This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Author: Jonn Lilyea

  • Sadr’s army; under seige

    As I predicted, AP reports that Sadr’s army is feeling the “surge” while US troops are still preparing to leave the US;

    Two Shiite militia commanders said Thursday that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has stopped protecting radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Madhi Army under pressure from Washington, while the fighters described themselves as under seige in their Sadr City stronghold.

    Their account of an organization now fighting for its very existence could represent a tactical and propaganda feint, but there was mounting evidence the militia is increasingly off balance and has ordered its gunmen to melt back into the population. To avoid capture, commanders report no longer using cell phones and fighters are removing their black uniforms and hiding their weapons during the day.

    From Curt at Flopping Aces, we’ve read that a top Sadr aide has been captured;

    Sheik Abdul-Hadi al-Darraji, al-Sadr’s media director in Baghdad, was captured in the eastern neighborhood of Baladiyat, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of security concerns.

    This is significant, as Captain Ed at Captain’s Quarters points out;

    Another interesting point about Darraji’s arrest is where it took place. The troops raided a mosque in Baghdad to get him, which may show that initial reluctance to enter the worship sites has faded. This might be the best indicator of how seriously the Americans and Iraqis take this mission. They’re not out to win hearts and minds with this phase of the new strategy, but to find and destroy the enemy. This is reminiscent of the action taken in 2004 against the Mahdis, before Sadr wisely capitulated in return for his freedom.

    So, the new strategy in Iraq no only includes the famous “surge”, but also a common sense change of tactics. Maybe we’ll turn those brave warriors of ours loose for and change and let them break stuff kill people like they’re trained to do.

    Expect more yipping and yapping from terrorist huggers like Murtha, Durbin and Kerry.

  • Democrats screw working people — again

    Democrats passed legislation yesterday aimed at recovering about $10b in royalties from “Big Oil”. Who do Democrats think they’ll be getting that money from, anyway? Do they honestly think that the energy companies will just dig down deep and fork over the money from their own pockets? Hell, no.

    They’ll just raise prices on the consumer end of the chain. I’m not saying that’s wrong (I’d do the same thing in their position), but I do blame the Democrats for being disingenuous about the whole thing.

    That’s a $10 billion dollar hit on the entire economy and an unneccessary one at that. Did the government pay $10 billion to oil companies when they were operating on razor-thin profit margins in the late 90s? Is that $10 billion going back to the consumers who kept paying for $3.80 gasoline and kept the economy going through the last few years of the increasing fuel prices? That would almost make sense wouldn’t it?

    But, nope, that money is going into Washington political maneuvering. Democrats love to take money from rich people – rich, faceless corporations are even more fun to stick up apparently. I’m sure the Democrats are celebrating their thievery as some sort of Robin Hood exercise, but we’re all going to end up paying for it – it’s a tax hike on working Americans disguised as “social justice”.

  • MoveOn targets McCain

    I don’t know how many times in the last seven years I’ve heard or read that John McCain is a moderate candidate for President that the Left could stomach electing. From the time he started his “Straight Talk Express”, the media has been in love with him. But I’ve always doubted that was true, and said as much at every opportunity. I was sure that in the run-up to the 2000 primaries, the Left wanted McCain to run because he was easier to beat in the general election than George W. Bush.

    When McCain lost the Republican bid, many on the Left used the fact that McCain wasn’t the candidate as an excuse to oppose Bush at every opportunity (until they used the war against terror to oppose him at every opportunity).

    Now, from the Washington Post, I read that MoveOn.org has already begun running ads against McCain’s candidacy;

    Over the past several election cycles, Moveon.org has demonstrated a willingness to throw its weight around in the political process.

    Today provides yet another example, as the influential liberal group is up with television commercials intended label Sen. John McCain — the leading Republican candidate for president in 2008 — as the leading supporter of sending more U.S. troops to Iraq.

    In the ad, as images of McCain and President Bush flash across the screen, a narrator intones: “John McCain has done more than just embrace George Bush’s failed policy in Iraq. It’s actually his idea to escalate the war there.”  

    If he was such a wonderful choice for us in 2000, what has changed since? Nothing, really. McCain has always been strongly for our national defense, so his support for the so-called “surge” isn’t surprising.

    I suspect that MoveOn.org’s strategy is a move to push Republicans towards McCain (what self-respecting Republican would vote against a Republican candidate in a primary because MoveOn.org told them to vote against him?). MoveOn.org doesn’t normally throw away money trying to influence registered Republicans to vote against their candidates because those candidates don’t support the Democrat side of the issue. Especially in the primary.

    I guess they figure they can’t influence Republicans honestly, so they’ll try skullduggery. Again.

  • Piling on Jimmy Carter

    Everyone seems to be taking shots at Jimmy Carter today. By everyone, I mean the world of bloggers. Sister Toldja, Powerline and Crotchety Old Bastard get their licks in today. It’s probably because he’s an elitist SOB who has never gotten over his 1980 defeat. or it could be because he writes crap like this in the Washington Post;

    I am concerned that public discussion of my book “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid” has been diverted from the book’s basic proposals: that peace talks be resumed after six years of delay and that the tragic persecution of Palestinians be ended. Although most critics have not seriously disputed or even mentioned the facts and suggestions about these two issues, an apparently concerted campaign has been focused on the book’s title, combined with allegations that I am anti-Israel. This is not good for any of us who are committed to Israel’s status as a peaceful nation living in harmony with its neighbors.

    So, because no one is paying attention to what he’s saying in his book, we all deserve to die? Every time someone does pay attention to his book, they find lies and misrepresentations – lies and misrepresentations he refuses to defend in public. Of coourse the media calls it polarizing the discussion about the Middle East, but an intellectually honest person would call it propaganda.

    Carter calls the politics in Israel apartheid and refers to the Israeli occupation – two terms that are so rigid in their meaning, there’s no room for discussion. Carter has purposely used extreme terms to stifle debate. He only demands agreement;

    Abbas is wise in repeating to Secretary Rice that he rejects any “interim” boundaries for the Palestinian state. The step-by-step road-map formula promulgated almost three years ago for reaching a final agreement has proved to be a non-starter — and an excuse for not making any progress.

    So everyone should give in completely to the Palestinians? No “roadmap”? No concessions? And, jimmy, why don’t you tell us why the “step-by-step” formula doesn’t work? Maybe because the Palestinians are so steeped in their hatred of Israelis that they can’t help but kill Israelis no matter what the Israelis give the Palestinians.

    The premise of exchanging Arab territory for peace has been acceptable for several decades to a majority of Israelis but not to a minority of the more conservative leaders, who are unfortunately supported by most of the vocal American Jewish community.

    And what happened last year when the Israelis exchanged territory for peace? Did they get peace?

    See Carter playing fast and loose with the truth is not new. He promised in his “malaise speech” that he would build refineries and piplines which never materialized. He promised before the 1976 election that he would never surrender the Panama Canal Zone to Panamanians.

    I wrote a paper in college about the Torrijos-Carter Treaty and I had to read his “Keeping the Faith” memoirs and discovered a paragraph that explained why he figured the American people were for giving away the Canal. He explained that even though only 20% of Americans agreed we should give up that resource, 75% of Americans who “understood the issue” as he did agreed with him.

    That’s what Jimmy Carter thinks of the average American. That’s why he lost the 1980 election and why he continues to be the worst ex-President in history.

    UPDATE: According to Fox News Channel (by way of Little Green Footballs) I’m reading that Brandeis will allow Alan Dershowitz to rebut Carter after Carter’s lecture there next week.

  • More “US troops join war protests” stories [Updated]

    An article from the Hampton Roads Daily Press;

    Several dozen service members joined peace activists today to call for an end to the war in Iraq, part of a nationwide effort that links a growing group of active-duty protesters to the peace movement.

    An “appeal for redress” petition, signed by more than 1,000 active duty soldiers and sailors nationwide — many of whom served in Iraq — is to be delivered to Congress on Tuesday.

    On a day devoted to honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Norfolk-based Seaman Jonathan Hutto quoted the civil rights leader at a gathering of war protestors at the Unitarian Church of Norfolk.

    “Dissent is not disloyalty,” Hutto said, noting that King objected to the Vietnam War and insisted that protestors “were not fools or traitors.”

    Invoking the name of Martin Luther King, Jr. to defend their own cowardice, huh? I tend to think that Martin Luther King, Jr. would be more than pleased that the US has freed millions of Iraqis and Afghanis from their respective yokes of oppression, rather than defend the selfish desires of a few.

    Roughly 100 people attended the gathering to hear speeches and to rally support for veterans who are speaking out against the war.

    “Roughly 100” people? That’s hardly a surge of support in a town like Hampton Roads which is nearly half military and former military. If it was in support of the war, “roughly 100 people” wouldn’t even make the news.

    I checked the two complete names in the article against the publicly available records on Military.com’s Buddy Finder. Jonathan Hotto is indeed a member of the Navy, but the other fellow, Jabbar Magruder, doesn’t have a record there, although there is indeed a Jabbar Magruder in California. At the risk of being called “not terribly bright“, I have to assume that Magruder is another wannabe.

    “We served in combat and we’ve seen the futility of this war,” said Sgt. Jabbar Magruder of Los Angeles, a member of the National Guard who served 11 months in Tikrit, a town northwest of Baghdad. “The soldiers want to resist. The soldiers want to come home now. We need the citizens to back us.”

    Sorry, Jabbar, but 100 people or even 1000 people on a petition doesn’t justify bringing troops home from a legal war.

    Oh, and by the way, attending a political rally and representing yourself as a member of the military to lend credence to your cause is indeed a crime whether you’re in uniform or not. Please scroll down to page N-4 and N-5 at this link and read the prohibited activities sections like the one that mentions “no implied government position or involvement”.

    UPDATED: I bumped this back to the top because it turns out that my rudimentary research into Jonathan Hutto is juvenile in comparison with the research that the Mudville Gazette‘s Greyhawk has done here, here and here on the little communist and the rest of Petition for Redress crowd.

    I’ll just sit silently with my hands folded.

  • How to be cowardly without really trying

    The Wall Street Journal reports that Congress may take up a resolution condemning the President’s escalation of troops in Iraq (that has already begun and is already paid for) as early as this week;

    The two-part strategy is on display this week as top Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee expect to announce agreement on a resolution challenging President Bush’s decision to increase U.S. troop levels. As those talks proceed, the House Appropriations Committee will also begin hearings this morning to lay the groundwork for tougher fights over war-related spending requests this spring and summer.

    Since the Democrat’s majority in Congress is razor-thin, they’ll depend on cross-over (or crossdressing) Republicans;

    “For those of us from the Northeast, it’s pretty evident that people are losing patience and want to get out,” said Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R., N.J.), a member of the defense appropriations panel. “A lot of people are peeling off from supporting the president.”

    So? What’s the big damn deal? Sometimes the American people are the most fickle creatures on earth. When they had a chance to impeach the worst criminal to have ever served in the White House, they supported him. Most sat on the sidelines and watched us dragged kicking and fighting from Vietnam while we were winning the war. Americans lose patience pretty easily.

    I remember the Panama invasion when the man-on-the-street interviews were full of idiot questions like “When are the troops coming home?” the day after the invasion began. I remember the people decrying that we torturing poor Manuel Noriega by forcing him to listen to Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me” – not to mention the poor representatives of the Holy See who were trapped in there with him.

    Americans don’t have the stomach for war, generally speaking, which is why we have a volunteer military. That compounds the problem because Americans don’t generally understand why men go to war for this country and they don’t understand that the members of our military are willing to die for the less committed members of our society.

    They don’t want to die for nothing, which why they’re over there giving their all – despite American public opinion. From the moment the first US troop died, it became a war that we couldn’t lose, in their eyes.

    The Washington Post tells us that politically ambiguous Chuck Hagel is in cahoots with Biden and Levin against the President;

    Senate leaders will introduce a bipartisan resolution of opposition to President Bush’s new Iraq policy as early as today, taking the lead from House Democrats who are increasingly divided on how far to go to thwart additional troop deployments to Iraq.

    The resolution — crafted by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) and Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) — will not come to a vote before Bush’s State of the Union address on Tuesday. But by sending it to Biden’s committee this week, Democratic leaders will give senators from both parties multiple opportunities to voice concerns about the president’s policy.

    Ain’t that sweet of them to wait until after the State of the Union address (which by the way will be rebutted by terminal asshole and political turncoat Jim Webb). So the party we could always couont on for our National Security is turning into the party of namby-pamby political hackery.

    Bill Krystal calls Congress “Boneless Wonders“, borrowing from a Churchill quote. Krystal describes the thought processes of these spineless cowards;

    Say you’re an average congressman. How do you react to President Bush’s Iraq speech? You suspect, deep down, that he’s probably doing more or less what he needs to do. We can’t just click our heels and get out of Iraq–the consequences would be disastrous. And the current strategy isn’t working. You have said so yourself. Last fall you called for replacing Rumsfeld. You’ve complained that there weren’t enough troops. What’s more, you’ve heard good things about General David Petraeus from colleagues with military expertise. So now Bush has fired Rumsfeld, put Petraeus in command, and sent in more troops. Maybe this new approach deserves a chance to work?

    But, hey . . . look at those polls! And those op-ed pages! You didn’t come to Washington to support an unpopular president conducting an unpopular war. And the Bush administration is doing a crummy job of explaining this change in strategy. The path ahead in any case is going to be tough, and the new strategy might fail. Besides which, being for “escalation” sure doesn’t sound good. Wasn’t that a problem in Vietnam?

    So you work on your talking points: You understand the president has a tough set of choices. You’ve got doubts about the path he’s chosen. You’ve got lots of questions. But perhaps we should give it a chance . . .

    But wait–that doesn’t sound like leadership. That doesn’t look decisive. And, if you’re a Democrat–you didn’t put in all that effort getting elected just so you could get a lot of grief from your own activists. If you’re a Republican from a Democratic-leaning state–you didn’t put in all those hours getting elected just so you could alienate the swing voters you need. So why not take the next step? Condemn the president’s approach! There. That’s a position.

    So Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, will make a purely political and pointless effort to undermine the President by voting to condemn exactly what they called for a year ago – escalation in troop numbers. So not only do the Democrats want the troops and the country to be cowardly, they take a cowardly approach to condemning the war – just like their cowardly approach to banning smoking. A sideways, through-the-backdoor kind of politically expeditious cowardice.

  • The Lukewarm Washington Post

    I’m really getting a major case of The Ass at the Washington Post’s editors this week. I just ran across this story in the WaPo that’s headlined “Saudi prince Offers Lukewarm Support on Iraq” which refers to this quote by the prince;

    Prince Saud al-Faisal said he supported “the objectives” of Bush’s plan, which calls for an increase of 20,000 troops to secure Baghdad, but declined to discuss the specifics.

    “The details of how to implement those objectives, I don’t think we can cover in one night of discussions,” Saud said, speaking after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had evening and morning meetings with King Abdullah and other Saudi officials. “So I really cannot comment on the means that will be applied.”

    So what kind of comment would not be “lukewarm” for the Post? Further on we read;

    Saud’s response to Rice’s visit was distinctly cooler than that of the Egyptian foreign minister, who after a meeting with Rice on Monday said Egypt was “supportive of that plan.”

    Oh, yeah, it sounds like Egypt is just jumping up and down with glee! Did my readers notice the string of superlatives in that statement? While the Saudis “support the objectives”, the Egyptians are “supportive of that plan”. See the difference between lukewarm and distinctly warmer?

    The Washington Post is just full of nuance, aren’t they?

    UPDATE: WaPo rewrote the story after 4pm this evening.

  • Changes coming in France

    Excellent and informative piece by Matthew Kaminski in the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Section explaining current French politics;

    The French presidential campaign started in earnest this week after the ruling center-right party tapped Nicolas Sarkozy to face off against Socialist Ségolène Royal. His nomination also brings closer the day that Charles de Gaulle will be laid to rest. Wait, you say, the man is dead and buried since 1970. True, but he’s gone in body, not in spirit. The general has shaped France’s view of the world and itself from the closing days of the last great war. Come May, with a new resident in the Elysée Palace, that looks bound to change.

    In Sarko or Ségo, as they’re widely known, France would get its first head of state born after World War II. More than a change of the generational guard looms on the horizon. Neither of the presumptive successors to Jacques Chirac sounds beholden to a Gaullist creed characterized by the prickly defense of the Fifth Republic’s “grandeur” and a knee-jerk anti-Americanism. To judge by their rhetoric, the two leading candidates are willing apostates, particularly on foreign policy. The repercussions should not be minimized.

    The 74-year-old Mr. Chirac is a Gaullist par excellence — whether storming out last year when a Frenchman dared speak English at a European Union meeting or grandstanding over Iraq in 2003. “I have a simple principle in foreign affairs. I see what the Americans are doing and I do the opposite. That way, I’m sure to be right,” he’s told colleagues on several occasions, according to Franz-Olivier Giesbert’s “La Tragédie du Président,” a political obituary of Mr. Chirac published last year.

    Electoral setbacks, poor health and plummeting popularity make it unlikely Mr. Chirac will dare seek a third term or be able to hand the reins to a trusted ally such as Dominique de Villepin, the neo-Napoleonic (much less Gaullist) prime minister. Mr. Sarkozy, a nemesis of both men, won their party’s Sunday primary with 98% of votes.

    On nearly all matters, Mr. Sarkozy sees what Chirac is doing and does the opposite — especially on America. Mr. Sarkozy hails the Yankee “can-do spirit” and openness to newcomers. France and America, he says, have a common enemy, terrorism. In a visit to Washington last fall, he enthusiastically met with George W. Bush and lashed out against “French arrogance”; neither won him plaudits back home. One of his nicknames — Sarko l’Américain — isn’t intended as a compliment.

    It goes on to describe the Leftist candidate, Ségolène Royal, as an intellectually void, pretty face. I’d really like to see France join the rest of us in the 21st century.

    I’ve always said that Paris is a wonderful city, if only it weren’t filled French people.