My three part series on ending Saddam's regime without war
There are no perfect solutions, selection of risks must be made

As I see it, there are only three choices that the United States has in responding to the threat posed by the pursuit of atomic weapons by Saddam Hussein's regime:

Do nothing, leave Saddam in power and hope that Saddam will never actually obtain WMDs. Trust that if he does, he can be deterred. I discussed why this option is unacceptable here and here.

Decide that the present state of Iraq's effort yields unacceptable risk. Therefore, military action against Iraq must be carried out with the objective of destroying Saddam's power. This what the Bush administration and the Blair government are pursuing now. I support this course of action unless an alternative can be found that accomplishes its ends in other ways.

Decide that the present state of Iraq's effort yields unacceptable risk. Take steps by means other than war to effect a regime change. That is what this series of postings is about:

Part 1 - "Regime change" by means other than war - it's been done. Recent history gives cause for belief that Saddam can be brought down without war.

Part 2 - How to bring down Saddam without war. Some anti-war thinkers actually have something of a plan; call for regime change through non-violent means, agree that Saddam has to go.

Part 3 - A non-war plan to topple Saddam. Concrete, non-war actions America can do to effect a regime change.

A non-war plan to topple Saddam
Concrete, non-war actions America can do to effect a regime change

This is Part 3 of a series:

Part 1 - "Regime change" by means other than war - it's been done. Recent history gives cause for belief that Saddam can be brought down without war.

Part 2 - How to bring down Saddam without war. Some anti-war thinkers actually have something of a plan; call for regime change through non-violent means, agree that Saddam has to go.

What can the US do to energize the masses in Iraq to begin mass demonstrations and other measures to bring down Saddam?

By now it is a cliche that the celebrations in Kabul over the end of the Taliban regime will seem like a funeral procession compared to how Iraqis will act when Saddam leaves. Hence, the Bush administration is using liberation language to describe its intentions. The administration's rhetoric has for a long time been focused on Saddam as the evil in Iraq, not Iraqis as evil people.

How can the Iraqi people be energized to act in their own interests? I think there are some critical things the US could do that could bring them about.

The Iraqis have a love-hate relationship with Saddam. On the one hand, they admire the way he has stood for Iraqi nationalism. He is perceived of as a strong man in the Middle East, where Arab-style machismo is important. (Witness how Arafat's stock shot up when the Israelis withdrew from his compound.) Iraqis can be proud of their country and even of their ruler in the same way the residents of a city feel proud when their NFL team goes to the Super Bowl. Saddam is a man whom the rest of the world fears, he must be taken seriously. He is a player on the world stage. That means that Iraq is a important nation and Iraqis are important people.

On the other hand, Saddam is a murderous thug who rules through terror. No one can feel safe. The people resent the way they have to pretend to adore him and feed his endless ego. The cult of Saddam that he has inculcated is repulsive to both Iraqi Muslims and Christians; it is idolatrous. There are huge statues and heroic panoramas of Saddam all over the country. The national life revolves around his personality. His stand against the US also brings anxiety to Iraqis because they live in constant worry about where it will lead. They know that allied aircraft attack Iraqi military sites and kill Iraqi soldiers and that Saddam has not been able to stop it. They fear the military power of the US, magnified by the stories of returned veterans of the disastrous Gulf War and the experiences of the home front at the hands of allied aircraft then.

On the whole they would be more than happy to see the entire Saddam apparatus disappear.

I believe there are concrete measures the US can do to bring the Iraqi people into active and effective resistance against the regime. Note that I am not talking about guerrilla warfare or armed insurrection. I mean the kinds of non-violent acts described in parts 1 and 2.

We must open direct channels of communication to the Iraqi people. There are three principal means of such communication:

Electronic broadcast has already been started from a station in Kuwait. A broadcast in August actually encouraged the Iraqi people to topple Saddam. This service is part of the Voice of America.

At another level, mass leaflet drops over Iraq should take place for several weeks. There are approximately 22 million people in Iraq, so about 500 million leaflets should be dropped, at least. They should promise US support for any activity against the regime with suggestions of what kind of actions could be done (i.e., work slowdowns, mass demonstrations, strikes). Leaflets should also promise that the US is inalterably committed to Saddam's downfall. Some should be addressed to army units, some to Republican Guard units. There are area specialists that are far more conversant than I about what themes and messages would resonate with which sectors of the Iraqi population and military.

Leaflet drops should be followed by the infiltration of millions of personal AM radios into Iraq. I mean small, Walkman-type units that can be mass produced cheaply. They can easily be hidden by their users. Air Force C-130 psyops aircraft can broadcast 24/7 to the Iraqis from Turkey and Kuwait or over the Gulf.

Internet access to the Iraqi people is virtually non-existent. Significant internet access to Iraq at all only dates from 1999, and was limited to certain key offices. But these provide opportunities for psyops and disinformation.

Various members of the Iraqi resistance need to be trained in non-violent resistance organizing and techniques and sent back with money and communication equipment. They would provide liaison with in-country groups to coordinate activities and provide such information to allied offices. In fact, steps to do so have already been taken. At a seminar at American University last May of various Iraqi opposition groups,

Participants discussed non-violent resistance and civilian-based resistance, similar to the citizens' movement in Serbia that removed dictator Slobodan Milosevic, as a possible model for action in Iraq. Some participants said that the Saddam Hussein regime's grip on power is not as strong as it appears, and that civilian-based resistance could be effective.

US and UK Special Ops troops could accompany them to provide technical expertise and prove the alliance's commitment to the people..

The Iraqi people should be assured of a steady supply of medical supplies and food (humanitarian rations). We may want to consider setting up medical collection points where people injured by Saddam's goons can be picked up by US Special Ops CSAR aircraft and evacuated to US Army field hospitals in Kuwait or northern Iraq.

Iraqi army officers should be offered payments for defecting, paid by the US through the Iraqi resistance, not directly from the US.

The people and the regime alike should be told that demonstrations against the regime will be broadcast live to the world by unmanned US recon aircraft. Let all the world see the "peaceful" nature of Saddam's regime. To oppose demonstrations by force would prove to the world Saddam's true nature. At the least, it would make it very difficult even for the Western Left to defend the regime any more. Such aircraft would also be used to keep the resistance apprised of the location and movements of loyalist formations.

The success of this strategy cannot be guaranteed, of course. Neither can they be expected to be loss-free for the Iraqi people. But I am confident that the Iraqi people can see it through if they know we will not abandon them and will help them reconstitute their nation after Saddam's regime is gone.

Whether this sort of tactic should be "crept in" from the periphery of country, especially from the protectorate in the north (sometimes called Free Iraq), or it should be inculcated all over the country at once is a question I leave to better analysts.

One thing that previous non-violent successes in history had that Iraqis do not have (yet, anyway) is a "trigger event" that mobilizes the masses almost spontaneously. The three successes I describe in Part 1 all had such triggers. The trigger is an act of oppression that the people cannot emotionally accept. It may be possible for some brave Iraqis to engineer the regime to pull the trigger (hopefully no more than metaphorically), but this is a sticking point in the whole plan.

Consider, though, the effect that success of Iraqi non-violence would probably have on the other countries of the region. Their populations will learn how the Iraqis cast off their chains without suffering foreign conquest. Surely you can imagine the political panjandrum that realization would set loose upon the other oppressive regimes in the Arab world.

I also do not know whether it is already too late to implement such a plan. The war machine might have too great a head of steam to be shut down. However, there seems to be an awful lot of American activity going on fairly covertly in the theater. I would not be surprised to learn that the US and UK are fomenting something fairly similar to what I have described.

Also, the risk of small-scale civil war in Iraq immediately following Saddam's demise cannot be discounted. Iraq does not have the warlord factionalism that Afghanistan does. Even so, the Saddam regime is the only force for orderly life in Iraq today. If it disappears, the power vacuum may lure new contenders to take forceful steps for themselves. Major allied military formations must be ready to occupy the capital and a few other key locations on short notice. The imperative of Iraqi disarmament remains.

This is only a very rough outline of what a non-war plan to topple Saddam could look like. It is certainly no operations plan. But I humbly submit that it is leagues beyond anything offered so far by the Western Left. You decide.

How to bring down Saddam without war
Some anti-war thinkers actually have something of a plan;
call for regime change through non-violent means, agree that Saddam has to go

This is Part 2 of a series.

Part 1 - "Regime change" by means other than war - it's been done. Recent history gives cause for belief that Saddam can be brought down without war.

Part 3 - A non-war plan to topple Saddam. Concrete, non-war actions America can do to effect a regime change.

Yesterday, I excoriated the religious left for minimizing the lethal threat of Saddam Hussein and objecting to the administration's plans to overthrow him by military force. I said that objecting to the government's plan without proffering a realistic plan in its stead was futile.

I have said before that the left doesn't have a plan, it just has complaints. This point has been made by others, the latest instance I know of is on Blissful Knowledge, who links to a source posting, then adds:

They don't have policy prescriptions, i.e., a systematic plan for what America should do. All they have is [complaints].

How true.

For the most part, this sad state of affairs has been true for almost all the anti-war Christian voices. But not all. Right on the heels of my broadsides against the religious left comes this piece in Sojourners Online, entitled, "With Weapons of the Will
How to topple Saddam Hussein - nonviolently," by Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall. The very first paragraph is encouraging:

Saddam Hussein has brutalized and repressed the Iraqi people for more than 20 years and more recently has sought to acquire weapons of mass destruction that would never be useful to him inside Iraq. So President Bush is right to call him an international threat. Given these realities, anyone who opposes U.S. military action to dethrone him has a responsibility to suggest how he might otherwise be ushered out the backdoor of Baghdad.

At last! Such candor is all too rare on the left. (Whether Ackerman and DuVall qualify as "on the left" I don't know. One need not be left-liberal to oppose war in general, or this prospective war in particular. But it seems to help.)

The authors readily point out that nonviolent resistance to oppression is costly for the resisters. That fact makes it easy to scoff at them, but to stop there misses the key point. Nonviolent resistance also incurs costs to the oppressors. They cite the Nazi occupation of Denmark as an example. The Danes -

. . . developed a broad popular nonviolent resistance to their German occupiers and - through actions such as cultural protests in the beginning and later general strikes?managed both to create the space in which to operate and to impose substantial costs on the Nazi regime for its decision to occupy the country. Even though the Germans were capable of more severe repression in Denmark than they chose to apply, the point is that there was a transactional relationship between the Germans and the Danes, and the Danes discovered that fact - and from that they derived the leverage to press their resistance.

I recall that the king of Denmark decided to wear a yellow Star of David when the Nazis ordered the Jews to do so. Countless other non-Jew Danes did so as well. What could the Nazis do? Make everyone take them off?

The authors make another point that critically distinguishes their writings from the rest of the anti-war crowd. They frankly admit that the beginning point of non-violent resistance to Saddam is not a making a "moral display." It is to seize power from Saddam. In other words, the starting point for non-war resolutions of the crisis is the same as for the war resolution: regime change. Nonviolent resistance -

. . . does not typically begin by putting flowers in gun barrels and it does not end when protesters disperse to go home. It involves the use of a panoply of forceful sanctions - strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, disrupting the functions of government, even nonviolent sabotage - in accordance with a strategy for undermining an oppressor's pillars of support. It is not about making a point, it's about taking power. (italics added)

The authors imply that Saddam should be thought of as an occupier of Iraq in the same way the Nazis occupied Denmark. But there is a transaction between the occupier and the occupied. The former needs benefits from the latter, who are coerced into delivering them. The more tractably they deliver what the occupier wants, the less likely they are to suffer. The more intractably they deliver the benefits, the more they suffer.

But the occupier has to pay, though not usually in physical ways. Instead the costs to the occupier are paid in other coin: the necessity of increased security, internal intelligence apparatus, discontent among putative allies who, for their own benefit, may make private agreements with the occupied. Even mass executions cannot finally benefit the occupier because without the people, the occupier gains no benefits. (Exclude true genocide, though. Hitler, for example, wanted no benefits from the Jews, he just wanted them dead. However, the costs to the Nazi state to carry out the Final Solution did eventually prove too high for the Nazis to pay. They lost the war, tragically too late to save 6 million Jews.

This transactional basis between the oppressor and the oppressed forms the key to overthrowing Saddam's regime without war. If a campaign against Saddam -

. . . began with civilian-based incidents of disruption that were dispersed around the country and that did not offer convenient targets to shoot at, any attempt to crack down would have to depend on the outermost, least reliable members of Saddam's repressive apparatus. If the resistance made it clear to police and soldiers that they were not viewed as the enemy, and even if resisters were at first only a nuisance . . . the realization that Saddam was being opposed openly would begin almost immediately to lessen the fear of engaging in further, more systematic acts of resistance. As opposition became more serious or visible, this would offer to dissenting elements within the regime a place to which to defect, once events reached a crescendo.

A few years ago, in the holy city of Karbala, when tens of thousands of Muslims gathered for an annual religious occasion, the regime sent in troops because it feared disorder or an uprising. But they were so badly outnumbered by the civilians who came that they were effectively encircled - a graphic display of the limitations on Saddam's repressive apparatus if it were constrained to respond to incidents in all directions from Baghdad.

The authors conclude that Saddam can be overthrown without war:

By first demonstrating that opposition is possible, peeling away the regime's residual public and outside support, quashing its legitimacy, driving up the costs of maintaining control, and overextending its repressive apparatus. Strategic nonviolent action is not about being nice to your oppressor, much less having to rely on his niceness. It's about dissolving the foundations of his power and forcing him out. It is possible in Iraq.

Such declarations about the true nature of Saddam and his regime is amazingly refreshing to hear from this strain of Christian writing. This is hard-nosed stuff compared to what the fuzzy left is putting out. This article is a quantum improvement over what we have seen until now. It displays a realism and specificity that is so lacking elsewhere.

But it does not go all the way.

Next: What should the US government do to bring forth this kind of resistance to Saddam?

"Regime change" by means other than war - it's been done
Recent history gives cause for belief that Saddam can be brought down without war

This is Part 1 of a series.

Part 2 - How to bring down Saddam without war. Some anti-war thinkers actually have something of a plan; call for regime change through non-violent means, agree that Saddam has to go.

Part 3 - A non-war plan to topple Saddam. Concrete, non-war actions America can do to effect a regime change.

At the end of discussing the inadequacies of the religious left's objections to the coming Iraq war, I said, "Governments will take casualties to achieve their aim. The Euro-American churches will not."

Nonviolence as a mere moral symbol simpers along like a monkey with a parasol, but if nonviolence has an actual political aim (not done merely for its own sake) then history proves it can be as unstoppable as the Marines storming Iwo Jima - provided that its practitioners are just as willing to take casualties to achieve its objective.

Two cases in point can give encouragement to those who think that Saddam can be toppled without war. But "without war" does not mean "without cost." Even with the least violent outcome possible, people will certainly suffer, and some will almost certainly die.

Communist East Germany fell in late 1989. East Germans had always been forbidden to travel to West Germany. The border between them, called the Inner German Border (IGB) was fenced, mined, and covered by machine guns. I got close to the IGB in the early 1980s, and it was a sobering sight. But East Germans could travel to communist Czechoslovakia. They traveled there literally by trainloads because the Czech government did not restrict them from crossing into West Germany, which they did in "Freedom Trains." The West German government always welcomed East Germans.

So the Honecker regime in East Germany shut down travel to Czechoslovakia. Soon, men and women in the cities of East Germany began demonstrating against Honecker and the communist regime in general. The biggest demonstrations were in Dresden, where ultimately more than a million people filled the city's square and surrounding streets. The people also refused to work across the country. Honecker ordered the secret police, the Stasi, to make mass arrests. The Stasi did so, but not for long because Stasi's leaders were sympathetic to the people (and afraid of them, knowing they would suffer from the people's wrath if things got ugly). The army refused to take action because its generals hated communism as much as the people did. The communist government fell pretty quickly.

I also remember watching the people of Moscow tearing up cobblestones to build barricades against army tanks to defeat the 1991 attempted coup against Gorbachev. The army refused to support that coup and it failed after only four days.

In 1943, the Nazis rounded up Jewish Berliners to make the city Jew-free. They had been tolerated until 1943 because they were considered essential for the war effort (they were Germans, after all). Many of the abducted Jewish men had non-Jewish wives who remained free.

Word spread quickly about the abductions in Berlin, and before long a group of non-Jewish German women had gathered on the Rosenstrasse with food and other personal items for their Jewish husbands and children, whom they believed were being held inside. One of the women, Charlotte Israel, arrived and found 150 women already huddled outside. She asked one of the guards for her husband's potato ration cards, which he went to get. On the back of a card, her husband Julius wrote, "I'm fine." Other women began asking for personal effects to confirm that their husbands were inside and, soon after, began demanding their release. One woman's brother, a soldier on leave, approached an SS guard and said, "If my brother-in-law is not released, I will not return to the front." The crowds grew considerably despite the winter chill, and soon women waited outside day and night, holding hands, singing songs, and chanting "Let our husbands go!" By the second day of the protest, over 600 women were keeping a vigil on the Rosenstrasse. . . .

What gave further resonance to the wives' protest was that it was happening in the heart of Berlin, a city that had never been enthusiastic about Nazism. Cosmopolitan Berliners always saw it as a crude Bavarian aberration. Moreover, Berlin was the German base for foreign news organizations that still operated during the war. If political malcontents or the wire services were to get wind of the protest, the myth of the omnipotent Nazi state could be exposed. In fact, London radio did report on the demonstrations.

By the third day SS troops were given orders to train their guns on the crowd but to fire only warning shots. They did so numerous times, scattering the women to nearby alleyways. But the wives always returned and held their ground. They knew the soldiers would never fire directly at them because they were of German blood. Also, arresting or jailing any of the women would have been the rankest hypocrisy: According to Nazi theories, women were intellectually incapable of political action. So women dissenters were the last thing the Nazis wanted to have Germans hear about, and turning them into martyrs would have ruined the Nazis' self-considered image as the protector of motherhood.

Eventually, the Nazi minister of propaganda, Josef Goebbels, saw a public relations and propaganda disaster in the making. Ordinary Berliners, Gentile men and women, were swelling the ranks of the protesters. He freed the 1,700 men he was holding at Rosenstrasse, and even ordered some others returned from Auschwitz.

Without fully realizing what they had done, the Rosenstrasse women had forced the Nazis to make a choice: They could accede to a limited demand and pay a finite cost - 1,700 prisoners set free, if all the intermarried Jewish men were released. Or they could open a Pandora's box of heightened protest in the center of the capital and brutalize German women in the bargain. For the Nazis, maintaining social control was more important than making sure every last Jew made it to the gas chambers. The regime that terrorized the rest of Europe found itself unable to use violence against a challenge on its very doorstep. The Nazis were savage but they were not stupid.

The lesson: in the final analysis, governments do indeed govern only with consent of the governed, even in dictatorships. Next: Can these lessons be applied to Iraq?

Good heavens, what a snoozer
Listening to Torricelli resign is like taking dope

I'm sitting here trying to get some professional reading done, and Torricelli is delivering his stemwinding resignation. Gosh, he's boring. It's an orgy of self-congratulation.

Bob, shut up please. Go away. Please just go away. Now. Right now.

An idea is not a plan!
Wishful thinking passes for theological reflection nowadays

The Rev. Henry Brinton is the pastor of Fairfax Presbyterian Church in Fairfax, Va., near where I lived from 1990-1995. In today's Washington Post he explores the tension between his Christian faith and allegiance to the United States. Most of the article deals with pastoral issues, which is fine. Then he ventures into unknown territory - international politics.

The continuing difficulty I have with heeding the advice of my fellow pastors and theologians is that they continually tend to confuse wishful thinking with deep thinking. "Jesus," I am continually reminded, "taught that we should love one another. Bombing other people is not part of God's perfect will for humankind."

Well, duh.

I have learned to stay quiet and wait for inevitable other shoe to drop. Having established (News Flash!) that Jesus Christ would prefer we not kill one another, many of my colleagues in ministry feel therefore qualified to deliver lesson plans on how to conduct international affairs. To wit, Rev. Brinton:

There is still much that can be done internationally to bring about Iraqi compliance with all U.N. resolutions and to move vigorously to eliminate all weapons of mass destruction.

I submit that Rev. Brinton is ignorant or in willful denial. He is engaging in wishful thinking, not policy analysis. He would be much more persuasive if he would delineate what has not been tried that will yet gain compliance. Exactly what is the "much that can be done" to solve the crisis short of war? The answer is nothing. Saddam has rebuffed every peaceful attempt. He has already rebuffed in advance the US/UK proposal for a new UNSC resolution, and it hasn't even been debated in the Council yet.

North American and European theologians seem singularly unsuited for giving guidance for current events. Despite overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary, Western theology has come to affirm a thoroughly unscriptural, false doctrine of the inherent goodness of human beings. For example, I have "learned" that because Genesis teaches that God created human beings in his image, and because God pronounced all of creation good, that there is, ipso facto, a deeply abiding goodness in all people that can be realized through the right pedagogy and life-affirming theology. Or something like that.

On the other hand, I insist that a fundamental reality of human community is great evil. That is why I wrote that I have never been angry at our enemies for attacking us. What did we expect? Such murder has been a fact of nature for millennia. I can no more be angry about it than I could be angry at a thunderstorm or blizzard.

But my liberalist theologian and pastor friends worry and fret over what has gone wrong with American foreign policy or in other nations that has caused such violence. My answer is: Nothing has "gone wrong." No country's policies are perfect, including ours. But the idea that evil is somehow an aberration that comes to the fore when we let something "go wrong" is to deny reality. Evil is the normal state of human affairs.

There is presently a cohort of theologians who wish to be perceived as both profound and influential. In the main they do not take seriously the fundamental reality of sin and evil (they are not the same) in all aspects of human affairs. Where, in our contemporary theology, do we find any doctrine of sin at all?

I'll tell you where: only in catch-words like, racism, sexism, capitalism, exploitation, colonialism, imperialism, culturism, etc. etc. etc. All of these -"isms," of course, are the exclusive province of First World white men (meaning white American men), which means, really, that only we sin. The rest of the world are merely victims What seems distressingly absent in modern-day theology is a doctrine of sin as an indwelling property of humanity itself, a doctrine that is, I insist, empirically provable.

That is the point I was trying to make in my October 2001 essay, "Is America Justified to Use Force?" I quoted Reinhold Niebuhr, who really was both profound and influential:

Niebuhr concluded [in "Must We Do Nothing?" in The Christian Century, 3-30-1932], "The hope of attaining an ethical goal for society by purely ethical means, without coercion . . . is an illusion" of the "comfortable classes" of society. There never will be enough love and unselfishness among nations to resolve the conflicts of history only by ethical means, even though there may be occasional successes now and then. It is part of humanity's "moral conceit" to think that human sin will not overwhelm individual morality when persons act as a collective.

Until the return of Christ, human societies will never be able to conform purely to the ethic of Christian love. In the interim, we must structure our world based on justice, as best we can, even though communities of justice are inferior to communities of love. The best justice human societies can attain will only roughly correspond to divine justice. Human justice will always involve contests of power because different groups make opposing claims that they consider rightful. However, "no contending group can have all it wants . . . and hence must [sometimes] be restrained by force."

This state of affairs is not God's ideal for human community; it is simply the best we can do until the Kingdom of God comes in power. Hence, Niebuhr concluded that coercion is not to be automatically avoided to achieve justice. The ethical goals of human society must not be sacrificed "simply because we are afraid to use any but purely ethical means. To say all this is to confess that the history of mankind is a perennial tragedy, for the highest ideals" that we can imagine are exactly ones which we "can never realize in social and collective terms."

I went on to observe that the terrorists who attacked us last year display not simple evil but nihilistic evil.

Nihilistic evil seeks to destroy for destruction's own sake. There is no virtue in nihilistic evil that can be appealed to.

Pacifism is conscience without power. Nihilistic evil is power without conscience.

One of the tragic aspects of this world is that when conscience without power encounters power without conscience, conscience loses. The best that people of conscience can claim before they are annihilated is a moral victory, but in the final analysis, moral victories mean exactly squat.

But modern theology does not - indeed, does not know how to - frame sin as a universal category of human being. Sin indwells almost exclusively in American power, prestige and influence. Hence, modern theologians protest not against Saudi Arabia, China, Nigeria, Iraq, Iran, et. al.

Fopr some reason, such clergy think that such protests are adequate Christian responses, all by themselves. (However, they will never acknowledge their silence when the liberal, Democrat President Clinton was launching cruise missiles.) But objecting to the government's plan of action does not constitute another plan. If they say that President Bush's present course of action and stated intentions are wrong they are obligated to provide an alternative that -

1. Takes into account all the facts and circumstances at least as well as the Bush administration does, which means affirming unpleasant truths about present-day Iraq that they have always dismissed before,

2. Hasn't already been tried and failed, and

3. Will protect my children's lives at least as well as what the administration is doing and intends to do, now and in the future.

Nothing remotely like that has been forthcoming from any church leader. Instead, they give us wishful thinking and a fuzzy hope for peaceful resolution. But wishes aren't plans, and hope isn't a method.

Brinton finally appears to offer a glimmer of confidence, citing the Rev. Roy W. Howard, pastor of St. Mark Presbyterian Church in Rockville:

Howard argues that "Christians can work with Iraqi citizens to demonstrate visibly against the actions of their leaders which lead to human rights violations, death, and destruction of their people." This thoughtful approach to the issue could be part of a blueprint for Bush, one that would not require immediate military action.

Good idea! Let's start with a mass demonstration in Baghdad! I do not see how this approach is indeed "thoughtful," as Rev. Brinton believes. (Let's lay aside the Constitutional issues of the president using the Church to implement official US policy. You think the hue and cry over school vouchers for church-supported schools was lively!)

To be "thoughtful" it would include some implementation details, such as:

how the American churches will communicate with Iraqi churches,

how many American Christians will be needed to go to Iraq (illegally, which is okay by me),

how they will be recruited from American churches,

how they will be trained and where and by whom and for how long,

what their chain of support will be back to the US,

how they will be resourced and supported in country (if at all),

how they will travel to Iraq,

where they will enter Iraq,

and specifically what kind of activities they will do there ("work for peace with justice," a favorite mantra of the religious left, does not qualify for specificity.)

Until such questions have some real serious staff work applied to them, the naked assertion that "Christians can work with Iraqi citizens" is only wishful thinking. (I presume by "citizens" he really means Iraqi Christians, who number about 750,000.) And on what basis do the pastors believe that Iraqi citizens, Christian or not, are willing to work with us?

The central problem of the Church in dealing with issues of war and peace is that nation states are permanently organized for war, and churches are permanently organized for self-perpetuation. In the West, especially America, the same people do both. Waging peace is nowhere on anyone's "to do" list, certainly not the comfortable classes of Euro-American theologians, who have job and benefit packages that most of the rest of the world can only dream of. Then, when the saber is drawn and people have violently died, they start screaming from the air conditioned comfort of their book-lined studies about how we should be a people of peace, not war. Yet peace has been the furthest thing from their minds, else they would have risked their own lives (as soldiers risk theirs) to equip, organize and train the churches for waging peace as effectively and efficiently as governments do so for war.

You see, governments will take casualities to achieve their aim. The Euro-American churches will not.

Endnote:
I posted what I think would have been a true Christian response to the 9/11 attacks.

Theologian Telford Work responded to my essay on the use of force as follows, showing, I think, a truly impressive misunderstanding not only of what I wrote, but of what he wrote! (A mistake that massive is a real achievement.) He takes specific exception to my insistence of the pervasive, insistent destructiveness of sin, that sometimes reaches a power that destroys for destruction's own sake. And he seems not to understand that I can (and do) appreciate many of R. Niebuhr's insights without swallowing his entire theology whole.

In response to my claim about that happens when powerless conscience meets conscienceless power, Work wrote that my claim, "could never make sense of the story of Jesus" because

. . . the resurrection of the crucified Jesus is a cosmic victory, not just a moral one. It took decades for the Romans to notice that one of the Jews they had murdered hadn't been annihilated after all (e.g., Pliny the Younger, Letters 10.96, 97). Resurrection starts small. But it doesn't stay small.

The problem, of course, is that Jesus was not powerless as Prof Work says, since "in him dwelt the godhead fully," a particularly unique sort of power unavailable to either Prof. Work, me, or anyone else. The issue is not whether Niebuhr over-emphasized a doctrine of sin at the expense of grace and the church, a point I concede. It is that a cursory study of history surely can lead to no other conclusion than that sin is a defining characteristic of human life. Grace and the Church are supposed to be all about salvation. Any discussion of grace, salvation or the Church that blindly ignores why salvation is necessary in the first place is pretty useless, in my view.

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Today's posts:

Ted Kennedy and a new generation
It's time the torch was passed

Saddam's use of doubles confirmed
German ZDF TV claims it can forensically prove three doubles are used

Belling the cat by general assembly
A modern fable
The United Mouse General Assembly gathered to discuss the lethal threat against them posed by the cat.

Why deterrence worked against the Soviets
But would be losing bet against Saddam Hussein

Saddam's use of doubles confirmed. German TV network claims to prove it
ZDF television of Germany says that by using a coroner expert in facial reconstruction and facial recognition technology it can show that Saddam Hussein uses at least three doubles. The ZDf site is in German, of course, and someone more capable than I can check this translation by Google's page-translation feature. The link to the German page is here, and the link to the translated page is here. Here is the English text, which I have slightly cleaned up from the computer-generated translation:



Will the real Saddam Hussein please stand up?

ZDF says:

Saddam Hussein, America's public enemy number one, loves large appearances: Saddam with singing children, Saddam when pacing down a military parade. But for years rumors over Saddam Hussein's doubles [have] circulated. The Second Channel of German Television foreign journal submits now for the first time clear proofs over confusion in the center of Iraqi power.

"I [tell] you, these doubles gave [service] in former times. The reason for the practice was safety, because Saddam Hussein moved at that time so much, traveled so much and also often had contact with the people," explains Wafiq al-Samarae, former Iraqi secret service boss and now in the opposition. However, how often is the dictator to be still seen? For safety reasons Saddam Hussein regularly changed among 90 cars or let one of his doubles drive around.

But in the last [few] years the appearances of the dictator became rarer. In public frequently another shakes the hand of a guest at its place. Even in the revolutionary council, the internal circle of power, Saddam Hussein can be represented [by a double]. Rumors around the bad health of the ruler enrich the question around power in the country. The people and the world signs Phantome too. (German idiom, I think: "Dem Volk und der Welt winken Phantome zu." "Winken" mean "to wave." It probably means something like, "grasp at ghosts also." ) Saddam Hussein loves a hiding place and confusion.

A foreign journal has, based on more than 450 pictures of Saddam from Second Channel of German Television archives, for the first time realizations and proofs forwards over the doubles of the dictator. Clear scientific investigations prove that the ruler lets himself be replaced with public appearances of at least three doubles. An old ruler's trick or years of theatre for Iraqis scenes?

Saddam, the incalculable autocrat of the gulf, leaves puppets to dance for him. The doubles appear deceptively similar to him. They were trimmed partly operationally on the appearance of the statesman. The doubles, which gesture and mimic Saddam perfectly, differ only in tiny details from the genuine Saddam Hussein.

The Muslim ear, nose and throat physician al Asadi has concerned himself for years with the phenomenon of the doubles: "Between Saddam Hussein and another person, which arise also on the Iraqi television, I determined, thus five different body characteristics between the original and the double presented by the television." Also the Homburger physician Dr. Dieter Buhmann [has sifted through] the entire Second Channel of German Television film materials over Saddam Hussein to the [same] result. It [is] a recognition procedure developed by the American FBI and gives an explanation of the true identity of Saddam Hussein. Buhmann's analysis [is] still more explosive: "In the film sequences since 1998 only in each case the doubles [are] represented. He [Saddam] is not to be seen any more." But on past Saturday the surprise: Iraqi television shows the Saddam, the one the foreign journal considers genuine, before the revolutionary council.

Belling the cat by general assembly
A modern fable

The United Mouse General Assembly gathered to discuss the lethal threat against them posed by the cat. The cat was cunning and stealthy. It terrorized the mice because it pounced on them before they knew it was nearby.

"We need for a way to be warned the cat is coming!" yelled a mouse delegate.

So the mouse assembly formed a Mouse Security Council to study how early cat warnings could be established. The MSC met for three months, during which time 56 mice perished at the paws of the cat. Finally, the committee reported that special mouse sentries should be established to sound the alarm when they saw the cat.

The mouse assembly debated this proposal for four weeks. Finally, they rejected the sentry system as being too imperfect. It would be expensive. It could not guarantee 100 percent results. Some mouse colonies were too poor to provide mouse sentries, and there was never any agreement on the reporting procedures or chain of command of the sentries, who would come from different colonies. During the four weeks of debate, 17 mice were eaten by the cat.

Several more proposals were made, studied, debated and rejected in turn, consuming eight months and costing the lives of 163 mice.

Finally, a mouse suggested that they simply hang a bell around the cat's neck. That way, the bell would ring whenever the cat walked or stalked, automatically warning the mice when the cat was nearby.

This suggestion was met with shouts of acclamation and general approval. Then a mouse jumped to his feet and pointed out that the cat certainly would not cooperate. "We need to drug the cat first," he said. "That way he won't be able to stop us from hanging a bell around his neck."

The Mouse President asked, "Who has a narcotic we can slip in the cat's milk?" No one did. "We'll table that issue for now," said the president.

"We need ribbon from which to hang the bell!" another mouse delegate exclaimed.

"Who will provide the ribbon?" asked the president. No one volunteered. "We'll come back to that," the president said.

"The cat's neck is too high for us to reach," observed another mouse. "We need a ladder to be able to climb atop the drugged cat's neck to tie the ribbon."

A survey of the assembly revealed that no mouse colony had a ladder, or at least would admit to having a ladder.

"Let's move on," said the president. "The final item, of course, is the bell itself. Who has a bell we can hang around the cat's neck?"

There was silence.

"So," the president said, "the cat continues to kill us. We agree that this situation cannot continue. We want to hang a bell around the cat's neck, but we do not have a bell. We have no ribbon to suspend the bell. We have no ladder to climb atop the cat's neck to hang the bell. And we have no narcotic to drug the cat so he doesn't eat the mouse commandos who will hang the bell. What shall we do?"

All the mouse delegates glanced at one another uneasily. They stirred restlessly in their seats. Then one jumped up and exclaimed, "Let's bell the cat!"

And the whole assembly shouted with enthusiastic agreement. "Yes, yes!" the delegates repeated, "we need to bell the cat!"

Outside, the cat ate three mice.


Thanks to Carraig Daire for posting the original Aesop's fable of this story, which inspired me to update it.

Why deterrence worked against the Soviets
But would be losing bet against Saddam Hussein. Orson Scott Card has an essay on deterring Saddam that responds to the proposition that Saddam can be deterred from using WMDs against the US because, after all, we successfully used deterrence against the Soviet empire for 50 years.

. . . the Russian government actually cared what the rest of the world thought. They had an ideology to promote, and they knew they wouldn't promote it by using weapons of mass destruction.

This is a key point. What the Soviets wanted to do was convert the world to communism, not destroy it. I say "convert" on purpose. Having come to power through violent revolution, Stalin and successors wanted to foment similar revolutions in other countries. Yet successful revolutions are mass movements. They require masses of people to be converted, emotionally, to the revolutionary side, either actively to participate or passively support it. Persuasion, not destruction, was always the linchpin of the Soviet export of Marxism-Leninism to other lands. Not everyone in a country needed to be converted, but a large enough number had to be so that without a "critical mass" of True Believers, communism could not be established except as a fringe movement.

In the current unpleasantness, it is worth noting that Islam means "submission," not conversion. Islamic expansionism historically has relied on coercion more than conversion. Technically, one does not "convert" to Islam at all, one submits to Allah. Submission is accomplished by uttering the words, "There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet." A change of heart, or an emotional internalizing, of that statement is not necessary. All that is required is the utterance.

The Soviets always knew that they were in competition with the West mainly on a battleground of ideas. (Even a battleground of ideas could be violent: Korea, Cuba, Hungary, Viet Nam, Czechoslovakia, Grenada.) But competition is not the crucial nexus between the West and Islam. Most of the Islamic world (to be fair, really the Arab world) understands themselves to be in jihad with the West, not competition. In jihad with unbelievers, one dominates physically, not competes idealistically.

The Soviets never promised to annihilate American cities for annihilation's own sake. Even when Khruschchev thundered, "We will bury you!" he was not threatening nuclear immolation, but that we, not they, would wind up on the "ash heap of history," as Ronald Reagan later put it.

But the motivations of our terrorist enemies is nihilistic, not constructive. They wish to destroy us for destruction's own sake. With the events of 9/11, we must take them quite seriously when they say they "have the right to kill four million Americans, two million of them children." With the destruction they have wrought in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, can anyone sanely doubt that if al Qaeda could obtain a nuclear weapon, they would use it?

I do not think that Saddam Hussein or the Iraqi people have a natural affinity with al Qaeda terrorism or Taliban-style Islamic fanaticism. Only rarely does Saddam propagandize himself performing acts of Islamic duty, and neither he nor his henchmen spout the Quran. Saddam's Henchman in Chief, Tariq Aziz, is Christian, at least nominally; 750,000 Iraqis are Christian and a Jewish community has lived in Iraq for about 2,600 years. Iraq has been a fairly secular state for a long time. Radical Muslims, including, I believe, Osama bin Laden, have criticized Saddam for insufficient Islamic fervor. Yet al Qaeda unsuccessfully targeted Islamic Jordan in 2000 and has threatened the Wahhabist Saudis, but has not targeted Iraq, perhaps because they know that Saddam would be as merciless in vengeance as al Qaeda is in attack, or perhaps because they intuited that birds of feather finally do flock together.

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend." Saddam and al Qaeda may well hold one another in deepest contempt, but they share almost identical goals, even if from different motivations. Al Qaeda wants to kill us because, well, because they want to kill us. Saddam is a bona fide megalomaniac whom Eugene Volokh credibly imagines may be in the grips of a fantasy ideology concerned with being remembered for a thousand years as another Saladin, and Eugene isn't the first to think that.

The marriage between the Saddam and al Qaeda may not be made in heaven, but it is certainly one of convenience.

The danger from Iraq's nuclear program is that Saddam may provide terrorists with atomic munitions that could be smuggled into the US while disassembled. If Saddam knows that his nuclear program is safe inside Iraq, he may be content to smuggle atomic components into the US over many months. We have already been advised by our government of the patience of al Qaeda, who would do the actual dirty work. Our coastlines and borders cannot be sealed. Only if we had extraordinary intelligence would we have a decent chance of preventing such smuggling.

I am not willing to bet my family's life on it. Will you bet yours?

New template
I hope it works out better. Thanks to all who gave me test feedback. Comments should work again, too; thanks to Kieran Lyons for advising me they had vanished from my new template.

Beautiful women have corrupted us men
It's all their fault we're so screwed up

That's according to a Muslim preacher, as reported by Best of the Web Today.

"[The Greeks and Romans] succeeded in their conquest, establishing mighty empires. When the woman began to beautify herself, and to go out to clubs and public places . . . she corrupted the moral values of the men, weakened their combat skills--and their civilization collapsed. . . . This is the strategic goal towards which the enemies of the Muslim nation strive, as is written in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. . . . The enemies of the Muslim woman are the Jews, the Christians, the hypocrites, the secular, and the opportunists trailing behind them."

That's one of the milder, uh, "observations" made about Christians and Jews this weekend. However, the BOTWD also remarks about this report of an Arabic newspaper in London:

Arutz Sheva translates an editorial from Asharq Alawsat, "the London-based Saudi newspaper of record," which denounces the recent mass murder by Muslims of 29 Hindu worshippers in India. "The attack on a Hindu temple in Gandhinagar in India's Gujarat state was an act of utter barbarity," the editorial declares. "This barbarity, along with the equally barbarous execution-style murder of six Christian charity workers in Karachi, does unimaginable harm to Islam. . . . There has to be an end to such evil. The victims are not only those who get killed. It is also Islam's good name. That affects every individual Muslim the world over."

Let us hope that more and more Muslims are waking up to the fact that the war is truly a religious war, and is just as much an internecine war among Muslims as between the radical terrorists and the West.

40,000 US troops will be needed in post-Saddam Iraq
Occupation necessary to ensure transition

The World Tribune carries the story about a report by the Heritage Foundation.

The report said that the troops would not help rebuild Iraq but would be required to ensure that neither President Saddam Hussein nor his supporters would try to seize power, Middle East Newsline reported.

The United States would require 100,000 troops to topple the Saddam regime, the report said. A post-Saddam U.S. military presence would require 40,000 U.S. troops. Such a force would need to be bolstered by allied troops.

Although I have never put a number on the occupation troops needed, along with many other bloggers I have been saying for a long time that we would have to be in Iraq for a long haul, and would need to occupy the country for an indefinite time.

Unlike the Left, I and many other commentators think that a strong, long-term presence in a post-Saddam Iraq would be a good thing.

How did Moussaoui get a civil service job?
Now we see Tom Daschle's secret agenda

Read all about it here.

Superman decried as unilateralist
Didn't work within a coalition to defeat General Zod

You may recall Superman 2, when the Man of Steel prevented a smuggled atomic bomb from glassifying Paris.

James Durbin has this to say about that.

I'll be interviewed on the Hugh Hewitt Show tonight
Can listen online

I meant to post this yesterday, but the day got away from me. Thanks to Jason Rubenstein's recommendation, I will be interviewed for the last hour of the Hugh Hewitt radio show tonight from 9-10 p.m. Eastern Time. His web site indicates you can "Listen Online."

I am not actually familiar with the show, because no station in my area carries it. I understand it is a call-in show, 1-800-520-1234. I was told by the producer that my hour will likely cover current events and religious matters, including how they intersect.

So tune in if you are so inclined!

Krauthammer jumps on Gore speech
It's like a fumble: everyone's piling on it

The Washington Post, let it be said, can now be said to be singularly unimpressed by Al Gore's speech. First it ran Michael Kelly's detonation of the speech, and now it carries a piece by Charles Krauthammer that pretty adds a nail to Gore's the political coffin. In between, there has been only a piece by Richard Cohen approving of the speech. Says Charles:

It was a disgrace -- a series of cheap shots strung together without logic or coherence. Most of all, it was brazen. It was delivered as if there had been no Clinton-Gore administration, no 1990s.

Just as I predicted before the speech: "He cannot boast of anything the Clinton-Gore administration did regarding terrorism or Iraq . . . he will present it as if it was born anew this year."

It is not as if, during Gore's term, al Qaeda had not declared itself or established its postal address. It declared war on the United States, blew up our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and attacked the USS Cole. What did Gore's administration do? Fire a few missiles into the Afghan desert and a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory, then wash its hands and leave the problem to its successors.

Yes! This is the very point that will dog Gore like a hungry terrier if he seeks any other political office. The other day Fox News carried an interview with Wayne Newton, who is taking Bob Hope's position in the USO. Newton very effectively verbally clobbered Clinton-Gore for doing nothing about the terrorist threat for their eight years. I mean, Wayne Newton, for crying out loud!

Yet what is most remarkable about Gore's speech is that for all its poison, it is profoundly unserious.

That is really the most condemning ting anyone can say about the speech. Gore has simply revealed he is an intellectual lightweight.

"A properly armed society"
Eric Raymond shows why he named his blog, "Armed and Dangerous."

Another response to objections of "Christian ethicists"
Not terribly profound, but it's in a newspaper, after all

"Religion makes some people murderously violent,
but with others, it seems to cause blind idiocy."

So wrote Bill Quick, in response to this news story, "Churches say no to war
Use diplomacy, not bombs in Iraq, Christian leaders plead." The article says Canadian religious leaders sent a letter to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien:

"War drums threaten to drown out both law and compassion," they said in a letter to the prime minister. "This is a time for intense diplomacy and face-to-face negotiations, not for missiles and high-altitude bombing," said leaders of 16 of the nation's largest churches.

Honestly, I am so frustrated at the religious left (and the non-religious left, too) continuing with misrepresentations and distortions that I really would rather just let them blather unchecked. But eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, so here I go. (However, I also remember Robert Heinlein's admonition: "Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.")

1. Everything that the president has done to date has been in accordance with both domestic and international law. Cripes, I am not even going to try to document it because there are none so blind as those who refuse to see.

2. Compassion? For whom, please? We have showed great compassion for the victims of state terrorism, a heckuva lot more than you. By the end of October 2001 the US had dropped more than one million humanitarian rations to the being-starved people of Afghanistan, and more were dropped after that. An enormous tragedy of mass starvation was averted. By the beginning of last summer the people of A'stan had been freed from a contender of most brutal regime in all history, 1.5 million refugees there had returned home, and women and girls were learning to read.

The people of America had been protected from more deadly attacks. The people of Iran had been heartened enough to begin large demonstrations against their tyrannical regime (Glenn Frazier documented this in detail).

We have been shielding the people of northern Iraq for more than 10 years from the murderous predations of Saddam Hussein, and freedom has flourished there.

Where is our lack of compassion?

"A time for intense diplomacy"? Criminy, you nitwits, the president just personally addressed the entire general assembly of the UN. The secretary of state and his deputies are in constant conversation with Europe and the Middle East and Asia on this topic. The UN itself has been negotiating with Iraq about restarting weapons inspections.

Where is the lack of diplomacy? I'll tell you: it is in Iraq delivering ultimatums to the UN about the exact conditions under which inspectors may return, how long they may stay, and where they may go.

"Yes, the world is faced with a dangerous situation, in Iraq and in the Middle East region as a whole. But non-military approaches to those grave problems are possible and infinitely preferable to war," said the letter . . .

"The idea of going in with military force is simply overkill and not necessary."

Note to the religious left: please explain:

what those "non-military approaches" are

that have not already been tried to exhaustion.

The use of the word, "approaches" is telling. It is process-focused rather than results oriented. An approach is not a solution, it is a conversation. It admits of no unacceptable risk to American lives. Note well the absolute lack of detail in what those approaches are.

The left does not have a plan, it has a complaint. A whine. A snivel. But no solution, and they know it.

Rev. Mark Lewis, moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Canada, said Iraqi civilians are still suffering and dying because of sanctions imposed after the Gulf War, and many more would suffer if the U.S. attacked Iraq.

The left, which has been screaming bloody murder about all the Iraqi children dying because of the sanctions, now decides it loves sanctions enough to guarantee their continuation instead of bringing liberty to Iraqis. The fact that our victory over Iraq would end the sanctions and literally enrich ordinary Iraqis means nothing to them. But maybe you expected the religious left actually to come out in favor of freedom? Really?

Rev. Lewis said what seems to be driving U.S. President George W. Bush to attack Iraq is the desire to control Middle Eastern oil resources and his determination that "western civilization and religion will dominate."

Lewis says that like it's a bad idea. . . . All Lewis does here is reveal his personal contempt and loathing for his own civilization and professed religion.

"It is not in the mind of George Bush that people who come from different backgrounds and religions can live together," he said.

Mainly because we have been dying, not living.

What religion other people decide to follow is no concern to the US government. But they may not kill us on its behalf - concepts too simple for the leftist mind to grasp.

He said Mr. Bush and others urging war have lost sight of the people of Iraq. "No one is asking what the human cost of this war would be. Nobody has asked how many lives would be worth taking Saddam out," said Mr. Hildebrand.

Which means, I suppose, that we should be releasing projected casualty figures for your approval? We have not lost sight of the people of Iraq, but we do not seem them more clearly than we see the 3,000 of our countrymen killed by terrorists, or the 280 million still at risk. Nonetheless, "The war being designed now is an attack on a government, not a country."

What we have asked is what the human cost would be to do what you want (that is, to do nothing). And that cost is so realistically, potentially high that it is unacceptable to us or to the people of Iraq, who would certainly suffer more after Saddam strikes us than before.

Even if we simply maintain the status quo, the day will come when Saddam knows he has nothing to lose by hitting us with WMDs. As I wrote earlier (in more detail):

Someday Saddam will die, whether by US action or natural causes. Anyone who thinks he will not do everything he can to strike America and Israel before death robs him of the satisfaction is simply living in cloud-cuckoo land.

The crisis point will be when Saddam knows his death is reasonably imminent. He envisions no future beyond the end of his own life, and therefore will not be dissuaded from striking the US by threats of retaliation against Iraq. The fate of the Iraqi people means nothing to him except as they are able to serve him personally. Does anyone seriously doubt that Saddam would be willing to sacrifice countless more Iraqi lives to strike America, especially if he knew that his own end was near whether he did so or not?

If Saddam ever obtains deliverable WMDs, he can be deterred only as long as he thinks his health is holding up. That is why we must act now.

Later, I have posted critiques of Anglosphere Christian pacifism; I think I'll work up a summary and post it.

Here is a brand-spanking new blog for your review
"Born-on" date is this week

It's hard for new blogs to get attention. Someone with fairly high hit counts must link to them. Because this week I have been treated kindly in links by my compatriots in the blogosphere, I am pleased to pass the favor on to a new guy, especially since he is retired military.

I am pleased to call attention to Shine your Shoes n' Get a Haircut! First up: "I don't speak Spanish."

"Bully for Gore!"
Richard Cohen thought Al's speech was just fine

And he attempts to explain why.

What I find amazing is that Cohen is so willing to accept Gore's provably wrong assertions at face value, but is deeply suspicious of everything Bush and company claim. Why, Richard, why?

Oh, never mind . . . .

Oh, Canada! We knew you'd come through, and you did
Ottawa now backs tough US-sponsored resolution

So says this late-afternoon WaPo story.

"He went as we wanted him to do, to include the U.N.," Chretien said Tuesday about Bush's appeal to the world body three days after their Detroit meeting.

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham also called for a U.N. resolution with "no wiggle room to fool around, or action will be taken."

"We can certainly endorse the United States position that there has to be clear consequences for a failure to act," he said.

While neither Graham nor Chretien committed to supporting a military campaign, Canada is considered a likely backer once the U.N. process has played out.

Attention All Bloggers! I am Coining a New Blogosphere Term!
"Rebound referrals" - my contribution to blogging slang

I just checked my referral log and noticed I have been getting a huge number of hits from this post at Sgt Stryker, a posting written by CPO Sparkey. I knew about his post; in fact, I even linked back to it since we were talking about the same topic. (Joe Katzman started it, though.)

But it seemed to me that the number and pace of referrals coming from the Sarge's site was really high, so I wondered why. A little investigating gave me the answer. I now coin a new term for the blogosphere. It is "rebound referrals," meaning the additional referrals blog site C gets from a link on site B, which was in turn linked to by Site A.

I define Site A as a first-level site - one that very large numbers of people read routinely without being referred to it by any other site. Such as Instapundit or Daily Pundit or Andrew Sullivan, etc.

A little note about comments
Keep it clean, please!

One of the best things I ever did with my blog was add a commenting feature, hosted by Haloscan.com. Many readers post a lot of very smart, insightful things, including when they don't agree with me.

My rule for commenting is very simple: no profanity. I do not use it. Profanity does not add profundity, does not mean one is somehow more serious or well educated on the topic. Being a retired artilleryman, I assure you I am quite expert in the swearing arts, if I chose to use them. I do not so choose.

I just spent a few minutes editing a comment that used profanity (and, I admit, relatively mild profanity). I didn't delete the comment because it made excellent points. I just edited the profanity out. But frankly, I don't want to become a comment editor. So in the future, I'll just delete comments that use profanity.

Read this. Just read it.
Little Green Footballs quotes Larry Miller. Short and excellent.

A $39.95 counter-measure to our expensive Air Force weapons?
Well, no, because US designers aren't idiots

My friend Joe Katzman was kind enough to email me notice about his posting today of the potential that very cheap GPS jammers can block the satellite signals from being received by the GPS-guided Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), a heavy bomb used by the Air Force and the Navy. Joe quotes a correspondent as writing,

At the Paris Air Show in 1999, a Russian company called Aviaconversia demonstrated a 4-watt GPS jammer. The jammer weighed about 19 pounds and was capable of denying GPS reception for more than 100 miles. Many such jammers are available through the Internet for as little as $39.95.

Sorry, no. They may merrily jam away from now til the cows come home, right up to the moment when the JDAMs blow them up (or some other target), leaving the poor-sucker jammers wondering why their "As Seen on TV Call Before Midnight Tonight" $39.95 jammer didn't work - provided they live through the impact of a one-ton bomb detonating within 100 feet.

Financial Review carries this story, dated tomorrow, no less, about the cheap jammer. It has a breathless tone, sort of like it was written by Chicken Little, saying, "The only bona fide solution involves strengthening signal power." Untrue, the problem was solved years ago.

JDAM's designers anticipated the potential of jamming from the beginning. The weapons are built not only with the GPS guidance system, but also an inertial navigation system (INS). The INS slaves off the aircraft's electronic mission data. According to the Federation of Atomic Scientists:

Mission plans are loaded to the host aircraft prior to take off and include release envelope, target coordinates and weapon terminal parameters. The weapon automatically begins its initialization process during captive carry when power is applied by the aircraft. The weapon . . . aligns its INS with the host aircraft?s system. Targeting data is automatically down loaded to the weapon from the host aircraft. . . .

Once released, the bomb's INS/GPS will take over and guide the bomb to its target regardless of weather. Guidance is accomplished via the tight coupling of an accurate Global Positioning System (GPS) with a 3-axis Inertial Navigation System (INS). The Guidance Control Unit (GCU) provides accurate guidance in both GPS-aided INS modes of operation (13 meter (m) Circular Error Probable (CEP)) and INS-only modes of operation (30 m CEP).

What this means is that even if the JDAM bomb's satellite reception is blocked, there bomb will still hit within 30 meters of the target center. Bear in mind that JDAMs are big bombs of 1,000 or 2,000 pounds each. (A 2,000-pound bomb once landed five kilometers from me during a training exercise, way outside of its casualty radius. I saw it fall and hit. It kicked up an enormous plume of smoke and dirt and dust. About 15 seconds later the "boom" hit. Even from five km away, I physically felt the sound in my chest, like someone mildly slapped my solar plexus.)

It's important to note that JDAM was designed as a guided bomb, not a true precision weapon. It is an area weapon. So for the type of targets it is mostly used against, a 30-meter CEP is acceptable. And we can always use more than one per target. The FAS site continues:

INS only [guidance] is defined as GPS quality hand-off from the aircraft with GPS unavailable to the weapon (e.g. GPS jammed). In the event JDAM is unable to receive GPS signals after launch for any reason, jamming or otherwise, the INS will provide rate and acceleration measurements which the weapon software will develop into a navigation solution. The Guidance Control Unit provides accurate guidance in both GPS-aided INS modes of operation and INS-only modes of operation. This inherent JDAM capability will counter the threat from near-term technological advances in GPS jamming.

Translation: JDAM's designed anticipated the jamming problem from the first design stages, and incorporated a self-contained redundancy to overcome it. Since it was first fielded, JDAM's accuracy has been improved from 13-meter CEP to three, with an improvement in INS guidance, so that upgraded models do approach true precision status, even in a jamming environment.

The Navy developed another solution called DAMASK, of which this test was achieved almost two years ago:

In the most recent test of a Joint Direct Attack Munition equipped with the low-cost Direct Attack Munition Affordable Seeker, the weapon punched a hole in the target off dead center by only 0.95 meter?about the width of your office door. And, even more impressive, the weapon attained that accuracy in the GPS-denied mode, relying only on JDAM's inertial navigation system (INS) and DAMASK's template-matching capability.

Interested readers may also read the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) paper on total system guidance in jamming environments, and another DARPA paper here.

UPDATE: CPO Sparkey, who has true professional credentials in this stuff, does a great job of explaining other angles.

I have made the typeface larger
My presbyopic eyes need a larger size.

I changed the font size in the template from 12 to 14. I hope this is easier to read. When I experimented with font sizes on my testing blog it seemed much better. I hope you like it!

Why the world is filled with anxiety
"The world prefers Jews and Americans as victims"

Stephen Rittenburg analyzes this part of Al Gore's speechifying. Al said that after 9/11,

. . . we had an enormous reservoir of good will and sympathy and shared resolve all over the world. That has been squandered in a year's time and replaced with great anxiety all around the world, not primarily about what the terrorist networks are going to do, but about what we're going to do. "

Stephen responds that the reason there is less warmth and fuzziness about America is that we are fighting back:

We are no longer viewed by the world as hapless victims sunk in mournful despair. Indeed, we are causing 'anxiety' to millions of Islamists and their sympathizers in Europe who fear the roused wrath of our country, as well they should. But for Mr. Gore these fears and anxieties are bad; they are indications that we must be at fault. In his view what's needed is greater empathy and understanding, greater soul searching on our part to discern how we must be responsible for such things as Germany's withdrawal of support. Perhaps Mr. Gore has learned from the example of Israel that the world greatly prefers Jews and Americans as victims, and ceases to extend sympathy when they fight back against barbaric killers.

Which I think is a good point.

Our kids are more conservative than we are
So says Berkeley study

Bill Quick points out that a Berkeley study finds youths are more conservative than their parents. Then Bill says, "Evidently DailyPundit and The Angry Clam are having a beneficial effect.

I think it's pretty well acknowledged that blogs are written more by centrist and right-of-center authors than by liberals. Someone, I forget who, said the reason is that the liberals and the left see enough of their own world view repeated back to them in the mainstream media every day that they feel no need to add to it. But conservatives, so this theory goes, feel shut out from most media and so blog away.

Unquestionably, college-age and younger kids are more computer-savvy than their parents, on the whole. My guess is that the blogosphere is very popular among the young because it is easily accessible and is fairly rebellious against the Establishment, which is always attractive to the youngsters.

Everything you always wanted to know about what's really happening in America

Steven den Beste explains it all. Hint: It's all about oil. Really.

Saddam's fall may literally revolutionize the Arab countries
Arab author gives credence to "domino effect"

Way back on April 6, I wrote:

Samuel Johnson once observed, "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." Few things would concentrate the minds of Arab strongmen and their docile intellectual class more than to see Saddam dead or captured. The flowering of freedom in Iraq will have the salutary effect of making it clear to the rulers of neighboring states that they had better get with the program.

So the mere existence of a liberated Iraq, with no further military action by the United States, will almost inevitably lead to more open and freer societies in the rest of the region. It will be impossible for their rulers to suppress the news that the Iraqi people are flowering under democratic institutions. The domestic pressures on the other regimes to liberalize will be irresistible. So they will loosen their control just a bit, thinking that such concessions will placate the masses.

But they won't. Give a thirsty man a taste of water and he wants the whole pitcher. Russian author Victor Suvorov observed that successful revolutions are launched when the oppressive regime concedes some reforms. The Russian Revolution occurred just after Czar Nicholas II instituted some reforms, said Suvorov. Open the tap of freedom just a little, and a flood will push its way through.

Comes now this MSNBC article by Mohammed Al-Jassem, editor-in-chief of Newsweek in Arabic. Al jassem says pretty much the same thing. Best of the Web cited it, and quoted these paragraphs:

After Saddam's fall, the dismantling of the extremist Islamic parties and the containment of the Palestinian issue, most Arab rulers will no longer be able to hide from their people by invoking the dangers of "external threats." The Arab leaders will lose the rationalization for the use of "crisis logic," a phrase coined by political scientist Mohammed Jaber Al-Ansari to denote the way the Arabs handle politics, as opposed to the logic of a normal state of affairs.

The next stage in Arab history will be one of internal domestic confrontations. After Saddam, not one Arab regime, including Syria and Libya, will dare oppose the United States, and most Arab regimes will be forced to pledge themselves to slogans like "renewal, reform and change" as a way of keeping their frustrated masses at bay. In this era, the United States will have to find ways to befriend the Arab masses, not the beleaguered regimes.

More PC Police idiocy
Let's rename it, "The Bellringer of Notre Dame"

Real foolishness from Britain, explained by Geitner Simmons.

Yet another alternate universe story
Congress says don't fight Nazis while dealing with the Japanese

What if, asks Rand Simberg,

WASHINGTON, December 12, 1941 (Routers)--Despite yesterday's declaration of war against the US by the German government, some in Congress are concerned about becoming embroiled in a war in Europe, when we are apparently so ill prepared to defeat the duplicitous Japanese, who only five days ago attacked and decimated our Pacific fleet in Hawaii without warning.

"The formerly important Al Gore"
Michael Kelly does a j-o-b on Al

Really, this whole fisking of Gore by Michael Kelly (in the WaPo, of all places!) is too good to excerpt. Just read the whole thing.

And please read my own fisking of Gore's speech.

Sen. Joe Lieberman rips Al Gore
Al's 2000 running mate runs away from Al's speech;
Toricelli says Al's speech irrelevant

Se. Joe Lieberman, vice presidential candidate in 2000 as Al Gore's running mate, "sharply disagreed yesterday with Mr. Gore's assertion that President Bush was pandering to conservative Republicans with his push for military action against Iraq," says the Washington Times.

"I have never said that, and I don't believe it," the Connecticut Democrat said in unusually blunt disagreement with Mr. Gore's comments. "I'm grateful President Bush wants to do this [in Iraq], and I don't question his motives." . . .

Mr. Gore's remarks prompted strong criticism from some Democrats running for re-election.

Sen. Robert G. Torricelli, New Jersey Democrat, who was trailing his Republican opponent badly in the polls, called Mr. Gore's speech "not relevant."

"I don't think it has any effect on Democrats' thinking at all," Mr. Torricelli said.

Sen. John Edwards, North Carolina Democrat, asked about Mr. Gore's charge that Mr. Bush was pandering to conservatives, said, "I want to stay focused on the substance of it."

Let me praise the Australians
Our friends down under have been steadfast, too

Paul Wright of the Land Down Under was kind enough to link to my fisking of Al Gore's Commonwealth Club speech. Paul commented after my posting:

You might like to include a brief mention that Australia was the first to commit support to the war on terrorism. Our Prime Minister had his mind focussed by being right close to the Pentagon on The Day.

So let me formally acknowledge and express true gratitude for the contributions of the Australians so far. But my posting was future-directed, looking ahead to the campaign against Iraq, and Canberra has made no commitment to that campaign. According to the Sept. 17 Australian newspaper, The Age, "The essential problem with Australia's position on Iraq is that it is nowhere to be found. . . ."

So it seems that so far, Australia is sitting Iraq out. (Here is a description of Australia's military contributions to the Gulf War.)

Referrals can come from the strangest sites
I got a referral yesterday from this site. Who'd a thunk it?

My previous template crashed
I was trying to tweak it, and for about 30 minutes, all the text of my postings disappeared. I knew they had not vanished into the bit bucket, but blogspot would not display them. So I copied and saved all the old template into a text file, which means I still have my links and other customizations formatted, ready for re-pasting into the template. It's too late to mess with the any more tonight. I'll recuperate my old look tomorrow morning.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away
Imagine an alternate universe with Gore as president

That's what Hoystory does:

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- President Al Gore, speaking at a fund-raiser at the Commonwealth Club here, reacted angrily to news that terrorists detonated a small "briefcase nuke" in Washington, D.C., destroying the Capitol and the White House and leaving thousands dead.

"I'm furious. Really, I am," Gore told reporters when informed of the news.

Gore said his administration's first step would be to drain Iraqi accounts frozen since that country's invasion of Kuwait and place the money in the Social Security lockbox.

************************************
Fisking Al Gore on Iraq
Thinks only a "coalition" can defend US lives; urges more of same old failed Clinton-Gore policies

Ever-alert reader Richard Heddleson was kind enough to supply the link to the text of Al Gore's speech to the Commonwealth Club yesterday. Take a look at the opening sentence:

Like all Americans I have been wrestling with the question of what our country needs to do to defend itself from the kind of intense, focused and enabled hatred that brought about September 11th . . . .

Gee, Al, why didn't you just stand up and ask, "Why do they hate us?" As if, you know, it's our fault.

I'm speaking today in an effort to recommend a specific course of action for our country which I believe would be preferable to the course recommended by President Bush.

Is anyone surprised that Al opposes Bush's course of action? Does anyone think that there is any course of action Bush could have chosen that would have garnered Al's approval? Please.

Okay, let's see how specific Al gets, per his promise.

I believe we should focus our efforts first and foremost against those who attacked us on September 11th and have thus far gotten away with it. The vast majority of those who sponsored, planned and implemented the cold blooded murder of more than 3,000 Americans are still at large, still neither located nor apprehended, much less punished and neutralized.

In AlGoreWorld, the campaign in Afghanistan against al Qaeda and their Taliban allies seems not to have happened because the perpetrators of 9/11 "have gotten away with it," Scott free, I guess. But let's look at some facts which (unsurprisingly) Al seems not to know:

Osama bin Laden, driven into the Afghan mountains, hasn't been heard from since December. Possibly (I say probably) he is dead.

Senior al Qaeda official Abu Zubaydah, chief of al Qaeda's military operations, captured in March, is in US custody, being grilled like a Fourth of July hot dog.

Senior al Qaeda terrorist Abu Anas Al-Liby, who plotted the American embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania which killed 224 people. Reported arrested in Sudan, but the US government is mum due to sensitive relationship with Sudan, which once harbored bin Laden.

Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a high-ranking al Qaeda paramilitary trainer and particularly close associate of Abu Zubaydah, apprehended and handed over to U.S. authorities by Pakistani forces in January.

The Taliban's former ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef, turned over to US custody by Pakistan.

273 members of al Qaeda or of the deposed Taliban regime that sheltered them, in custody, with the number rising daily, and that back in January.

Five senior al Qaeda members killed by US forces, bin Laden aides Muhammad Salah, Assadullah and Tariq Anwar al-Sayyid Ahmad, the group's operational coordinator Abu Saleh al-Yemeni and trainer Abu Ubaida. Two others, Abdul Aziz and Abu Faisal, were captured in mid-December.

Taliban leaders Jalaluddin Haqqani, killed in action. Two others, Mahammad Fazal and Noorullah Nori, taken prisoner.

More than 300 enemy personnel imprisoned at the US base at Guantanamo, Cuba.

Many enemy officials captured and extradited to the tender mercies of US-aligned Middle East governments.

Muhammad Atef, al-Qaeda's military commander, killed in an air raid in November 2001.

The US military destroyed at least 11 terrorist training camps and 39 Taliban command and control sites before 100 days after Sept. 11.

As of July, "U.S. and coalition partners have captured over 2,000 terrorists. Just about that many weren't quite as lucky," said President Bush.

In the week before Sept. 23, U.S. officials in Pakistan took custody of five al Qaeda members, including a key strategist for the September the 11th attacks. And here in America, federal agents arrested six men suspected of having trained at al Qaeda terrorist camps in Afghanistan.

I could go on, but I think the point is made: Al's assertion that the perpetrators of 9/11 "have gotten away with it" is as credible as his statement that he invented the internet.

As for al Qaeda still at large, estimates of al Qaeda's strength published before 9/11 began at tens of thousands and went up from there, in 60 nations. Now, Al, maybe we could have "apprehended" them in the past year, but that would have required highly unilateral actions of the type you later decry. As the list above shows, many have been apprehended, anyway, by several different nations. Didn't you know that? Really?

No, in AlGoreWorld, the Bush administration has been twiddling its thumbs, wondering what to do, and when it decided, it decided wrong. Every time. Al again:

I do not believe that we should allow ourselves to be distracted from this urgent task simply because it is proving to be more difficult and lengthy than predicted.

We are not distracted. Operations against the enemy in other parts of the world will not stop just because the US strikes Saddam.

Who says this task is more difficult and lengthy than predicted? Al Gore says, that's who. Who supposedly predicted it would be easy and quick? Not President Bush nor any other member of his administration:

"I say long-term," he [Bush] explained, "because this is a determined enemy we face. This isn't just a one-battle war. This is a war that will occupy not only our time, but will occupy the time of future presidents and future members of the United States Congress and future agency heads" [from a speech in July]

Al Gore again:

We are perfectly capable of staying the course in our war against Osama Bin Laden and his terrorist network, while simultaneously taking those steps necessary to build an international coalition to join us in taking on Saddam Hussein in a timely fashion.

I don't think that we should allow anything to diminish our focus on avenging the 3,000 Americans who were murdered and dismantling the network of terrorists who we know to be responsible for it. The fact that we don't know where they are should not cause us to focus instead on some other enemy whose location may be easier to identify.

Nevertheless, President Bush is telling us that the most urgent requirement of the moment - right now - is not to redouble our efforts against Al Qaeda, not to stabilize the nation of Afghanistan after driving his host government from power, but instead to shift our focus and concentrate on immediately launching a new war against Saddam Hussein. And he is proclaiming a new, uniquely American right to pre-emptively attack whomsoever he may deem represents a potential future threat.

Once again, Al just does not get it. He seems to think that this country cannot do more than one thing at a time. Apparently, we are too weak and inept to continue the fight against al Qaeda and bring down Saddam. I think this says a lot more about Al Gore than it says about America. It's really Al who cannot concentrate on more than one item at a time.

Furthermore, he is still tied to the myth that an international coalition is necessary to bring down Saddam. Let me rebut that on two points. First, a coalition is not an unmitigated blessing. Everyone who sits at the table wants to be dealt some cards. Usually, the more nations there are in a coalition, the more complex operations become, not less. Even so, there are good reasons to form coalitions sometimes, but coalitions should never be formed for the sake of having a coalition.

What Al does not get is that this war is real war, not a peacekeeping operation where no one's feelings are supposed to get hurt, and a status quo maintained. The first, foremost and only important interests are that of America.

Second, we do have a coalition in place for action against Saddam. Great Britain is obviously on board. So are Qatar and Kuwait. Turkey is supporting US military operations in the area now. Reports have said that Jordan has agreed at least to limited US operations from its soil. Israel will not openly ally with the US militarily, but intelligence sharing between the US and Israel is continuous and deep.

What makes a coalition? Three nations? Ten? Forty? What gets Al's goat is not the lack of a coalition, because there is a coalition. For Al, the coalition is made up of the wrong people.

Moreover, no international law can prevent the United States from taking actions to protect its vital interests, when it is manifestly clear that there is a choice to be made between law and survival. I believe, however, that such a choice is not presented in the case of Iraq.

In other words, Al is willing for the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. In fact, the case that Iraq is feverishly pursuing WMDs is compelling. The Bush administration and most members of Congress, Dems and Republicans, agree that the risk to conclude what Al concludes is unacceptable. So does Gore's running mate, Sen. Joe Lieberman, who said of Saddam, "The greatest danger of all would be to do nothing" about the threat he poses to America.

So, gentle reader, on whom would you rather bet your life - Gore or Bush? Because betting your life is exactly what you are doing.

Indeed, should we decide to proceed, that action can be justified within the framework of international law rather than outside it. In fact, though a new UN resolution may be helpful in building international consensus, the existing resolutions from 1991 are sufficient from a legal standpoint.

Ping ping ping - Ricochet Rabbit! Let's see - we shouldn't act alone because it's not justified but we can anyway because it's been justified since 1991.

Al, what about self defense? Unilateral action by the US (which, remember, already has a coalition in place to take down Saddam) is based on the fundamental right of sovereign states to defend themselves. Iraq has never ceased hostilities against the US since 1991.

Al says that the 1991 UN resolutions are legally sufficient for action against Iraq. So what's his beef? Oh, yeah, I forgot, there's no "consensus." The rest of the world has ignored the proof and Al gthinks we should, too.

Stop betting my life, Al.

What a strange reversal from Al Gore the candidate, about whom David Sanger of the NY Times wrote:

In his debate performances, interviews and speeches on foreign and economic policy, Gore has repeatedly portrayed himself as a man who has come to believe in vigorous American intervention abroad, a reversal of Democratic philosophy for most of the time since the end of the war in Vietnam. He describes how the experience of seeing the Clinton administration move too slowly to end the killing in Bosnia drove him to conclude that America must be prepared to prevent disaster. . . .[italics added]

Al Gore again:

. . . in 1991, a strong United Nations resolution was in place before the Congressional debate ever began; this year although we have residual authority based on resolutions dating back to the first war in Iraq, we have nevertheless begun to seek a new United Nations resolution and have thus far failed to secure one.

Again, Al says we already have UN authority to act, but insists we need even more UN authority. Then Al indicates that that Congress cannot act unless the UN does first. Al, here's a new motto for your '04 campaign: "America: Vassal to the UN." Yes, Al, we are just dying for the UN to act, aren't we?

Fourth, the coalition assembled in 1991 paid all of the significant costs of the war, while this time, the American taxpayers will be asked to shoulder hundreds of billions of dollars in costs on our own.

Gore wants to fight the war with OPM (Other People's Money). Gee, isn't that terribly, uh, Democrat, to want others to pay for something?

Once upon a time, a Democrat President announced,

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty . . . . [italics added].

And we have. And we will. (President Kennedy would never make it in the Democrat party today; he'd have to be a Republican.)

Gore continues:

Neither has the Administration said much to clarify its idea of what is to follow regime change or of the degree of engagement it is prepared to accept for the United States in Iraq in the months and years after a regime change has taken place.

I guess Al missed Condi Rice saying that American will "democratize Iraq." She seemed pretty clear. Al's fear of commitment wasn't shared by JFK in his inaugural speech:

To those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required . . . ." [italics added].

Al seems not to understand that this fight with Iraq is for all the marbles, meaning it is a fight that Gore, tutored by Bill Clinton (the launcher of occasional cruise missiles), does not understand. This will not be a fight of symbolic gestures, intended to warn Saddam to behave. This fight will see the end of tyranny in Iraq and the beginning of true freedom for the Iraqi people.

The speech is too long for me to continue to respond in this manner. Let me summarize my thoughts about it this way: "The perfect is the enemy of the good."

What Al does repeatedly is harp about potential problems with Bush's courses of action. Basically, he just says, over and over and over, that Bush's plans aren't perfect. There are too many unknowns, too many unfilled blanks, too much uncertainty, too much open-endedness, too much determination by Bush to protect American lives and critical interests apart from the prior approval of the UN.

All Gore offers instead is more of the same failed policies of the Clinton-Gore administration: endless consultations with the UN, love of collectivism, infinite postponement of decisive action, magnifying downsides while minimizing upsides of decisive action, love of "solidarity between America and her allies" (oblivious that alliances are always occasional rather than perpetual), deep self-suspicion of American power even when intended for the good, pretense that all nations are equals in setting the course of the globe for the future.

Gosh, am I ever so glad that Florida Democrats don't know how to punch a chad.