Rotted Through

That the upcoming election appears to be close is in itself an extreme tragedy. Too many yearn for surrender. As David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen writes,

...even if Mr. Bush wins, I have seen the face of defeat. It is obvious to me, at the end of the most gruelling political campaign that I can remember, over the most extraordinary stakes, that the elites in the media, in the academy, in the legal and other public professions -- the "intellectuals" considered together as a class; the "clerisy" as Coleridge called them; the people upon whom a society depends for its thinking -- are, in America as much as elsewhere in the West, morally rotted through.



This has been most evident in the media, because the big newspapers, TV networks, and the repulsive entertainment industry of which they have become increasingly a part, are what we see from day to day. Yet the people in the media, whom polls have shown overwhelmingly support Kerry, seldom do any original thinking. They are more reflective of the conditions that made them; they represent the thinking of the larger class.



It could be said, of this larger intellectual elite in the United States, that when their own country, under attack by a lethal, entrenched, and unambiguously evil enemy, rose in self-defence, they pretended to be neutral. But it was only a pretence: for as we've seen through the media, the battlefield reporting and the rumour-mongering has been consistently slanted. There was no mistake, nor presumed mistake, made by American forces, or the U.S. political leadership, that was not blared across the front pages and the television screens.



Conversely, there has been only the most perfunctory coverage, not merely of American successes and accomplishments in the field -- which have been many, and some astonishing -- but even of the real problems U.S. forces have encountered. How, with such media on their backs, could the allies have defeated Hitler?



Now here, in my view, is the heart of the matter: Michael Moore's "documentary" film, Fahrenheit 9/11, presented a crackpot conspiratorial view of events in which easily established facts were wildly skewed. It did not play to small audiences. I believe the view of reality presented in that film -- with its leading suggestion that 9/11 itself was merely a convenient pretext for the Bush administration -- is actually embraced by America's intellectual elite. Worse, they believe it because they want to believe it.



This is the face of defeat. And the fact that the Democrats have been willing to appeal to this constituency, yet still hope to win the presidential election, speaks tawdry volumes.

The essay concludes:

The fact of Mr. Kerry is a symptom only. I'm afraid the disease that has made his candidacy not only possible, but competitive, goes much deeper than that. And it is from that, in the end, I pray America will recover.

Amen!

Relentlessly and Thoroughly

In a prescient piece written 3 years ago, just one month after the 9/11 attacks, English historian Paul Johnson makes the case that the fight against islamism must be relentless and thorough:

One central reason why appeasement is so tempting to Western governments is that attacking terrorism at its roots necessarily involves conflict with the second-largest religious community in the world.

Dispensing with the deliberate fiction that Islam means "peace", Johnson states the unpleasant Truth:

Islam means "submission," a very different matter, and one of the functions of Islam, in its more militant aspect, is to obtain that submission from all, if necessary by force.



Islam is an imperialist religion, more so than Christianity has ever been, and in contrast to Judaism...



Islam remains a religion of the Dark Ages. The 7th-century Koran is still taught as the immutable word of God, any teaching of which is literally true. In other words, mainstream Islam is essentially akin to the most extreme form of Biblical fundamentalism...

Read that last sentence again, it's important.



Got it? Good. It gets worse:

Moreover, Koranic teaching that the faith or "submission" can be, and in suitable circumstances must be, imposed by force, has never been ignored. On the contrary, the history of Islam has essentially been a history of conquest and reconquest.

Johnson deals with another bit of modern self-hating revisionism:

The Crusades, far from being an outrageous prototype of Western imperialism, as is taught in most of our schools, were a mere episode in a struggle that has lasted 1,400 years, and were one of the few occasions when Christians took the offensive to regain the "occupied territories" of the Holy Land.

He clearly lays out the age-old cycle: civilizations, no matter how advanced, always fall under the pressures of barbarians:

This millennial struggle continues in a variety of ways...Indeed, in the West, the battle is largely demographic, though it is likely to take a more militant turn at any moment. Moslems from the Balkans and North Africa are surging over established frontiers on a huge scale, rather as the pressure of the eastern tribes brought about the collapse of the Roman Empire of the West in the 4th and 5th centuries A.D. The number of Moslems penetrating and settling in Europe is now beyond computation because most of them are illegals. They are getting into Spain and Italy in such numbers that, should present trends continue, both these traditionally Catholic countries will become majority Moslem during the 21st century.



The West is not alone in being under threat from Islamic expansion. While the Ottomans moved into South-East Europe, the Moghul invasion of India destroyed much of Hindu and Buddhist civilization there. The recent destruction by Moslems in Afghanistan of colossal Buddhist statues is a reminder of what happened to temples and shrines, on an enormous scale, when Islam took over. The writer V. S. Naipaul has recently pointed out that the destructiveness of the Moslem Conquest is at the root of India's appalling poverty today. Indeed, looked at historically, the record shows that Moslem rule has tended both to promote and to perpetuate poverty.



Meanwhile, the religion of "submission" continues to advance, as a rule by force, in Africa in part of Nigeria and Sudan, and in Asia, notably in Indonesia, where non-Moslems are given the choice of conversion or death. And in all countries where Islamic law is applied, converts, whether compulsory or not, who revert to their earlier faith, are punished by death.

That's no hyperbole. It's an accurate portrayal of what's going on today -- right now -- and is not the work of some tiny minority.



For those who complain, like Kerry, about lack of allies in Iraq, Johnson was way ahead of him:

It is vitally important that America stick to the essentials of its military response and carry it through relentlessly and thoroughly. Although only Britain can be guaranteed to back the White House in every contingency, it is better in the long run for America to act without many allies, or even alone, than to engage in a messy compromise dictated by nervousness and cowardice. That would be the worst of all solutions and would be certain to lead to more terrorism, in more places, and on an ever-increasing scale.

He concludes by noting, as Gladstone said, that "the resources of civilization are not yet exhausted", and exhorts the US, the main holder of those resources, to live up to its responsibility to relentlessly and thoroughly crush these soul-destroying lovers of Death.



And finally, we are reminded to not falter

when the weasel words of cowardice and surrender are pronounced.

Especially when pronounced by the likes of exit-strategy-seekers and quagmire-declarers such as Kerry and the media-celebrity complex that backs him.

Who Benefits?

British historian Paul Johnson points out the stakes:

Anti-Americanism, like anti-Semitism, is not, of course, a rational reflex. It is, rather, a mental disease, and the Continentals are currently suffering from a virulent spasm of the infection, as always happens when America exerts strong and unbending leadership.



Behind this second line of adversaries there is a far more sinister third. All the elements of anarchy and unrest in the Middle East and Muslim Asia and Africa are clamoring and praying for a Kerry victory. The mullahs and the imams, the gunmen and their arms suppliers and paymasters, all those who stand to profit—politically, financially, and emotionally—from the total breakdown of order, the eclipse of democracy, and the defeat of the rule of law, want to see Bush replaced. His defeat on November 2 will be greeted, in Arab capitals, by shouts of triumph from fundamentalist mobs of exactly the kind that greeted the news that the Twin Towers had collapsed and their occupants been exterminated.



I cannot recall any election when the enemies of America all over the world have been so unanimous in hoping for the victory of one candidate. That is the overwhelming reason that John Kerry must be defeated, heavily and comprehensively.

Even bin Laden has literally come out of his cave to support Kerry, literally using Michael Moore and Democrat National Committee talking points.

From his comments on the tape, bin Laden even appeared to have watched U.S. director Michael Moore's film "Fahrenheit 9/11," which shows Bush first hearing news of the Sept. 11 attacks while visiting a school.

(Thanks for helping a mass-murderer with his propaganda, Michael. I cannot question your patriotism, for that is the greater sin these days, is it not?)



And in his derangement, Walter Cronkite tells Larry King that Karl Rove was responsible for the tape!



After the forged CBS documents that Dan Rather would not disavow; after the ABC memo directing the news to ignore Kerry's distortions; after the ridiculous and unfounded Captain Queeq-like focus on missing strawberries, er, explosives; it seemed the media could not stoop lower.



Yet it finds new, unimaginable ways.



Who can align themselves with these forces?



it is often maintained that Bush is just a puppet, controlled by Rove, or perhaps Cheney, or by Halliburton, or maybe the Saudis, or Zionists. And yet, as Johnson points out, Kerry

seems to have no strong convictions about what he would do if given office and power. The content and emphasis of his campaign on terrorism, Iraq, and related issues have varied from week to week. But they seem always to be determined by what his advisers, analyzing the polls and other evidence, recommend, rather than by his own judgment and convictions.

This is the man to fight implacable fanatics with memories measured in centuries?

Ineligible

The Constitution of the United States, Article XIV, Section 3:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress...or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States...who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States...to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.

Lt. Kerry, as an officer of the United States, took such an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.



And, even while still in the Naval Reserve, Kerry gave aid and comfort to our enemies.



Whether as a knowing agent or as a naive, manipulable tool is for you to decide, but the fact remains in either case that the outcome was aid to the enemy's plans.



How so?



We know that the North Vietnamese were our enemies in 1971, in what was still then a hot war.



We know that the communist agents of these enemies were actively directing and coordinating with the anti-war movements in the US.



For example, here is a translation of a document captured in South Vietnam in May, 1971. Note how it outlines the Spring Campaign of American demonstrations. Note how it specifically references the April rally in which Kerry threw away someone else's medals, that he then capped off with his fabricated "Jenjis Khan" war-crime testimony to Congress. Note the instructions on how to capitalize on this propaganda.



Here is another translated and annotated captured enemy document. It speaks of coordinating with labor unions, anti-war groups, and ex-service men. It lays out the plans for the Fall 1971 Anti-war Movement. Note how it specifically states

The spontaneous antiwar movements in the US have received assistance and guidance from the friendly [i.e., Viet Cong and North Vietnamese] delegations at the Paris Peace Talks.

Kerry, while still in the Naval Reserve, was also on the Executive committee -- a leadership role -- in the anti-war group VVAW.



And in that capacity he attended the Paris Peace Talks and met with communist agents, specifically Madame Binh, subsequent Minister of Information [i.e., Propaganda] of Vietnam.



Not only is this trip not denied by Kerry, nor his meetings with delegates at the Talks, but the FBI even records his trip.



Why in the world would the FBI remark in a field report about John Kerry going to Paris? Because he went with the VVAW's Executive Director, Al Hubbard, who linked the VVAW to the PCPJ (The People's Committee for Peace and Justice), a known subversive communist-controlled group that was, for example, specifically mentioned in this captured document (linked above) as "the most important" anti-war group that "maintains relations with us [the Vietnamese communists]."



Now, what was Kerry, the VVAW's national spokesman, told to do by these enemy agents in Paris?



We don't know.



But what, he just went to chat about the weather? What we do know is that the captured circular above indicate it was the plan of our communist enemies to "widely disseminate the seven-point peace proposal."



And as soon as Kerry returned from Paris, he held a press conference to disseminate the seven-point peace proposal:

July 22, 1971, three weeks after the Paris talks, Kerry called on President Nixon to accept the plan at a press conference in which he surrounded himself with the families of POWs, a strategy outlined in the...document.

Quite a coincidence, no?



This "seven-point peace plan" that Kerry was pushing for the enemy side essentially intended to withold releasing US POWs until Nixon would pay reparations and set a firm deadline for withdrawal.



You know, like an "exit strategy".



Now, is this aid and comfort?



The brutal communist regime that took over (remember the Boat People?), after war protests like Kerry's caused us to cut and run, was so pleased with his efforts on their behalf that they placed a photo of Kerry in the honored "war protester" section of their Communist War Remnants Museum, formerly the War Crimes Museum.



But wait, there's more!



Remember Hubbard, on the FBI watch list of subersive agents?



The FBI also records a meeting of the VVAW in Kansas City in which Hubbard and Kerry are listed in attendance -- not as mere members but as part of the Executive Committee. The FBI report shows that Hubbard explained the Paris meeting that he attended with Kerry was at the specific invitation of the Vietnamese government and that they met with its representatives. Also invited for the little soiree was the Communist Party USA.



But that's not the real meat of that night's meeting. No, it was at that November 1971 meeting at which the VVAW discussed a proposal to assassinate pro-war members of Congress.



That's not protest, ladies and gentlemen, that's Treason. That's Sedition. That's waging war against the United States.



The proposal was not adopted.



But did Kerry disavow the organization? Did he warn anybody?



No.



And remember, he's the National Spokesman of this group, not just some curious walk-in.



To this day he claims he was not present at that meeting.



But the FBI report indicates his attendance.



In fact, the London Telegraph reports there are a great deal of FBI files on Kerry, some of which have been stolen from a historian -- though by Democrats (to suppress them) or Republicans (to publicize them) is unclear.



Now as we all know, the media has been pounding Bush about possible "gaps" in his National Guard service, and whether he might have missed a physical. And Bush has signed the proper form to release ALL of his military documents.



Kerry has not signed such a form. He is keeping much of it hidden. And the media seems to have no interest in pursuing his anti-war actitivities while in the Naval Reserve.



Curious, no?



What would he be hiding?



Who knows? Rumor has it that the unreleased documents indicate his discharge was "other than honorable" due to his violating his oath and giving aid to the enemy. And that it was only "fixed" under Carter's 1978 amnesty to draft dodgers and war protestors.



But, that remains speculation at this point.



Such amnesty would not rehabilitate him for eligibility to be a Senator, let alone to be President, under the 14th Amendment, however!



That would take a special vote of 2/3 of both Houses of Congress, according to the rest of Section 3.



Is anyone going to raise this issue?



Will the media care he's ineligible? Will it even be discussed?



Or are parts of the Constitution just inoperable if the intelligentsia deem to ignore them?



Are we an Aristocracy, or a Republic?



If we were serious about the Constitution, Kerry could not run.



If we were serious about the Constitution, nobody could in good conscience vote for him due to his clear ineligibility.



But this is not a serious age.



When illegal combatants -- enemies of civilization and life as we know it -- are demanded to have full POW status, and when POW status is believed further to require access to lawyers and civilian courts as if they were mere burglars rather than enemy warriors fanatically devoted to our destruction -- a position without any precedent in history -- then no:



we are not serious even about our own survival.

Distraction?

It is often said by the likes of Kerry that Iraq is a "distraction" from the War on Terror.



I would just point out that after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the first thing we did was to invade North Africa -- half a world away from Japan!



And it was not even to attack the Germans, but the French!!!



I think people tend to forget that.



And that it made sense in the context of a global campaign.

Phenomenal Success

Charles Krauthammer points out in the Washinton Post:

This week, just three years after a two-month war that destroyed the Taliban, Afghanistan completed its first free election, choosing as president a pro-American democrat enjoying legitimacy and wide popular support.



This represents the single most astonishing geopolitical transformation of the past four years. (Deposing Saddam Hussein ranks second. The global jihad against America was no transformation at all: It existed long before the Bush administration. We'd simply ignored al Qaeda's declaration of war.) But perhaps even more astonishing is how this singular American victory has disappeared from public consciousness...



Within days of Sept. 11, the clueless airhead president that inhabits Michael Moore's films and Tina Brown's dinner parties had done this: forced Pakistan into alliance with us, isolated the Taliban, secured military cooperation from Afghanistan's northern neighbors, and authorized a radical war plan involving just a handful of Americans on the ground, using high technology and local militias to utterly rout the Taliban.



President Bush put in place a military campaign that did in two months what everyone had said was impossible: defeat an entrenched, fanatical, ruthless regime in a territory that had forced the great British and Soviet empires into ignominious retreat. Bush followed that by creating in less than three years a fledgling pro-American democracy in a land that had no history of democratic culture and was just emerging from 25 years of civil war.



This is all barely remembered and barely noted.

It's truly baffling.

BILD

Germany's largest newspaper, BILD, in a surprise move endorses Bush with some pithy points that expose the weakness of the case for Kerry:

2. Bush has learned the lessons of history. Military strength, not pleasant talk, is the only thing that helps against violent fanatics. And with Bush — unlike with Kerry — there is no doubt about this.



...



5. Bush has learned that America can defeat every country in war, but needs allies in peace. Thus, his second term will be characterized by cooperation with international partners. But he will not depend on how Syria or Libya vote at the UN.



6. Bush knows that Europe and Germany don’t have the military at their disposal to become involved in any further foreign military engagements. Therefore he won’t ask them for help. Kerry will do exactly that — and will further burden already damaged German-American relations.



...



9. Every new American administration makes mistakes. Bush has already made his. Kerry, on the other hand, has of yet held no (executive) position in the government. He would be worse prepared than most Presidents preceding him.



10. With Bush, we know what to expect. With Kerry, nobody knows what he stands for and where he wants to lead America — and the world.

Some may complain that point 5 is false; but then how to explain his insistence of staying multilateral in dealing with North Korea, for example?

Surprise!

We've heard rumors of this before.



Now named officials are speaking publicly.



The fate of the "missing" explosives may be tied to the whereabouts of the "missing" WMD materials, according to the Washington Times:

Russia Tied to Iraq's Missing Arms



Bill Gertz

The Washington Times



Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein's weapons and related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 U.S. military operation, The Washington Times has learned.



John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, "almost certainly" removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad.



"The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of military units," Mr. Shaw said. "Their main job was to shred all evidence of any of the contractual arrangements they had with the Iraqis. The others were transportation units."



Mr. Shaw, who was in charge of cataloging the tons of conventional arms provided to Iraq by foreign suppliers, said he recently obtained reliable information on the arms-dispersal program from two European intelligence services that have detailed knowledge of the Russian-Iraqi weapons collaboration.



Most of Saddam's most powerful arms were systematically separated from other arms like mortars, bombs and rockets, and sent to Syria and Lebanon, and possibly to Iran, he said.



The Russian involvement in helping disperse Saddam's weapons, including some 380 tons of RDX and HMX, is still being investigated, Mr. Shaw said.



The RDX and HMX, which are used to manufacture high-explosive and nuclear weapons, are probably of Russian origin, he said.

Hmmm. How about that.

Al-Qaqaa, a known Iraqi weapons site, was monitored closely, Mr. Shaw said.



"That was such a pivotal location, Number 1, that the mere fact of [special explosives] disappearing was impossible," Mr. Shaw said. "And Number 2, if the stuff disappeared, it had to have gone before we got there."



The Pentagon said there was no evidence of large-scale movement of explosives from the facility after April 6.

Yet Kerry still keeps pounding this story that the troops and Bush let it get away.

A second defense official said documents on the Russian support to Iraq reveal that Saddam's government paid the Kremlin for the special forces to provide security for Iraq's Russian arms and to conduct counterintelligence activities designed to prevent U.S. and Western intelligence services from learning about the arms pipeline through Syria.



The Russian arms-removal program was initiated after Yevgeny Primakov, the former Russian intelligence chief, could not persuade Saddam to give in to U.S. and Western demands, this official said.



A small portion of Iraq's 650,000 tons to 1 million tons of conventional arms that were found after the war were looted after the U.S.-led invasion, Mr. Shaw said. Russia was Iraq's largest foreign supplier of weaponry, he said.



However, the most important and useful arms and explosives appear to have been separated and moved out as part of carefully designed program. "The organized effort was done in advance of the conflict," Mr. Shaw said.



The Russian forces were tasked with moving special arms out of the country.



Mr. Shaw said foreign intelligence officials believe the Russians worked with Saddam's Mukhabarat intelligence service to separate out special weapons, including high explosives and other arms and related technology, from standard conventional arms spread out in some 200 arms depots.



The Russian weapons were then sent out of the country to Syria, and possibly Lebanon in Russian trucks, Mr. Shaw said.



Mr. Shaw said he believes that the withdrawal of Russian-made weapons and explosives from Iraq was part of plan by Saddam to set up a "redoubt" in Syria that could be used as a base for launching pro-Saddam insurgency operations in Iraq.



The Russian units were dispatched beginning in January 2003 and by March had destroyed hundreds of pages of documents on Russian arms supplies to Iraq while dispersing arms to Syria, the second official said.



"Whatever was not buried was put on lorries and sent to the Syrian border," the defense official said.



Documents reviewed by the official included itineraries of military units involved in the truck shipments to Syria. The materials outlined in the documents included missile components, MiG jet parts, tank parts and chemicals used to make chemical weapons, the official said.



The director of the Iraqi government front company known as the Al Bashair Trading Co. fled to Syria, where he is in charge of monitoring arms holdings and funding Iraqi insurgent activities, the official said.



Also, an Arabic-language report obtained by U.S. intelligence disclosed the extent of Russian armaments. The 26-page report was written by Abdul Tawab Mullah al Huwaysh, Saddam's minister of military industrialization, who was captured by U.S. forces May 2, 2003.



The Russian "spetsnaz" or special-operations forces were under the GRU military intelligence service and organized large commercial truck convoys for the weapons removal, the official said.

It seems there is documentary evidence. The story concludes:

Defense officials said the Russians can provide information on what happened to the Iraqi weapons and explosives that were transported out of the country. Officials believe the Russians also can explain what happened to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs.

Hoist. Petard. Own.





UPDATE: 10/28/2004 Just heard Condi Rice on Laura Ingraham tonight, and she said, to paraphrase, they know a lot of things were being moved around before thew war, but she had seen no specific evidence to link the Russians to it.

Arafat Ailing

Poor old Arafat is not well.



He will likely be dead soon.



The AP has run a touching timeline of key events in his life.



I particularly like this entry:

-Feb. 4, 1969: Arafat takes over PLO chairmanship, transforms it into dynamic force that makes Palestinian cause known worldwide.

Well, I suppose that's one way to describe becoming the Father of Modern Terrorism by pioneering the concept of airline hijackings and creating a cult of death g(l)orifying mass murder through suicide bombings.



What is wrong with these people?



Somehow the slaughter of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics didn't make the timeline.



Would that fall under "dynamic", or making the "cause known worldwide"?



It tells you something about the UN -- the people we're supposed to listen to -- that they granted the PLO official observer status in 1975. This shortly after Arafat was allowed to speak at the body -- while carrying a gun.



What is wrong with these people?

Digging Deeper

Kerry just keeps hammering away on this missing explosives story everywhere he speaks.



Now ABC weighs in:

Iraqis said there were 141 tons of RDX explosives at the facility.



But the confidential IAEA documents obtained by ABC News show that on Jan. 14, 2003, the agency's inspectors recorded that just over 3 tons of RDX was stored at the facility -- a considerable discrepancy from what the Iraqis reported.



The IAEA documents could mean that 138 tons of explosives were removed from the facility long before the start of the United States launched "Operation Iraqi Freedom" in March 2003.



Another Concern



The documents show IAEA inspectors looked at nine bunkers containing more than 194 tons of HMX at the facility. Although these bunkers were still under IAEA seal, the inspectors said the seals may be potentially ineffective because they had ventilation slats on the sides. These slats could be easily removed to remove the materials inside the bunkers without breaking the seals, the inspectors noted.

This is simply ludicrous.

Good Old Days

We've heard much hand-wringing and cries of despair from the very beginning: the fearful Afghan Winter, the dreadful Iraqi Summer, the inconceivable house-to-house fighting in Baghdad -- all of these would defeat us.



And now we hear cries of alarm, and threats from terrorists, about the redeployment of the famed Scottish Black Watch Regiment to the hotspots around Baghdad.



Well gather 'round.



I'd like to tell a little story about the good old days before everyone turned into frightened "girlie-men", that feature other Highland regiments.



The time: 1857.



The place: mutinous India.



In parts of India, a mutiny flared up. Most British outposts were taken by surprise as their native contingents suddenly changed sides and joined the mutineers and princelings. A new Emperor of Hindustan was declared, and a bin-Laden-like character Nana Sahib emerged as a rebel leader.



Many outposts were massacred outright, along with their women and children. Others found themselves besieged, isolated and in desperate straits.



One group of about 350 British troops with a few hundred natives troops of uncertain morale, and over 500 women and children, were trapped in the Residency compound at Lucknow.



What to do?



Declare a quagmire?



Beg for forgiveness?



Remember, this is 1857 -- before the days of body armor, helicopter medevac, and air superiority. Before antibiotics and anesthesia. Before humvees, armored or otherwise. Before tanks and armored personnel carriers. Before satellite-guided bombs.



This was halfway around the world, in a gigantic country, now hostile.



And at the peak of the hot season with 100-degree temperatures.



They'd have to march on foot through densely-populated cities in house-to-house fighting, and all they had were muskets and whatever supplies and artillery they could drag themselves.



Rather than fret in fear and doubt, the Brits got down to business.



This was May, and the Lucknow garrison believed it could hold out until September.



There being many trouble spots, the Lucknow relief force began with under 2,000 troops. And the Residence -- with only about 500 or so defenders -- was surrounded by between 50,000 and 100,000 mutineers.



Over 50,000!



Many of them not a rabble, but well-armed and trained former native troops.



Nobody kept carping that there "weren't enought troops" to get the job done, they just set out to do it, with discipline and determination.



By July, the relief column had reached Cawnpore, still some distance from Lucknow. And nobody was screaming "Quagmire!" even though 2 months had already gone by.



The original garrison of Cawnpore had negotiated a surrender, and upon marching out, all the men were immediately murdered. The hundreds of women and children were taken as hostages, and just before the relief column arrived, they were taken to a room and systematically hacked apart with swords and cleavers.



Among the relief column were the 78th Highlanders, and nobody in the world is as motivatible by sentimental fury as a Victorian Scot.



The Highlanders arrived to find the entire floor was drenched in blood. The walls were smeared red, with hack-marks matted with human hair. The room had a well, into which the dead and dying were stuffed, until it overflowed with body parts.



And if the newspapers of the day are to be believed, scrawled on the walls, presumably in blood, was the message "countrymen, avenge us!"



And nobody found that sentiment insensitive or offensive.



In the well was found the head of one of the former commander's daughters, from which the Highlanders requested cuttings of locks of hair. Passing them around, each Highlander counted the strands and swore a blood oath to personally slay at least one rebel for each hair received.



Eventually reinforced to a strengh of about 3,000 by September, the relief force finally forced its way into the Residency, spurred on by the battle cry, "Remember Cawnpore!"



But still being surrounded by a huge hostile force, they could not safely escort the defenders, many of them sick or wounded. The garrison was now, however, able to hold out longer with this injection of reinforcements.



Was the operation declared a failure? Did the media ask for an "exit strategy"?



No, a new force of around 5,000 was formed to finish the relief in November, which included 2 other Highland regiments (among others), as well as a naval artillery force. The 93rd Highlanders, newly arrived in country, were still in the tartan kilts and feathered bonnets.



Making its way through the maze of deadly streets and compounds, with attackers in every mosque (nothing has changed...) and alley the column would not be denied, the massacre at Cawnpore still fresh in their minds.



The sailors with the unit manhandled their heavy artillery right up to the skirmish lines, as if they were delivering broadsides from their warship at sea, to withering effect, and progress was good until they ran into the Secundrabagh, a large fortified and walled compound.



The plan was for the artillery to breach a small hole in the wall, through which a party of Highlanders would charge to open the gates for the rest.



As soon as the breach appeared, however, the Highlanders could not be restrained, and the entire regiment of 700 surged forward "with a terrifying yell of long-suppressed rage" as the pipes skirled up The Haughs of Cromdell, aka The Old Highland Charge, "the sound of which raised the men's fury to a berserk level."



There being no time to reload in the close-quarter fighting, this was to be an argument in cold steel, with death coming from distances under 3 feet from broadsword, dirk, and bayonet.



When it was all over, the bodies of over 2,000 mutineers were piled in the courtyard, with not a single one knowingly let to escape, for a loss of 22 Highlanders.



The next obstacle was the Shah Najaf mosque, an apparently even tougher nut, but after the bombardment started, given the grim outcome at the Secundabragh, the defenders soon abandoned the position.



And thus the Residency was relieved, and its occupants escorted to safety, after holding out for 6 months.



Mopping-up operations would continue for another year, with the Nana Sahib fleeing to the remote regions of Nepal, and was rumored to have died the next year but was never found.



We would do well to reclaim the steadfastness and confidence of the Victorians.



[this account paraphrased and quoted from "Impossible Victories" by Bryan Perrett.]



UPDATE: Other sources give the title of the Highland Charge as "The Haughs of Cromdale" rather than Cromdell (as in the source I quoted).

The Real Scandal

There are 2 "real" scandals developing over these "missing explosives."



As remarked here earlier, an NBC news crew was at the Al Qaqaa site with the 101st on April 10, 2003, and they didn't notice any IAEA-sealed bunkers during the 24 hours they were there. But one could always say they weren't necessarily looking.



But we now find that CBS, which was working on breaking this story with the NYT just before the election, with the charge that the explosives disappeared during the looting of mid to late April (before inspectors arrived again in May), ALSO had an embedded crew.



And that the CBS crew arrived at Al Qaqaa with the 3rd ID a week earlier, and filed a report on April 4, 2003 that didn't mention the presence of tons of explosives -- and the 3rd ID was specifically searching the site!



What they did find was boxes of white powder, that may have been the remnants -- indicating the bulk of the stockpiles were moved earlier:

The site is enormous and U.S. troops are still investigating it for potential weapons of mass destruction, the official said.



"Initial reports are that the material is probably just explosives, but we're still going through the place," the official said.



Peabody said troops found thousands of boxes, each of which contained three vials of white powder, together with documents written in Arabic that dealt with how to engage in chemical warfare.



He also said they discovered atropine, used to counter the effects of nerve agents.



The facility had been identified by the International Atomic Energy Agency as a suspected chemical, biological and nuclear weapons site. U.N. inspectors visited the plant at least nine times, including as recently as Feb. 18.



The facility is part of a larger complex known as the Latifiyah Explosives and Ammunition Plant al Qa Qaa.

Now CBS knew this. They know there's a period between February 18 and April 4 when the explosives could have been removed, and that the report of their own crew suggests it likely that they were gone by April 4.



Yet they were still going to report -- without a shred of evidence -- that the disappearance happened later, after we should have been responsible for it.



We also find out that in the visit of the inspectors before the war, that they didn't even confirm all of their own seals were intact, and only checked some of them. As if the seals alone tell you anything. I've seen pictures, and all they are is a strand of wire through the door handles with a metal tag imprinted with the IAEA seal. As if those can't be duplicated! As if there might not be secret entrances!



And the second big scandal is, if these HDX and RDX explosives are so darn dangerous, and a key ingredient in an atomic weapon, they why didn't the IAEA hvae them destroyed, like they were supposed to, anytime in the preceding 10 years?



Because maybe the whole notion of non-cooperative inspections is a farce?



Because maybe international agencies don't share the interests and concerns of the United States, and shouldn't be relied on for our security?

Political Violence

Sometime back I predicted a surge in political violence by the Left. Readers Fondu and Mellow Traveller at LGF have kept a tally (if I were Reuters, I'd call it "a grim tally"...)



10/26/2004

Cinderblock thrown through window of Bush/Cheney HQ in Santa Cruz, California



10/23/2004

Bush/Cheney HQ in Flagstaff, Arizona vandalized

Bush/Cheney HQ in Cincinnati, Ohio burglarized and ransacked



10/22/2004

Bush/Cheney HQ Lake Havasu City, Arizona - Bomb Threat



10/18/2004

Republican Candidate's office in Salt Lake City, Utah vandalized



10/16/2004

Bush/Cheney HQ in Fairbanks, Alaska attacked

Bush/Cheney HQ in Anchorage, Alaska attacked

Bush/Cheney HQ in Longmont, Colorado vandalized



10/15/2004

Bullet placed outside door of Bush/Cheney HQ in Littleton, New Hampshire

Piece Of ply-board thrown at the window/door Of Bush/Cheney HQ in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Bush/Cheney HQ in York, Pennsylvania vandalized

Windows smashed at Kerry/Edwards HQ in Medford, Oregon



10/13/2004

Bush/Cheney HQ in Spokane, Washington burglarized.

Bush/Cheney HQ in Mt. Vernon, Illinois vandalized

Window smashed at Bush/Cheney HQ in Laconia, New Hampshire



10/12/2004

Kerry/Edwards HQ in Toledo, Ohio burglarized

Bush/Cheney HQ in Canton, Ohio burglarized and vandalized



10/11/2004

Bush/Cheney HQ in Easton, Maryland vandalized

Bush/Cheney HQ in Spokane, Washington burglarized and vandalized, computers stolen



10/09/2004

Bush/Cheney HQ in Edmond, Oklahoma vandalized

Bush/Cheney HQ in Pensacola, Florida vandalized

Republican Candidate's office vandalized in Rochester, New York



10/07/2004

Republican Congressional Candidate receives death threat in Santa Cruz, California

Kerry/Edwards HQ vandalized in Bozeman, Montanna



10/06/2004

Bush/Cheney HQ in St. Paul, Minnesota attacked

Bush/Cheney HQ in Hagerstown, Maryland vandalized

Bush/Cheney HQ in Tampa, Florida stormed by Union workers



10/05/2004

Bush/Cheney HQ in Miami attacked by mob

Bush/Cheney HQ in Orlando, Florida attacked by mob

Mob attacks Bush/Cheney HQ in Tampa, Florida

Shots fired into Bush/Cheney HQ in Knoxville, Tennessee

Bush/Cheney HQ in West Allis, Wisconsin attacked



10/04/2004

Kerry/Edwards HQ in Lawrence, Kansas vandalized



10/03/2004

Burglary at Bush/Cheney HQ in Thousand Oaks, California



10/01/2004

Bush/Cheney HQ in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania attacked



9/28/2004

Vandalism at Bush/Cheney HQ in Springfield, Missouri

Bush/Cheney HQ in Oxford, Mississippi vandalized



9/23/2004

Bush/Cheney HQ in Arbor Vitae, Wisconsin vandalized



9/20/2004

County Republican Chairman attacked at Bush/Cheney HQ in Gainesville, Florida



9/17/2004

Kerry/Edwards HQ vandalized in Lafayette, Louisianna



9/11/2004

Bush/Cheney HQ in Bloomington, Illinois - Arson

9/11 Memorial at University of Tennessee in Knoxville vandalized with Anti-bush messages



9/10/2004

Bush/Cheney HQ Field Director receives death threats in West Virginia



9/09/2004

Bush/Cheney HQ in Edwardsville, Illinois vandalized

Tire jack smashes window at Kerry/Edwards HQ in League City, Texas



9/04/2004

Bush/Cheney HQ vandalized in Bozeman, Montanna



9/02/2004

Shots fired into Bush/Cheney HQ in Huntington, West Virginia

Cinderblock smashes window at Kerry/Edwards HQ in Grand Rapids, Michigan

Bullet hole found in front Of Bush/Cheney HQ in Miami, Florida



I never imagined it would be this widespread, and nearly every day. "Shots fired"?!? This is brown-shirt behavior!



Links to the original news articles supporting the data are here.

The Perils of Delayed War

I love this guy! It's gratifying to find someone with a clear grasp of military history. I wonder if those who view history from the military side -- which borders on classic "great man" approaches -- avoid the toxic effects of trendier Marxist interpretations.



But I digress.

The West should be thankful that it has in US President George W Bush a warrior who shoots first and tells the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to ask questions later. Rarely in its long history has the West suffered by going to war too soon. On the contrary: among the wars of Western history, the bloodiest were those that started too late. Why should that be the case? The answer, I believe, is that keeping the peace requires prospective combatants to maintain the balance of power...Postponing war therefore creates equally matched opposing blocs who eventually will annihilate each other.



More than ever does this principle apply to the present race for nuclear weapons...



Whether or not Saddam Hussein actually intended or had the capacity to build nuclear weapons is of trifling weight in the strategic balance. Everyone is planning to build nuclear weapons. They involve 60-year-old technology no longer difficult to replicate. It hardly matters where one begins...It hardly matters which one you attack first, so long as you attack one of them.

After some interesting historical examples, he concludes:

That is why George W Bush has my moral support in the upcoming US presidential election. He may not fathom what he is doing, and he may have made a dog's breakfast of Iraq, but at least he is willing to go straight to war, no questions asked. That is precisely what the world needs.

Why is it what the world needs? Because in an article two years ago, this same author wrote with tremendous foresight:

Iraq's nuclear program is the 21st-century equivalent of Russia's railroads in 1914. The United States must prevent Saddam Hussein from building nuclear weapons now, or the cost of stopping him (and others in the future) will be incalculable. The trouble is that today's Arabs (and to a great extent other Islamic populations) are in the position of the Slavs of 1914. They are an endangered culture, and like many endangered cultures, the extremists among them will take desperate measures.



No more than in 1914 can the diplomats avert a tragedy. No more than in 1914 does any important participant desire a tragedy. The elite of Europe and America's East Coast somnambulistically re-enacts the first days of August 1914, wailing out warnings like a tragic chorus. The American administration believes it will bring democracy to the Mideast, and plows ahead like a tragic hero. The tragedy will proceed. Unlike 1914, of course, the two sides are not equally matched. America outweighs its prospective adversaries by an order of magnitude. Yet its potential adversaries are so numerous and so bereft of hope that the tragedy will not play itself out in four terrible years. It well may last for 40.

The author would prefer a short series of messy conventional wars now, versus a modern version of WW1 with nukes on both sides in the near future.



So would I.

Tocqueville vs Marx

Illuminating essay on the philosphical underpinnings of the current culture war in the West:

The slow but steady advance of Gramscian and Hegelian-Marxist ideas through the major institutions of American democracy, including the Congress, courts, and executive branch, suggests that there are two different levels of political activity in twenty-first century America. On the surface, politicians seem increasingly inclined to converge on the center. Beneath, however, lies a deeper conflict that is ideological in the most profound sense of the term and that will surely continue in decades to come, regardless of who becomes president tomorrow, or four or eight or even 20 years from now.



As we have seen, Tocquevillians and Gramscians clash on almost everything that matters. Tocquevillians believe that there are objective moral truths applicable to all people at all times. Gramscians believe that moral "truths" are subjective and depend upon historical circumstances. Tocquevillans believe that these civic and moral truths must be revitalized in order to remoralize society. Gramscians believe that civic and moral "truths" must be socially constructed by subordinate groups in order to achieve political and cultural liberation. Tocquevillians believe that functionaries like teachers and police officers represent legitimate authority. Gramscians believe that teachers and police officers "objectively" represent power, not legitimacy. Tocquevillians believe in personal responsibility. Gramscians believe that "the personal is political." In the final analysis, Tocquevillians favor the transmission of the American regime; Gramscians, its transformation.



While economic Marxism appears to be dead, the Hegelian variety articulated by Gramsci and others has not only survived the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also gone on to challenge the American republic at the level of its most cherished ideas. For more than two centuries America has been an "exceptional" nation, one whose restless entrepreneurial dynamism has been tempered by patriotism and a strong religious-cultural core. The ultimate triumph of Gramscianism would mean the end of this very "exceptionalism." America would at last become Europeanized: statist, thoroughly secular, post-patriotic, and concerned with group hierarchies and group rights in which the idea of equality before the law as traditionally understood by Americans would finally be abandoned. Beneath the surface of our seemingly placid times, the ideological, political, and historical stakes are enormous.

Reader HA at Roger L. Simon comments that:

Leftists have take to calling themselves "progressives." But what are they "progressing" towards? The answer is Gramscian Marxism. As a Gramscian propaganda organ, the only news that is fit to print at the NY Times is that which advances the Gramscian transformation process. All news that serves to transmit traditional American principles is unfit to print.



The Democratic party and the MSM have reach a point of absolute moral and intellectual corruption. By this, I mean that they no longer believe in, and will no longer participate in perpetuating the American political creed. They are actively opposing that creed and in its place they are advancing the Gramscian Marxist creed that is rotting out Europe. They are tearing America apart BY DESIGN and in accordance with the latest, state-of-the-art marxist theory. God help us all of they succeed.



American democracy is in serious trouble. All of our opinion forming organizations have been take over by Gramscian Marxists. The Democratic party and the MSM are organized around the principles of Gramscian Marxism and they are in the process transforming the rest of American society around these principles. If this process is not reversed, the consequences will be devestating, not only for America, but the whole world. America is the last best hope for mankind. If the transformation of American society along Gramscian principles continues, there will be no hope.

Let's not let this be a desperate rear-guard action, that staves off darkness for just a few more years. We must revive our patriotism -- pride not just of country but also of our Western culture -- and sense of exceptionalism whole-heartedly.



Re-embrace the classics.

Ultimate Kerry Ad

Hilarious, devastating mp3 of clips put together by a radio show host as a fake "ad" for Kerry, that shows him taking all sides on all issues, is here.



And it goes on for over 4 minutes!



Direct link to the mp3 is here.

New York Times Lies To You

First CBS with the fake documents, now the New York Times fabricates a story to damage Bush and gets caught -- ratted out by NBC.



Make no mistake, they are they enemy.



The story, you may have heard, is the "missing" 350 tons of explosives that the UN's IAEA had tagged, but now are gone. The implication is Bush/Rumsfeld had too few troops, or planned poorly, or didn't know what was important to guard.



The only problem is, the explosives were gone before Iraq fell.



Let's also ignore that the Corps of Engineers has secured or destroyed 410,000 of explosives, so a "missing" 350 tons is less than 1/10th of 1%! Let's not remark on the other 99.915%, that might look like something's going right!



The NYT first reported, in its second paragraph:

United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the

explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon

officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime

after the American-led invasion last year.

But that's an outright lie.



And they know it. How does that make you feel?



All that was really acknowledged "after the invasion" is that indeed the explosives are unaccounted for. The suggestion that the time they disappeared was after we took over is a total fabrication, in a deliberately misleading statement.



I'll dissect the rest of the NYT story below to show the internal contradictions, but here's the punchline: NBCNEWS had an embedded crew with the troops that first swept through the area, and they discovered the bunkers were already emptied:

tonight, NBCNEWS reported: The 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives were already missing back in April 10, 2003 -- when U.S. troops arrived at the installation south of Baghdad!



An NBCNEWS crew embedded with troops moved in to secure the Al-Qaqaa weapons facility on April 10, 2003, one day after the liberation of Iraq.



According to NBCNEWS, the HMX and RDX explosives were already missing when the American troops arrived.



"The U.S. Army was at the site one day after the liberation and the weapons were already gone," a top Republican blasted from Washington late Monday.



The International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors last saw the explosives in January 2003 when they took an inventory and placed fresh seals on the bunkers.



Dem vp hopeful John Edwards blasted Bush for not securing the explosives: "It is reckless and irresponsible to fail to protect and safeguard one of the largest weapons sites in the country. And by either ignoring these mistakes or being clueless about them, George Bush has failed. He has failed as our commander in chief; he has failed as president."



A senior Bush official e-mailed DRUDGE late Monday: "Let me get this straight, are Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards now saying we did not go into Iraq soon enough? We should have invaded and liberated Iraq sooner?"



Why is the U.N. nuclear agency suddenly warning now that insurgents in Iraq may have obtained nearly 400 tons of missing explosives -- in early 2003?



NBCNEWS Jim Miklaszewski quoted one official: "Recent disagreements between the administration and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency makes this announcement appear highly political."



The source behind the NYT story first went to CBSNEWS' 60 MINUTES last Wednesday, but the beleaguered network wasn't able to get the piece on the air as fast as the newspaper could print. Executive producer Jeff Fager hoped to break the story during a high-impact election eve broadcast of 60 MINS on October 31.

Oh look, there's CBS again!



Once you get deep into the NYT story, you find that paragraph 2 is directly contradicted:

The Qaqaa stockpile went unmonitored from late 1998, when United Nations inspectors left Iraq, to late 2002, when they came back. Upon their return, the inspectors discovered that about 35 tons of HMX were missing.

So it was already disappearing well before the war.



Then during the war:

By late 2003, diplomats said, arms agency experts had obtained commercial satellite photos of Al Qaqaa showing that two of roughly 10 bunkers that contained HMX appeared to have been leveled by titanic blasts, apparently during the war. They presumed some of the HMX had exploded, but that is unclear.

Who knows, maybe all that was left there was destroyed. They tell us nothing about the relative sizes of the bunkers or how much may have been in those 2!



Then the article tells us near the end:

A senior Bush administration official said that during the initial race to Baghdad, American forces "went through the bunkers, but saw no materials bearing the I.A.E.A. seal."

So the area WAS checked, and the particular explosives in question WERE NOT THERE.



And now NBC confirms.



Then we find the whole "scandal" is based on this:

experts say they assume that just before the invasion the Iraqis followed their standard practice of moving crucial explosives out of buildings, so they would not be tempting targets. If so, the experts say, the Iraqi must have broken seals from the arms agency on bunker doors and moved most of the HMX to nearby fields, where it would have been lightly camouflaged - and ripe for looting.

So the NYT admits it's likely much of the explosives WERE REMOVED PRIOR TO THE WAR AND HIDDEN. But it's just speculation where they were moved to or when. It says "assume"! The notion they were moved to "nearby fields" and "ripe for looting" is just made up!



And yet, Kerry and Edwards tried to make hay from an obviously shaky story, didn't they even read it?

"This is one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the great blunders of this administration," Kerry said.

And even when faced with this new revelation from NBC, the Kerry campaign won't back down, but clings to the big lie:

Top Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart fired back Monday night: "In a shameless attempt to cover up its failure to secure 380 tons of highly explosive material in Iraq, the White House is desperately flailing in an effort to escape blame. Instead of distorting John Kerry’s words, the Bush campaign is now falsely and deliberately twisting the reports of journalists. It is the latest pathetic excuse from an administration that never admits a mistake, no matter how disastrous."

The New York Times holds you in contempt.

Interesting New Blog

Just came across this new blog recently that looks intriguing. It's examining in very clear terms the basis of Western civilization -- things everyone should be taught early, but aren't -- and how it relates to current events.



For example:

Jews brought the Law to the West, and with the Law came the idea of a man standing in relation to his God, with Whom he had a covenant, and Whose ordinances he was bound to obey. In that sense, the individual is the smallest unit of our human race to be judged by God on the basis of the Law.



The Greek innovation is reason, which looks to the world as an object separate from the self, an object that can be analyzed and understood by rational means. The Analyzer and Ratiocinator is the individual.



But the force which combined these two threads was Christianity, which brought the Law to Aristotle. In the teachings of Christ it becomes clear that the individual and his conscience are distinct in the eyes of God (Matthew 6:5-6 KJV)...



This individual, in unmediated communion with God, possesses those natural rights which were recognized in the Declaration of Independence. He is granted these rights by his Creator, and they cannot be taken away by men.



The individual is the cornerstone of the West, on whom the structure of its civilization depends. The great experiment in Iraq depends for its success on the emergence of something similar in Mesopotamia.

This is the "neoconservative" solution to the "root cause" of Islamic Jihad, aka "terror".



Ok. Maybe it sounds crazy, or at the very least improbable and daunting. But what, you got a better solution?



And no, pixie dust that makes the whole globe suddenly develop a magical hydrogen economy isn't a realistic answer. Something doable in the next 10-20 years, please. Wake me if we decide to build 1,000 new nuclear reactors.



The blog begins with the observation:

From our perspective at the dawn of the 21st century it is hard to realize that a little more than three centuries ago the whole of Christian civilization was threatened. When the Turks stood at the Gates of Vienna it seemed that all of Europe would be overrun by the legions of the Prophet.



This war never ended. While many individual treaties were made between various states over the centuries, no truce was ever declared between Islam and the infidels, and no permanent peace was established (as General Gordon discovered at Khartoum in 1885).

The authors identify the current GWOT as actually the Third Wave of Islamic Jihad:

The thesis of this blog is that, like it or not, we are in a religious war.

Might as well get used to it.



Check out the rest at "Gates of Vienna".

Laser Gunship?

Last weekend I heard reports that the AC-130 gunships were active over Fallujah.



Hallelujah!



The AC-130 gunship is a cargo plane that has been jammed full of advanced targeting optics and reconfigured to carry nothing but piles of ammunition to feed its hungry side-mounted guns.



The armament consists of a high-speed 25mm gatling gun, firing 1,800 rounds per minute; a 40mm Bofors cannon that can pepper an area with 100 grenade-like exploding projectiles per minute; and even a freakin' 105mm howitzer that can put a 4-inch wide high-explosive round through your window up to 10 times a minute.



This is a view of the AC-130 head-on, with the guns visible protruding from the side.



This is a view of the 105mm howitzer inside.



Here is the howitzer firing.



This is a time-lapse photo of an AC-130 saturating a ground target in Afghanistan, showing how it just flies in lazy banking circles as the advanced targeting systems keep the guns trained on a single point.



Note that only every 5th round is a tracer, so the actual volume of fire is much higher than you can see.



According to FAS,

The AC-130U is the most complex aircraft weapon system in the world today. It has more than 609,000 lines of software code in its mission computers and avionics systems. The newest addition to the command fleet, this heavily armed aircraft incorporates side-firing weapons integrated with sophisticated sensor, navigation and fire control systems to provide surgical firepower or area saturation during extended loiter periods, at night and in adverse weather. The sensor suite consists of an All Light Level Television system and an infrared detection set. A multi-mode strike radar provides extreme long-range target detection and identification. It is able to track 40mm and 105mm projectiles and return pinpoint impact locations to the crew for subsequent adjustment to the target.

And you thought those new fighter planes were fancy! We've only got about a dozen of the "Spookys" in the inventory.



At $190 million. Each!



Wouldn't it be cool to put an infrared laser heat ray on this beast?



You bet!



(BTW, John Pike doesn't really know what he's talking about. Tracking a moving target is easy. It's especially suited to laser weapons. Given the speed of the photons, and the lack of inertia in the beam, and advances in CCD camera technology, tracking fast moving targets, even missiles, is a laser weapon's raisson d'etre!)



The concept is called the "Advanced Tactical Laser", or ATL, and according to World Tech Tribune (Who are they? I don't know. It's tough to find relatively up-to-date, open-source information on this topic that isn't completely whacky),

The US Military has been working on getting lasers in their arsenal for about fifteen years, but there’s always been the problem of size. Unlike the handheld phaser guns seen in Star Trek, a laser gun in the real world is about the size of a dump truck. Unless you’re a very big boy, most men on the front lines would be unable to hoist a laser gun that size around the battlefield.



Until laser guns can be miniaturized down to handheld size, they are mounted as cannons on warships or large planes. The Boeing Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) cannon has been in testing at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico for the past year. The ATL would be used for both lethal and non-lethal missions. Just as low flying AC-130 gunships ripped Taliban soldiers and military installations to shreds over the past four months with machine guns, a laser-enabled AC-130 would be able to fry human enemies and liquefy metal targets like communications antennae with pinpoint accuracy from nearly ten miles away. The Bush Administration’s proposed defense budget increases funding for the ATL by four times and hopes to have a laser-enabled AC-130, called the AC-X or “Son of Spectre” in the skies by 2004.



Lasers require a lot of energy to be effective, so many might ask: “Is the ATL nuclear powered?” Any chance the leftist watermelons (you know the type: Green on the outside and Red on the inside) have of demonizing the ATL as ecologically dangerous are slim. The ATL is fueled by common household chemicals like hydrogen peroxide, iodine and water.

The chemicals were always the dicey part. And you're stuck with the wavelength that the chemical reaction produces, even if it's not the optimal wavelength you'd want to have to avoid the detrimental effects of diffraction, turbulence, and absorption -- especially if you're attacking a target in the atmospheric "soup" near the ground, which is what the ATL is supposed to do, unlike, say, its bigger brother the ABL (Airborne Laser), which is a modified 747 that does nothing but carry a humongous COIL laser that's an order of magnitude more powerful than the one envisioned for the ATL and is meant for high-altitude engagements against boosting ballistic missiles.



So there's a competing effort to develop electric-powered, solid-state semiconductor lasers, instead of the chemical lasers, at power levels that are sufficiently interesting. Now the big problem is cooling it.



Here's a cool promo shot of what a laser lab looks like. This is supposed to be a scaled-down version of the actual engagement, in which everything (including the physical effects of the atmosphere) was made smaller in the right proportion so the physics stays the same, which saves you from having to do unrepeatable field experiments with 5-foot wide beams and hundred+ mile ranges.



I think that's the Lockheed lab. Technically it was a disaster and got shut down. But don't worry, MIT's version of that lab worked just fine.



Here's the ABL "artist's concept" drawing that we all overuse in our powerpoint presentations. You can see why.



They're having trouble fitting the big laser into the 747. It's not clear the plane will be able to get off the ground. The plumbing for all those nasty chemicals is complex. Here for example is part of a COIL module. They claimed if given enough money, they could shrink it down and put several of them on the plane. Good luck with that. Probably they'll make do with fewer modules, and live with lower power levels (and shorter ranges) than advertised.



Anyway, it's a start.



Ground-based lasers like the THEL (Tactical High Energy Laser) have already shown they can track and shootdown Katyusha rockets and even mortar shells. The MIRACL (mid infrared chemical laser) beam it projects, however, also requires nasty chemicals like deuterium fluoride. The goal is to make THEL mobile: the MTHEL. All that requires is putting a 3-story building full of PhDs on wheels.



The artist concept looks neat anyway.



But electric-powered solid-state lasers may save the day. The boys in engineering have some interesting concepts involving coherent laser fibers and small laser diodes. They just have to get 10,000 of them all aligned and working in concert.



Mid-power lasers with power supplies carried on a small truck like a Humvee might be a few scant years away. And John Pike doesn't even say something obviously wrong:

Yet John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense research firm that often criticizes weapons programs as impractical, said solid-state laser weapons technology finally appears to be moving from "pure physics to engineering."



"They're starting to talk about specific platforms and specific missions for the lasers," Pike said. "They are getting close enough that they can actually ask for money with some confidence that they can deliver on what they promised."



Although the Pentagon has emphasized development of chemical lasers, the focus in the last year has begun to shift to solid-state variants, which would be easier to package and transport. Low-power solid-state lasers are used in a variety of commercial applications, from compact disc players to grocery store scanners.



The Holy Grail



Research in solid-state lasers received a major boost last month when the Pentagon quietly launched a $50-million initiative to develop a 25-kilowatt laser by the end of 2004, with the goal of deploying by the end of the decade a 100-kilowatt laser that could be installed on warplanes, tanks and ships.



The most powerful laser currently is a 10-kilowatt model that is being tested by the Army.



Information about the damage such lasers could inflict is classified. But in general, experts say, a 25-kilowatt laser could blind an enemy sensor several hundred miles away. It also could put a hole through a sheet of metal from a distance of several miles.



Correspondingly, a 100-kilowatt solid-state laser -- the Holy Grail for weapons developers -- could deliver a destructive beam to a target dozens of miles away, making it an effective tactical weapon.



A laser's beam would not by itself cause a target to explode. But it could slice through the outer casing of a missile, disabling the guidance system or causing the missile's propellant to explode...



Meanwhile, scientists working on solid-state lasers have made major strides in boosting the power output and the quality of the beam, two key factors for determining a laser's lethality and accuracy.



"Over time, solid-state lasers will become more powerful and more compact, which will make them more useful on the battlefield and perhaps revolutionize the conduct of war," said Loren B. Thompson, chief operations officer for Lexington Institute, a defense think tank.



"I have no doubt that by the end of the decade, we will have a laser weapon installed on a Joint Strike Fighter jet or an AC-130 gunship."

I don't doubt it either.

Lord and Savior

[This post's tagline was inspired by a comment at LGF last summer from Arrr.]



So, did you hear about the evangelical Christians in Michigan? It seems a group of them have taken up residence in a small, mostly Polish Catholic town, and they decided to take their protestant proselytizing one step further than usual.



They've started blaring out of loudspeakers from their church into the town, several times a day,

JESUS IS YOUR LORD AND SAVIOR!

JESUS IS YOUR LORD AND SAVIOR!

JESUS IS YOUR LORD AND SAVIOR!

JESUS IS YOUR LORD AND SAVIOR!

JESUS IS YOUR LORD AND SAVIOR!

Over and over again.

JESUS IS YOUR LORD AND SAVIOR!

JESUS IS YOUR LORD AND SAVIOR!

JESUS IS YOUR LORD AND SAVIOR!

JESUS IS YOUR LORD AND SAVIOR!

JESUS IS YOUR LORD AND SAVIOR!

Man, that really gets annoying, doesn't it?

JESUS IS YOUR LORD AND SAVIOR!

JESUS IS YOUR LORD AND SAVIOR!

JESUS IS YOUR LORD AND SAVIOR!

JESUS IS YOUR LORD AND SAVIOR!

JESUS IS YOUR LORD AND SAVIOR!

It just doesn't stop.



Of course, many residents didn't like having to hear that message all the time. In fact, many non-Christians found it offensive and even threatening.



The evangelicals didn't care. And the town council wouldn't do anything to stop them, as it had sympathizers on the board.



But whew, at least the ACLU got on the case and put a stop to it.



Oh, wait a minute.



Scratch that.



I had that a little wrong.



The ACLU was nowhere to be found.



And it wasn't an evangelical church, it was a mosque.



And they weren't blaring a message about Jesus, they were amplifying this message 5 times a day, as early as 5:30 am and as late as 10:30 pm:

Allah is greater, Allah is greater

Allah is greater, Allah is greater



I bear witness there is no deity but Allah

I bear witness there is no deity but Allah



I bear witness that Muhammad (pbuh) is the Messenger of Allah

I bear witness that Muhammad (pbuh) is the Messenger of Allah



Hurry to the prayer

Hurry to the prayer



Hurry to the success

Hurry to the success



Allah is greater, Allah is greater



There is no deity but Allah

This is happening in Hamtramck, Michigan. The position of the mosque was it didn't matter what the secular authorities did anyway:

Masud Kahn, the associate imam of the mosque, said the mosque will begin the calls to prayer Friday, as planned, no matter what happens with the petition and the council.



Kahn and council President Karen Majewski say the mosque didn’t need the city’s permission to broadcast the calls to prayer in the first place.

The Detroit News patronizingly call this incident "a lesson in democracy, freedom of speech and freedom of religion."



I call it a lesson in dhimmitude, "the Islamic system of governing populations conquered by jihad wars."



The narrow legalistic and technical question of whether or not this violates a noise ordinance, or whether or not it is equivalent to the mere musical pealing of churchbells, is of no interest to me.



The real issue is what broadcasting this "call to prayer" means: it is an expression of in-your-face triumphalism, meant to put you in your place, kuffaar, pure and simple.



It's part of the standard playbook of subjugation.



As an aside, Kuffaar or Kaafir are what the Muslims call us non-Muslims, by the way. We translate it as "infidel", but the connotation is closer to "nigger."



For example,

Can we greet the kuffaar with a greeting other than salaam?

I would like to understand something about the greeting of the kouffar. I know that we don't have to give them sellem first but I have this question if we live in a kouffar country are we allow to greeting them first but no with sellem but with good morning like in the workplace...

Praise be to Allaah.



We appreciate your eagerness to learn; may Allaah increase us and you in knowledge and acceptable righteous deeds...



It was reported that the Messenger of Allaah [Mohammed] (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: “Do not initiate the greeting of salaam to the Jews and Christians, and if you encounter them in the street, push them to the narrowest part of the road.”



So we should not initiate the greeting of salaam to a kaafir at all; if he initiates the greeting of salaam, then we should say “wa ‘alaykum” in response, in obedience to the command of the Messenger (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him).



There is no reason why we cannot then say, How are you? Or, How are your children? – as has been permitted by some of the scholars, including Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyah (may Allaah have mercy on him), especially when doing so serves an Islamic purpose such as encouraging him to take an interest in Islam so that he will be receptive to da’wah...

Do a little googling on terms like kafir, kaafir, kufr and kuffaar for a bit of an eye-opening. You will find the Muslim world lethally obsessed with loathing and disgust over how to have daily interpersonal dealings with such spiritually unclean and intrinsically sinful beings as ourselves.



Check out shirk, too, if you're really bored.

Steyn's Points

I was considering making a point about "Canadian" prescription drugs, and the peris of price controls.



But I find Mark Steyn has already done so quite elegantly:

Speaking of [government health care], if there's four words I never want to hear again, it's "prescription drugs from Canada." I'm Canadian, so I know a thing or two about prescription drugs from Canada. Specifically speaking, I know they're American; the only thing Canadian about them is the label in French and English. How can politicians from both parties think that Americans can get cheaper drugs simply by outsourcing (as John Kerry would say) their distribution through a Canadian mailing address? U.S. pharmaceutical companies put up with Ottawa's price controls because it's a peripheral market. But, if you attempt to extend the price controls from the peripheral market of 30 million people to the primary market of 300 million people, all that's going to happen is that after approximately a week and a half there aren't going to be any drugs in Canada, cheap or otherwise -- just as the Clinton administration's intervention into the flu-shot market resulted in American companies getting out of the vaccine business entirely.

I also wanted to point out Kerry's contradictions during the debates on the use of allies, but Steyn covers that as well:

On the one hand, the Tora borer drones that Bush "outsourced" the search for Osama bin Laden to the Afghans, though at the time he supported it ("It is the best way to protect our troops," he said in December 2001. "I think we have been doing this pretty effectively."). But, on the other, he claims he's going to outsource Iraq to the French and the Germans, though neither of them wants anything to do with it.

In other words, Kerry is simply not a serious candidate with serious ideas.



Steyn concludes:

After much stonewalling, the Province of Quebec's Health Department announced this week that in the last year some 600 Quebecers had died from C. difficile, a bacterium acquired in hospital...One thousand Americans are killed in 18 months in Iraq, and it's a quagmire. One thousand Quebecers are killed by insufficient hand-washing in their filthy, decrepit health care system, and kindly progressive Americans can't wait to bring it south of the border. If one has to die for a cause, bringing liberty to the Middle East is a nobler venture and a better bet than government health care.

And don't forget the 15,000 elderly who died horribly of dehydration in the summer heatwave in France while their caretakers went off to vacation...and Iraq is the quagmire? And Reuters and AP trumpet a new "grim milestone" in Iraq combat deaths every time the number ends in a zero when it's still less than 1/10th the carnage (and about 1/60th the rate!) in French hospitals?



Read the whole thing.

Equal Opportunity

Thought you'd heard it all, did you?



Nope. Not even close:

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's Armed Forces have enlisted their first Satanist after a naval technician serving on a frigate was granted permission to practice his beliefs while at sea, the Ministry of Defence says.



Defending the decision to allow a Satanist among the Royal Navy's ranks, a ministry spokesman said on Sunday it was an "equal opportunities employer" and did not discriminate against specific religious beliefs.



The Sunday Telegraph newspaper said Chris Cranmer, 24, from Edinburgh would be allowed to have a funeral carried out by the Church of Satan should he be killed in action.

What a relief!

The Church of Satan was founded in the 1960s, but Satanism can refer to a diverse set of practices that include viewing Satan as a force of nature.



Members of the church, which rejects Christian ideas of God and the Devil, follow 11 Satanic Rules of the Earth.

So in other words, it's a cult somebody made up recently, and to give these people the time of day is another breach in the edifice of civilization as we know it. But this is to be expected; they already recognize the "Jedi Knight" as a "religion", never mind its fictional origins.

"I am utterly shocked by this," said Conservative parliamentarian Anne Widdecombe.



"Satanism is wrong. Obviously the private beliefs of individuals anywhere including the armed forces are their own affair but I hope it doesn't spread," she said.

Well, guess what, it's going to spread and it's going to get worse because defending our culture is equated with bigotry with "discrimination" -- meaning, according to the dictionary, "The ability or power to see or make fine distinctions; discernment" -- is now the greatest sin.



"Tolerance" has come to mean nothing less than acceptance and accomodation, even celebration.



The Royal Navy may one day find its true purpose -- defeating those who would harm Britain -- has been forgotten, and that it has been spending its precious time and resources in being an "equal opportunity" employer and a vehicle for experiments in social engineering, when rather it should have been relentlessly honing its warfighting skills.



Makes one nostalgic for the old Royal Navy traditions of "rum, sodomy, and the lash."



Indeed, this frivolity makes me nostalgic for the Puritans...and I'm a Catholic!

Across The Pond

Someone over there gets it, in the Telegraph:

So who gains if Bush loses? The Labour Left, of course, and the political power of the European Union, the Guardian readers who have been writing magnificently counterproductive anti-Bush letters to the voters of Clark County, Ohio, and every twerp who says with a trembling lip that Mr Bush and Mr Blair have "blood on their hands"; not to mention every corrupt, undemocratic, "pragmatic" government in the Middle East that longs for a return to stasis.



But some rather more fearsome people gain too, such as the man who said of Americans in a document discovered earlier this year "…these are the biggest cowards of the lot, and we ask God to allow us to kill, and detain them, so that we can exchange them with our arrested sheikhs and brothers". He is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and it is probably he who killed Ken Bigley. Such men believe they have already changed the government in Spain; they will claim at once that they have done the same in the United States. They will be right.



And who loses? Iraqis about to have real elections of their own for the first time, Afghans who have already voted with more than expected success, Iranians trying to assert their own democracy against its clerical corruptions. And us. What one can see in each twist of the Iraq story - don't send the US Marines into Fallujah, don't send the Black Watch to help the Americans, do give in to Ken Bigley's kidnappers - is exactly what is meant by defeatism, an actual longing to lose. Whatever you think of the war, why would you want that?

Narrow Vision

They like to say "Bush Knew!"



Well it turns out Kerry knew of the specific possibility of multiple hijackings out of Boston's Logan airport, and did nothing because the people complaining weren't "constituents".



Read the incredible story of narrow vision.

Sen. John Kerry boasts how he "sounded the alarm on terrorism years before 9/ 11," referring to his 1997 book "The New War." Too bad he didn't blast it when it really counted - four months before the hijackings, when he was hand-delivered evidence of serious security breaches at Logan International Airport, with specific warnings that terrorists could exploit them.



Former FAA security officials say the Massachusetts senator had the power to prevent at least the Boston hijackings and save the World Trade Center and thousands of lives, yet he failed to take effective action after they gave him a prophetic warning that his state's main airport was vulnerable to multiple hijackings.



"He just did the Pontius Pilate thing and passed the buck" on back through the federal bureaucracy, said Brian Sullivan, a retired FAA special agent from the Boston area who in May 2001 personally warned Kerry that Logan was ripe for a "jihad" suicide operation possibly involving "a coordinated attack."



Rewind to May 6, 2001. That night, a Boston TV station (Fox-25) aired reporter Deborah Sherman's story on an undercover investigation at Logan that Sullivan and another retired agent helped set up. In nine of 10 tries, a crew got knives and other weapons through security checkpoints - including the very ones the 9/11 hijackers would later exploit.



The next day, Sullivan fired off a two-page letter to Kerry highlighting the systemic failures.



"With the concept of jihad, do you think it would be difficult for a determined terrorist to get on a plane and destroy himself and all other passengers?" he warned. "Think what the result would be of a coordinated attack which took down several domestic flights on the same day. With our current screening, this is more than possible. It is almost likely."

...

A fiery ex-Navy Seal, Elson spent three years as part of an elite FAA unit called the Red Team, which did covert testing of airport security across the country, before retiring as a field agent in Houston. He offered to fly to Washington at his own expense to give Kerry a document-backed presentation about the "facade of security" at Logan and other major airports.



But a Kerry aide said not to bother. "You're not a constituent," Elson was told just a few weeks before the hijackings. He went ballistic, warning that if Kerry didn't act soon he'd risk the lives of planeloads of his actual constituents. That warning now looks like prophecy: At least 82 Kerry constituents were murdered aboard American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175.



"Enhanced security would have prevented the hijackings, virtually without question," Elson now insists. If nothing else, it might have discouraged ringleader Mohamed Atta, who monitored security procedures at Logan weeks before the hijackings.

Way to order those priorities.