dropped as jury selection was about to begin for his court-martial. The government has been seeking Tatum's testimony against the squad leader, Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich of Meriden, Conn. [Editor's Note: Haditha Marines still need your help! Click here now.]

In addition to two counts of involuntary manslaughter, Tatum had been charged with reckless endangerment and aggravated assault. Tatum's attorney, Jack Zimmerman, said there was no agreement with the government before the dismissal.

''Absolutely, there is no deal,'' he said.

Zimmerman said Tatum would testify if called as a witness in future trials but that he would testify as a neutral witness, not a government witness.

Four enlisted men originally faced multiple murder charges. Tatum is the third to have all charges dismissed. Two of the four officers charged with failing to investigate have also been cleared. (See also my July 2007 post about the case.)

This travesty has already gone on far too long. The "evidence" that the Marines shot unarmed civilians consisted chiefly of "eyewitness statements" by Iraqis who were clearly insurgents, probably insurgents, family of insurgents, or intimidated by insurgents, and whose stories were contradictory and not credible.

The all-day battle was documented in detail by Maj. Frank Dinsmore, an intelligence officer, with UAV video, radio transmission transcripts, and reports from everyone involved up and down the chain of command. The investigating officer at the Article 32 hearing (equivalent of a civilian grand jury proceeding) found the prosecution's case against these men without merit and Dinsmore's evidence compelling, and he recommended that all charges be dropped. The government ignored that and tried to prevent Dinsmore from testifying.

As far as I know, Rep. John Murtha still hasn't apologized for calling his fellow Marines "cold-blooded murderers." Mainstream media outlets that prominently covered news of the "atrocity" and editorialized against it have never retracted or corrected what they said (except for Time magazine, which had to retract several parts of their original story, but AFAIK never apologized for accusing these men of war crimes). And despite losing at every turn, the government persists with the case.

One of the defense attorneys estimated that legal fees for each defendant will be around half a million dollars. If you'd like to help with those, go here. I don't know how they're supposed to get their reputations and the last three years of their lives back.

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Vindicating Rumsfeld

Posted by Richard on January 16, 2008

Now that almost everyone admits that the situation in Iraq has greatly improved, the conventional wisdom seems to be that Donald Rumsfeld screwed things up, and that the Petraeus plan and troop surge turned things around. Alec Rawls begs to differ. In an important post from early December (I just recently saw James Rummel's link to it), Rawls argued that Rumsfeld set the stage (wittingly or unwittingly) for the current success:

Why did the Iraqis turn against al Qaeda and Iran? Because al Qaeda and Iran were murdering them en masse. And why were al Qaeda and Iran murdering Iraqis en masse? Because Defense Secretary Rumfeld’s small-footprint force-protection strategy meant that they couldn’t attack American troops without getting immediately annihilated.

In order to get the “continuing violence” that their allies in the Western media could use to create American defeat on the home front, the Saudi and Iranian proxy warriors in Iraq had no choice but to wage war on the Iraqi people.

Rawls further argued that the Rumsfeld strategy not only led to the current military success, but created the conditions from which political success will spring:

When al Qaeda answered his force protection strategy by attacking the Iraqi population, Rumsfeld obviously knew that this would turn the Iraqi people against al Qaeda, turning that population equation drastically in our favor. There was no reason at that point to upset this advantageous applecart by changing strategy. Just let it work, and not just because al Qaeda’s attacks on the Iraqi population promised to win the war on the ground for us. Equally important, it also handed us the one victory that we never could have won by military means alone: the battle to create in Iraq, not just a democracy, but a republic in the American sense (a system of liberty under law).

The great danger going into Iraq was not that we would lose the war, which was never a realistic possibility (so long as the Democrats did not actually succeed in losing the war at home). The real danger was losing the peace: that the Iraqi people, devoid of any post-Saddam identity beyond religion, would elect a Khomeinist government, handing the country democratically to the Islamofascists. …

If the theocrats took democratic control of the government even once, Iraq would be lucky to ever have democratic elections again. Elect people who believe that democracy is an “evil principle,” (Zarqawi’s description) and they are not likely to adhere to it. But Rumsfeld’s force-protection strategy, and al Qaeda’s response to it, matured the Iraqi contempt for theocracy in a short couple of very long years.

The vast majority of Iraqis now hate the religious vision of the Islamofascists. They hate the contempt for democracy and they hate the religious intolerance. Iraqis are rising now as a united people, promising brotherhood with Iraqis of other faiths. Just as Sunnis are standing up to al Qaeda , so too are Shiites standing up to Iran and the Sadr army.

This is a long, thought-provoking, and very important essay for anyone interested in Iraq and its future. I found it quite persuasive, and I strongly recommend that you read the whole thing. Be sure to check out the comments, too — there are some good ones. 

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Another anti-war bomb

Posted by Richard on November 26, 2007

Four weeks ago, I noted that Hollywood's recent spate of anti-American propaganda films had been singularly unsuccessful:

The bad news is that Hollywood is relentlessly cranking out film after film intended to undermine support for the war against Islamofascism. The good news is that Americans are avoiding these propaganda pieces in droves. Most recently, Babel, The Kingdom, and Rendition have all bombed at the box office.

Add Brian De Palma's execrable Redacted to the list. In fact, put it at the top. According to a NYPost story quoted by JammieWearingFool, it may be the biggest box-office bomb ever. On its opening weekend, it took in about $25,000. No, I didn't accidentally leave off three zeros. Twenty-five thousand dollars. At what — about eight bucks a ticket? That means more people attended your average minor-league hockey game than saw this left-wing turkey.

JWF's post also has the unbelievable story of how De Palma is complaining that he's a victim. You see, his corporate overlords insisted on blurring the faces of dead American soldiers in a "collage of actual bloody bodies at the end of the film." He's been censored! Denied his opportunity to inflict gratuitous pain and suffering on the families and friends of the dead in service of his art (and politics)! Poor Brian!

De Palma is a vile POS, and a pretty sorry director, too — overrated, overblown, and completely derivative. His career should have ended years ago. I remember a great (late 70s?) Saturday Night Live parody commercial for a De Palma film called The Clams — a silly ripoff of Hitchcock's The Birds, complete with clams gathering on a jungle gym. As I recall, the money line at the end was "every couple of years, he picks the bones of a dead director and gives his wife a job."

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Burying the good news

Posted by Richard on November 8, 2007

Apparently, the front page of The New York Times is reserved for covering global warming, the (perennially) impending recession, and bad news from Iraq. Good news from Iraq has to figuratively sit in the back of the bus. From Newsbusters (emphasis in original):

When Rush Limbaugh opened today's show by mentioning that the New York Times had relegated to page A19 the story of the ridding of Al Qaeda-in-Iraq from all of Baghdad, I actually thought he might be joking. Surely not even the Times could be so brazenly biased as to bury such a huge story reflecting the success of the surge. But, sure enough, Rush was right. A19 is exactly the location to which the Times exiled the story. And to further reduce the number of people who would learn the good news, the paper stuck this bland headline on the story: "Rebel Unit Now Out of Baghdad, U.S. General Asserts". The headline of the online version of the story, "Militant Group Is Out of Baghdad, U.S. Says," differs slightly, but the text is the same.

Yeah. It was just some "rebel unit" or "militant group" that the MNF has driven out of all of Baghdad: AL-FREAKING-QAEDA!

"Rebel Unit," indeed — it's just amazing what lengths the NYT editors will go to in order to avoid the obvious headline, "Al Qaeda Driven Out of Baghdad."

The Washington Post, not to be outdone in terms of burying the good news, relegated this story to page A20:

BAGHDAD, Nov. 7 — The drop in violence caused by the U.S. troop increase in Iraq has prompted refugees to begin returning to their homes, American and Iraqi officials said Wednesday.

Tahsin al-Sheikhly, an Iraqi government spokesman, said 46,030 displaced Iraqis had returned last month from outside the country to their homes in the capital. He declined to comment on how the government determined those statistics.

"People are starting to return to their homes," said Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil, commander of U.S. troops in Baghdad. "There's no question about it." 

The quote from Maj. Gen. Fil is from the same luncheon with reporters that the NYTimes story cited. WaPo not only buried the whole story one page deeper, they didn't mention the general's remarks about driving out al Qaeda until the 7th paragraph.

Here's something else I noticed: The NYTimes story described al Qaeda in Iraq as "the homegrown Sunni extremist group that American intelligence agencies say is foreign-led," and the WaPo story described it as "a largely homegrown Sunni insurgent group that U.S. officials say they believe is led by foreigners."

These aren't wire service stories, and they don't appear to share any authors — the NYT story is by Damien Cave, with contributions from Baghdad by Khalid al-Ansary, Anwar J. Ali, and Mudhafer al-Husaini; the WaPo story is by Amit R. Paley, with contributions from "Zaid Sabah and Dalya Hassan in Baghdad, Saad Sarhan in Najaf and other Washington Post staff in Iraq." I suppose the NYTimes' Iraqi contributors could also be the "other" WaPo contributors. But I suspect the nearly identical descriptions are simply media group-think.

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Hollywood’s war

Posted by Richard on October 31, 2007

The bad news is that Hollywood is relentlessly cranking out film after film intended to undermine support for the war against Islamofascism. The good news is that Americans are avoiding these propaganda pieces in droves. Most recently, Babel, The Kingdom, and Rendition have all bombed at the box office.

But it's not just that film-makers are making anti-war movies. They've also gone out of their way to avoid portraying the most believable and likely villains around today, Islamist terrorists, even if it meant rewriting stories like Tom Clancey's The Sum of All Fears to kowtow to the demands of CAIR (unindicted co-conspirators in a terrorism-financing operation). The film version replaced the Islamist terrorists in Clancy's novel with cartoon neo-Nazis.

Michael Fumento noted the difference between Hollywood then and now:

In 1942, Hollywood went to war. It began pumping out countless movies designed both to entertain the public and bolster its will to fight. A lot of them were cheap, hokey, or both. But even in a nation that seemingly needed little reminder of the dastardly attack on Pearl Harbor or the evils of the Nazis, they kept drilling home the message that we must persevere no matter the costs or the duration.

Well that they did. President Franklin Roosevelt lived in constant fear that the public would turn against the war. Indeed a Gallup Poll taken just five months before Germany’s collapse and long after the American public began learning of the horrors of the Holocaust, showed about one-fourth did not want to drive on to unconditional surrender.

Fast forward that reel to the post-9/11 era. Just how many Hollywood movies (not documentaries) have been made in which the bad guys are Islamist terrorists that do not specifically concern the Sept. 11 attacks? If you have to guess, guess “none.”

Read the whole thing. As Fumento observed, Hollywood seems bent on convincing us that either Islamist terrorists aren't really a threat or that they're no worse than we are.

Also, read Ed Driscoll's Hollywood Nihilism, which argues that the change in Hollywood predates 9/11 and Bush ("who's the real enemy," indeed).

It's really remarkable (and disgusting) that Tinseltown — with its well-known predilection for hedonism, its commitment to feminism, its enthusiastic embrace of alternative lifestyles, and its general "do your own thing" attitude — has consistently sided with the most barbaric, mysogynistic, intolerant, and repressive religio-political movement on the face of the earth, a movement that would, given the chance, behead or stone to death practically every last one of them. 

Driscoll be damned, I blame Bush.  

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Bad news for Democrats, good news for Iraq

Posted by Richard on October 24, 2007

The Democrats' ongoing effort to declare defeat in Iraq has suffered another setback with yet more confirmation that the Petraeus Plan is working well:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Violence in Iraq has dropped by 70 percent since the end of June, when U.S. forces completed their build-up of 30,000 extra troops to stabilize the war-torn country, the Interior Ministry said on Monday.

Of course, this is Reuters, so reporter Aseel Kami felt compelled to insert a bit of random, pointless buzzkill: 

The ministry released the new figures as bomb blasts in Baghdad and the northern city of Mosul killed five people and six gunmen died in clashes with police in the holy Shi'ite city of Kerbala south of the Iraqi capital.

Imagine the previous sentence rewritten by someone not rooting for the other side: 

"The ministry released the new figures as two new office buildings were dedicated in Dohuk and Erbil International Airport announced expansion plans to accommodate the growing number of direct flights from Vienna, Frankfurt, Istanbul, Stockholm, Dubai, and other European and Asian commercial centers."

Critics would object, "that's propagandizing!" Exactly. And that's what Aseel Kami's version is, too. Ah, well, what else is new?

It looks like the Democrats' latest attempt to undermine the war effort isn't succeeding, either. They sought to anger Turkey (whose bases and support the U.S. and Iraq badly need) by bringing up an alleged Ottoman Empire genocide from 90 years ago (while doing nothing about genocide today in Darfur and increasing the likelihood of genocide tomorrow in Iraq).

At first, it appeared to be working. The Turks became angry at us and threatened consequences. Soon, they were rattling their sabers regarding the long-standing problem of terrorist attacks into Turkey by the PKK, hiding out in rugged northwestern Iraq. Now, it seems that all sides have agreed that the PKK are murderous communist scum who in no way represent the interests of democratic Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran:

Iraq today vowed to do all it could to disrupt the activities of PKK fighters sheltering in its northern border region with Turkey as international pressure intensified on Ankara and Baghdad to find a way of avoiding a Turkish invasion.

Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq's Kurdish foreign minister, said after talks in Baghdad with his Turkish counterpart, Ali Babacan, that both Iraq's central government and the Kurdistan regional government (KRG) in the north were committed to reining in the PKK.

"We will actively help Turkey to overcome this menace," said Mr Zebari. He said Iraq would send a security and political delegation to Turkey for more talks, and promised full cooperation with the Turkish government "to solve the border problems and the terrorism that Turkey is facing through direct dialogue."

This isn't surprising to anyone who read what Iraqi President Jalal Talabani (a Kurd) said a couple of days ago:

… In a speech that I recently made in Al-Sulaymaniyah, I openly stated that the Kurds do not believe that the PKK's military acts in Turkey or Iran can serve the Kurdish people's interests. Indeed they undermine their interests. We believe that armed action hurts democracy in Turkey and hurts Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party [AKP]. This party is a new democratic feature that wishes to build a new Turkish society that makes room for Turkey's Kurds and the other ethnic groups in the country.

The AKP recognizes the existence of a Kurdish people and a Kurdish cause. It adopts a friendly attitude towards using the Kurdish language in the media. Furthermore the recent parliamentary elections were free in the Kurdish areas and led to the election of patriotic Kurdish deputies to parliament. The AKP won more than 60 percent of the Kurdish vote, which means that they are happy with it. This means that carrying out armed actions against this party serves only chauvinist forces in Turkey.

Regarding the presence of PKK combatants in Iraq, our constitution clearly forbids the continued presence of foreign armed forces on Iraqi territory or using such forces to launch armed attacks on neighboring countries. …

I wish to state that we are willing to operate within the tripartite committee with Turkey and the United States to put an end to the PKK's activities in Iraqi Kurdistan and to confine them to the Qandil Mountains [in Turkey]. At any rate we do not want to allow them to benefit from the current situation.

Apparently, The New York Times was paying no attention to Talabani's remarks or Babacan's visit to Iraq, or to the Kurdistan Regional Government's unambiguous condemnation of violence and terrorism and commitment to democracy, peace, and friendly relations with its neighbors. Either because they're behind the curve or just determined to ignore anything remotely positive, the NYT editors eagerly embraced doom and gloom today (emphasis added): 

The news out of Iraq just keeps getting worse. Now Turkey is threatening to send troops across the border to wipe out Kurdish rebel bases, after guerrillas killed at least a dozen Turkish soldiers. This latest crisis should have come as no surprise. But it is one more widely predicted problem the Bush administration failed to plan for before its misguided invasion — and one more problem it urgently needs to deal with as part of a swift and orderly exit from Iraq.

Since I'm not a highly-paid editor with a Columbia j-school degree, it's not immediately apparent to me how we urgently deal with the PKK problem as part of a swift and orderly exit from Iraq. Is the NYT suggesting that American troops depart overland to the north and west? 

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