The Failure to Use 9-11

The greatest mistake made by the Bush Administration was the failure to fully utilize the political opportunity offered up by September 11th. I suppose that it's hard to blame them, given the chaos of those days, but I still believe it to have been a serious mistake. Simply put, I tend to view politics as a locked wheel. Most of the time there's not much give to spin the wheel either one way or another. Yet, from time to time, there are Earth-shattering events which give one a quick chance to radically spin the wheel. Once the chance passes, the wheel freezes again in its new position, with only minor movement possible.

As I see it, there were several lost chances after 9-11 to lay the groundwork for a broad and lengthy conflict (though, I hasten to add, one which might well be mostly over by now). The first came on 9-11 itself.

Like many, I hated the President's initial speech. It was too focused on healing and not focused enough on vengeance. It failed to meet the scale of the challenge.

Lately, I've been testing an experiment which I like to call, "re-branding the Global War on Terrorism." In the course of a day, I encounter far more people whose minds have been poisoned by the likes of Michael Moore than I'd care to meet in a lifetime. The problem, as I see it, is that the causes and reasons for the present war are too complicated for them. The majority of the population, not being particularly sophisticated politically, tend to be eager to accept the simplest explanation available to them. Since most explanations of the rationale for the present war tend to become complex fairly quickly, they tend to zone out. And they tend to fall for the easy answers offered by the likes of Michael Moore. ("War for oil", etc.)

Take one of those people and explain it to them differently. Instead of focusing on terror, democracy and the rest, focus on the plans of Islam. Explain, in essence, that Islam is evil and wants to conquer the world and, therefore, most be resisted. Explain it that way and, more often than not, I've found that people will "get it" and be willing to accept this answer. It won't work on hard-core lefties, of course, but it'll work on most average people. It instinctively makes sense to them in a way that other explanations don't.

It seems to me that the best possible course of action would have been for President Bush, on 9-11 itself, to have worked the words "Third World War" and "World War Three" into his speech. The media, being the media, would have found these words irresistible.

The headlines the next day would have looked something like this:
New York Times: "Following Attacks, Bush Declares Beginning of ‘Third World War'"
New York Post: "WORLD WAR III"

And, of course, the TV networks wouldn't have been able to resist creating wondrous "Third World War" banners for their twenty-four hour coverage. By the very fact of his speaking the words, it would have been made so.

To accompany that declaration, the President should have then gone on to take several other steps. First: the whole of the National Guard and the reserves should have been called to active duty, regardless of the actual military need for their services. Second, "war bonds" should be have (as was discussed) been issued, regardless of their actual utility.

A major part of waging a modern war is marketing and selling it. One of the biggest problems we've faced in the years since 9-11 is that people who are unable or unwilling to pay sufficient attention are simply incapable of grasping the nature of the threat.

The other missed chance to show the reality of the danger was at Tora Bora, when Bin Laden and his minions made their way into the mountain complex. Now, I'm not foolishly saying that we should have dumped US troops into there, as John Kerry did. Had that been done, the odds are that there'd have been a thousand US dead in that single battle and there'd still be no certainty of getting Bin Laden.

No, what I think should have happened is much simpler: US and Afghan troops should have backed up and the place should have been plastered with nuclear bombs. A dozen or so nukes would have sealed those caves for the rest of time, destroying much of al-Qaeda.

The best effect of such a move, of course, would have been its demonstration of US resolve. No one, especially in December of 2001, (well, no one who counts) would have had the will or ability to actively oppose such a decision.

Alas, chances come and then they are lost. But the President would be well-advised to be prepared to seize his chance if the terrorists strike again.

Fall of Canada Round-Up

This, from the Vancouver Sun, is just priceless:

Corren, an elementary school teacher in Coquitlam, has been fighting for recognition of homosexual issues in the curriculum for nearly nine years. He and his partner were married in July and legally changed their last names just prior to the wedding. Before the couple was married, they were known as Murray Warren and Peter Cook.

Heh.

The article itself is less amusing, being about their attempts to forcibly inject pro-gay content into the school system, most notably history. As I said a few weeks ago, I'm fairly sure that, in a decade or so, students are going to be asked to write serious essays about the gay love affair between Jesus and Judas.

And, in even more alarming news, apparently Canada is filled to the brim with Chinese spies. This, of course, is a danger that I've warned of for some time, but it's nice my essential rightness confirmed once again.

Good News

Susan Sontag is dead.

A Vicious, Wicked Faith

Americans who are fearful that they will soon lose some of their freedoms should look no farther than Canada and Britain to see the shape of things to come. �Freedom�, for the left, appears to have become something that ends at the bathhouse door (that is, if you�re not a member of a Designated Victim Group�). At the same time radical judges are courageously imposing the social mores of a French brothel upon the rest of the West, lawmakers and judges both are undermining other, more fundamental, freedoms.

Let us consider the case of Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party. He was recently arrested for calling Islam a, �vicious, wicked faith.� Now, I�ll stipulate to the fact that Nick Griffin, by most accounts, appears to be an unsavoury character. I�ll further grant you that the British National Party is a hideous collection of low-life racists. But, I assert, even low-life racists ought to retain their freedom of speech. Especially when all Mr. Griffin said was something that millions of people without a hint of racial prejudice in their personal make up believe.

Scratch that: even if Mr. Griffin were to be caught on video screaming racist obscenities while dressed up in blackface, he should not be arrested. People should not be judicially punished simply for the things that they believe.

Now, some may say: how do you reconcile this with your calls for people who support or sympathize with terrorists to be punished? That, at least, is an easy matter.

I don�t believe that it�s a crime, punishable by law, to be pro-terrorist. I believe that it�s an act of war concert with our enemies. We�ve broken down the distinction between crimes and wars. Crimes need to be punished judicially. Acts of war need to be punished martially. I think we need to bear in mind a clear distinction between the two.

I don�t think that anyone should go to jail for being a member of al-Qaeda. I think that, in keeping with a proud tradition, anyone found to be a member or supporter of al-Qaeda anywhere in the world, including within the United States, ought to be treated as all combatants found out of uniform have traditionally been treated under the laws of war. In other words, anyone who is a member of al-Qaeda or takes any action to support them should be tried by a military commission and then summarily executed.

But, I�ve been diverted. The point I was getting at was that there are different standards for those advocating a domestic political position and those working for the enemies of one�s country. The freedoms of the former need to be protected. The freedoms of the latter need to be ended with rope.

We seem to have this backwards. Far too many in Western societies seem to be interested in protecting our enemies and punishing domestic political expression.

It only gets worse: in Britain, the Labour Government is preparing a law against �religious hatred� which would, in all probability, make even less statements of opposition to Islam a crime. One of the individuals working on the new law has gone so far as to say that it would, �make it illegal to say that Muslims are a threat to Britain.�

Well, let me say two things right now. First: I agree with Mr. Griffin that Islam is a, �wicked, vicious faith.� There can be, and are, good Moslems but that does not change the obvious and fundamental fact that Islam itself is, in general, a bad thing and that we�d all be better off had it never been created. Second: I agree that Moslems are a threat to Britain, to Canada, to America and to free people everywhere.

We have some evidence that Islam is compatible with democracy, but we have very little evidence that it�s compatible with pluralism. That, if we�re courageous enough to face the truth, is the real reason for the persecution of people like Mr. Griffin and for the whole concept of �religious hatred� laws.

If you make a play falsely slandering Jesus as a homosexual, you�ll be lauded for your courage and face, at the most, a few threatening letters.

If someone actually let you produce a play accurately depicting Mohammed as a pedophile (see: Aisha), the odds are fairly high that both you and your family will be murdered.

That is why, if everything goes according to plan, it will soon be a crime in Britain (and elsewhere!) to defame the character of Mohammed. The authorities have looked at their options, and decided that they�d rather not deal with future religious riots of the sort that we saw in Nigeria over the Miss World Pageant.

One reason I plan to emigrate at the earliest opportunity is that I have what I believe to be a well-founded fear that Canada is, at the most, a half-decade away from the point where political expression on the issues of Islam and other matters will be fully criminalized. Frankly, given the size of my mouth, I�ve very little doubt that, if I stay, someone will try and come at me for something.

Already, as a result of various e-mails I�ve received threatening me with attempts to press criminal �hate speech� charges against me (my favourite being one announcing that anyone expressing support for President Bush could be prosecuted under Canadian anti-genocide laws) that I�ve prepared plans to, if necessary, flee a political prosecution and seek asylum in the United States.

That sounds crazy, I know. But I�m not at all sure if it sounds as crazy as it once did. A few years ago, a man in Saskatoon was successfully prosecuted by a �human rights tribunal� for taking out an ad in a newspaper quoting certain Bible versus that denounce homosexuality. Under a new criminal law passed last year, it seems entirely possible that someone could end up in jail for doing the same thing today.

Defenders of that law claim that it contains a protection for religious expression. We�ll see. So did the law under which he was prosecuted a few years ago. The tribunal got around the exemption by claiming that any speech that is �hateful� cannot be considered to have been made in �good faith�, an interpretation of the law which essentially nullified the exception.

In defense of our freedoms, we must stand up for the repugnant. For, if we do not defend those who we can agree, by mutual consent, to be �bad� it won�t be long before the state starts to come for all the lesser shades of �bad.�

The Democratic Coup in the State of Washington

“Why is it always the Democrats who steal elections?” a friend asked me recently, “isn’t it that you’re just a Republican and you want to blame everything on Democrats?” While that is, of course, mostly true it does not alter the fixed fact that Democrats commit electoral fraud with far greater frequency than Republicans do. This is not (entirely) due to the well-known moral turpitude of the followers of the party of idleness, dishonesty, and treason, rather it is mostly a product of a geographic situation which results in Democrats universally possessing the two elements necessary to commit a crime: motive and opportunity.

In a broad sense, Democrats steal elections simply because they feel like it. More specifically, I suspect, Democrats rationalize it to themselves through logic that was on full public display during the most recent Presidential election. Essentially, Democrats believe that they are the natural party of government and, if they do not win, that means that they’ve been victims of fraud or deception or that their voters have somehow been “disenfranchised.” This is the driving force behind the increasingly wild conspiracy-theorizing over matters in the State of Ohio. Democrats can’t accept that they lost because they don’t believe that it’s possible for them to lose. They tend to view their failure to win as ipso facto proof of fraud or malfeasance.

This is, of course, a humorous thing since it’s well-known that Democrats are far more likely to engage in electoral fraud than Republicans. As I’ve already shown, they’ve got motive a-plenty for fraud (not to say that Republicans don’t as well), the difference is this: the Democrats have opportunity as well.

The places where it’s easiest to commit electoral fraud are, obviously, those with the most voters. In other words: inner city precincts. Those places, as it so happens, fall under almost-total control by the Democratic Party. It’s hard to create thousands of new ballots in a rural county with two thousand people. It’s easy to do it in Seattle, Detroit, or Columbus.

Combine motive, opportunity and immorality and, more often than not, you’ve got a crime. And so we have.

What we’ve got in progress today in the State of Washington is nothing less than a non-violent coup d’etat. The will of Washington voters is being overturned through fraud and the complicity of a media which is, as always, willing to cover up the wanton criminality of the Democratic Party. What’s going on in Washington is the same thing which the Democrats try in every election: the perpetuation of a great crime against the people.

Simply put, at this point, any election result which puts State Attorney General Christine Gregoire in the office of Governor is, on its face, invalid. There’s simply been too much malfeasance for any such result to be accepted. Frankly, at this point the actual ballots in Washington State have been so heavily contaminated that I don’t think anyone can trust the results.

The stories of what’s gone on are legion. And, of course, almost all of them involve King County: a locality controlled by a classic, old-time Democratic machine. Ranging from the initial discovery of 10,000 “misplaced” ballots, to the “enhancement” of ballots that the machines wouldn’t read, to, finally, the sudden “discovery” of another 750 “lost” ballots, the whole thing has been closer to what you’d expect out of South Texas in 1948 than Washington State in 2004.

Frankly, when all’s said and done, I won’t be at all shocked if we discover that those final absentee voters all managed to vote in alphabetical order.

Now, I realize that among the final batch of “disenfranchised” absentee voters in King County was a King County Councilman. This, on its face, would seem to be strong evidence that those voters were actually excluded from the original count as a result of worker error. Very strong evidence. In my opinion, suspiciously strong evidence.

Frankly, I wouldn’t be at all shocked if someone simply manufactured those additional ballots and make sure to put a prominent politician’s name of the list of supposedly disqualified voters in order to create the appearance of the vote’s propriety. It wouldn’t be hard at all. Get a list of people who voted absentee and pick off seven hundred plus people at random and add their names to the lists while manufacturing a second ballot for each of them.

I’m not claiming that is what happened: I’m just saying that it could have happened. I really don’t know. A month and a half is an awfully long time for ballots to be sitting around.

Further recounts won’t do any good: the pool of ballots has already been contaminated. Trying to separate the dirty Democrat ballots from the rest would bear remarkable similarity to attempting urine from a swimming pool.

In Defense of Rumsfeld

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has made mistakes, just as anyone who has ever done anything has made mistakes. That isn�t the questions. The question before us is this: what did Donald Rumsfeld ever do to create the current firestorm? The answer, insofar as I can tell, is this: pretty much nothing.

Forgetting the present mini-controversies about up-armouring Humvees and the use of the autopen to sign condolence letters, what are the charges against Rumsfeld? There appear to be two major lines of attack against the Secretary, one from the right and one from the left.

The first, ostensibly from the right (but often echoed from the left) is that he should be held at fault for the fact that there are �too few� troops in Iraq. This is an often-repeated but little thought upon notion.

Think about it for a moment: what would �more troops� do, were they to actually be deployed to Iraq, except serve as additional targets for the insurgents? Really think about it. What would these additional troops be doing? The answer seems to be �patrol.� Patrol what? The streets? The roads?

More troops would be called for if we were fighting a conventional army. But we�re not: we�re actually fighting no more than a handful of insurgents who kill, in essence, with purposeful randomness. �More troops� might be called for if US forces were engaging another army and being defeated. But they aren�t. The overwhelming majority of US casualties are the result of acts of terrorism being carried out by a relatively small band of people.

Think back to October of 2002 when the DC Snipers were wandering around. They managed to kill ten people in twenty-three days before they were caught, almost entirely by accident. That was two people, with one rifle and beat-up old Chevy Caprice. Imagine how many people they might have killed if they had access to everything that Saddam left lying around the country.

What Coalition forces in Iraq are facing isn�t an �army� but a number of people operating it the same fashion that Muhammad and Malvo did: wandering about looking for targets of opportunity. Given the present casualty level, I�d say that the number of active Iraqi insurgents (those killing, as opposed to those attending meetings and pledging their willingness to die for Allah before going home to enjoy Whisky and pornography) is probably a number in the hundreds. A few thousand, at the most, might be added to those numbers if we count those willing to act as members of ad hoc local militias into those numbers.

This means, in essence, that the potential benefit of adding additional troops to the mix would be outweighed by the increased causalities. You can�t just throw whole Army Divisions against the insurgents (except in exceptional cases like Fallujah or the Sadr-inspired uprisings where things have spun out of control). To track down most of these insurgents you need first-rate local intelligence derived from the cooperation of the local population. US forces aren�t ever going to truly get that. To truly run the �mad killer� insurgents to ground, Iraqi forces are going to have to do the work.

So what, then, would these additional troops do? They�d really do nothing, other than provide dozens of new mess tents for the �mad killer� terrorists to lob rockets or mortar shells into. You�d sustain hundreds of additional losses in exchange for a minimal benefit.

The present number of US troops is adequate to perform the essential functions which the United States is called upon to undertake: securing key sites, supporting the new government, preventing overt foreign intervention, attacking Jihadists, and standing at the ready against any attempt at the launch of a more general insurgency. Troops beyond the present level promise nothing more than diminishing returns.

People angry about the troop levels in Iraq are suffering from a failure of imagination. A lot of the people talking seem to think that additional forces could just storm the �bases� the insurgents are using and things would be over with. Far from it. In order to do that you�d have to storm every single house in Iraq at the exact same time. And you�d have to burn down every other potential hiding place while you�re at it.

Carthaginian strategies are wonderful against an enemy you wish to destroy, but foolish against a population you wish to lead to liberty.

All additional troops will do is force the US to assume security roles that should be taken by Iraqi forces as soon as possible. All flooding the country with another 100,000 troops would do is delay the date of Iraq�s political and military self-sufficiency. More troops, ultimately, would mean nothing more than more dead.

The second attack against Rumsfeld is part of the developing effort to point US actions against prisoners as a Nazi-like war crime. This is occurring, of course, mostly from the left but, as in the first attack, the assault is being joined from the right as well. In the case of the right, it�s being supported by alleged conservatives who are smart enough to support the war, but not quite smart enough to accept that strong measures are needed to fight it.

I think, though, that all of this will pass soon enough. When Iraq, about a month from now, holds its first free elections the scale of our achievement there will be undeniable. Better still, it seems likely that the next month will be the high-point of the insurgency in Iraq. As democracy takes root in that nation and free political processes run their course, the government will gain the courage and the political support to take on the killer terrorists who provide the insurgency with its punch.

Rumsfeld may be being beat up upon now, but history will vindicate him.

The Gay Attempt to Rape the Memory of Honest Abe

There’s a movement at work in the land to rape the memory of Abraham Lincoln. Various individuals, for motives that are there own, are engaging in an attempt to posthumously conscript ol’ Honest Abe into the ranks of the Lavender Brigade. Yes, my friends: the gays are coming for Lincoln.

Frankly, I fear that they’ll be successful. From what I’ve read there’s exactly enough to confuse the stupid and indoctrinate the young. I won’t be at all shocked if, in a decade or so, schoolchildren are routinely taught about the inner turmoil of the painfully closeted 16th President.

The basis of this blasphemous obscenity is a book, entitled The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, written by the late Dr. C.A. Tripp (who just happened to be a disciple of famed fraudulent “sex researcher” Alfred Kinsey) which claims the “out” Lincoln as a homosexual. Already the book has received a great deal of favourable coverage and, quite frankly, I’m sure that it will receive much more as it moves towards release.

Already the matter has been raised in the pages of both the Manchester Guardian and the New York Times. Each, naturally, managed to find some plenty of experts willing to back up this “theory.” As the story gets more coverage with the book’s release, it seems likely that there will be no shortage of Professors, academics, and other assorted “experts” ready to back up its conclusions.

The “evidence” that Lincoln was gay can be summed up as follows:

1) While working on the frontier, he slept in the same bed as other men: an extremely common practice in the day.

2) His marriage was mostly unhappy.

3) His stepmother once said that he wasn’t very fond of girls.

4) He once, in 1829, wrote a humorous poem which mentioned a man mentioned to another man.

5) He and his bodyguard were close during the Civil War (to prove that this has a homosexual link, Dr. Tripp cites an 1895 Regimental History which, to put it mildly, would be unlikely to contain such a thing, even were it to be true).

As a side note, Dr. Tripp began working on the book with a partner who fell out with the good Doctor after accusing him of plagiarism and fabricating evidence that Lincoln was gay. These revelations were, apparently, enough to delay but not enough to stop the publication of the book.

In other words, major newspapers and other organizations are attempting to smear Father Abraham as a homosexual on the basis of distortions, conjecture and rumours being peddled on behalf of a man accused of attempting to fabricate evidence of Lincoln’s supposed homosexuality.

Dr. Tripp is fortunate to be already dead. This kind of thing practically cries out for an Americanized fatwa.

I’m mostly kidding about that last part.

This story will be spread because it provides perfect fodder to advance the agenda of the queer-left coalition. The New York Times is, as is the model, less-than-subtle in spelling out the real point of the story:

Larry Kramer, the author and AIDS activist, said that Mr. Tripp's book
"willchange history."

"It's a revolutionary book because the mostimportant president in the
history of the United States was gay," he said. "Nowmaybe they'll leave us
alone, all those people in the party he founded."

That’s the real point of the whole thing, of course: to embarrass the Republican Party and attempt to force them to swallow the whole of the gay agenda. The left is willing to rape the memory of the nation’s greatest President in order to advance its agenda.

What they’re counting on is the natural agnosticism of most people when confronted with new information. When the average person is presented with information from a theoretically respectable news source, they tend to be willing to accept it or, at the least, they fail to reject it outright. And once this is out there, it’ll spread.

Being not so far removed from Public School classrooms, I can already see that this is information which teachers, especially leftist ones, will latch on to. Children will be indoctrinated with the notion that Lincoln, the greatest President, was gay and so, therefore, there can’t possibly be anything wrong with being gay.

This is revisionist history as its worst: history altered to suit the political purposes of a later day. The names of good men dragged through the mud for the sake of scoring a few points.

More than anything else, this resembles the whole sordid story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, where the less-than-credible findings of a few politically biased individuals were used by the media to advance a political point (in that case, to convince people to ease off on Clinton during the Lewinsky matter).

It is now, of course, popularly accepted that President Jefferson carried on an affair with his slave, Sally Hemmings, and that children were produced as a result of this union. This is, to put it mildly, complete and utter bullshit.

DNA testing in the late 1990’s (ironically, the same testing used to damn Jefferson during the Clinton years) proved that, at the most, one of Sally Hemmings many children was fathered by one of many Jefferson males, most likely Thomas’ half-wit younger brother Randolph who was known for idling away his days hanging out with the Jefferson family slaves. Since that time, the Thomas Jefferson Historical Society has commissioned a panel of scholars who produced a 565-page report which concluded that Jefferson almost certainly did not have a sexual relationship with Hemmings or father any of her children.

But now, of course, it’s far too late for the popular belief to be corrected. People will go on believing the story of a sexual relationship between Jefferson and Hemmings for centuries. In the year 2500, there will probably be a class of schoolchildren orbiting some far-off star reading about it.

That’s why it’s important to speak out about this slander now, before it spreads. Once the rape has been actually committed, nothing can ever quite be put right again.

Hyper-Sensitivity in War

For a variety of reasons, I think that it’s fairly safe to say that we’re going to hear a lot in the coming months about Abu Ghraib and other incidents of “abuse” in Iraq. I say this both because the so-called “torture memos” that Alberto Gonzalez wrote as White House Counsel are sure to be a big deal during the Senate hearings to confirm him as Attorney General and because it’s now become quite clear to me that the media (and those Republicans eager to court favor with the media) are now out to get Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. All of this, in my view, is truly a shame.

Now, let’s get something straight. I don’t think that the abuse of prisoners is a positive thing. In fact, I think that it’s wrong to treat anyone sadistically as a matter of sport. But, the corresponding point is this: even though I think it’s wrong, I don’t particularly care about it either. It’s fairly close to my view on homosexuality: it’s gross but, if you keep it out of my sight, I don’t much care what you do.

Look, ladies and gentlemen: this is a war, not tea-time. People are going to be abused. People are going to be senselessly killed. Those things happen in war. If you can’t accept that, you should stop paying attention.

Nothing bugs me more than the people who claim to support the war but who fly off the handle, consumed by some sort of sick grief, when discussing a few “tortured” terrorists. At least the people opposed to war have an excuse for weeping like babies for the enemies of freedom: they’re already openly on the same side.

One of the great myths out there about torture is that it “doesn’t work.” That is, to put is simply, obvious nonsense. If torture really didn’t work, then humans wouldn’t have used it as a reliable means of information extraction for centuries. If torture really didn’t work then interrogators wouldn’t want the power to resort to its use during “ticking bomb” situations. If torture really didn’t work the Israeli Supreme Court, which has as much experience on the issue as any other court in the world, wouldn’t allow considerations of necessity to be used as a mitigating factor when considering the sentences of people charged with torture.

Of course torture works. What doesn’t work is a straw-man argument constructed by the left and civil libertarians which holds that torture doesn’t work because someone being tortured will, “tell you whatever you want to hear.”

That’s true: but that’s only going to be a matter if either the person conducting the torture is inept or if the objective of the torment isn’t the extraction of information, but the coercion of false statements (IE: “Comrade Krutuv was privy to the details of the plotting of Trotskyite counterrevolutionary saboteurs and worked to assist them in spreading false news of crop failures.”).

A competent individual will easily be able to use torture to extract necessary information. It that truly wasn’t the cause, we wouldn’t even be talking about this.

Torture or other similar things may not be pleasant, but they may also be necessary. We can’t afford to be hyper-sensitive in war.

One of my greatest fears is that the Global War on Terrorism is being stalled by an ultra-caring and radically litigious culture which is more wrapped up with the rights of killers than results. It’s bad enough that police are handcuffed in this country by the decisions of lunatic judges: are we to fight wars the same way as well?

The culture of sensitivity, this cult of emotion, it isn’t just an annoyance: it’s a major danger. On at least two occasions already it’s been the primary cause of foreign policy problems which would otherwise have been avoided.

In the first Gulf War, in 1991, the US held off on destroying the Iraqi Army as it retreated from Kuwait because it feared that the images it was creating would anger the Moslem world and, more importantly, because it upset the stomachs of some in the US chain of command. Had the Iraqi forces been utterly obliterated, as ought to have happened, the odds are much higher than Saddam Hussein would have been overthrown in 1991.

In the opening stages of the Iraq War, US forces sought to minimize Iraqi casualties when, in truth, a much more prudent strategy would have been to drive them to the highest levels possible. Now the US is paying for that miscalculation in blood.

We need to learn to accept the realities of war. People die, and often that’s a good thing. People are tortured and abused and, while that’s never a happy occasion, that may be necessary as well.

We can’t fight and win a war if our field of action is limited by the afternoon-special morality of the Oprah-watching crowd.

Vietnam in Iraq

I’m going to come right out and say it: the situation on the ground in Iraq is increasingly beginning to resemble that in Vietnam during the war down. No, I haven’t become a commie-lib. Let me finish. The situation on the ground in Iraq, by all appearances, turned into a slow war of attrition. Insurgents and foreign terrorists are being slowly defeated. Above all other things, the situation appears to be under control.

Iraq is not Vietnam in 1968: Iraq is Vietnam in 1972. The enemy has slowly, but surely, been brought to heel. The fighting has been difficult and things have not always gone perfectly. But they’ve gone well enough. Iraqi forces, while not perfect, are fighting. Over the next several years, US forces will be able to reduce their numbers while the remaining forces will assist local Iraqi forces in fighting local enemies.

When people think of the end of the Vietnam War they always think of Saigon in 1975. I suppose that’s normal. But it also distorts the military lessons of the war.

People often mock the claims of those who say that the US had effectively won the Vietnam War by the time of the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. But their derision does not alter the essential truth of that statement: when direct US involvement in South Vietnam ceased in 1973, US war aims had been achieved. The insurgency from within South Vietnam had been defeated and South Vietnamese forces were strong enough to, with continued US aid, maintain South Vietnamese independence. It was only a series of improbable and unexpected events which led to the defeat of the Republic of Vietnam. Had US aid continued at expected levels, there would be a free South Vietnam to this very day.

In Iraq, Secretary Rumsfeld and President Bush adopted the strategies which brought about the US victory of 1972 early. That’s the simple and plain reason why they’ve refused to introduce additional troops into the Iraqi theatre of operations: more troops simply means more targets for the enemy and more responsibilities assumed by the United States. That’s entirely the opposite of what’s being sought here.

The President has held back from deploying additional troops, even when the short-term benefits would have been high, because the risk of being sucked into a Vietnam-style conundrum, where the United States is forced to assume virtually all local responsibilities, is much too high. This has mean talking a tight-rope. There have to be enough US troops in the country to respond to major challenges, but not so many that they become expected to assume total command and that Iraqi forces are ignored and allowed to languish.

The last few months and the next month will probably mark the highest single-month death tolls for the war. Obviously US losses were going to be high during the Battle of Fallujah, which was the largest urban engagement by the United States Marine Corps since Hue during the Vietnam War. Further, it’s fairly obvious that insurgent attacks are going to pick up during the run-up to Iraq’s first democratic elections. That’s all to be expected.

All of this, however, disguises the essential truth that all attempts to create an uprising of a truly national character: all attempts to forge something which might be credibly claimed to be a true “resistance movement” have failed. The enemy in Iraq is not a broad uprising of the Iraqi people: it’s a motley collection of bitter-enders, foreigners, and the sort of riff-raff who would be members of street gangs had they been born in the State of California instead of Al-Anbar Province.

I don’t think that anyone has a firm idea on the actual number of insurgents in Iraq but, from what I’ve been reading, I don’t think the number of actual fighters is very high at all. There might be 10,000 or so (and perhaps many more) in the whole of the country if you count everyone who screams “Allah Akhbar” at a meeting as a full-fledged resistance fighter. But, as some of my devoted readers are very fond of reminding me, people who scream are, for the most part, not all that likely to do.

Read the casualty reports and the reports of terrorist attacks. They’re all basically the same. Occasionally it’s gunmen. More often it’s bombs planted by the side of the road. US casualties are unacceptably high but, given the level of weapons and resources known to be at the disposal of the terrorists, they’re also rather low.

There just aren’t that many terrorist fighters actually conducting operations in Iraq. Probably no more than a few hundred full time. This is good news and bad news. The good news is, of course, that the scale of the problem is smaller than popularly believed. The bad news is that individuals operating in the way described are extremely hard to catch.

Think back to October of 2002 when the DC Snipers were operating. Major law enforcement resources were devoted to catching these people by a number of states, the District of Columbia and the Federal Government. During this period, the two Snipers were actively killing people with a rifle. They were killing people who they had to be close enough to see. Still, it took weeks to catch them and, when it did happen, is occurred as much by chance as by anything else.

This, of course, was with police who intimately knew the country they were going over. Now, imagine that Muhammad and Malvo had been leaving improvised explosive devices by the side of the road. How long would it have taken to catch them doing that?

So that’s both the good news and the bad news. This insurgency can’t win, but it can go on killing people for a long time. Look at the length of time it took Germany to deal with the Red Brigades during the 1970’s: and those only consisted of, at the most, a few dozen people.

As in Vietnam in 1972, there is exactly zero chance that the internal forces operating within Iraq will be capable of defeating the forces of the government. Similarly, Iraqi forces are reaching a point where they will, with American assistance, be capable of handling external threats as well.

The danger is not a military defeat for US forces: the danger is demoralization leading to a defeat as it did in Vietnam in 1975. Iraq could probably hold together for a little bit after a US withdrawal at this point, but not for more than a few years. It’s vital that the United States maintains its resolve to assist the Iraqi Government in fighting the insurgency and that it guard against Syrian or Iranian moves against the new government.

Fundamentally, the situation in Iraq calls for the US to respond by simply staying the present course. There’s no need to radically alter US strategy. A gradualist approach will bring victory over the course of the next several years.

If the US keeps fighting terrorists, training Iraqi forces, and gradually distributing reconstruction aid, then everything will turn out fine in the end. The danger lies not in the present course, but in radical alterations to it.

There’s not going to be a day when we know that we’ve won. The fighting may continue sporadically for many years. It might even go on for decades. But a secure Iraq will be preserved. As Iraqi forces improve, some US forces will be withdrawn. There will probably be a large (at least Division-sized) residual force in Iraq for decades, to act in emergencies. But troops numbers will decline.

Above all we must maintain confidence that, if we remain confident, things will work out in the end.

Islam Delenda Est

I hate to admit to it but, in the weeks immediately following September 11th, I initially bought into the widely-circulated platitudes about the ‘peaceful’ nature of Islam. It would be fair to say (if one were trying to put it as mildly as possible) that my position has since changed.

Many have noted in recent months that I’ve spent an increasing amount of time discussing the broader Islamic threat as opposed to merely the Islamist threat. That’s because I’ve come to a simple conclusion: if Western Civilization is to survive, Islam must be destroyed. The two are not compatible and cannot co-exist on a single planet.

Some of the bolder souls on the right have moved beyond the initial belief that the present war is merely against “terrorism” to the more specific belief that we are fighting “Islamists.” But, allow me to ask a question: how are we to distinguish what is Islamist from what is merely Islamic? The answer, in truth, is that we can’t. The Islamist operative planning to blow up the Sears Tower is to the Moslem in Tehran what the Communist agent in Washington was to the Moscow factory worker in the Cold War. Both are part of the same evil system, only their guilt differs.

Islamism is merely the leading edge of Islam. Islamism and Islam are, in practice, one and the same. It’s just that the Islamist detonates the bombs while the simple supporter of Islam merely cheers the news of their detonation.

The only way I see to draw a distinction between the Islam and Islamism is to take and judge each individual on a case-by-case basis. This is, of course, not possible. Just as we were forced to act against all of Germany for the crimes of Nazism, so too must all of Islam pay for the crimes of the Islamists.

There may well be some “good Moslems” out there. If there are, I say: let them speak now or forever hold their peace. Most of the Moslem world is silent about the crimes of their co-religionists.

“Islam” isn’t just a religion: it’s a political ideology prepared to offer a serious challenge to the supremacy of the West. “Islam”, as I speak of it, is no benign creed: it is a faith of action on the march, determined to win for its adherents a leading place in world affairs. Ultimately, it is a totalitarian ideology which seeks the same sort of universal control over human affairs as its true predecessors, Communism and Nazism, did.

Just as we confronted and destroyed both Nazism and Communism, we must do the same for Islam.

This is not to say that one or the other will be destroyed in a Holy War (though that may be the case) but it is to say that one will be transformed and ultimately consumed by the other. I do not as of now know which will be destroyed. But we will all know it before long.

The words call to me from the recess of the Western mind: Islam Delenda Est. Islam must be destroyed. Again and again, they come. These are words that emanate from a dark place, where men are stripped of all pretence and formality, but it does not change their essential truth. For one to survive, the other must fall. Islam must be destroyed.

This does not mean that it is necessary or desirable that everyone who call themselves a Moslem be killed, far from it. It is to say that it is necessary that the basic structures of their lives be transformed.

Islam can be destroyed in two ways: as Communism was destroyed or as Nazism was destroyed.

By invading Iraq, President Bush has clearly chosen to destroy Islam in the same way that the United States destroyed Soviet Communism. Spread the ideals of freedom and the truth of democracy, this line of reasoning goes, and no totalitarian society can survive. The world of modern Islam, this theory holds, will collapse in the face of freedom and be replaced by a new society which, ideally, will be post-Islamic in the way that our societies are post-Christian.

I hope and pray that President Bush’s strategy will work. It’s certainly better than the only other alternative (basically a phased surrender) which has any popular support. But I’m not so sure that it will work.

The great problem with staging our battle against Islam over the long-term is this: the demographics are not on our side. It took forty-five years to win the Cold War. Do we have forty-five years to wait for the collapse of modern Islam?

Consider: as things stand today, eight million of France’s sixty million people are Moslems. The Moslem birth rate (plus continued immigration) means that the Islamic population of France is rapidly increasing while its native population is actually shrinking. What will the composition of the French population be in thirty years?

It’s not at all hard to envision the emergence of a Moslem majority in France during my lifetime. Already, France’s Moslems are having a disastrous effect on French foreign policy, leading towards an even more pronounced anti-American tilt in both action and rhetoric.

France is, of course, the typical example. So let me offer another one: Canada. In 1991 there were about 250,000 Moslems in Canada. By 2001 there were nearly 600,000. And that’s just the official estimate: given widespread illegal entry and other forms of lawlessness, I suspect (and the Moslem community claims) that the actual number is much higher. It’s not at all implausible to believe that, in a few decades, Moslems will make up higher than 10% of Canada’s population and that, if the numbers were allowed to increase unchecked from there, that Canada would eventually end up in a France-like bind.

In the present conflict waiting will equal a victory for the other side. Islam is winning its war with the West not on the battlefield but in the delivery room.

Someone Who Should Be Shot

I hate Jeremy Hinzman. I want him dead. The “American” deserter from the 82nd Airborne Division, presently attempting to convince a review board that he should be allowed to remain in Canada as a refugee, is scum of the worst sort. The world can only be made better by his inevitable exit to Hell.

Just to make it very certain that everyone understands what I am saying: I do not believe that Jeremy Hinzman should be shot by vigilantes or that any action to harm him should be taken extra-legally. That’s my disclaimer. I feel it’s necessary because of what I’m going to say next: Jeremy Hinzman, for his crime of deserting from the United States Army and entering Canada to claim refugee status, deserves to be executed by firing squad. I would consider it a high honor to personally witness the life draining out of the bullet-riddled body of the traitorous scumbag.

He should be executed, his wife should be jailed for aiding his desertion, and his son should be taken away and given to a morally decent family. That’s what I think of Jeremy Hinzman. The fact that this alleged man is living in Canada, living off of the tax dollars I pay, I find to be absolutely enraging.

The only people I have more contempt for in this world than the terrorists are Americans who turn into traitors like “Mr.” Hinzman and John Walker Lindh. We shouldn’t be shocked, coming out of the tradition that he does, to get what we get from Bin Laden and his ilk: but this, from our own, we do not need.

Since we’re in Canada, of course, he’s not going to go back to the death he deserves since, even if the US Army still did shoot deserters, we wouldn’t extradite him to go and meet that richly-deserved fate.

Such a pity.

Terrorists are Enemies of the Human Race

The dumbest political episode of this past year was the torrents of fake outrage and abuse hurled at the Bush Administration over the Abu Ghraib prisoner “abuse” “scandal.” So far as I’m concerned, the real wrong committed at Abu Ghraib was committed not by the US Army and not by the Bush Administration, but by CBS News and others who reported on something which, in wartime, ought to have been covered up and dumped deep into a file for some mid-level scholar to discover and write a journal article about in thirty or forty years.

Oh, sure, the soldiers involved should have been punished. Their actions showed a total lack of discipline and, much worse, threatened to create a political problem for the Administration both and home and abroad. For that alone they should have been punished. But, beyond the distastefulness of a bunch of National Guardsmen behaving like High School football players during a particularly degenerate hazing season, I can’t summon up any real moral outrage over the things they did.

We need to get the thing straight once and for all: terrorists are not regular foes. Anti-American terrorists, their supporters, and their sympathizers are not just “enemies” in the conventional sense of the word. They are enemies of the human race and deserve to be treated as such. Terrorists, their supporters, and their sympathizers aren’t honourable foes to be met on the battlefield, worthy both of our respect, they’re sub-human monsters deserving of our deepest scorn and hatred. They’re useless beasts that need to be exterminated.

The real problem I have with complaints about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo is that they start from the basic premise that terrorists have “human rights” which are deserving of respect. To treat terrorists with even the most basic level of respect is an insult to the dignity of all other people. They’re monsters, not people.

To the extent that we keep terrorists alive at all, it should be for some necessary purpose. If we need information from them, we should extract it by the best and quickest means open to us and then dispose of them. Perhaps those terrorists who grovel for their lives and possess a great quantity of useful information might be allowed to live in exchange for cooperation, but that should be about it.

By worrying about “abuse” and the “human rights” of terrorists we are, to a great extent, treating them like they’re ordinary criminals. By housing them in clean cells at Guantanamo and taking care to abide by the absurd standards of various international human rights conventions, we are according them a status that they do not deserve and we are twisting our own perceptions.

To be ultimately successful the Global War on Terrorism must be a war of extermination.

What is required for victory in such a war is a program of de-humanization. By worrying about the “rights” of terrorists and showcasing them as “victims”, we help to make them seem more like humans in the eyes of the public.

Where an acknowledgement of humanity exists the seeds of empathy are sown. Empathy leads inexorably to sympathy, at least at a personal level, which will eventually erode the support necessary for the sort of all-out war which must be waged if we are to ever attain the final victory we so desperately require.

President Bush has laid out, and I support, a two-track plan for dealing with the terrorists. We will work to reform the Islamic world, to de-fang it if you will, by spreading democracy outwards from the islands of freedom that have been created in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That solves (or, eventually will solve) much of the problem. It still leaves us, however, with the problem of what to do with that small percentage of the Islamic world who is actively engaged in acts of support for al-Qaeda.

For these alleged “people” there is, as I’ve said, only one workable option: annihilation. They’re too far-gone to cure. Like a cancer they cannot be healed, only destruction will end the threat they pose.

Such a campaign must, I think, ultimately move beyond what we’ve already seen. I think that the core of any campaign to truly wipe out the Islamists would be a well-planned and swiftly-executed set of strikes designed to kill those who truly help sustain the Islamist tide.

Part of this must be a campaign of assassinations directed at two groups of people: the preachers and the pushers. There’s a widespread belief that killing leaders and public figures “only makes martyrs.” I am not an adherent of this belief. Perhaps the killing of a single leader only makes a martyr: the killing of a hundred just makes corpses.

We need to breach the artificial wall that now seems to separate the military and “civilian” side of Islamism, for it is the civil side: the radical Imams, the shops which sell Islamist propaganda and the web sites which store Islamist videos which feed the military side. The shelf-life of people in the military wing of Islamism is short.

In order to truly destroy Islamism, we need to start blowing up the Mosques which are used to preach hate and recruit. We need to shoot in the streets the supposedly “peaceful” Imams and Professors who, from all over the Islamic world, recruit men for Jihad.

Remember: cash goes a long way in the Moslem world. It wouldn’t be at all hard for a few dozen operatives, with access to hundreds of millions of dollars in clean American $20 bills, to do a lot of damage.

I don’t imagine it would be at all hard to find a gang of Pakistani thugs willing to burn down Madrassas in the dead of the night in exchange for a few hundred dollars each. I don’t know what the going rate it: but I’ll bet that a million dollars will buy at least twenty-five murders in most of the Moslem world.

Ultimately, one of the best ways to take the fight to the Islamists is to turn their tactics back against them. For example: one of the ways that they generate the money to fund their terrorist enterprises is through a variety of front businesses. There’s no real reason why these businesses or people who work for them should be immune from attack.

What’s needed is a program of counter-terrorism designed to wipe these malevolent creatures out.

The Worst Act Moslem Terror in Canadian History

Yesterday was the fifteenth anniversary of what I regard as the most deadly Islamist attack in the history of Canada. As goes without saying, this aspect of the incident was not reported.

The story is universally known to all Canadians and is, I suspect, reasonably well-known in other parts of the world. On December 6th, 1989 a man named “Marc Lepine” entered the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, pulled out a rifle, ordered all of the men out of the classroom he had entered and proceeded to kill fourteen women and wound another fifteen. He left a suicide note in which he raged against “feminists” and so forth. Since then, December 6th has turned into a day on which both men in general and gun-owning men in particular have been roundly denounced.

That, at least, is the conventional narrative. Now here’s (to borrow Paul Harvey’s wonderful phrase) the rest of the story. The real name of “Marc Lepine” was (wait for it) Gamil Gharbi. His father was a Moslem from Algeria who believed (and taught his son) that all women were chattel. Naturally he gave his son rigorous lessons in the grand Islamic tradition of spousal abuse, beating his wife regularly in the presence of his won. This is, of course, a tradition at least as deeply-rooted in Islam as the age-old practice of going to an Inter-faith meeting on Thursday night to explain the peaceful nature of Islam and then going to the Mosque on Friday night to call for the murder of Christians and Jews.

The hard (and virtually unknown) truth is this: the “Montreal Massacre” wasn’t an example of generic “violence against women” or something that demonstrated the need for repressive gun control measures: it was the worst ever act of Islamic-inspired terror in Canada.

Now, I don’t know if Gamil Gharbi was formally a member of the Moslem faith when he committed his crime: I don’t think it really matters. One only need read his suicide note, oozing with contempt for women, and compare it to (for one example) the letter left behind by Mohammed Atta (in which he demanded that his grave not be contaminated by the presence of women) to discern the origins of his hate.

If, as was tried in the case of the Oklahoma City bombing and has been tried in this case, outside influences can be held to share in the blame for the actions of a deranged individual, then Islam must claim much of the credit for the things that Gharbi did. In his method of indiscriminate slaughter, in his pathological hatred of women, and by his heritage: Gharbi must be considered a sort of proto-Islamist.

Now, it may well be true that Gamil Gharbi was eventually raised away from his father and supposedly developed his hatred of women on his own. But the seeds of it: the “root cause” of it, to borrow a favourite phrase of the left, was clearly his Mohammedan heritage.

I do not deny that the Moslem faith can be practiced peacefully. I myself have known peaceful Moslems (but then, those same peaceful Moslems I’m thinking of now were also heavy drinkers, so their fidelity may be in doubt). But that does not detract from the real and obvious fact that Islam, practiced as advocated by Fundamentalists (who are in the ascension in much of the Islamic world) is fundamentally harmful.

We don’t want to take about whether it was Gamil Gharbi’s Moslem father’s attitudes (which appear to have not deviated all that far from the commands of that book, whose name I dare not speaks, which commands and commends wife-beating, among other things) led to what happened in Montreal because it would mean having a serious discussion about things like immigration (and whether we really want to be headed towards a country where one in ten persons is a Moslem) or religion and whether or not those sects of the faith that, wherever they are preached, lead to terrorism and violence need to be examined.

If we included Gamil Gharbi’s Mohammedan background alongside the other potential causes of his crimes (including, the laughably-commonly cited ‘war movies’ thing, as though watching Patton too many times leads one inevitably to mass murder) we’d have to answer the question: what’s wrong with Islam? And that is a question that the Western world does not want to answer.

Needless to say: this is not reported by the Canadian press. They love to use December 6th to demonize all men as would-be abusers and killers of women and to agitate against the most magnificent and useful tool ever devised by man: the gun.

This is not to say that men as a whole were blameless in this particular case of violence against women, though: if there’s anything that the men should be blamed for, it’s for leaving the female students to die after the madman Gharbi pulled out his rifle. The idea that all of the men in the classroom filed neatly out of the room in order to allow the terrorist to go about his work is more than appalling: it’s sickening.

Though one can never be sure of what one will do in a crisis, I’m pretty sure that it’s fair to say that a group of “men” who gamely file out of a room and wait outside while a killer goes about his work don’t really deserve the honor of being called men. There’s something disgustingly “Canadian” about that response. It’s the response of a people trained by the state and by the media to behave like obedient sheep. One suspects that, had Flight 93 on September 11th been filled with modern Canadian men of that type, they’d have sat calmly in their seats, watched the in-flight movie, and cheerfully accepted the end.

Men don’t need to be “educated about violence against women”, they need to be educated about how to stop violence against women. Not, of course, as the activists mean it (“together, we’ll stop violence with Purple Ribbons and full-page newspaper ads!”), but as men traditionally have: with weapons and, failing that, with fists. I think that all Canadian men, and Canadian men in the past have been known to demonstrate courage, should consider it a mark of shame that not a single man thought to raise his fists or grab a weapon to attempt to do something, anything, to stop the terrorists.

True, not every school massacre or event like it in the United States has been met with resistance: but many have. People tried to tackle the Columbine killers. The passengers on Flight 93 resisted once they realized what was happening. At a law school in West Virginia, a student went and got his gun and shot the killer. The idea of the men simply filing out of the room, leaving the women to their fate, seems to me to be an egregious example of craven cowardice.

But then again, this did happen in Quebec, where a majority opposed participation in both World Wars and where the populace actively resisted service in wars being fought, at least in part, to preserve the freedom of France. So perhaps we should be shamed, but not surprised. I’m certain that Albertan men would have given a good accounting of themselves.

If anything, the entire thing makes the case not for gun control, but for gun proliferation. The crazed Gharbi, running about in search of women to kill, could probably have been taken down with one shot by someone with a concealed pistol. If the Mohammedan killer had tried his stunt in Texas or Georgia, someone would have gone out to their truck, picked up their rifle, gone back in and tried to kill the bastard.

I’ve long said, and nothing I’ve yet seen has shaken my belief, that a universally-armed society is the best solution to most forms of crime, spree killing, and terrorism. If every second person is packing, a killing “spree” is going to kill two people instead of fourteen. Robberies, burglaries, car thefts and the other crimes which tend to effect much more of the public than (relatively rare) crimes like murder are going to drop pretty rapidly when you’re as likely to get shot as get someone’s wallet.

Let December 6th stand not as a memorial to mere “violence against women”, let it stand as a monument to the much-deeper troubles that it exposed. Let is stand as our memorial to let nothing, not even a massacre, stand in the way of our blithe acceptance of those multicultural pieties which hold that all forms of religion must be accepted as equal and always held blameless (excepting, of course, Christianity which is well-established as the root cause of every evil event in the history of the world including the suicide of Socrates and the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War).

December 6th should stand as a memorial as well to the softening of our culture. A day of shame to commemorate our inability and unwillingness to defend either ourselves or others.

David Brooks, in the NYT

In the Times, David Brooks discusses the people who just might save America. He calls them the "New Red Diaper Babies."

It's a very good piece, which discusses what might preserve America in the coming storm.

How Not to Fight Crime

Mark Steyn in the Telegraph.

Bush’s New Deal

In the first year of his second term, President Bush has the chance to have enacted the most comprehensive program of domestic reform since that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. If you read things carefully, it has become increasingly clear that the program that the President has in mind is one of the most ambitious proposed in recent years. Certainly, it is the most comprehensive since that of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Moreover, given what we know of the President’s temperament and understanding the composition of the Congress, it appears likely that he’ll be able to get much of what he wants done.

The time for Social Security reform has come. Everyone in America knows this. Outmoded pyramid-scheme style pension plans are carnivorous dinosaurs which threaten to destroy the economy of virtually every nation which has one in place. Unless something is massively changed (and unless the changes are made soon) these execrable rip-offs will eventually bankrupt virtually every country in the Western world.

President Bush knows this. During the campaign he continued to push for the sort of bold reforms that Social Security needs and the Democrats’ scare-tactics didn’t work. The conventional wisdom, that Social Security reform is a career-killing issue, is clearly dead.

What form the final program will take is as yet unknown. It doesn’t really matter in the short-term, since we won’t know whether whatever is done will be truly successful for years. What matters for now is that, for the first time in decades, something substantive will get done. Whatever it is that does get pushed through will make the system more market-oriented. It’ll add elements of personal ownership to the system.

But it isn’t just Social Security that’s up for reform. We don’t yet know what final form the Intelligence Reform bill will take, but we know that it’s going to be the most comprehensive overhaul of that system since the time, five and a half decades ago now, when the CIA and the other Cold War agencies were originally created.

The other elements of the program aren’t clear yet. Social Security reform will probably take a year or more. A vacancy or two on the Supreme Court will probably tie up the Senate and freeze other business for months. And, of course, there remain the “unknown unknowns” like those which halted action on much of the Bush domestic agenda in the first term.

But these things are going to get done, one way or another. The President is determined and when this President wants to get something done it has a strange way of getting done.

Tax reform, Health reform, and the Gay Marriage Amendment all figure somewhere on the agenda. They probably won’t all get done: they’re reforms of opportunity. The Federal Marriage Amendment will probably only go through if first the Supreme Court overturns some state’s gay marriage amendment.

What the President is working on, fundamentally, is the restructuring of the United States Government for the Twenty-First century. Bill Clinton talked a lot about “building a bridge to the 21st century”, but George W. Bush is going to be the one do to the actual construction.

President Bush’s agenda promises to lay the foundation of a lasting Republican majority. The concept of the “Ownership Society” which means, in essence, the reform of government and the economy to end old-fashioned entitlements and replace them with individual ownership of things like pensions and health accounts is not only good for the economy, but it’s good for the Republican Party as well.

Think about it for a second. How are the Democrats likely to respond to any actual attempt to push Social Security reform? We all already know the answer. They’re going to respond with sad stories about old people eating dog food and starving in the streets. Their leaders are going to shout at and denounce the people proposing even the mildest reforms as though they were proposing to gas all American citizens when the reach the age of thirty as a method of population control.

That all works perfectly well when you don’t seriously expect reform to be enacted: it doesn’t work quite as well when it is. People who make repeated false predictions of Armageddon are not the people who most of us wish to administer our pensions (or, for that matter, to protect us from terrorists).

By desperately fighting reform and casting themselves at its enemies, the Democratic Party is going to make a horrible mistake: it’s going to flip roles with the Republican Party on Social Security. Because it was Democrats who originally created Social Security and Republicans who fought it, there’s always been a lingering suspicion (one encouraged by both the media and the Democratic Party) that the Republican Party is out to destroy the system. No matter how slavishly Republicans have adhered to the system, there’s always been an impossible-to-dispel and easy-to-rekindle shadow cast over Republican motives.

When a Republican President and a Republican Congress reform Social Security and the Democrats fight it with utter savagery and desperation, the Democratic Party is going to be forever cast as the enemy of the new system. Since, all hyperbole aside, Social Security reform is likely to be successful, this is going to be a long-term problem for the party. Where, in the past, Democrats could always make political hay out of accusing Republicans of planning to privatize the system, now Republicans will be able to accuse the Democrats of planning to nationalize it.

If the Democratic Party were institutionally smart, it would now fully embrace Social Security reform and allow no space between itself and the President on this issue. After all, respectable Democrats like Daniel Patrick Moynihan supported reform, so it isn’t that far of a leap. They could say things like, “Democrats created Social Security, and now we’re going to save it.” Republicans would have no choice but to go along with it.

Thankfully, the Democratic Party isn’t all that bright.

This is an exciting time in American political life. Ever-so-quietly Bush is preparing to launch his own New Deal.

Islam in Europe

David Pryce-Jones has an excellent piece in Commentary on the Islamicization of Europe.

The Domestication of Man

Frankly, I sometimes fear that our society is too “civilized”. We’re too far removed from some of the primal instincts of man: from that killer instinct which drove our ascent over the other species of the Earth and which built the civilizations whose comforts we now enjoy. Man, I often worry, has been domesticated.

If there’s one group of people that sickens me as much as liberals it’s people who understand the things that are necessary for victory in war or justice at home, but who recoil from those things. Prime among those people are the ‘conservatives’ who vigorously supported the Iraq War right up until the revelation of the Abu Ghraib prisoner “abuse” scandal and those whose ‘principled’ objection to the death penalty ultimately comes down to the fact that they lack the nerve to kill even when it is right and just to do so.

It’s these people who worry me the most: people who understand, on an intellectual level, what needs to be done, but who simply have had the capability of doing that bred out of them.

Strangely, the moment where I came to regard this as a serious problem was in one of the oddest of all possible places: the end of a Tom Clancy novel. It was The Bear and the Dragon, I think. China has fired a nuclear-tipped ICBM at Washington, DC. President Jack Ryan refused to move out from under where the blast will fall because he knows he lacks the will to order a retaliatory nuclear strike. Luckily, in the book, a US ABM system takes down the Chinese missile. But it won’t always happen that way.

What scared me about that was this: Jack Ryan was deliberately designed to be the macho (however much I loathe the word, it applies) hero of action novels. I never saw a word of objection to this section from fans: they all seemingly took it as perfectly normal that a President would lack the courage to do what is just and right. Worse still, it was presented as praiseworthy: a sort of badge of honor on Ryan’s character. That’s what scared me: not only did no one find it objectionable that President Ryan would fail to do his duty, but some would find his dereliction of duty to be praiseworthy.

Later, I discussed it with other people. Few, if any, saw what I was on about. “What’s the point of retaliating in a nuclear war?” more than one asked, “why kill all those people.” Those people lacked the will to do what is necessary. Harry Truman understood that it was necessary to drop atomic bombs on Japan to end the war, save American lives, and send a message to the world.

Earlier in the war, FDR and Churchill saw that it was necessary to fire-bomb German and Japanese cities in order to win the war. Millennia earlier, the Romans saw that it was necessary to destroy Cartage in order to ensure that it never threatened Rome again.

But, today, most would recoil from such action. If, tomorrow, China were to destroy Los Angeles and kill ten million Americans with nuclear weapons, I have little doubt that about half the country could quickly be convinced to oppose nuclear retaliation. More and more, there are real men out there like the fictional Jack Ryan: men who understand what must be done, but are incapable of doing it. I call these people “Domesticated Men.”

Domesticated animals are nice amusements and companions: but they’re not suited to survive without outside protection. If my kind-hearted cat were to find himself alone in the dark against some vicious wild animal he’d have exactly two choices: run or die and, in any case, there’s no certainty that the former would work. In the wild, ultimately, you have two choices: kill, or be killed. The only animals who survive in the wild without the capacity for combat are those which are adept at running and hiding.

The same, I think, is true among the peoples of the Earth. There’s a tidal wave coming: a demographic tidal wave in which the stronger people, those without as much “culture”, “refinement” and “sophistication” as we of the West have threaten to swamp and drown us. A few far-sighted people can see it come. A brave few have tried to warn of it, despite the near certainty that such courageous individuals will be libellously derided as racists and bigots.

In this world the strong people, the people with the will to win, always do win and the weak peoples, the people without the stomachs to do what is necessary, always lose. That is the way of things. More importantly, in a philosophical sense it’s the way things ought to be.

Most in the West are taken in by the delusion that we can simply sit back and that the wider world will freeze. They’re captivated by the mad fantasy that, if only we learn to turn our back on some of the baser instincts of man, so will the rest of the world. And so they may: but not before they’re done with us.

The final blow to the Roman Empire in the West was delivered by savage hordes. The Greeks were destroyed by unwashed Romans and barbarians from Macedonia who then went on to finally destroy the glorious Persian Empire. It’s a consistent pattern of history: cultures grow decadent, convinced of the permanence of their superiority, and are eventually destroyed.

It is the natural order of things. But we cannot allow it to come to pass this time. Their must be a revival, a new renaissance, in the West.

It is plain as day who the rising peoples and who the fading peoples are. It is the Chinese, the Indians, and Moslems who are on the rise in this world and it is the European that is in decline. The fate of the American is yet to be determined. That is where the demographics point and that is the pattern to which the politics will eventually adjust.

Fantasies about a “United States of Europe” which may someday challenge the United States are the fanciful ravings of delusional men. Europe is dying. I doubt if it will be possible to resuscitate it without a resort to extreme measures of the sort from which even strong men would recoil.

As I see, that’s an almost unchangeable fact: here and there, bits of Europe might adjust and survive to see the new world but Europe as we know it is dead. The Europe of 2050 will be a place nearly-run (or actually run) by semi-Europeanized Moslems who will preside over an empire of elderly European pensioners, a handful of angry white people, and a rising Islamic tide. The best possible future I see for Europe is one in which the residents eye eachother warily from well-fenced and well-guarded residential compounds in which they remain perpetually locked as a result of endemic racial and religious violence. And that, I’ll add again, is the best-case scenario. I think that it’s far more likely that the Europe of my old age will look something like Yugoslavia writ large.

Here in the Americas, there’s still a chance for Western Civilization: but it will not be easy. We need to harden people for the hard years ahead. I think that the coming century will be one in which we will never know a moment’s peace.

Our present fight with the terrorists obscures the larger problem: the demographic rise of Islam, relative to the decline of Christianity. The deadliest threat to the long-term future of Western civilization isn’t the suicide bomber: it’s the dedicated Wahhabi mother of eight. The present battle is just a skirmish, a prologue to the greater challenge to come.

What do we do when Moslems make up a third of the world’s people, as they may well by mid-century? They will demand a third of the world’s wealth and, quite naturally, they will soon seek more than that.

The same is true of the Chinese and the Indians. We haven’t adequately thought through the implications of nations with a billion and a half people each and rising economic strength. They’re going to want their place in the Sun as well.

Looking ahead, I don’t see a way out for anyone that doesn’t end in mass-death, cities burning, and all the rest of that jazz. There’s no way out, save the hard one.

I have developed a program for ensuring long-term American dominance which I will be laying out in the days ahead.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers, nor that my ideas are perfect: but we need to start talking.

We need to talk about what kind of world we want to have in five decades time.

We need to talk about what we’re prepared to do and what we’re prepared to sacrifice for the survival of Western Civilization.