Thursday, March 27, 2008

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Is the "US magic" really over?

Historian Victor Davis Hanson explains why the "magic" may not be over despite what French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said about the US’ "global reputation".

Monday, March 17, 2008

Iraq and the war.

Jules Crittenden on the war in Iraq, after 5 years:

After 1989, we were encouraged to believe that war was history. This illusion made the shock of 9/11 all the worse. Even then some people wanted to believe it was an aberration, something we had brought on ourselves and could fix with kind words and deeds. The ease of the Taliban's ouster then created the false impression that we had managed to reinvent war in a more palatable form.
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Iraq has become the central battlefield in the 21st century's Islamic war, and may have been destined to be, with or without us. Lying geographically, ideologically, and culturally athwart the Middle East, rich in resources and boiling with rage long before we got there, it is the place where the war will either be settled or truly begun. It is a fitting role for the cradle of civilization to host a war in which the very progress of civilization is being challenged.

While there were terrible errors made in going to war in Iraq, the decision to go to war was not one of them.

Friday, March 07, 2008

A worldwide phenomenon:

Sharia creep and soft jihad.

Where's the British pride?

RAF personnel ordered not to wear uniforms in public after suffering abuse in the street.

They serve their country with pride and are ready to put their lives on the line.

Yet RAF personnel have been repaid with volleys of abuse in the street.

Remember when the King of Spain, Juan Carlos, told Chavez during a summit late last year to "shut up"?



If he had listened to the King, his terrorist ally who was killed by the Colombian army last Saturday would still be alive.


Thursday, March 06, 2008

Irish terrorism.

From Strategy Page:

The IRA has devolved into a criminal gang, but al Qaeda, and other Islamic radical groups have found Ireland a convenient place to hide out and plan their next atrocity. The Irish economy has been booming for the last decade, and suffering an ongoing labor shortage. If Islamic radicals can slip into the country, they can find work, and cover in the many immigrant neighborhoods.

The Combat Mind-set vs. the Mind-Set of the New "Feminized Majority"

From Dr. Helen:

...one must train himself into a state of mind in which the sudden awareness of peril does not surprise him. "His response should be not "Oh my God, I'm in a fight!" but rather, "I thought this might happen and I know what to do about it."

The regression of the West:

This is happening today in the UK. Children brides-to-be. Where are the feminists...

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Cry for US, Argentina...

After watching the Obama-Clinton debate in Cleveland on Tuesday, I came away convinced that both candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination want to run this country like Argentina.

In that country, Juan Peron-inspired labor syndicates and their bosses dominate the economy and work hand-in-glove with the state. Together they have ensured Argentina's isolation from international commerce and investment, and a slow but steady decline in living standards.



They "are going to win, because [we] love life and [they] love death...

At the recent funeral for the assassinated Hezbollah terrorist Imad Moughnaya -- the mass murderer responsible for killing 241 marines in 1983 and more than 100 women, children and men in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 -- Ms. Maladan was quoted in the New York Times giving the following warning to her son: "if you're not going to follow the steps of the Islamic resistance martyrs, then I don't want you."


Sunday, March 02, 2008

South America's most prosperous nation:

There are now two South Americas,” says Chilean economist Rolf Lüders, a former prime minister under Augusto Pinochet. The old South America, which remains mired in populism and Marxist rhetoric, includes Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The new South America is democratic and free-market-oriented, and includes Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. Chile is undoubtedly the most prosperous and stable country in the group, with an annual real growth rate averaging 5.5 percent over the last 15 years and a per-capita annual income of $12,000, the highest in Latin America. The country owes its unqualified success to an oft-vilified group of U.S.-educated free-market economists known as the “Chicago boys,” of whom Lüders, a former student of Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, is one.
Read the whole article at City-Journal.

Interview by Swiss newspaper Junge Freiheit of American historian Victor Davis Hanson on the future with Europe... here's a sample:

JF: Is there a corresponding bias against Europeans in American society? How come nobody has ever thought to diagnose such a sentiment? Is it truly non-existent, or is it just that Americans are too wise, and Europeans too cowardly to mention it?

VDH: There has always been skepticism of Europe as a class-bound, hopelessly aristocratic static society, warped by Old World factionalism, and prone to dangerously wide springs between totalitarian fascism and totalitarian Marxism. Few note such suspicions of ours, since we are self-obsessed within our borders, and don’t translate these musings into some driving ideology. Nor do we feel that Europe per se affects our lives to any great degree, despite our ubiquitous Western heritage that we owe to Europe and the billions of U.S. dollars that are held by European governments.

The irony is that while Europeans periodically chest-pound and loudly vie with each other in hating the United States for various alleged sins (fill in the blanks from global warming to Iraq), slowly, insidiously we in the U.S. are drifting away from Europe, whether defined by commitments to its security (I doubt we would intervene again in the Balkans) to sort of a popular weariness. One article in Le Monde or a quip by a Chirac or Schroeder might pass over the heads of those in Iowa or Nebraska, but not a few hundred of these per day. So the Europeans have done the almost impossible: alienated a Western powerful ally, that kept it safe and free for the majority of the 20th century.

Does the democratization of the Middle East ever entail any responsibility?

The Palestinian "civilians" were given a choice in 2006, and they chose to elect Hamas — a choice that was overwhelming in Gaza, where the terror organization — having ousted the more "moderate" terror-mongers from Fatah — now rules. If the civilians, eyes wide open, opt to be led by a terrorist organization whose chief calling card is its pledge to destroy Israel (a sentiment shared by a large majority of the "civilian" population), how upset are we supposed to get when the said civilians get caught in the cross-fire that is provoked by the savages they elected?
Read it all here.