Sidney Blumenthal says that one of the most viewed posts in the life of the blogosphere was the result of a grand conspiracy, instantaneously executed:
Within minutes of the conclusion of the broadcast, conservative bloggers launched a counterattack. The chief of these critics was a Republican Party activist in Georgia. Almost certainly, these bloggers, who had been part of meetings or conference calls organized by Karl Rove’s political operation, coordinated their actions with Rove’s office.
Over the past months, there has been a ratcheting up of rhetoric and preparations for a war against Iran. Now there are military men going on the record about war planning for Iran, a new development, with several possible motives. UK Times:
Project Checkmate, a successor to the group that planned the 1991 Gulf War’s air campaign, was quietly reestablished at the Pentagon in June. It reports directly to General Michael Moseley, the US Air Force chief, and consists of 20-30 top air force officers and defence and cyberspace experts with ready access to the White House, the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
Detailed contingency planning for a possible attack on Iran has been carried out for more than two years by Centcom (US central command), according to defence sources. Checkmate’s job is to add a dash of brilliance to Air Force thinking by countering the military’s tendency to “fight the last war” and by providing innovative strategies for warfighting and assessing future needs for air, space and cyberwarfare. It is led by Brigadier-General Lawrence “Stutz” Stutzriem, who is considered one of the brightest air force generals. He is assisted by Dr Lani Kass, a former Israeli military officer and expert on cyberwarfare…
Checkmate was formed in the 1970s to counter Soviet threats but fell into disuse in the 1980s. It was revived under Colonel John Warden…Checkmate’s role is to develop the necessary expertise so that “if somebody says Iran, it says: ‘here is what you need to think about’. Here are the objectives, here are the risks, here is what it will cost, here are the numbers of planes we will lose, here is how the war is going to end and here is what the peace will look like”.
Warden added: “The Centcoms of this world are executional – they don’t have the staff, the expertise or the responsibility to do the thinking that is needed before a country makes the decision to go to war. War planning is not just about bombs, airplanes and sailing boats.”
So war planning against Iran would appear to be more real than ever, with military officials going on the record about it. In addition, the advertising of Checkmate would appear to be intended to make the point that a campaign against Iran would be better planned than the Iraq War. Such a preemptive US domestic propaganda campaign also suggests that the administration is very serious about an Iran war.
the official address to the 9/11 commemoration ceremony by Deval Patrick, who is apparently the governor of Massachusetts: 9/11, said Gov. Patrick, “was a mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States.” “Mean and nasty”? He sounds like an oversensitive waiter complaining that John Kerry’s sent back the aubergine coulis again. But evidently that’s what passes for tough talk in Massachusetts these days…
If you’ll forgive such judgmental categorizations, this isn’t about “them,” it’s about “us.” The long-term survival of any society depends on what proportion of its citizens thinks as Gov. Patrick does. Islamism is an opportunist enemy but you can’t blame them for seeing the opportunity: In that sense, they understand us far more clearly than Gov. Patrick understands them…
Why do radical imams seek to convert young Canadian, British and even American men and women in their late teens and twenties? Because they understand that when you raise a generation in the great wobbling blancmange of Deval Patrick-style cultural relativism – nothing is any better or any worse than anything else; if people are “mean and nasty” to us, it’s only because we didn’t sing enough Barney the Dinosaur songs at them – in such a world a certain percentage of its youth will have a great gaping hole where their sense of identity should be. And into that hole you can pour something fierce and primal and implacable.
Tra, la la. What a rabble rouser. We have much better things to do today, teach children conflict resolution, play non-winner games, try out the new ab buster, and of course watch OJ and more OJ.
James Lewis looks at Europe and sees a self-inflicted mess. His analysis is interesting in that it identifies coldly calculated domestic political gain, at the expense of losing the country, as the culprit:
London had its Underground bombing a couple of years ago. Madrid had its train bombings, which drove Spain out of the anti-terror coalition. France has had two years of seasonal riots on the outskirts of Paris, and Germany just arrested bomb-plotters trying to create “another 9/11″ at Frankfurt Airport or the Ramstein US air base. The Netherlands had its public murder of Theo Van Gogh, as well as unpublicized violence, and Denmark had its cartoon riots. Levels of rape by immigrants who view women as cattle are up all over Europe, as well as honor killings, genital mutilation, chain immigration and a rising atmosphere of fear and intimidation. If you don’t think people are scared in Europe, you aren’t paying attention…
The governing elites don’t care. After all, the multi-culti crowd who run the place created the problem of uncontrollable immigration in the first place, because immigrants vote Left, just like illegal immigrants in the United States, who are also considered automatic Democrats. So the calculation is that the Left can endanger its native voter base, and still make up for the loss by importing and buying Muslim votes. So far, that calculation has worked very nicely for the political class, so that major cities like Amsterdam, Paris and London are rapidly trending Muslim in polulation. Socialist Britain hasn’t even managed to get rid of terror-preaching Imams who are not legal British citizens. The rule of Shari’a comes next if you just wait long enough.
Roger Simon wrote a paragraph the other day whose concepts were beyond the ken of all but a handful of Americans six long years ago:
anyone who says the three religions are the same when Judaism and Christianity have gone through numerous reformations and Islam has not is simply delusional or lying or a combination of the two. For that reason, fundamentalists are a minority in Judaism and Christianity, while everybody is in one sense a fundamentalist in Islam. The Koran is the verbatim word of God, therefore immutable. The Bible is only a report of the word of God. Out of this, we still have Islamic people beheading people, trying to blow up civilians in subways, destroying Buddhist monuments, institutionally oppressing women and all the rest in 2007, not 1007. Are the perpetrators the exceptions? Sure to some degree (though not in the oppression of women). And there are certainly more of these violent types by far, exponentially far, than there are in any other religion. Do we see the Islamic world rising up in opposition to their behavior? Not at all.
The ability to write that paragraph is precisely how the world has changed since 9-11, whether Christiane Amanpour and CNN choose to acknowledge it or not.
We had never encountered the term poetry slam until today. This was a pretty good way to make its acquaintance. Perhaps the revolution will be televised after all. HT:LGF
There appear to be a number of signs that this year’s annual warning from Adam Gadahn might possibly have a bit of substance behind it. For example, the New York City police department went into high gear yesterday after Debka reported a dirty bomb threat against NYC, LA, and Miami; now police activities are being “scaled back.” The editor of Debka made the salient point to Ynet that the NYC police were not acting on Debka’s report alone:
Be it true or false, imaginary or realistic, DEBKAfile’s Giora Shamis can rest easy on Saturday, after having spun New York police into a frenzy following a Debka report that al-Qaeda might be plotting to detonate a dirty bomb in the city…”The New York Police didn’t have to take my information seriously,” he said. “They had other information, additional to ours.”…”We never know if the threat is real or not, but if you follow these publications for years, you can get a feel for whether the threat is serious or not. This time this threat seemed -– due to the intensiveness of the exchange of messages — to be more serious than others.”
Interestingly, Bill Roggio reports that al Qaeda and Taliban training camps — the kind the US destroyed in the aftermath of 9/11 — have been emptying out:
The Fourth Rail interviewed a senior US military intelligence official and a US military officer, both of whom are familiar with the situation in the Northwest Frontier Province and wish to remain anonymous. The sources confirmed Mr. Shahzad’s information concerning the al Qaeda and Taliban camps in North Waziristan and the Taliban’s reorganization is accurate. Both sources are particularly concerned about the implications of the emptying of the camps…Mr. Shahzad reported there were 29 al Qaeda and Taliban camps in North and South Waziristan, and all but one “have been dismantled, apart from one run by hardline Islamist Mullah Abdul Khaliq.”…
The al Qaeda and Taliban personnel abandoned the 28 camps after “the US had presented Islamabad with a dossier detailing the location of the bases as advance information on likely US targets,” Mr. Shahzad reported….”This is one of the reasons that we are worried about a major CONUS [Continental United States] attack,” the senior military intelligence source told The Fourth Rail, noting the recent influx of news of terror cells attempting to penetrate the US. “If they evacuated their bases, they almost certainly did so out of fear of more than just the Pakistani army.”
Meanwhile, DHS reports increased penetration attempts from both Canada and Mexico, via ABC:
“Tunnels under U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico serve primarily as conduits for transporting illicit drugs into the United States. In addition, reliable reporting indicates that some tunnels also are used for alien smuggling, including special interest aliens.”…In its own report, “Special Assessment: Underground Tunnels: A Border Security Threat,” DHS noted that 65 tunnels have been discovered since 1990 — all but one originating in Mexico — and the pace of tunneling or the discovery of tunneling appears to be accelerating…
Canadian officials meanwhile have issued a warning that “several…counterfeit visas…have been intercepted at Pearson International Airport in Toronto.”…”The counterfeits were detected in the possession of nationals of Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan, and most recently, nationals of India. The counterfeits, purportedly issued in Kiev and Chandigarh, bear serial numbers starting with ‘A043283.’”
Finally, some odd things have been happening in Washington as well. The Republican administration is suddenly making noises about taking border enforcement seriously, and the Democratic Congress went along with warrantless domestic surveillance with relatively few complaints. Happenstance, coincidence, or other? (And, by the way, should we start thinking about August 22 again, as Bernard Lewis suggested last year?)
Observations by Michael Yon, who has spent 18 months embedded with troops in Iraq:
almost none of those who have cast themselves as truth-tellers have the requisite credibility for the job. The one man who does was told he had only until September to evaluate progress. I’m not suggesting that I make a worthy substitute for the commanding general, David Petraeus, on this or any subject, but since December of 2004, I have spent roughly a 1½ years on the battlefields of Iraq.
I’ve traveled alongside American Army and Marines and British forces, from Basra to Mosul and just about anywhere of note in between. When it comes to Iraq, being there matters because of the massive disconnect between what most Americans think they know about Iraq, and what is actually going on there…
Al Qaeda is in Iraq, intentionally inflaming sectarian hostilities, deliberately pushing for full scale civil war. They do this by launching attacks against Shia, Sunni, Kurds and coalition forces. To ensure the attacks provoke counterattacks, they make them particularly gruesome.
Five weeks ago, I came into a village near Baqubah with American and Iraqi soldiers. Al Qaeda had openly stated Baqubah was their worldwide headquarters — indeed, Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed just a short drive away. Behind the village was a palm grove. I stood there, amid the crushing stench of death, and photographed the remains of decapitated children and murdered adults. I can still smell the rotting corpses of those children.
Clearly, not every terrorist in Iraq is Al Qaeda, but it is Al Qaeda that has been intentionally, openly, brazenly trying to stoke a civil war. As Al Qaeda is now being chased out of regions it once held without serious challenge, their tactics are tinged with desperation.
And some rather pointed conclusions:
1. Iraqis are uniting across sectarian lines to drive Al Qaeda in all its disguises out of Iraq, and they are empowered by the success they are having, each one creating a ripple effect of active citizenship.
2. The Iraqi Army is much more capable now than it was in 2005. It is not ready to go it alone, but if we keep working, that day will come.
3. General Petraeus is running the show. Petraeus may well prove to be to counterinsurgency warfare what Patton was to tank battles with Rommel, or what Churchill was to the Nazis.
Wow. That’s an incredible endorsement of General Petraeus. It was just a few months ago that we heard him damned with the faint praise of being called an “intellectual,” and derided as “arrogant” and “excessively ambitious.”
lawmakers are worried that too few Americans know that the analog TVs they have been using for years could become big cathode-ray paperweights after February 18, 2009, when broadcasters shut off their analog signals.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., fretted over the “high potential for a train wreck” as she and other lawmakers questioned National Telecommunications & Information Administration director John Kneuer and FCC Consumer Bureau chief Cathy Seidel. “Far too few of these consumers know that the transition from current analog television technology to digital television, or DTV, is under way,” said committee chairman Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii…
A poll released in January by the Association for Public Television Stations indicated 61% of respondents had “no idea” the digital transition was going to take place….The government earmarked $5 million for public education.
Given the current state of TV, the best course might well be to do nothing and let the sets go dark on February 19. Failing that, the most efficient use of the tiny publicity sum of $5 million would be to give half each to Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton in exchange for these model citizens’ agreement to wear T-shirts announcing, “Your TV won’t work in 2009″. That would keep Fox News busy for two or three months at least — between disasters and blonde kidnappings, of course.
Question: what do the two geniuses quoted below have in common? (1) a great strategist of our age:
“Let me make this clear…There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaida leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”…”By refusing to end the war in Iraq, President Bush is giving the terrorists what they really want”...
This man must be a great mind indeed to propose this Pakistan strike strategy; would he propose it for Canada too, or Mexico? How about France or the UK? (2) here’s the second brainiac, one of the great artists of our time, a man who wants to “shut down” the internet:
“The internet has stopped people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff…I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span…There’s too much technology available…I don’t have a mobile phone or an iPod or anything.”
What do these two geniuses have in common? Answer: one has been a guest at the White House, the other wants to live there.
“Welcome to Venezuela, Mr. Penn. What drives him is consciousness, the search for new paths,” Chavez said Wednesday in a televised speech. “He’s one of the greatest opponents of the Iraq invasion.” Chavez read aloud from a recent open letter by Penn to President Bush in which the actor condemned the Iraq war and called for Bush to be impeached, saying the president along with Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are “villainously and criminally obscene people.”
The socialist president…said he and Penn talked by phone — “with my bad English but we understood each other more or less.”…He called the actor “well-informed about what is happening in the United States and the world, in spite of being in Hollywood.” What’s more, Chavez said, “he’s made great films.” The Venezuelan leader said he recently watched Penn’s Oscar-winning performance in the film “Mystic River.”
Great minds, and so forth.
UPDATE II
Gwen Stefani has been nominated for an honorable mention.
Ace has a few things to say about Fox News and its non-stop coverage of the witless events of the day. “Your core audience is conservative. Not retarded” — sums up his conclusion. We can’t wait to read the WSJ once News Corp gets control.
Mickey Kaus thinks 2008 will be a banner year for entertaining ads against politicians who vote for the current immigration bill. He specifically referred to Questions 59-63 in the recent Carville-Greenberg poll as fodder for such ads. Here are the questions:
60-66% of those polled would have “serious doubts” about their Member of Congress if he voted for a bill with those provisions. Disapproval numbers as high as two-thirds means, among other things, that the ads against those Members could be really hard-hitting. Let the fun begin.
There is much to ponder in Michael Barone’s most recent analysis of electoral trends. You could chew on this sampling from a large, dense piece for a month:
The results of the 2006 election were significantly different from those of the five biennial elections between 1996 and 2004. For a decade, we seemed to be an almost evenly divided and deeply politically polarized country. From the 1995-96 budget showdown between President Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich until after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the political balance across the country remained very much the same. We were a 49 percent nation, as was written in this space six years ago.
In the five House elections between 1996 and 2004, Republican candidates won between 49 percent and 51 percent of the vote, and Democratic candidates won between 46 percent and 48.5 percent — an unusually narrow range in American history. Clinton was re-elected with 49 percent of the vote in 1996; George W. Bush and Al Gore both won a rounded-off 48 percent in 2000; Bush beat John Kerry in 2004 by 51 percent to 48 percent, the narrowest percentage margin for a re-elected president since Woodrow Wilson beat Charles Evans Hughes 49 percent to 46 percent in 1916.
The electorate was divided primarily by cultural, even moral, issues: two armies in a culture war facing each other across the trenches. The bitterness of these divisions was exacerbated because the two men who occupied the White House — Clinton and Bush, both born in 1946, the first year of the Baby Boom, and both graduating in the high school class of 1964, which had the highest SAT scores since the test was first administered — happen to have personal characteristics that those on the other side of the cultural divide absolutely loathed. Elections became less a matter of persuading movable voters in the center and more a matter of turning out the party faithful on Election Day — or even before, thanks to the increasing trend toward absentee and early voting.
The 2006 election was at least somewhat different. Most glaringly different in a partisan sense: Democrats won a clear-cut victory, gaining majorities in both the Senate and the House, for the first time since 1992. (The Democrats’ 2001-02 Senate majority was attained by a party switch rather than an election.) The Democratic capture of the Senate last year owed something to luck, as is often the case; Democrats won six of the seven closest races, and their candidates won in Montana and Virginia — both long shots at the start of the year — by a total of 12,891 votes. But parties have captured (or put themselves in position to capture) Senate majorities by winning most of the close races before — Republicans in 1980; Democrats in 1986 and 2000…
The AFL-CIO and other unions again conducted a major voter-turnout drive in 2006, and that effort seems to have paid off. Fully 23 percent of 2006 voters said they were either union members or part of a household in which someone was a union member, and 63 percent of them voted Democratic. This is a startlingly high number, because only 8 percent of private-sector workers (and 36 percent of the many fewer public-sector workers) are union members. The unions seem to have leveraged a rather small movement into a much stronger political force, one to whom Democratic politicians owe very much indeed.
The GOP continues to owe a debt to white evangelical and born-again Protestants, who despite some grousing by leaders turned out strongly enough to form 24 percent of the electorate, and who voted 70 percent Republican. In contrast, people who said they never attend church services (15 percent of voters) voted 67 percent Democratic.
The 2006 election may turn out to be the beginning of a long period of Democratic dominance. Or it may not. The election was more a verdict on competence than on ideology, and it gave the Democrats an opportunity but, on most issues at least, not a mandate.
As the liberal columnist E.J. Dionne wrote, Democrats got their votes on loan. It was a negative verdict on the conduct of the military struggle in Iraq and on the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. It was a negative verdict on a Republican Congress that seemed casual about corruption and complacent about wasteful spending. It was a victory won after a campaign that was conducted largely in an idea-free zone. Republicans campaigned on pretty much the platform that Bush ran on in 2000 and 2004, though many of his promises had already been fulfilled, and others — such as Social Security reform — had been set aside as unachievable. Democrats campaigned pretty much as opponents of Bush, with a platform made up of planks that were minimalist (raise the minimum wage) or lacking in specifics in voters’ minds (enact all the recommendations of the 9/11 commission, whatever they were).
There’s much more where that came from, and it points to considerable uncertainty as to what lies ahead, at least in our view.
The Central Valley Business Times reports the latest in pro-Senate bill arguments — the risk of farmers moving offshore. How they get their land to Malaysia, Mexico or China was left unexplained, however:
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in a speech Thursday to the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives…says that unless there is meaningful immigration reform, U.S. farmers might have to curtail operations or move offshore because of labor shortages. “I don’t believe Americans in large numbers are going to go pick lettuce,” Mr. Chertoff says. “What you will see is a major shift of our businesses, certainly the agriculture business, out of the country, and that that is going to be a very, very bad thing,” he says. Mr. Chertoff also faulted much of the right-wing blathersphere for its opposition to the Senate bill. “We are fighting a very heavy headwind,” he says, pointing to talk radio as a major culprit.
Is this like the idea of sawing off New Jersey and letting it float out to sea? HT: Polipundit
Quote 1: “I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”
Quote 2 from 1980: “Thurmond declared: ‘[We] want that federal government to keep their filthy hands off the rights of the states.’…After Thurmond spoke, Lott told the group: ‘You know, if we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today’.”
Quote 3: “I’ve got two goats on my place in Mississippi. There ain’t no fence big enough, high enough, strong enough, that you can keep those goats in that fence. Now people are at least as smart as goats, maybe not as agile. Build a fence. We should have a virtual fence. Now one of the ways I keep those goats in the fence is I electrified them. Once they got popped a couple of times they quit trying to jump it.”
There does seem to be a consistency among all these various comments, does there not?
opponents of the Iraq war are toying with the idea of American defeat. A number of them are simply predicting it, while others advocate measures that would make it more likely. Lending intellectual respectability to all this is an argument that takes a strange comfort from the outcome of the Vietnam War. The defeat of the American enterprise in Indochina, it is said, turned out not to be as bad as expected. The United States recovered, and no lasting price was paid. We beg to differ…
Today, in Iraq, there should be no illusion that defeat would come at an acceptable price…Defeat would produce an explosion of euphoria among all the forces of Islamist extremism, throwing the entire Middle East into even greater upheaval. The likely human and strategic costs are appalling to contemplate. Perhaps that is why so much of the current debate seeks to ignore these consequences.
As in Indochina more than 30 years ago, millions of Iraqis today see the United States helping them defeat their murderous opponents as the only hope for their country. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have committed themselves to working with us and with their democratically elected government to enable their country to rejoin the world as a peaceful, moderate state that is a partner to its neighbors instead of a threat. If we accept defeat, these Iraqis will be at terrible risk. Thousands upon thousands of them will flee, as so many Vietnamese did after 1975…
Osama bin Laden said, a few months after 9/11, that “when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” The United States, in his mind, is the weak horse. American defeat in Iraq would embolden the extremists in the Muslim world, demoralize and perhaps destabilize many moderate friendly governments, and accelerate the radicalization of every conflict in the Middle East.
Our conduct in Iraq is a crucial test of our credibility, especially with regard to the looming threat from revolutionary Iran. Our Arab and Israeli friends view Iraq in that wider context. They worry about our domestic debate, which had such a devastating impact on the outcome of the Vietnam War…
Powerline has the fascinating backstory of the co-authors, who were on opposite sides in the Killing Fields debate about Cambodia and Indochina, but are on the same side in assessing Iraq.
WAS THE IMMIGRATION BILL COLLAPSE A DEFEAT FOR BUSH? Yes, but: On the other hand, the immigration compromise was almost universally disliked and threatened to split the GOP coalition. Maybe its death was a blessing for the president. Unless he’s dumb enough to bring it up again, which I predict he will be.
A Google search of Bush Dumb brings up about 1.7 million responses. This opinion started out mostly on the Left, but, after the issues of the war, Harriet Miers, and the immigration bill, among other matters, that opinion no longer appears to be the exclusive province of the President’s political opponents.
Mickey Kaus, writing on the Dan Balz WaPo piece on the failure of the Senate immigration bill, criticizes Balz’s contention that the failure of the bill was a failure of bi-partisanship and the polarized political atmosphere of Washington:
I prefer the alternative Boehner Hypothesis….Balz’s piece is a near-Platonic example of the Neutral Story Line — a sweeping, seemingly profound and biting analysis that nevertheless doesn’t offend anyone because it doesn’t seem to be taking sides. But of course it does take sides. It takes the “bipartisan” side — simply assuming that “comprehensive immigration reform” is a good idea. What if the bill’s collapse represented: “a rare example of the political system appearing capable of finding ways to reject half-baked, grandiose schemes of a reckless President“?
Alas, the words “half-baked” and “grandiose” do appear to have some resonance after these many years of the Bush administration, do they not?
Mickey Kaus notes in his “Read my flips: no back taxes” comment on the Seante immigration bill that the White House removed the requirement that illegals pay their back taxes. He quotes the White House spokesman: “Determining the past tax liability would have been very difficult and costly and extremely time consuming,” and suggests that we all try that one on the IRS.
China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia remain the top blockers. Each nation filters not just pornography, but also a wide range of political, human-rights, religious, and cultural sites deemed subversive by those countries’ governments. Other countries are more selective in what they let citizens see or not see. Syria and Tunisia, for example, filter a great deal of political content, while Burma and Pakistan target websites that pertain to national-security issues.
Wretchard notes: Just as churches are prohibited in Saudi Arabia while mosques are protected in the West, the Jihad may eventually be broadcast from certain countries and their reception in the West guaranteed as a “right” while anyone who mounts a reply will not only be blocked, but charged with “hate speech”. Indeed.
We have previously noted here that many sites within the US have been inappropriately blocked by being branded as “hate speech.” This trend, both domestically and internationally, looks likely to only get worse.
