Category: War – Peace – Foreign Affairs

The Price of Liberty

Justin Logan, one of Cato Institute’s nay-sayers, asks: “What Would You Rather Have, The War in Iraq or $1,075?” He notes, “That’s how much you’ve spent on it so far.”

Well, I know his answer: He’d rather have the $1,075. That’s because he’s one of those paleo-libertarians who’d rather wait until he sees the whites of his enemy’s eyes, that is, until it’s too late.

My answer: I’d rather have a successful war in Iraq, even if it costs me a lot more than $1,075. World War II cost the average American more than $20,000 in today’s dollars, not to mention the vastly greater number of casualties inflicted on American forces in that war than in Iraq.

Regardless of what paleo-libertarians and their Leftist allies may think, the war in Iraq is a facet of a larger effort to defeat terrorism, in part by neutralizing its state sponsors. It is not an exercise to slake the blood-lust or power-lust of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axis.

It is imperative to win in Iraq, just as it is imperative to keep the airways safe, even if that means inconveniencing travelers. Terrorists win when they kill us, not when we thwart them. They certainly do not win when a flight is diverted or canceled, as whiners and scoffers (of all political stripes) would have it.

Related posts:
Not Enough Boots
Defense as the Ultimate Social Service
I Have an Idea

I Have an Idea

Let’s just pack up and go home. That’s what the paleos (conservative, libertarian, and liberal) want us to do. So let’s just do it:

  • Let’s pull all of our armed forces back to the United States and its territorial waters. (Better yet, let’s disband the armed forces: threats to the U.S. are merely illusory.)
  • Let’s leave Western Europe to rot in its own socialistic, Muslim-infested juices.
  • Let’s leave the Turks, Kurds, sheikhs, Jihadists, and others to fight it out over the fate of the Middle East and North Africa and their vast reservoirs of oil. (Though we should ensure that Israel is well-stocked with nuclear weapons before we leave.)
  • Let’s leave Central and South America, with their oil and other natural resources, to Hugo Chavez and his ilk.
  • Let’s leave China, North Korea, South Korea, and Japan to fight it out over the fate of East Asia.
  • Let’s leave India, Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan to fight it out over the fate of South and Southwest Asia.
  • Let’s allow the resurgent imperialism of Vladimir Putin to feast on Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the “Stans,” and who knows what else.
  • Let’s just pretend that everything will turn out all right: that someone else will deal with the predators out there; that natural resources won’t be monopolized by despots; and that international trade will flow apace.
  • Let nothing stand between us and the Stalins, Hitlers, and Maos of the 21st Century.

Let’s just do it — and leave this legacy for our descendants:

  • More widespread poverty than at any time since the Great Depression. (Not the “simple but happy” life of the Luddite Left’s imagining.)
  • A garrison state, devoting a large share of a reduced national output to the (perhaps futile) task of keeping predators at bay.

Is that what the paleos want? That’s what they seem to want, given their inability either (a) to find a real threat to our existence or (b) to offer a coherent strategy for dealing with those enemies whose existence they are willing to acknowledge.

Related posts:
Not Enough Boots
Defense as the Ultimate Social Service

Defense as the Ultimate Social Service

After posting “Not Enough Boots” I remembered Strategy for the West, by Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Slessor. There, Slessor says:

It is customary in democratic countries to deplore expenditures on armaments as conflicting with the requirements of the social services. There is a tendency to forget that the most important social service that a government can do for its people is to keep them alive and free.

Not Enough Boots

Mike Rappaport of The Right Coast despairs about Iraq:

[I]t does seem to me that we are now clearly losing in Iraq in large part because the President and Secretary of Defense refused to put enough troops in a couple of years ago. Hardly the first time people will have heard this, but it is the first time that I feel convinced of it.

Perhaps it is not even too late now militarily to put more troops in, but politically the White House seems unlikely to do so. They don’t seem to understand that when it comes to war, it is essential to win. And they are not doing that.

Combined with the Lebanon situation, it is enough to make you despair. Five years out from 9-11, and things look pretty dangerous.

Rappaport, like many another conservative, seems to have been hypnotized by the incessant drumbeat of defeatism in the mainstream media. But he points, nevertheless, to a significant truth: At a time when our forward military strategy requires a larger ground-combat force than it did after the end of the Cold War, that force (i.e., the Army and Marine Corps) remains at the low, post-Cold War levels reached during the Clinton era. Here, courtesy of infoplease, is a history of active duty manpower levels since 1940:

Active Duty Military Personnel, 1940–20061

Year Army Air Force Navy Marine Corps Total
1940 269,023 160,997 28,345 458,365
1945 8,266,373 3,319,586 469,925 12,055,884
1950 593,167 411,277 380,739 74,279 1,459,462
1955 1,109,296 959,946 660,695 205,170 2,935,107
1960 873,078 814,752 616,987 170,621 2,475,438
1965 969,066 824,662 669,985 190,213 2,653,926
1970 1,322,548 791,349 691,126 259,737 3,064,760
1975 784,333 612,751 535,085 195,951 2,128,120
1980 777,036 557,969 527,153 188,469 2,050,627
1985 780,787 601,515 570,705 198,025 2,151,032
1990 732,403 535,233 579,417 196,652 2,043,705
1991 710,821 510,432 570,262 194,040 1,985,555
1992 610,450 470,315 541,886 184,529 1,807,177
1993 572,423 444,351 509,950 178,379 1,705,103
1994 541,343 426,327 468,662 174,158 1,610,490
1995 508,559 400,409 434,617 174,639 1,518,224
1996 491,103 389,001 416,735 174,883 1,471,722
1997 491,707 377,385 395,564 173,906 1,438,562
1998 483,880 367,470 382,338 173,142 1,406,830
1999 479,426 360,590 373,046 172,641 1,385,703
2000 482,170 355,654 373,193 173,321 1,384,338
2001 480,801 353,571 377,810 172,934 1,385,116
2002 486,542 368,251 385,051 173,733 1,413,577
2003 490,174 376,402 379,742 177,030 1,423,348
2004 494,112 369,523 370,445 177,207 1,411,287
2005 488,944 351,666 358,700 178,704 1,378,014
2006 (June) 496,362 352,620 353,496 178,923 1,381,401
NOTE: Figures for 1998 through 2006 include cadets/midshipmen.

1. Military personnel on extended or continuous active duty. Excludes reserves on active duty for training.

Source: Department of Defense.

Information Please® Database, © 2006 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.

The problem isn’t so much with the present administration (though it can be faulted) as it is with the unwillingness of adminstrations and Congresses since the end of the Cold War to provide adequately for the common defense.

More generally, the problem lies in the mindset that takes the end of a war as a signal to demobilize — as we did after World War I, World War II, Vietnam, and the Cold War. It is considered dangerous to prepare for the last war. But it is even more dangerous to assume that the next war will not happen, or that it will be easier than the last.

Englishman Douglas Jerrold, speaking to the Empire Club of Canada in 1949, put it this way:

“But”, say the strategists, “what is the use of attempting to build up ground forces, because who knows what the next war is going to be like, and anything we do now will be out of date?” That is always the argument used in progressive circles for doing nothing. It is what the politicians call “statesmanship”, but statesmen call it by a harder name. There is no record in history of a war which has been lost by preparing for the last war; on the contrary, wars are always lost by those who, failing to do this, inevitably make no preparation at all. If we take the last two great wars, 1914 and 1939, the immense initial successes of the German forces were due solely to the fact that they, and they alone had prepared for the last war. In 1914 they had prepared for the Russo-Japanese War, the war of entrenchments and massed field artillery, and in 1939 they had prepared for the new mechanized war which was used by the British in the Battle of Cambrai in 1917. Had the British and French in 1940 had even half the number of tanks that they employed at Cambrai in 1917, the battle of France would have been won and not lost.

We have got to realize that we have imperative obligations in this matter. The whole of history is one long lesson of the fatal and irrevocable consequences of not being prepared militarily, and there is no technical, financial or other reason why we should not be adequately prepared. Today it is a matter of will power and will power only, and a matter of instructing public opinion in the elements of the necessities of the case.

Hear, hear!

Conspiracy Theorists’ Cousins

The nut-cases who believe that 9/11 was an “inside job” won’t be deterred or converted by facts and logic, but perhaps their paranoia will not spread too far if Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up To The Facts is well publicized. Austin Bay writes about Debunking at TCS Daily:

[It] expands to book-length a collection of articles Popular Mechanics published in March 2005. The book contains new appendices and updated analyses. . . .

[T]he book follows a “Claim” and “Fact” format. Here are excerpts from the section entitled “Melted Steel”:

“Claim: … ‘We have been lied to,’ announces the Web site AttackOnAmerica.net. ‘The first lie was that the load of fuel from the aircraft was the cause of structural failure. No kerosene fire can burn hot enough to melt steel.’ The posting is entitled ‘Proof Of Controlled Demolition At The WTC.’ …”

“FACT: … Jet fuel burns at 1,100 to 1,200 degrees Celsius … significantly less than the 1,510 degrees Celsius typically required to melt steel. . . . However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn’t need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength — and that required exposure to much less heat…”

The “Fact” section includes analysis from structural engineers, a professor of metallurgy and explosives experts.

The 9/11 conspiracy theories have overt and covert promoters. Some are more nuisance than threat. Howard Dean verbally toyed with 9/11 conspiracy theories when he was playing primary election footsie with hard-left constituencies. . . .

[Popular Mechanics editor-in-chief James] Meigs analyzes eight 9/11 conspiracy-spinner techniques. I’ll mention two:

  1. Attempts to “marginalize opposing views.” Meigs says thousands of eyewitness 9/11 accounts and the analyses of numerous universities and professional organizations (including Underwriters Labs and the American Society of Civil Engineers) are dismissed as “the government version.”
  1. Circular reasoning. Meigs writes that ” … among 9/11 theorists, the presence of evidence supporting the mainstream view is also taken as proof of conspiracy.” He concludes: “Like doctrinaire Marxists or certain religious extremists, conspiracists enjoy a world view that is immune to refutation.”

Meigs’ analyses of “demonization” and the “paranoid style” are particularly crisp and compelling.

That should be that, but . . .

Bay’s mention of Howard Dean’s pandering to “hard-left constituencies” leads me to the conspiracy-theorists’ cousins:

  • First, there are the Leftists, who will seize on any excuse to bash a Republican administration. Such Leftists are not true conspiracy-theorists; they would not countenance an “inside job” theory were Al Gore or John Kerry in the White House. They are merely unprincipled, and unhinged in their own way. (See this and this, for example.)
  • Then there are the radical libertarians, who do not subscribe to “inside job” theories. No, their conspiracy theory runs on a parallel track: The undeniably evil state is interested only in power, and it seizes on every opportunity to accrue more power. Thus it overblows the threat of terrorism and takes away our liberties, a slice at a time. (See this, for one example.)

Radical libertarians would be a greater threat to liberty than conspiracy nuts and Leftists, were there more than enough rad-libs to fill a high-school football stadium. Why? Because they seem more plausible than conspiracy nuts and Leftists; that is, they do not foam at the mouth.

Rad-libs are quick to assign evil motives to the state, without examining the evil motives of our enemies or acknowledging the necessity of state action against those enemies (given that we do not live in the stateless nirvana to which rad-libs aspire). Rad-libs are quick to minimize the dangers of terrorism by comparing the risk of being killed by terrorism to such risks as dying in an auto accident or falling off a ladder — as if one could nullify terrorism by driving or climbing ladders more often.

Finally, rad-libs fail to acknowledge the likelihood that the low risk of being killed by terrorism is owed to those very actions that rad-libs assail as inimical to liberty (e.g., NSA surveillance, “sneak and peak” warrants). They prefer death in a pure state of liberty, which is not liberty at all.

Carnival of Links

I collect interesting links, group them by topic, and dump each related set of links into a draft post. Then, using the links as a starting point, I convert the draft to a full-blown post, as I have time.

I still have many interesting links in my collection that I probably won’t build into full-blown posts. Rather than hoard or discard those links, I present them here, organized by topic and with brief descriptions.

Liberty and the State

Mere Libertarianism: Blending Hayek and Rothbard: Agree or not with the author’s premises and conclusions, it’s an informative comparison of the two main schools of libertarianism.

Anarchism: Further Thoughts: An analysis of the varieties of anarchism and the faults of each.

Tax Rates Around the World: A brief post about the disincentivizing effects of high tax rates.

Paternalism and Psychology: A different look at the wrongness of “libertarian paternalism.”

Principles and Pragmatism: Why one libertarian blogger prefers idealism to pragmatism.

Lochner v. New York: A Centennial Perspective: (go to download link for full paper) The author of this long paper suggests that Lochner‘s much reviled “substantive due process” holding is in fact the basis for key Supreme Court decisons (e.g., Griswold v. Connecticut, Roe v. Wade, and Lawrence v. Texas).

Terrorism, War, and Related Matters

Apply the Golden Rule to Al Qaeda?: Why it makes no sense to apply Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions to terrorist detainees.

Captain Ed’s archive on Saddam’s Documents: A collection of posts about Saddam’s WMDs and terrorist ties.

The ACLU and Airport Security: How the ACLU is trying to depict behavior profiling as racial profiling.

Infinite Hatred: Considers and rejects the idea that it is futile to kill terrorists.

They, the People: An essay that parses the degrees of conflict and suggests that all-out war is the best way to change the hearts and minds of the enemy.

The Brink of Madness: A Familiar Place and The Mideast’s Munich: War with the Mullahs Is Coming: Two persuasive arguments that the West’s present mindset is like that which prevailed at the time of the Munich Agreement in 1938.

Sustaining Our Resolve: A sober but upbeat assessment of the prospects for the Middle East and the war on terror, by George P. Schultz.

Is the Bush Doctrine Dead?: An analysis by Norman Podhoretz.

Code Red: In which the writer tackles several anti-war and anti-anti-terror shibboleths.

Presidential Signing Statements

Bush’s Tactic of Refusing Laws Is Probed: An article about a panel of the American Bar Association’s so-called probe of Bush’s signing statements. (This WaPo article is anti-Bush, of course, but it sets the stage for the next two links.)

Enforcing the Constitution: A brief post defending signing statements.

The Problem with Presidential Signing Statements: A longer analysis of signing statements that also defends them.

Ideas

The Fifty Worst (and Best) Books of the Century: A distinguished panel of libertarian-conservatives compiles a list of the worst and best. The lists of worsts seems about right. The list of bests includes too many boring “classics.”

“Fake but Accurate?” Science: A scathing indictment of the “hockey stick” curve — which purports to show that global warming is only a recent phenomenon — its author, and its coterie of defenders.

The Problem of the Accuracy of Economic Data: An exposition of the spurious precision of economic statistics and analyses based on them.

Taking On Torture

There is a reason for the United States to abjure torture. That reason can be summarized thusly: We could allow torture in exigent circumstances (e.g., to save the life of a kidnapped child who has been buried in a sealed container, where the perpetrator is in custody and is unwilling to disclose the child’s location). But if we do that, it is likely that the precedent will result in the use of torture in circumstances where an innocent person is tortured to no avail.

As an answer to that objection, there is Alan Dershowitz’s proposal to legitimate and regulate torture (as summarized at Wikipedia):

Although [Dershowitz] claims to be personally against the use of torture, he believes that authorities should be permitted to use non-lethal torture in a “ticking bomb” scenario, regardless of whether international law permits it, and that it would be less destructive to the rule of law to regulate the process than to leave it up to the discretion of individual law-enforcement agents. Under his proposal, the government would not be allowed to prosecute the torture subject based upon information revealed under that interrogation method. “If torture is going to be administered as a last resort in the ticking-bomb case, to save enormous numbers of lives, it ought to be done openly, with accountability, with approval by the president of the United States or by a Supreme Court justice”. [A CNN interview of Dershowitz on this subject is here.]

Relatedly, Tom Bevan of the RealClearPolitics Blog writes about an exchange between Charles Krauthammer and Michael Kinsley:

Last December Charles Krauthammer argued the following in a Weekly Standard cover story:

However rare the cases, there are circumstances in which, by any rational moral calculus, torture not only would be permissible but would be required (to acquire life-saving information). And once you’ve established the principle, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, all that’s left to haggle about is the price. In the case of torture, that means that the argument is not whether torture is ever permissible, but when–i.e., under what obviously stringent circumstances: how big, how imminent, how preventable the ticking time bomb.

Michael Kinsley responded the following week, calling Krauthammer’s argument a case of “salami-slicing:”

You start with a seemingly solid principle, then start slicing: If you would torture to save a million lives, would you do it for half a million? A thousand? Two dozen? What if there’s only a two-out-of-three chance that person you’re torturing has the crucial information? A 50-50 chance? One chance in 10? At what point does your moral calculus change, and why? Slice the salami too far, and the formerly solid principle disappears.

If the reports out of Pakistan are true [that Pakistan used torture to develop the intelligence that led to the breakup of the plot to take down 10 UK-U.S. flights], this theoretical debate just became much more interesting, because we now have a very real slice of salami. If more than four thousand lives were saved as a direct result of intel obtained using torture, does that make it justified? I think it’s clear what Krauthammer would say. But what about Kinsley? Are four thousand innocent lives a big enough slice of salami for him?

Krauthammer seems to subscribe to something along the lines of Dershowitz’s proposal. Kinsley does not, because he is worried about proportionality. In Kinsley’s case, the proportion must be, say, tens of potential victims saved for every act of torture. That’s akin to the foolish notion that it is better that ten [or 100] guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer. But, as I put it here,

Better for whom? It’s better for the guilty, who may claim more victims, but certainly not better for those victims. [See also this post.]

With respect to torture, the right proportion, under the right circumstances, is one to one. Why should the life of, say, one kidnapped child be sacrificed because we are unwilling to condone the torture of one known perpetrator? Where’s the morality in that?

It seems to me that given the circumstances now surrounding the United States, we should openly adopt a policy along the lines of Dershowitz’s proposal, as opposed to posturing piously about torture à la John McCain.

Other related post: A Rant about Torture

Leni Riefenstahl Redux

Mike Wallace does for Iran’s Ahmadinejad what Leni Riefenstahl did for Hitler.

Testing, Testing

From the Associated Press:

Chertoff says U.S. needs more authority

WASHINGTON – The nation’s chief of homeland security said Sunday that the U.S. should consider reviewing its laws to allow for more electronic surveillance and detention of possible terror suspects, citing last week’s foiled plot.

Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, stopped short of calling for immediate changes, noting there might be constitutional barriers to the type of wide police powers the British had in apprehending suspects in the plot to blow up airliners headed to the U.S.

But Chertoff made clear his belief that wider authority could thwart future attacks at a time when Congress is reviewing the proper scope of the Bush administration’s executive powers for its warrantless eavesdropping program and military tribunals for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“What helped the British in this case is the ability to be nimble, to be fast, to be flexible, to operate based on fast-moving information,” he said. “We have to make sure our legal system allows us to do that. It’s not like the 20th century, where you had time to get warrants.”

The outcry from “civil libertarians” is bound to be loud and shrill. “Civil libertarians” are focused exclusively on the protection of “rights” for the sake of, well, protecting “rights.” They take no interest in actually protecting fundamental rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

P.S. Score one for the defenders of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in their battle against the American “Civil Liberties” Union. The right not to be bombed triumphs over the “right” not to be searched in NYC.

Related post: Privacy: Variations on the Theme of Liberty

A Message to Our Domestic Enemies

Yesterday I quoted Alan Furst. In light of last night’s events in the UK, I repeat what Mr. Furst said:

[G]ood people don’t spend much time being good, mostly they want to mow the lawn and play with the dog, whereas bad people spend all their time being bad, or thinking up ways to be worse. Then, one day, the good people have to turn around and do something, or the whole thing will go off the cliff.

Any person or institution who stands in the way of detecting and preventing terrorism is traitorous. Do you read me, George Soros, Mikhail Moore, Cindy Sheehan, The New York Times, and the ACLU?

UPDATE: There should be a special place in hell for leakers.

Related post: Com-Patriotism and Anti-Patriotic Acts

The Problem of Good vs. Evil

[G]ood people don’t spend much time being good, mostly they want to mow the lawn and play with the dog, whereas bad people spend all their time being bad, or thinking up ways to be worse. Then, one day, the good people have to turn around and do something, or the whole thing will go off the cliff.

Alan Furst, author of several best-selling novels about espionage, set in Europe before and during World War II. From an interview posted at TCS Daily.

My Alma Mater in (Typical) Action

From WorldWideStandard.com:

The Center for Naval Analyses has just released a report on “Managing Civil Strife and Avoiding Civil War in Iraq.” A senior military analyst emailed me his take after reviewing the report:

There are two interesting things about this report, in my view. First, although the panelists identified the power vacuum [see here for more on the roots of this vacuum) as the greatest factor contributing to the rise of militias on both sides, they assume, apparently without much discussion, that the US can do nothing to fill this vacuum. Second, they focus almost entirely on recommending solutions that rely on improvements in things we have the least control and leverage over. . . .

The discussion about what to do in Iraq is spinning off into never-never land as people focus ever more on irrelevant theories and propose solutions that can’t be implemented. . . .

This piece by Dexter Filkins in today’s New York Times seems to confirm much of the above.

Typical. It’s just what you’d expect from an institution which is headed by a self-described “Carter Democrat,” and the staff of which comprises too many political non-scientists, whose idea of finding the truth is to convene “balanced” panels of bloviators. Yet one more bit wasteful exercise in self-aggrandizement, at the taxpayers’ expense.

P.S. The first link in the block quotation takes you to the home page of the Center’s parent organization, The CNA Corporation. The conference report in question is here.

Parsing Peace

Peace comes through amity, comity, deterrence, victory, or surrender. When you have intransigent enemies — enemies who are dedicated to the demise of your civilization — the only available options are deterrence, victory, or surrender. When those enemies are fanatical, the only options are victory or surrender.

Those who merely wish for peace — but who are unwilling to fight for it (or support the fight for it) — have opted for the peace of surrender.

Related post: Riots, Culture, and the Final Showdown

That Sums It Up

Israel’s ambassador to the UN said,

for us, every dead Lebanese child is a mistake and a tragedy; for them, every dead Israeli child is a victory and a cause for celebration.

(Thanks to Kim Priestap of Wizbang! for the quotation.)

"Proportionate Response" in Perspective

“Proportionate response,” as it has come to be used lately, means that a nation with more potent military forces than those of than its enemies should give the enemies a “handicap,” just as a better golfer gives a lesser golfer a handicap in a country-club match.

Israel, to name the nation in question, has a potent military force precisely because it is surrounded by enemies who would destroy it. Israel is most decidely not playing a country-club golf match or playing a game of tit for tat. Israel is fighting for its survival. It needs every ounce of military might it possesses, and then some. Proportionality, in this case, should mean the application by Israel of enough of its military might to ensure its survival. Israel cannot afford to err on the side of caution.

What about the civilian casualties that Israel inflicts — incidentally and unwillingly — as it defends itself? Regrettable, yes. But what about the civilian casualties among Israelis if Israel fails to defend itself adequately? Or don’t the lives of Israelis matter? Apparently not, to those who cynically cry “disproportionate response” as Israel defends itself.

Anti-Bush or Pro-Treason?

It’s sometimes hard to tell the difference.

Unclaimed Territory – by Glenn Greenwald (as he modestly calls his blog) gets snippy in a post about “right wing” bloggers. (Patriots are safer targets when they’re called “right wingers.”) The post (dated July 16) is “Journalists: It’s time for some articles on the pro-Bush blogosphere.” Greenwald expends a couple of updates ranting about Little Green Footballs and Michelle Malkin. Their sins? Greenwald speaks:

UPDATE: Helpfully right on cue, LGF has a post today entitled “The Media are the Enemy” — a title which really summarizes one of the principal points made on a daily basis by the blogs maintained by Powerline, Instapundit, and Malkin. Today’s treasonous act is that a NYT photographer took photographs of a member of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army engaged in combat with American forces. Apparently, taking a photograph of someone engaged in a war is the same as aiding and abetting them and being on their side and rooting for them to win. Hence, photographers who take photographs of the enemy are themselves “the enemy.” . . .

UPDATE II: Michelle Malkin’s post today is entitled “In the Company of the Enemy” and she pointedly says: “Which side are they on? The New York Times settles the question definitively” — both with an editorial that criticizes the Leader and with the photographs found by LGF. She then links to John Hinderaker at Powerline, who cleverly observes that there was nothing courageous about the photographer taking those photographs because there was no “likelihood that a member of the Iraqi “insurgency” would regard a representative of the New York Times as an enemy.”

This photographer-as-traitor lunacy spreading among them like wildfire may make it seem like I fortuitously picked a good day to highlight the extremism and treason-obsession of the pro-Bush blogosphere. But today is nothing new. This goes on every day with the right’s largest blogs. Every day, a new traitor, more treason, more journalists and Democrats who deserve to be hanged.

It smacks of nothing but treason to take a photograph of a sniper taking aim on the soldiers of your own country instead of telling the soldiers of your own country where the sniper is located. But Greenwald doesn’t try to explain why the act wasn’t treasonous — as if he could. He merely attacks those who call it treasonous. Why? Because they’re “pro-Bush.”

Being for the defense of this nation and against treason isn’t a pro-or-anti-Bush issue. (Well, it shouldn’t be one, anyway.) The problem we have here isn’t with the likes of LGF, Michelle Malkin, and Powerline. No, the problem is with the likes of Glenn Greenwald, who reflexively defends anyone and anything that seems opposed to the policies of the Bush administration, even treasonous newspapers.

The New York Times treasonously publishes classified information that aids terrorists. But that’s all right with the Greewalds of this world, as long as it goes against the wishes of the Bush administration. The fact that publishing such information undermines the war on terror doesn’t matter to a Greenwald, as long as you’re anti-Bush.

All of that is lost on Greenwald. He is wedded to the notion that his anti-Bush stance is a courageous one because he harbors the delusion that he is part of a beleaguered minority. For example, in a reply to a commenter he says that

[t]he left-wing blogosphere performs functions for liberals which no other venue is performing, while the right-wing blogosphere is largely redundant and arguably unnecessary in light of Fox News, right-wing radio, Townhall, Drudge and other similar venues.

It’s as if ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, NPR, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, etc., etc., etc., were objective sources of information rather than megaphones for the anti-Bush, anti-war (because it’s anti-Bush) crowd. Greenwald is a fish in water. In his distorted view of reality, anti-Americanism is the norm and patriotism is an aberration.

Related posts:
Treasonous Speech?
I Dare Call It Treason
Shall We All Hang Separately?
Foxhole Rats
Foxhole Rats, Redux
Know Thine Enemy
The Faces of Appeasement
We Have Met the Enemy . . .
Whose Liberties Are We Fighting For?
More Foxhole Rats
Hanging Separately
In Which I Reply to the Executive Editor of The New York Times
The Wages of Publicity
The New York Times: A Hot-Bed of Post-Americanism
Post-Americans and Their Progeny

"Peace for Our Time"

That seems to be the unspoken motto of Cato Institute‘s vice president for defense and foreign policy studies, Ted Galen Carpenter. In a recent emission about the Iran problem, Carpenter considers various military and non-military options, and rejects each of them, except the least effective (to which I will come). He is especially exercised by the notion of a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities:

If the United States attacks yet another Muslim country (which would make three in the last five years), there will not be a Muslim from Morocco to Malaysia who will not believe that Washington is out to destroy their culture and religion. America’s troubles with the Islamic world do not yet constitute a war of civilizations, but [a pre-emptive] strategy could well produce that result.

This is wrong at several levels. First, there is a “war” of civilizations, that war being between radical Islam and the liberal traditions of the West. (By liberal, I mean dedicated to liberty — as in the tradition of Adam Smith and the Framers of the Constitution — not dedicated to statism — as in the tradition of the Roosevelts and today’s Democrat Party.) We cannot default in that war simply for the sake of mollifying the “Muslim street.”

Second, if the clear purpose of an attack on Iran is the defeat of a dangerous, radical Islamic regime bent on the destruction of liberal values, those who choose to side with that regime would have be unworthy allies in the first place. And — to anyone who is not blinded by hatred of the U.S. — our purpose would be clear, given the history of the Iranian regime and its support of anti-American and anti-Western causes.

Third, hearts and minds were aren’t won by cringing indecisiveness, they are won by bold action. The “masses” tend to side with a “winner.”

Fourth, Iran’s regime is far from universally loved in the Islamic world. Many Muslims would rejoice in its humiliation and eventual ouster.

Fifth, massive hatred of the U.S. among mostly powerless Muslims — if it came to that — would be better than the alternative, which is to permit powerful Muslims (e.g., the Iranian regime) to pursue their military ambitions.

Carpenter, true to form, nevertheless counsels appeasement:

We should make a serious diplomatic effort to get Iran to give up its quest for nuclear weapons–and that means going substantially beyond the scope of the current EU-3-led negotiations. Washington should propose a grand bargain to Tehran. That means giving an assurance that the United States will not use force against Iran the way we did against such nonnuclear adversaries as Serbia and Iraq. It also means offering restored diplomatic relations and normal economic relations. In return, Iran would be required to open its nuclear program to unfettered international inspections to guarantee that the program is used solely for peaceful power-generation purposes.

It is possible that Tehran would spurn a proposed grand bargain, since the Iranian political elite seems divided about whether to seek a rapprochement with the United States. Indeed, Iran may be unalterably determined to join the global nuclear weapons club. But we will never know for certain unless we make the offer.

If Iran turns down the proposal, Washington’s fall-back position should be to rely on deterrence. The one thing we should not do is start yet another war.

Even if Iran were to “accept” such a proposal it likely would do just what North Korea did when it “accepted” Bill Clinton’s proposal in 1994: continue on its present path in secret. (Is there no end to the naïveté of the anti-any-war crowd?)

The fallback to deterrence rings hollow, at least coming from someone like Carpenter, who would counsel restraint in the face of every provocation short of an Iranian missile attack on the continental United States. Deterrence is meaningful only if it promises the use of military force against Iran for any action against the U.S. or Israel, wherever such action occurs. (The action against Israel may have occurred today. AP reports: “Elite Iranian troops helped Hezbollah fire a sophisticated radar-guided missile at an Israeli warship in a surprise blow by militants who had been using only low-tech weapons, Israeli officials said Saturday.”)

Why involve Israel? Because our failure to defend a long-standing ally against an overt or covert attack by Iran would invite Iran to attack U.S. overseas interests with impunity.

When Neville Chamberlain declined to defend Czechoslovakia, and instead signed the Munich Agreement, he encouraged Hitler’s aggressive designs on Europe. Carpenter and his ilk counsel another Munich. Will they never learn?

We can avoid another Munich — and its certain consequences — only if we do not delude ourselves about Iran’s intentions, and only if we take decisive action when Iran attacks our allies or our interests.

Related posts:
Libertarian Nay-Saying on Foreign and Defense Policy
Libertarianism and Preemptive War: Part I
Right On! For Libertarian Hawks Only
Understanding Libertarian Hawks
More about Libertarian Hawks and Doves
Sorting Out the Libertarian Hawks and Doves
Libertarianism and Preemptive War: Part II
Give Me Liberty or Give Me Non-Aggression?
More Final(?) Words about Preemption and the Constitution

What Would We Do Without the UN?

UPDATED, 11:20 PM

The lede of an AP story:

UNITED NATIONS – Japan said Wednesday it is considering sanctions against North Korea in a U.N. resolution that would condemn the reclusive communist nation’s missile tests and call for a return to six-party talks on its nuclear program.

Maybe if North Korea were less reclusive . . . (Hah!)

UPDATE: In case you were wondering whether Russia and China are our allies:

UNITED NATIONS – China and Russia resisted an attempt in the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions against North Korea for its missile launches Wednesday, saying only diplomacy could halt the isolated regime’s nuclear and rocket development programs.

Seems to me that what brought the USSR to its knees wasn’t diplomacy.

Sic ’em, George.

The Lessons of the Hamdan Decision

The Supreme Court today handed down its 5-3 decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. According to SCOTUSblog,

[t]he Supreme Court ruled . . . that Congress did not take away the Court’s authority to rule on the military commissions’ validity, and then went ahead to rule that President Bush did not have authority to set up the tribunals at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and found the commissions illegal under both military justice law and the Geneva Convention. In addition, the Court concluded that the commissions were not authorized when Congress enacted the post-9/1l resolution authorizing a response to the terrorist attacks, and were not authorized by last year’s Detainee Treatment Act. The vote against the commissions and on the Court’s jurisdiction was 5-3, with the Chief Justice not taking part.

The Court expressly declared that it was not questioning the government’s power to hold Salim Ahmed Hamdan “for the duration of active hostilities” to prevent harm to innocent civilians. But, it said, “in undertaking to try Hamdan and subject him to criminal punishment, the Executive is bound to comply with the Rule of Law that prevails in this jurisdiction.”

Okay, so here are the lessons:

1. Don’t hold ememy combatants at Gitmo.

2. Try again after the retirement of Justice Stevens (author of the majority opinion).

3. Let the Court enforce its own rulings.

4. AJ Strata says, “can’t try them, so fry them.”

More Takes on the New York Times

Michael Barone asks — and answers — the question “Whose side are they on?“

Ann Coulter opens with this question: “When is the New York Times going to get around to uncovering an al-Qaida secret program?”