Bush’s Backbone, Please Call Your Office

Gerard Baker thinks George Bush should ask How’m I doin’?, except that he might not like the answer.

What we have now is a situation in which the world’s only superpower, with the largest economic and military advantage any country has ever enjoyed on Earth, is pinned down like Gulliver, tormented by an army of fundamentalist Lilliputians.

As John O’Sullivan points out on The Corner:

Baker is not a European appeaser complaining about U.S. unilateralism.

Quite the contrary. He was and is a supporter of the Iraq intervention and a defender of a strong U.S. role in the world—as readers of his work in the Times, The Weekly Standard, and The National Interest know.

But he is not a self-deceiver either. And it is plain that Bush, Condi, and the administration have lost their way and perhaps their self-confidence too.

If Bush does not learn and apply the lessons of the present crisis, he will leave office as a failure. What is worse, the world will have moved further toward a real and bloody clash of civilizations.

I know I’m not the only one deeply disappointed in both Bush and Rice. It seems that the fears that he was morphing into his father were all too well-founded.

Scary, sad day.

Eye Witness

A fascinating series on the Christian Science Monitor’s site about, and by, the reporter who was held hostage for 82 days. As of this posting, it’s up to Part 5.

It’s worth reading just for the up-close look she got of the enemy and how they operate and think.

Be Skeptical

While not taking our enemy seriously is a good way to lose the Long War, taking everything our own government says at face value is unwise as well. The Register, that hardy band of skeptics in England, points out that the noise about binary explosives may be bunkum.

We asked University of Rhode Island Chemistry Professor Jimmie C. Oxley, who has actual, practical experience with TATP, if this is a reasonable assumption, and she told us that merely dumping the precursors together would create “a violent reaction,” but not a detonation.

To release the energy needed to bring down a plane (far more difficult to do than many imagine, as Aloha Airlines Flight 243 neatly illustrates), it’s necessary to synthesize a good amount of TATP with care.

Read the whole thing to learn how silly the idea of mixing TATP in the lavatory really is.

Now it’s a big leap from debunking TATP to claiming that binary liquid explosives are “out of the question”. But as someone who seriously doubts that air travel under the boot of the TSA is any safer than September 10th, I suspect the Register guys are right.

Making a difference

Yesterday I flew to Burbank for meetings at a major studio. Then this happened.

It specifically targets “terrorist organisations” such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine.

“We the undersigned are pained and devastated by the civilian casualties in Israel and Lebanon caused by terrorist actions initiated by terrorist organisations such as Hezbollah and Hamas,” the ad reads.

“If we do not succeed in stopping terrorism around the world, chaos will rule and innocent people will continue to die.

“We need to support democratic societies and stop terrorism at all costs.”

Coincidence? You decide.