Politics: December 2003 Archives

Hope everyone had a blessed Christmas. Please keep me in prayer over a personal matter, as two of my New Year's resolutions are quite tough this year, but are problems in my life that need to be addressed. (Smoking is one of them.)

On to politics and predictions for the new year. I continue to think Howard Dean is gonna prove more difficult to the President's re-election bid than what most Republicans (and Republican sympathizers like myself) realize. While Dean is currently stumping to the left in the Democrat primaries, we need to keep in mind that the Howard Dean we see now is not the Howard Dean against whom President Bush and the Republican Party will square off against in the campaign leading up to the general election.

Already we are seeing Dean discover religion. Once the Dem nomination is firmly in hand, you will like see him continue his move to the center. Likely, he will trumpet his record of balanced budgets in Vermont. We need to hold Dean to the left. Health care, taxation for middle-class families and agriculture are three areas where Dean is weak.

Next, we need to recognize that President Bush is still politically vulnerable over the war in Iraq. I know this sounds strange, but over the short-term, Dean is likely to prove right in that the capture of Saddam Hussein will not make things any safer in the West. Basically, Hussein's capture is radicalizing the islamo-fascists who were reluctant to jump into the frey as long as Hussein was still hanging around. So don't be surprised to see terrorist attacks increase over the coming year. Additionally, you're seeing the Dean camp spin the fact Osama bin Looney still hasn't been captured.

Of course, the best answer would be to capture bin Looney and/or uncover WMDs in Iraq. Barring this possibility, however, the best way to to counter the Dean spin is to point out the long-term security benefits yielded by the capture of Hussein. For example, Libya abandonning its WMD programmes is a direct result of the President's firm leadership. Libya has had a long history of sponsoring terrorism. Additionally, Time Magazine reports that the Al Quack network has recently diverted much of its resources to Iraq. Given the geo-political makeup of Iraq versus that of Afganistan, it should be much easier to capture or kill key terrorists in Iraq than in Afganistan.

Finally, there is the gross human rights violations that took place under Saddam's regime. A number of leftists who support the war, such as Prime Minister Tony Blair in the UK and Alexa McDonough (former leader of Canada's socialist party) have often appealed on the left to Hussein's brutality against his own people people as justification for the Iraq war.

What about an anti-Dean candidate? The only one of the other Democrat candidates that I think presents a credible challenge within the Dem. primaries is Joe Lieberman. Neither Braun nor Sharpton present a credible challenge. When it comes to African-Americans, the Dems prefer tokenism to actually giving blacks real power. Note that it was the GOP who appointed Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, Colin Powell as Secretary of State, and who have seriously floated the idea of putting Condi Rice on the 2004 ticket where she could become the first African American and the first woman to become Vice-President.

Kucinich is out of the question. Not only are his policies to the left of Dean, but he makes Al Gore look charismatic. Edwards and Gephart also lack any charisma or marketability within this race. Finally, Kerry and Clark have flip-flopped over too many issues to be credible candidates at this point. Both of them come across as desperate, and not in a good sense.

Yet where Lieberman also comes across as somewhat desperate, his centrist credentials are solid. Other than Dean, he's the only serious candidate among the Dems who hasn't wavered in his position on key issues such as national security. Therefore, I would not be suprised if he emerges as the key anti-Dean candidate.

I never met an Iraqi who didn't have a dead relative because of Saddam Hussein. From Adil, my civilian colleague in London, who had a brother gunned down in the street by the Republican Guard, to the scores of Iraqis I met in their cities and towns, everyone was closely related to at least one of Saddam's victims. Many parents were missing two, three, four children because of the tyrant. It was as if a plague like the Black Death had visited the country, striking down men at random.

That explains the visceral reaction that the Iraqi journalists showed during the press conference announcing Saddam's capture. When they showed him undergoing a medical examination, they started yelling and screaming at the television, as if he were in the room with them. (Maybe the Western journalists can lecture them privately about how the press is supposed to live in a world beyond good and evil.) It was gratifying, to me at least, seeing him treated like a common criminal on his way to arraignment.

Whatever you might think of the Iraqi war, you would have to be spiritually blind not to be happy for the Iraqi people on this day. They will have the opportunity to put their tormentor on trial for his monstrous, scarcely believable crimes. Today, let's pray that the Iraqi citizens get the quiet, normal existence that they deserve.

In case you're keeping score, the following is free speech:
-- Computer-generated child pornography;
-- Burning the American flag;
-- Making rap songs about injuring women's genitals while having rough sex.

The following is not free speech:
-- Contributing money to a political party you favor; and
-- Speaking out against a political candidate.

When are we going to realize that the Supreme Court, along with many of the lower courts, are mainly comprised of petty tyrants? Sooner or later, we must (bloodlessly) remove them from power. They are a threat to our liberties, and we have to deal with them as Americans have traditionally dealt with tyrants. It's time to remove them from their judicial thrones.

This just in: Mark thinks he's been "overly snippy [in] the last few weeks". An occupational hazard of full-time blogging, I suppose. Daily visits of Mark's blog will resume forthwith. However, the point about just war remains valid.

Mark Shea continues his snide attacks on Iraq war supporters on a near-daily basis, which has caused me to discontinue my daily visits to his site. He, and many other faithful Catholics, continue to question the motivations behind removing Saddam Hussein and his merry band of sadistic murderers.

I must ask: does 61,000 dead people in Baghdad count for anything? Between 300,000 and 1,000,000 people were executed under the previous regime. Do they count, either?

Mr. Shea, a man whom I respect, and at least one of whose books I own, comments, "Yes. Saddam is a monster. So as long as the country in question is ruled by a monster, Just War questions can be dispensed with and we can simply invade?"

The just war theory — it's not doctrine, keep in mind, it's a theory, as Shea himself has reminded us — must have room in it for a foreign power to intervene in the case of genocide. If it doesn't, then it needs to accomodate it. The theory is useful because it describes the circumstances under which a state may use military force to restore justice. If it is used to make excuses for inaction in the face of a crime that shrieks to God for intervention, then there's something wrong with it.

I don't happen to think that there's anything wrong with the just war theory, and I think it does cover instances where a foreign state is not the wronged party, yet acts with force. This isn't the time to go through it, as others have, and it's past my bedtime. I simply want to point out that saying, "So what about the tens of thousands of dead? There aren't any weapons of mass destruction found yet" is perverse. Human lives are less important than observing the just war theory? How Christian is that?

BONUS LINK: to a story about all the great work civil affairs soldiers are doing in Iraq. As a civil affairs Marine, I wish them well and pray for their work & their safety.

Algore, on the subject of invading Iraq: "...[M]y friends, this nation has never in our two centuries and more made a worse foreign policy mistake...."

Maybe it's the Internet, maybe it's our schools' failure to teach history, but have you noticed that hyperbole is the dominant mode of discourse these days? The Democratic presidential candidates are falling over themselves to show how gosh-darn mad they are. Fine — but why does everything have to be "the worst ____ in history" or "a total failure" or "a complete disaster"?

Hyperbole precludes real arguments from taking place. How can anyone seriously argue that "never" has there been a "worse foreign policy mistake"? Never ever? How about the failure to encourage France and Britain to crush Nazism in the 1930s? Or in 1919, to "smother Bolshevism in its cradle," as Churchill wanted to do? The prosecution of the Vietnam war in the 1960s? The flaccid response to Soviet aggression in the 1970s?

Or take a matter close to Catholic Light readers' hearts. Remember when the homosexual priest scandal was at its height? People who should have known better were saying that this might be "the end of the Catholic Church in America." Some fevered souls were saying that this would "shake the roots of the Church itself." While it was probably the most grave scandal in American church history (or is that hyperbolic?), it hasn't affected the direction of the Church, at least not yet. If anything, it has emboldened orthodox Catholics to press for true reform, and encouraged the heterodox We Are Church types to increase the volume of their shrill, rear-guard campaign to abandon the Church's solemn teachings.

For the record: Algore is the worst politician in 5,000 years of recorded history. So there.

(Thanks to Publius for bringing Algore's words to our attention.)

I have no problem with using appropriately harsh tactics against insurgents anywhere. No matter whether they're domestic terrorists, like the Weathermen or Earth Liberation Front, or foreign terrorists, our government -- any government -- must ensure the safety of its own people. Those who make war on a society by killing officials and the innocent should be imprisoned or eradicated.

That said, articles like this disturb me. I find it unlikely that bulldozing civilian houses or arresting relatives of suspected insurgents is going to make murderous thugs go away. It's all well and good that the Israelis have used similar tactics in the last few years against the Palestinians, but one might ask whether their campaign has been a success.

Other observations:

1. The Army is no good at counterinsurgency operations. They are good at destroying large formations of troops, wrecking equipment, and smashing their way into enemy-held territory. They aren't good at the delicate, murky, gut-level actions that must be used against insurgencies. The Marine Corps is the only U.S. force that is good at such things, as they have proved in every clime and place (though usually the clime is hot and/or topical, e.g. Haiti, Nicaragua, Vietnam.)

2. Nobody ever rooted out a vicious band of thugs by cordoning off villages and monitoring who comes and goes. True, the British made similar moves in Malaysia, and defeated the Communist insurgency there. Anyone who thinks Malaysia -- where the Chinese minority lives under an apartheid regime -- is a model society, you're welcome to explain why.

3. An officer who makes an asinine statement such as, "With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them" should be shuffled off to a desk job in the bowels of the Pentagon, where he can exchange impolitic e-mail messages with colleagues instead of talking to New York Times reporters.

NRO's David Frum comments today, "It really is incredible that the Democratic party seems determined to nominate a candidate who sounds, as James Taranto put it, like a conceited 15-year-old." (Taranto's original words are here.)

That statement is true, if by "the Democratic party" you mean "Democrat primary voters." The party establishment hasn't been tripping over themselves to support Howard Dean, for reasons both petty (he's not one of the D.C. power-lunch crowd) and substantive (many power-lunchers think he'll take the party way too far to the Left.)

If he weren't mildly scary, I'd be inclined to laugh at Howard Dean. For a man whose entire state has far fewer residents than cows, he certainly thinks a lot of his leadership ability. "Mr. President, if you'll pardon me, I'll teach you a little about defense." He could teach the president how to avoid military service, but it's tough to think of a defense-related subject on which he could tutor the president.

Dean is the quintessence of the liberal Baby Boomer: boundlessly arrogant, with a self-regard that borders on the pathological. He is gripped by a vision of his own righteousness, and -- mark this -- his first instinct is to tear down edifices and destroy people. Just like his contemporaries who protested in Vietnam, he has no particular vision of the common good, other than a vague idea that he will assist the lowly once he finishes savaging the rich and powerful. In the meantime, he spews calumny and promises an armageddon for his enemies.

Quick trivia question: when was the last time a non-Southern Democrat was elected to the presidency?

One of the most decisive events in the Iraqi pacification campaign hasn't been mentioned much in our infotainment-driven news media. (In fairness, they have to save room for Michael Jackson stories.) Next month, the old Iraqi currency with Saddam's face on it will no longer be legal tender -- meaning that any stashes the ancien regime has will be worthless.

Maybe Saddam and his thugs have foreign currencies with which to buy attacks on Coalition forces. Hard to say. But if he's paying his minions in Swiss francs or euros, that kind of thing will stand out. If he hasn't got the money, look for the "resistance" to drop off precipitously. A lack of cash, coupled with some judicious ass-kicking, will convince the thugs and murderers to pursue more honest employment. You heard it first on Catholic Light !