Gloom

Stanley Kurtz serves up a big, lukewarm dish of hawkish gloom.

The West is on a collision course with Iran. There will either be a preemptive war against Iran’s nuclear program, or an endless series of hot-and-cold war crises following Iran’s acquisition of a bomb. And an Iranian bomb means further nuclear proliferation to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as a balancing move by the big Sunni states. With all those Islamic bombs floating around, what are the chances the U.S. will avoid a nuclear terrorist strike over the long-term?

I hope he’s wrong. I fear he’s not.

Apocalypse When?

Now, according to articles linked to by Cliff May.

In this context, mutual assured destruction, the deterrent that worked so well during the Cold War, would have no meaning. At the end of time, there will be general destruction anyway. What will matter will be the final destination of the dead — hell for the infidels, and heaven for the believers. For people with this mindset, MAD is not a constraint; it is an inducement.

Reuters Meltdown

If you’ve been reading Little Green Footballs (there’s a link to your left) you already know about the ham-handed photoshopping of Beirut by the now infamous stringer Adnan Hajj. Check out the bridge too weird over on Power Line.

Reuters claims that Hajj’s photographs will no longer be used. But I see a Pulitzer in this guy’s future. Just as soon as he learns how to use the clone stamp tool less obviously.

UPDATE:

Michelle Malkin has more at Hot Air. And Chris Muir figured out where failed Reuters photogs go.

Eye on Iran

How long before Joe Wilson steps forward to say that Iran isn’t really buying uranium from Africa?

A United Nations report, dated July 18, said there was “no doubt” that a huge shipment of smuggled uranium 238, uncovered by customs officials in Tanzania, was transported from the Lubumbashi mines in the Congo.

Tanzanian customs officials told The Sunday Times it was destined for the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, and was stopped on October 22 last year during a routine check.

From the annals of Socialized Medicine

Worried that your government-funded medical system may be “over-performing”? (No, i’m not kidding.)

The solution is simple. minimum waiting times.

The measures also seem certain to add to the anger that erupted last week after Ipswich Hospital in Suffolk admitted it had forfeited £2.4 million because it treated patients too quickly, having already agreed a 122-day minimum waiting time with East Suffolk Primary Care Trust (PCT), its funding body. The hospital finished the last financial year £16.7 million in the red.

Is Bush Serious?

Heather MacDonald wonders.

President Bush claims he’s serious about immigration enforcement. Here’s one way he could show it. The Orange County, Ca., sheriff has asked the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to train and deputize his detectives in immigration law and to authorize them to enforce it. That way, when a sheriff’s detective comes across an illegal-alien gang suspect, he can get him off the street immediately on an immigration charge. ICE has sat on Sheriff Michael Corona’s request (which conforms to a 1996 federal law) for ten months. If President Bush wants to demonstrate that he is willing to protect the country against illegal-alien criminals, he should order ICE to approve Orange County’s request without further delay.

Well, Mr. President? is you is, or is you ain’t?

The Camera Doesn’t Lie

But photographers and caption writers do.

This photo could be captioned “His clothes are clean, it’s hours after the attack, but he’s still running away.”

Hat tip: Klo and her emailer.

1938 again?

VDH also looks about him and sees 1938 again.

Yes, perhaps Israel should have hit more quickly, harder, and on the ground; yes, it has run an inept public relations campaign; yes, to these criticisms and more. But what is lost sight of is the central moral issue of our times: a humane democracy mired in an asymmetrical war is trying to protect itself against terrorists from the 7^th century, while under the scrutiny of a corrupt world that needs oil, is largely anti-Semitic and deathly afraid of Islamic terrorists, and finds psychic enjoyment in seeing successful Western societies under duress.

In short, if we wish to learn what was going on in Europe in 1938, just look around.

NB: I stand corrected. In Remembering the victims I said the attackers were from the 8^th century. VDH is a historian and I’m not, so I apologize for granting them an umerited century of progress.

Hezbos on the ropes?

Rush Limbaugh reads the calls for a “cease fire” as evidence that Israel is winning. As he points out, would anybody ask for one if they thought Israel was getting its clock cleaned?

Mark Levin agrees, linking to this analysis from his blog.

Amid the relentless images of the dead extracted from a building in Qana, amid the fiery anger those images generated–from Lebanon to Europe and from Egypt to Indonesia–and amid deafening global cries for an immediate ceasefire, a curiously contradictory picture is emerging from the battlefields of Hizballistan: Hizballah is on the ropes, running short of resources and desperate for a ceasefire for its very survival.

Green Helmet Guy

LGF found out who he is. Through an Arabic-speaking friend of a reader they learn:

His name is Abdel Qader. He claims that they couldn’t reach the building before 8 am because of the conditions of the road and the danger of being hit by the Israeli airforce. His voice is girly and his clothes look impeccably clean!

Be sure to watch the video linked at LGF. Especially the part where the stretcher bearers and photographers are setting up a shot in the background.

Useless Idiots

I have long warned friends and coworkers about the dangers of being interviewed by the media. Am I in a sensitive government position? A politically-charged think thank? No. I make cartoons, for gosh sakes. And yet my warning is always, “What journalists don’t get wrong due to bias they get wrong due to incompetence.” While there have been a few exceptions (whom I always go out of my way to thank), most are just clueless. If those who can’t do, teach then those who can’t teach go to journalism school.

I was interviewed a little over a decade ago by Millimeter in what was supposed to be just a simple fluff piece about the movie we were making. Here’s how I was “quoted”:

“It’s like a highly developed style, jam-packed with story. Our pacing will end up being like ‘The Wizard of Oz’, with a cohesive sound score by the whimsical Randy Newman that propels the story, but more like ‘The Graduate’ in that no one breaks out in song.”

Huh?

While I may have found that annoying, at least when a movie rag muffs a story people don’t die.

Not so the case in the World War where incompetence aids the enemy.

What I realized, from watching [NBC’s Ann Curry] and other journalists like her, was that contrary to popular belief, most of these journalists are neither “pro” nor “anti” Israel. In fact, they are not exactly journalists at all, at least not in the sense that we have been taught to believe. They do not seem interested in reporting what is traditionally understood as news — that is, information that attempts to convey as complete and realistic an accounting of events as possible.

They can be more accurately described as entertainers, who stimulate their audiences with that which is factual and passing. The most striking thing about the producers and on-air reporters who show up in Israel is how deeply ignorant they are of the conflict and its history. This is not exactly their fault: It is the product of their job, which is to entertain rather than inform. The skills required of them are technical and theatrical, not historic or intellectual, and thus they do not approach their task with much in the way of rigor; they are looking for interesting personal stories and manufactured mini-dramas, whose correlation to reality is only occasionally discernable.

What was I worried about?

Obviously there is no more crime in the UK.

Remembering the victims

The court that tried Moussaoui has put nearly all of the trial exhibits on line. This is an unprecedented amount of stuff. All that’s redacted are a few classified items, and the actual audio of the Flight 93 CVR (cockpit voice recorder). But the transcript is there.

One of the most moving is a video of the collapse of Tower Two synchronized with the audio of Kevin Cosgrove’s last telephone call with a 911 dispatcher. (Viewer discression is advised, and it’s a big download. Also, the web site has been getting a lot of hits, so patience is required.)

Cosgrove was in an office on the 105th floor. Hedid not die stoically. He was angry. Frightened. Begging.

Human.

Who hasn’t imagined the Brave or Important things we’d like to say when facing death? Cosgrove’s panicked voice ripped away my veneer of bravery and told me the truth. In a situation like that I, too, would probably panic. The best I could hope for is to, like Cosgrove, keep trying. He was still talking to the helpless 911 dispatcher when the end came, spelling out the name of the person’s office where he and two others were trapped. And he heard it coming.

KC: We’re in John Ostaru’s office.
O. S. T. A. R. U.

DP: A. R. U.?

KC: Right. That’s the office we’re in.
There are three of us in here.
O. S. T. A. R. U. Hello?

KC: HELLO! We’re looking… we’re overlooking the Financial Center.

Three of us.

Two broken windows.

OH GOD! OH!

Kevin Cosgrove left behind a family with young children. He didn’t want to die. He shouldn’t have. Not that day.

He died because religiously-motivated savages from the 8th century hijacked the lives and technology of the 20th century and turned them into weapons.

We’re not going to survive, let alone win, this war if we don’t keep a clear concept of exactly who the enemy is and what the enemy has done. Were it up to me, all of this evidence would be required viewing. I’ve just started to go through it. I hope a lot of people find it and dig through it.

We must remember.

Obsession

One of the best polemical political documentaries you will ever see or, at least, the most timely. Obsession. It’s long, but worth viewing. Be warned that there are scenes of graphic violence.

I vaguely knew about the parallels between Naziism and Islamofacism, but had no idea how joined at the hip they are. Some of the WWII footage was an eye-opener. (Did you know that the Mufti of Jerusalem organized his own Bosnian Muslim SS troops?)

The film has its own web site where you can order a copy on DVD.

When worse is better

Rich Lowry hits a homer.

It is for Qanas that Hezbollah conducts its operations among civilians in the first place. It hopes that Israeli attacks will cause civilian casualties so that the Jewish state’s offensive will be delegitimized. It thus depends on a perverse logic whereby a civilized military force attempting to avoid civilian casualties at the cost of the effectiveness of its own operations is considered barbaric and is pressured to end its campaign — and the world perversely reasons right along with it.

This is one of the greatest asymmetries of asymmetric warfare. For a guerrilla force, worse is always better, even though the worse comes at its instigation. It seeks a widening gyre of death and destruction. “Promoting disorder is a legitimate objective for the insurgent,” David Galula writes in his classic study of insurgency warfare. “Moreover, disorder — the normal state of nature — is cheap to create and very costly to prevent.”

The Thirties Again

Michael Ledeen has been way out front on Iran and the regional/global nature of the war, plaintively calling “faster, please”. I think he’s right a lot more than he’s wrong. While I wasn’t around for the Thirties, I think he’s right again.

The greatest failure of our leaders, with rare exceptions, is their refusal to see the war plain, which means Iran and Syria (might as well call them “Syran,” since they operate in tandem, with Tehran pushing most of the buttons). It was never possible to “win in Iraq” so long as we insisted on fighting in Iraq alone. You can not win a regional war by playing defense in one country. It was, and remains, a sucker’s game. Syran pays no price at all for killing our kids and our allies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now in Gaza and Lebanon/Israel.

Syran reasonably concluded that there was no price to pay for killing us, and so they predictably expanded the scope of the war. Our leaders do not see this whole; they see each component as a separate issue. They see that Hezbollah is an Iranian entity. They see Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers at work in Lebanon and Iraq. They know the best weapons in the war come through Syran and in many cases are manufactured by Syran. Any logical person has to conclude that you cannot win this war without defeating Syran.

Today’s Word

Today Buttle’s World pays tribute to my favorite mail list, A.Word.A.Day, for two reasons. One, today’s word was one I didn’t know before. And secondly, because Buttle rhymes with Guttle.