Gore rips Bush on Iraq
Says Bush risks "serious damage" to war or terror

According to the Washington Post's coverage of the speech, my prediction about the speech was right on target. I am looking for a text of the speech to analyze more closely.

My prediction on Al Gore's imminent speech on Iraq

He will attempt to pretend that 1993-2001 never existed. He cannot boast of anything the Clinton-Gore administration did regarding terrorism or Iraq (but I repeat myself). So no matter what tack he takes on the present situation, he will present it as if it was born anew this year. We'll see.

Today's posts

1. "Overwhelming" support for war resolution
Saddam's latest defiance seals his doom, say US senators of both parties.

2. Saddam's most dangerous failure
Saddam's fundamental ineptitude as a leader is exactly what makes him singularly dangerous.

3. Why Schroeder's win in Germany could drive France closer to America

4. Aaron Sorkin shows why he is a complete flipping idiot

5. North American Christianity's influence to wane as Third World's to rise
European churches' influence is already irrelevant except RC; Clash with Islam inevitable

6. Is Christianity more user-friendly than Islam?
Why language matters

Thank you for reading!

Is Christianity more user-friendly than Islam?
Why language matters

I referenced here Philip Jenkin's thoughts on the future of Christianity. Jenkins also says that in the evangelical battle for converts, Christianity has a distinct advantage. It translates its Scriptures into other languages, while Islam requires converts to learn Arabic to read the Quran. Says Jenkins:

The biggest single difference between them is probably the matter of translation, and I can see pluses and minuses for each. In Islam, wherever you live, you have to learn one particular language to read the scriptures, and that's an equalizing, democratic message, because it suggests that all languages in the world are equally inadequate before the holy language. Christianity operates in a different way, which is that it validates all languages as ones in which you can transmit the scriptures. I think that may be why Christianity is ahead, because by translating, by always putting the scriptures into new languages, it encourages literacy, it encourages the vernacular. And when people read for the first time, it probably gives them a great deal more self-confidence, more ability to make their own decisions, and that tends to spill over into political and social matters.

I had a religion professor at Wake Forest University who told of the Sunday he preached in a small town. He read from the Gospel of John using the Revised Standard Version. After the service a lady told him she enjoyed his sermon, but, she said, "I wish you would read from the original." Of course, she didn't mean the Greek text, but the King James Version.

As the saying goes, the King James Version was good enough for Jesus and it's good enough for me.

The reason the language of worship and Bible matters is this: as the apostles preached the Gospel, they either preached in the language of the people at the place, or used a translator. Speaking Greek, though, could get you pretty far back then, farther than Latin, actually. Greek culture intellectually dominated the Mediterranean world. So even Paul, a Jew, wrote his letters in Greek even when writing to other Jews outside Judea.

From the very first days, Christianity has always held that the Scriptures are fungible. A New Testament in Greek is as good as a New Testament in English is as good as a one in Tagalog is as good as one in Arabic, and so forth. One of the strengths of the Christian missionary effort over the centuries has been that missionary societies were always eager to translate the Bible into other tongues. The Gideons have translated the Jewish and Christian Scriptures into 80 languages.

This central fact of Christian mission means that the Christian faiths around the world and through time have always been culturally embedded. The arguments over whether our culture dominates the church or the other way round never get solved because from the beginning, the church and the culture have always been interwoven through each other like wool and polyester in a modern suit.

We use the language of our culture to describe God to ourselves, but we also agree that the revelation of God cannot be limited only to our own cultural context. God is greater than our culture or any other. God is present in our culture and in some way in all cultures. That means that at the heart of Christian faith is pluralism. Christianity does not hold that all religions are equally valid ways to salvation, quite the opposite. But most Christians do hold that there are many valid ways within Christian faith to encounter God.

Such is not the case for Islam. The Quran was written in Arabic. Even though three-fourths of the world's Muslims are not Arab, Muslim missionaries have never validated other languages or other cultures. A professor of Islamic studies at The George Washington University once told me that the Quran is the Quran only in Arabic. No non-Arabic version of the Quran is valid. Also, the five prayers per day that Muslims must pray facing Mecca may be uttered only in Arabic. Early Muslim scholars wrote that the willingness of Christianity to embrace other languages was a major defect of Christianity and was evidence of the falsification of the Christian message, a view still nearly universally held by Muslims.

In Asia, South America, Africa and the Pacific countries, this fact will matter. Advantage: Christianity, I think.

North American Christianity's influence to wane as Third World's to rise
European churches' influence is already irrelevant except RC;
Clash with Islam inevitable

There are more Christians in Africa than there are people living in North America. The churches in South America and Africa wear the same labels as First World churches, but are theologically are conservative and evangelical. And unlike the First World churches, they are growing. So says author Philip Jenkins, whose theses are profiled in Atlantic Monthly.

The places where Christianity is spreading and mutating are also places where the population levels are rising quickly - and, if Jenkins's predictions hold true - will continue to rise throughout the next century. The center of gravity of the Christian world has shifted from Europe and the United States to the Southern Hemisphere and, Jenkins believes, it will never shift back. So when American Catholics, for instance, talk about the necessity and the inevitability of reforms (reforms that Southern Catholics would most likely not condone), they do so without fully realizing that their views on the subject are becoming increasingly irrelevant, because the demographic future of their Church lies elsewhere.

That demographic future puts Christianity on a collision course with Islam. Though there will continue to be more Christians in the world than Muslims, they will be jostling for converts in the same places, and Jenkins forsees that several countries "might be brought to ruin by the clash of jihad and crusade." The Northern world is unlikely to be the instigator of future crusades. But it seems inevitable that both Europe and the United States will be shaken by the reverberations of growth and conflict in the new Christian world.

Aaron Sorkin shows why he is a complete flipping idiot

Sorkin fails to heed the old saying, "It is better for people to think you a fool than to open your mouth and prove it."

Why Schroeder's win in Germany could drive France closer to America

Glenn Frazier has a very good essay with some interesting observations.

Saddam's most dangerous failure
Saddam's fundamental ineptitude as a leader is exactly what makes him singularly dangerous

It was Bush the Elder who first characterized Saddam Hussein as Hitlerian, back in 1990 during the build up to the Gulf War. I think that comparisons to Hitler are almost always overdrawn, and Bush's statements back then struck me as bloviation, simple metaphors made to illustrate Saddam's threat and drum up domestic support.

Lately though, I have thought that the comparison is apt in a way that Bush did not intend.

Ronald Lewin's short but packed book, Hitler's Mistakes, probes deep behind the usual litany of tactical blunders that Hitler made beginning in 1942. Lewin discusses in detail why Hitler's fundamental conceptual incapabilities and how they inevitably led to colossal errors in the organization and function of the Third Reich in almost every area.

Perhaps Hitler's greatest "mistake" was not made as the result of choosing poorly from among several alternatives, but was actually the defining characteristic of Hitler's entire regime: because of Hitler's extreme megalomania, he demanded from the beginning that everything revolve around him personally. All of the Reich's apparatus - military, economic, political, security, cultural - was designed to enhance the cult of the Fuhrer.

That means, writes Lewin, that nowhere in the very basic conceptualization of the Thousand-Year Reich was there the slightest nod toward Hitler's succession. The political organization of the Reich utterly lacked a mechanism by which there would be an orderly transition of authority once Hitler died. Because there were many attempts to assassinate Hitler from the mid-1930s on, this lack of a plan for succession is astonishing - unless Hitler had no vision for the future of Germany that would outlive him personally.

The upshot of this spectacular flaw was that Hitler blamed every defeat on treason against him personally. When Soviet Marshal Koniev's army crushed the German Fourth Army in early 1945, Hitler denounced them all as traitors in a conference inside his bunker. "All our failures in the east can be traced to treachery - nothing else but treachery," he declared, despite the fact that the tenacity of German troops was extraordinary.

(Actually, Hitler was partially right about the treachery, though not in the way he meant. He meant that traitorousness was endemic down to the level of individual soldiers. But in fact, his closest aide, Martin Bormann, was a Soviet agent and had been giving the Soviets detailed information about Hitler's orders for years. But I digress.)

When Hitler saw his personal end closing in (in the form of Marshal Zhukov's army) he was quite willing to sacrifice German lives by the wholesale lot to preserve his own. And toward the last days, he actually gave orders to kill massive numbers of Berliners because they had failed him.

Cornelius Ryan documents that as the Soviets closed in on Berlin, Hitler ordered all water and electrical plants to be blown up, as well as other utilities. These orders were mostly disobeyed by the civilians who ran them, but had they been carried out, untold numbers of Berliners would have perished from the effects. At one point, Hitler order the subway system flooded so the Soviets could not use it, even though tens of thousands of Berliners were using the system as shelter.

Hitler ultimately did not care whether Germany survived him. In fact, he thought that the German people deserved to perish for failing him. His mouthpiece, Joseph Goebbels, summarized Hitler's thoughts precisely: "The German people have failed. . . . The German people themselves have chosen their own destiny."

What about Saddam?

Like Hitler, Saddam has based his entire regime around a cult centered on him personally. He has a bodyguard which is sworn not to protect Iraq, but to defend him. There is no evidence that anywhere in Saddam's government apparatus is there the slightest concern for the mechanism of succession. He, like Hitler, has no vision for Iraq that outlives him.

Like Hitler, Saddam has proven that he is quite willing to sacrifice Iraqi lives wholesale in order to achieve his personal goals - the Iran war, gassing of Iraqi Kurds and the Gulf War being three prime examples. Saddam's chief goal is his personal survival. He takes extraordinary measures he takes to that end - using doubles, random moves among his many palaces, spending the night in different places almost every night, building his personal staff and key offices from among relatives and members of his own tribe. But crucially second among his desires is almost certainly to strike lethal blows against America and Israel.

There are reasons to believe that Saddam's health is poor. The US and UK have documented his fanatical determination to acquire atomic weapons and other WMDs.

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.

"Overwhelming" support for war resolution
Saddam's latest defiance seals his doom, say US senators of both parties

Iraq's Saturday announcement that it would defy any new UN resolutions has made the Congress' approval of a war resolution certain, two key lawmakers said. Sen. John McCain, R.-Ariz., and Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., agreed that the course is now set for certain war.

France invades Ivory Coast
Complete lack of UN resolutions prove French unilateralism;
French act like les garcons de vaches

UPI reports,

French troops arrived in Abidjan Sunday to reinforce France's 600-man force in the Ivory Coast, as unrest continued to roil the West African country following an apparent coup attempt last week.

Well, I just don't what to say about this. I'm shocked.

Whew, that's a relief!

Hewitt: I am not Harry's father.
Former cavalry officer James Hewitt has denied he is Prince Harry's father.

Harvard President warns against anti-Judaism
Larry Summers recognizes its rise in the West

In his Sept. 17 Address at Morning Prayers, harvard President Larry Summers said,

. . . there is disturbing evidence of an upturn in anti-Semitism globally, and also because of some developments closer to home.

There have been synagogue burnings, physical assaults on Jews, or the painting of swastikas on Jewish memorials in every country in Europe. Observers in many countries have pointed to the worst outbreak of attacks against the Jews since the Second World War.

Candidates who denied the significance of the Holocaust reached the runoff stage of elections for the nation?s highest office in France and Denmark.
State-sponsored television stations in many nations of the world spew anti-Zionist propaganda.

The United Nations-sponsored World Conference on Racism -- while failing to mention human rights abuses in China, Rwanda, or anyplace in the Arab world -- spoke of Israel?s policies prior to recent struggles under the Barak government as constituting ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. The NGO declaration at the same conference was even more virulent.

But where anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israeli have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated right-wing populists, profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.

And then he gives some examples.

Condoleeza Rice: US will democratize Iraq: Link.

More evidence that Iraq war is not imminent
The Washington Post reports,

. . . the U.S. Central Command will move command and control facilities from Florida to Qatar in November.

CENTCOM is not going to make this move in the middle of active operations against Iraq.

From the same article, the Saudi plaint:

Mohammed Saeed Tayyeb, a liberal Saudi lawyer who hosts gatherings of Saudi intellectuals and who appears regularly on television talk shows, said in a telephone interview from Jiddah that there was a lot of frustration over the looming conflict.

"There is no way around riding the American train. We don't really know who the driver is, nor where he is taking us or at which station he is planning to stop or whether he plans to return. Yet if we stand by on the pavement, we are told we will sit alone and another train may crash right into us. There is a feeling among Saudis of having no choice," Tayyeb said.

"We feel that this American friend, whose political projects we did not hesitate to finance has dragged us into a war, made us build bases we barely use and sold us planes and weapons we don't know how to operate. We bought all of that, but it did not do us any good," he added.

Suckers!

"Extremely intense" attack planned against Iraq
Attack will focus on Saddam and his personal support structure; Iraqi military is secondary

This according to the Washington Post (some excerpts):

What is already clear, however, according to senior officers and others familiar with emerging "concept of operations," is that unlike the 1991 war, neither Iraq's infrastructure nor its military rank-and-file would be targeted. Instead, the U.S. military is thinking about how to execute a sharply focused attack on Hussein and the people and institutions that keep him in power. And rather than a five-week-long air campaign followed by a ground attack, as happened in 1991, the two could occur nearly simultaneously.

The war being designed now is an attack on a government, not a country.

"Our interest is to get there very quickly, decapitate the regime, and open the place up, demonstrating that we're there to liberate, not to occupy," one military planner said.

The bull's-eye is Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, where about 50,000 people live on the Tigris River about 100 miles north of Baghdad. "Tikrit is the political center of gravity," said Rick Raftery, a retired Marine intelligence officer who served in northern Iraq in 1991. "It must be immediately eliminated."

Experts on Iraq say that Tikrit is the nexus between Hussein, the security police and his weapons of mass destruction, or WMD. "Iraq's WMD are under the control of the special security organization," Khidir Hamza, a former Iraqi nuclear engineer, recently testified on Capitol Hill. "This is the same group that are charged with Saddam's security. This feared and ruthless organization is mainly composed of conscripts from Saddam's hometown and very loyal tribes in the adjacent areas."

The article says that the opening air attacks will last only a few days before the ground attacks begin - there will be no prolonged preliminary air campaign as there was in 1991. The air component of the initial phase will apparently be heavier and more violent than anything seen since the Viet Nam war, perhaps even since World War II (my comparison, not the WaPo's). The difference between then and now will be the enormous use of precision munitions.

The air campaign will use every type of warplane - B2s in quantity, B-52s, fighter bombers, cruise missiles.

Iraqi army units will not be targeted unless they deploy from their bases. Through psyop media, they will be warned of utter destruction if they take up tactical positions. Indeed, some Kurds have reported they have already been contacted by Iraqi officers trying to arrange favorable terms in advance.

There is plenty more, and it is intriguing. Much of it makes a lot of sense to me.

The Doolittle Raiders
One of the most astonishing feats in military history was 60 years ago

Smithsonian Magazine has a good article. These men simply fill me with awe.

Dating Christians can be hazardous to your health
Man kills wife and four kids over their relationship with Christians.

In an Islamic country, of course.

Women soldiers must take down porn images
Soldiers also forbidden to have sex with other soldiers

A decree has been issued stating that

. . . sleeping with fellow soldiers of either sex, or indeed their partners, would be bad for morale, threatening "mutual trust and soldiers' willingness to help each other."

I am not making this up.

Gee, ya think?

Headline on Reuters story: "Fearless Kids Said to Make the Best Athletes"

Acumen, hubris, jejune, lexicon, belie, chicanery, filibuster, sanguine, unctuous, thermodynamics, yeoman, moiety, parabola, quotidian

These are some of the 100 words that the editors of The American Heritage College Dictionary say that all high school graduates and their parents should know.