Nuclear Iran

Charles Krauthammer gives us a glimpse into what will almost certainly be one of the first matters the Bush administration will have to address if it is reelected in November: What to do about Iran.

A question Viewpoint wishes someone would ask John Kerry is what, exactly, he proposes be done about a state which supports terrorism, is exceptionally hostile to the United States and Israel, and which is, by its own admission, soon to be in possession of nuclear weapons. Kerry can't fall back on some vague mumblings about a multilateral approach and involving the U.N. since that's what the Bush administration is trying now with notable lack of success.

Kerry's realistic choices seem limited to attempting to ignite a revolution, military preemption against Iran's nuclear facilities, or doing nothing. The first doesn't seem as likely to succeed as we had hoped last spring, the second is pretty much what Kerry has been criticizing Bush for over the past two years, and the third puts the world at a risk that we simply can't accept.

Krauthammer's analysis of the problem is very good. Some excerpts:

The fact is that the war critics have nothing to offer on the single most urgent issue of our time - rogue states in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Iran instead of Iraq? The Iraq critics would have done nothing about either country. There would today be two major Islamic countries sitting on an ocean of oil, supporting terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction - instead of one.

Two years ago there were five countries supporting terror and pursuing WMDs -- two junior-leaguers, Libya and Syria, and the axis-of-evil varsity: Iraq, Iran and North Korea. The Bush administration has just eliminated two: Iraq, by direct military means, and Libya, by example and intimidation.

There may be no deus ex machina. If nothing is done, a fanatical terrorist regime openly dedicated to the destruction of the ``Great Satan'' will have both nuclear weapons and the terrorists and missiles to deliver them. All that stands between us and that is either revolution or pre-emptive strike. Both of which, by the way, are far more likely to succeed with 146,000 American troops and highly sophisticated aircraft standing by just a few miles away - in Iraq.

Iran cannot be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons. If people like John Kerry had had their way in the spring of 2003 we would be in a far weaker position today to do whatever it is that needs to be done to prevent it, and if John Kerry has his way in November what needs to be done probably won't be.

God and Time

One of the questions that arises among people who enjoy talking about the philosophy of religion concerns the relationship between God and time. Does God exist in our time? If not, is He outside time altogether or does He exist in his own, supernatural, temporality? I thought of this as I read an excerpt from a book by Kitty Ferguson entitled The Fire In The Equations: Science, Religion and the Search For God. at Belief Net.

Since our time is part of the creation and coterminous with it, and since God transcends the creation, it seems likely that although God may enter our time, He is not restricted to it or constrained by it. We may deduce that our time, cosmic time, is part of creation, i.e. the cosmos, by asking this: If there were no motion and no matter to move, if there were no thing at all, could cosmic time exist? If so, what, exactly, would it be that is existing? How would its existence be discerned? Since it's difficult to imagine time apart from matter in motion, or some sort of change, it seems reasonable to suppose, although it can't be proven, that our time came into being when space, matter, and energy did. Thus scientists talk about the "space-time" universe.

If we assume, then, that God is outside our time then we might ask further whether God is cognizant of our past, present, and most intriguingly, our future. Many theists hold that the concept of omniscience imputed to God entails that God must know the future, but if so, can humans have free will if God knows what they will choose?

We can frame the question in the form of an argument:

1.God knows today that I will do X tomorrow.

2.God is omniscient and therefore cannot be mistaken.

3.Therefore, I must do X tomorrow. I am not free to do Y.

When put this way it certainly seems as if God's knowledge of the future determines my choice, since I cannot be free to do Y if God knows I am going to do X. But there is something odd about this. Certainly, if God knows I will do X then I will do X , but it doesn't follow that God's knowledge determines my choice. Might it not be that my choice determines God's knowledge?

Consider the following propositions:

1. I am free to choose X or Y tomorrow.

2. God knows today which choice I will make tomorrow.

Let's stipulate that I freely choose X tomorrow.

This set of propositions is logically coherent, that is none of them is logically incompatible with any of the others, as far as I can tell. The conclusion which follows from them is simply that:

3. God knew today that I would freely choose X tomorrow.

Put this way there's no contradiction between my free choice and God's foreknowledge. In fact, God's foreknowledge may be seen as a consequence of my choice rather than my choice being an inevitable consequence of God's foreknowledge. Since it's possible to frame the argument this way it's at least possible that there is no contradiction between God's omniscience and human free will.

This does not satisfy some who can't shake the notion that if God knows X will happen, then X has to happen. It is certainly true that if God knows X will happen then, of course, X will happen, but confusion settles in because we tend to think of God as existing within our temporal frame of reference, but because God is outside our time it could be, as I've said above, that the event X causes God's knowledge, not the other way around.

If this is difficult to grasp think about it this way: Each of us knows what other people did yesterday, but we don't think our knowledge determined their behavior. Their behavior was chosen by them yesterday and the choice was unaffected by the fact that we know about it today. So knowledge of a choice doesn't necessarily determine the choice. The problem is that knowledge of a choice prior to its occurrence is different in kind than knowledge of a choice after it has occurred. This is true of us, embedded as we are in cosmic time, but if God is outside of cosmic time, it may not be true of Him.

If God is outside of our time, past and future are all in His present. Our past and future may well be temporally the same to God. Whether He is looking "back" at the past or "forward" into the future, it's all "present" to Him. Thus, if looking "back" doesn't determine what people chose in the past, looking "forward" may not determine choices either. In other words, It's possible that the choices God sees us make determine the content of His knowledge, His knowledge doesn't determine our choices.

For some theologians, however, the whole question of God's foreknowledge is moot. They argue that to say that God is omnipotent is to say that God can do everything that it is logically possible to do, but one thing that may not be logically possible is to know with certainty today what a free agent will do tomorrow.

This view is not very popular among orthodox theists, especially evangelical Christians, among which group I count myself, because it seems to diminish to too great an extent the sovereignty of God, and it is also difficult to reconcile with Scriptural passages which manifestly foretell choices which people will make centuries later. Few Christian thinkers, particularly evangelical thinkers, wish to sacrifice their belief in the Divine inspiration of the Bible on the altar of a philosophical speculation.

Advocates of the "Open Future" hypothesis reply to these concerns by asking how God can possibly know what someone will choose to do in the future unless their behavior is somehow determined? How can God know an indeterminate future that has yet to occur? If God knows the future doesn't that imply that the future somehow exists? If so, where, exactly, does it exist?

I confess I have read no fully satisfying answer to these questions. I also confess that, although I tend to hope that God does know the future, I find a certain allure in the notion that He does not. The reason for the attractiveness of this view for me is that it offers a possible answer to one of the most vexing of apologetic questions. The troubling question arises out of attempts to reconcile God's goodness and power with the existence of evil in the world, but a discussion of that topic will have to wait a couple of days.

Kofi Fiddles, Sudanese Burn

How many have to die before the U.N. acts? The Sudan is Rwanda all over again and, as then, Kofi Annan dithers. Meanwhile the U.S. is trying to do something to stop the killing of African Christians by a Muslim militia called Janjaweed, but the usual suspects are thwarting our efforts once more. From the article:

One problem is strong lobbying by the Arab League and others against any kind of sanctions or military intervention. The United States has had difficulty getting a resolution adopted that would threaten a travel and arms ban within a month if Sudan did not comply.

Of course, the United States could act "unilaterally", but the domestic secular left, which cares little about the suffering of black Christians in Africa but cares enormously about rendering America militarily impotent in the world, would doubtless make this very difficult politically. Add to the political difficulties the U.N.'s hurt feelings over Iraq which evidently trump the moral imperative to do something to bring relief to the suffering in the Sudan, and you have a recipe for inaction.

"We are still dealing with Iraq. We are not out of Iraq yet," Annan said.

So there the delegates sit, arms folded, a scowl on their faces, adamantly refusing to protect tens of thousands, even millions, of starving, disease-ridden women and children because the United States grew weary of their failure to do something about the horrors occurring in Iraq (and Bosnia and Kosovo and Rwanda) and finally did it ourselves.

"Any discussion of intervention in Sudan would be looked at very carefully by governments and I am not sure how quickly and how enthusiastically one would get support for that initiative. We have to be very clear on that," Annan said.

In other words, not enough Christians have died yet for the secularists and Muslims in the General Assembly to regard this as worth getting serious about. In a response to a question about the possibility of military intervention to stop the butchery of thousands of African Christians by a Muslim militia called Janjaweed, Annan displays in a single sentence the complete irrelevance of the United Nations, the absurdity of the Democrat criticism that George Bush failed to get U.N. permission to depose Saddam Hussein, and his own nincompoopery:

Annan said Sudan had been warned not to [use Janjaweed members as policemen]. "It is a 'no-no' for them to induct Janjaweed into the police force,"

A "no-no"?! I guess that will make the thugs in Khartoum think twice about helping the militias commit their genocide. Next Kofi will make them sit in a corner for a time-out. No wonder Saddam was so contemptuous of U.N. resolutions. And this is the body to which the Democrats want the United States to subordinate its national sovereignty and interests?

Intelligent Design

Joe Carter over at Evangelical Outpost has an interesting debate going about Intelligent Design and Methodological Naturalism for those Viewpoint readers with a philosophical turn of mind who are interested in the question of how life arose. Warning: Some of the comments are pretty technical but Joe's arguments are relatively brief and easy enough to understand by a non-specialist who has read a little bit on the topic.

A Force For Evil?

According to this Fox News report 40% of Canadian youth think the U.S. is a force for evil in the world. Youth can be forgiven their stupidity, but the Canadian media and educators who instill this nonsense into callow minds cannot.

If Canada's youth wish to see real evil in action they might simply read this news report. The United Nations, determined to show the U.S. why it should withdraw from this tawdry organization forthwith, voted 156 to 6 with ten abstentions to approve a resolution calling upon Israel to heed an International Court of Justice ruling that called upon them to tear down the barrier that has reduced terrorist attacks by 90% and saved the lives of countless Israeli women and children.

Unfortunately, the spared lives are evidently of no moment to the august delegates in Manhatten, who voted, in effect, to have the murders resume. Their rationale was that the wall is working a hardship on Palestinian landowners in some regions, but one would think that if that were really their concern the U.N. could bring other resources to bear to mitigate the hardship. Instead, the U.N. prefers to salve the suffering of the Palestinians by adopting measures that can only insure that more Israelis will die.

Only Israel, the U.S., Australia, Micronesia, Palau, and the Marshall Islands voted against this odious resolution. Where was Canada? Canada was too busy teaching its youth that the U.S. is a force for evil in the world to vote against a resolution which would deprive Israel of any means of protecting its citizens from the savages who wish to blow them to bits. In a display of moral courage they abstained.

Isn't it past time that the United States washed its hands of this absurd institution? America should join together with those nations which pledge themselves to the values of equality under the law, freedom of religion, press, and speech, representative government, free and open elections, and establish an alternative to the United Nations. The U.N. is little more than a bunch of thugs masquerading as statesmen and we should no longer be party to the charade.

Wilson, Berger, and Chirac

Marty Peretz, editor-in-chief at The New Republic has some thoughts on a variety of matters including the Joe Wilson and Sandy Berger affairs as well as the attitude of the French toward their own Jewish population. About the Wilson episode he says this:

[I]n a lot of dining rooms where I am a guest here, there is outrage that someone in the vice president's office "outed" Ms. Plame, as though everybody in Georgetown hadn't already known she was under cover, so to speak. Under cover, but not really. One guest even asserted that someone in the vice president's office is surely guilty of treason, no less--an offense this person certainly wouldn't have attributed to the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss, Daniel Ellsberg or Philip Agee. But for the person who confirmed for Robert Novak what he already knew, nothing but high crimes would do.

Regarding Sandy Berger he asks:

So my question is: Did Berger, who knew that he was under scrutiny since last fall, alert Kerry to the combustible fact that he was the subject of a criminal probe by the Justice Department and the FBI? My guess is not. Kerry is far too smart, too responsible to have kept him around had he known. But if Kerry didn't know, it tells you a lot about Berger, too much, really.

Perhaps another question Mr. Kerry might wonder about is this: Evidently Bill Clinton knew that Berger, an important advisor to Kerry, was under investigation, so why didn't he tell Kerry about it?

On the French, Peretz notes this troubling anecdote:

[Chirac} demonstrated in an off-hand remark that, for him, neither Jews nor Muslims, for that matter, are really genuinely French: "we are witnessing racial events involving our Jewish and Muslim compatriots. ... Sometimes just simple Frenchmen are attacked." This is an ugly dichotomy. But it is not new. After the terrorist bombing of the rue Copernic synagogue on October 3, 1980, Raymond Barre, the French prime minister, alluded to this "odious act which intended to strike Jews [and] struck innocent Frenchmen." Of course, Chirac and Barre are from the center-right and right where anti-Semitism has always nested. But such views are now a staple of the oh, so enlightened left, as well. French hatred of Jews now goes wall-to-wall. And French hatred of Israel, too. A few days ago, France went into a frenzy to mobilize the countries of the European Union at the UN to vote "yes" on the General Assembly resolution calling on Israel to take down the security barrier it is building against Palestinian terror. Many fatuous reasons were mustered to support this demand. But the real reason that France and some others oppose the fence is that it works.

There's more at TNR Online.

Nukes Found in Iraq?

I don't know if this UPI story is true, but if it is it could change the entire course of the presidential campaign. It'll be interesting to see how the Democrats and the media handle this report if it is confirmed.

Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves

Several weeks ago Viewpoint suggested that the array of individuals supporting John Kerry should give others leaning in his direction pause. We wrote that:

Undecided voters who might be considering a vote for John Kerry in November should ask themselves what it is about the Massachusetts senator that has won him the support of pornographers like Howard Stern and Larry Flynt, Hollywood ditzes like Barbra Streisand and Michael Moore, raving wild men like Al Gore and Howard Dean, the Communist Chinese, North Korea, Vietnam (Hanoi), and the French. What do they all know that maybe the rest of us should?

Now we can add to this list of disreputable characters the names of Joe Wilson, a Kerry advisor, and arrant slanderer, Whoopi Goldberg, whose sleazy put downs of the president were so offensive and vile that her corporate sponsor, Slim-Fast, dropped her from its celebrity endorser list, and most recently Sandy Berger, former National Security Advisor under President Clinton and, until last night, current advisor to Senator Kerry, who purloined documents dealing with matters of national security by concealing them in his pants and socks.

Berger calls his behavior an honest mistake. He inadvertently left the archives, he claims, with documents stuffed in his socks and down his drawers. The Dems want to laugh all this off, but they would be howling in outrage had it been a Bush administration official who stole the papers. Not only does their reaction to this incident, or rather their lack of reaction, evince a deep hypocrisy in the Democrat party, it also suggests that we may infer that this sort of behavior falls within the bounds of the Democrat standards for honesty. Berger is like a shoplifter with merchandise stuffed in his socks, trying to convince the police that he inadvertently left the store with the items, that he certainly didn't intend to steal them, and the Democrats seem to be okay with that.

Rather than expressing dismay that so many of their friends and political allies seem grossly deficient in either taste or integrity, they respond to this last incident by fretting instead about the "timing" of the revelation about Berger's conduct, as if that somehow is more nefarious than the conduct itself. It's no wonder the Democrats insist that character doesn't matter for public servants. If it did, a sizable number of them would be rendered ineligible.

George Bush can take comfort that people like these hate and oppose him, because people have always despised those who are morally superior to themselves. He can take comfort that so many feel impelled to lie about him, to utter the most mean-spirited and vile slanders about him. People do this because they know that they can't merely tell the truth about the man since the truth is not going to alienate voters from him.

People often feel indicted by another man's strength of character, by his integrity. His virtue is a mirror that constantly reminds them of their own inferiority, and they detest not themselves for being less, but they detest him for being better. Their jealousy doesn't motivate them to rise to his level, but rather it motivates them to drag him down, to discredit him, ruin him.

Destroying a man is one way to exert power over him and the exercise of power is the only way some people know to compensate for the character they themselves lack. If a man is better than they, they wish to destroy him. They can't tolerate a man whose very existence condemns them. They will project their own pathologies onto him in an attempt to prove that he's not really as virtuous as he seems. Thus they accuse Bush of lying to the world about Iraq when, in fact, the only evidence that people have lied points back to them. This is a sickness, a depravity which seems to reside deep in the human heart, and it's the root of so many of our social and political ills.

Terror and Liberalism

One of the silver linings of vacationing in a Central American country during the rainy season is that there is ample time to read. Having spent the last ten days in Costa Rica where it rained fairly often I had the good fortune to have along a copy of Paul Berman's best-seller Terror and Liberalism which does an outstanding job of helping the reader understand the nature of the battle with the forces of radical Islamism in which we are currently engaged. Berman's book is interesting, easy to read, and all the more compelling because Berman himself is a man of the left who is dismayed by the reaction of most leftists, both here and in Europe, to the war against terror. He notes in his preface the irony of millions of leftists marching in the largest mass demonstrations in history two years ago in an effort to prevent the overthrow of one of the worst tyrannies of the modern age. Even more incongruous, he adds, is that deterring the U.S. from deposing Saddam Hussein was seen as "the correct stance for every true friend of the downtrodden."

Berman himself is, in his words, one of maybe fifteen or twenty people in the country who are both pro-war and left-wing, and much of his book is given to explaining how the bulk of the ideological left, which began as a champion of the poor and oppressed, came to so passionately defend the most brutal of tyrannies, not just in Iraq, but in earlier times, also in the Soviet Union and even in Nazi Germany.

Berman's argument is complex and I will scarcely be able to do it justice, but it distills to this: There is in the human heart an impulse to rebel, to rebel against God, to rebel against authority. That impulse led millions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into mass movements of rebellion, such as communism and fascism, which evolved into totalitarian tyrannies and ultimately into cults of death. He argues that this sociopathological pattern is universal and expresses itself in cultures other than the European. What we're seeing in the Muslim world is an Islamic version of the European model.

Berman traces the evolution of the Baathi and the radical Islamists, two separate but parallel expressions of the totalitarian impulse, to the writings of Muslim scholars like Sayyed Qutb in the 1950s. He shows how both of these versions of Muslim totalitarianism have followed the logic of Qutb's thinking to become mindless, irrational mass movements drenched in blood and terror, and implacably hostile to the liberal values of the West. Following the trajectory of the earlier European movements, contemporary Islam, or at least a major portion of it, has become obsessed with killing and death.

In a chapter titled Wishful Thinking Berman explains why liberalism has been so blind to the threat these murderous totalitarianisms have posed in both the past and the present. He suggests several reasons. One is that liberals simply cannot believe that millions of people could possibly choose such an irrational path. Perhaps, they convinced themselves in the 1930s, the media was lying about Hitler, or the Bolsheviks. Perhaps today the media is being duped by corporate interests, and the jihadis are really not the threat that they are being made out to be. Perhaps if we could talk with them, understand their grievances, aid them in overcoming their suffering instead of threatening them, they would gladly lay down their arms. Surely, these people don't really despise the values we cherish: individual freedom, equality under the law, tolerance, separation of church and state. Surely they are not so unreasonable as to wish to kill us just for the pleasure of killing us. And so on.

In other words, although Berman doesn't put it quite this way, the left is convinced of the truth of the secularist assumption that man does indeed live by bread alone and that if only material conditions were optimal people would behave rationally. Put another way, the left has for at least eighty years been in denial about the low appeal for most of the world's peoples of the liberal values of freedom, tolerance, equality, and rationality. They have been in denial about the true nature of the human heart and the power of the non-rational compulsions, convictions, and obsessions which drive men all over the globe to commit genocide. Liberals, having long ago abandoned religion, cannot bring themselves to believe that evil actually exists, except perhaps in the Republican party, and cannot understand the hold that religious beliefs and motivations have on millions of Muslims.

What is worse, in my view, is that liberals tend to see the real enemy as anyone who possesses a realistic understanding of the nature of those who wish to do us harm and who are willing to fight to prevent it. This behavior horrifies the left because they are like the fellow in school who lives in fear of the tougher kids and who resents, even hates, any of his peers whom he thinks might provoke the bullies to start throwing their weight around. Like herd animals resigned to having the wolves now and then take a few of their number from the margins of the flock, they hope that by making themselves inconspicuous the predators will leave them alone.

If that doesn't work perhaps the wolves can be appeased somehow. Maybe if we disarmed and showed them we mean them no harm their hatred for us would be mollified. The left, in its naivet�, is completely oblivious to the utter contempt this response engenders in the mind of the wolf. The wolf simply sees all of it for what it is, an acknowledgement of weakness and a confirmation of the rightness of their cause and their strategy.

Bush and Blair have refused to go along with this politics of fear, instead they have swatted the Islamist hornets' nest with a stick, and the left at home and abroad loathes them for it. "Look what you've done!" they protest, "Now the wolves will really hate us!" In a strange, neurotic twist of an old aphorism, the left declares the enemy of my enemy to be my enemy. Thus it despises anyone who actively opposes the Islamist cult of death. It despises anyone who would seek to liberate millions of people from savage oppression if by doing so we risk offending those whose sole ambition in this life is to destroy America.

The Jews, the Americans, and anyone else they think the Islamists hate, the left also hates in the hope of ingratiating themselves with those who are eager to slaughter them. The left, Berman writes, has undergone a strange transformation. "They had begun [In the 19th century] as defenders of liberal values and human rights and they evolved into defenders of bigotry, tyranny, superstition and mass murder." They started as liberal democrats and themselves became allies and de facto sympathizers with fascists.

Berman gives many examples of this phenomenon, but one in particular stands out. He describes an episode at the 2002 Socialist Scholars Conference in New York where a substantial crowd listened to an Egyptian novelist defend a female Palestinian suicide bomber who had recently committed mass murder by blowing herself up in a crowd. When the novelist was finished praising the young woman the audience burst into applause. Applause for such a horrible crime is a symptom of a deep-seated sickness of the soul, but as Berman, citing Camus, points out, the left has always had a strange fascination with, and attraction for, violence, at least as long as it is not directed at them.

Berman's book is a powerful indictment of the modern left's hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy as well as a lucid presentation of the historical evolution of radical Islam. I urge anyone who is interested in trying to gain a better grasp of either of these to read the book in its entirety. Every page is enlightening, although his gratuitous plinking at George Bush at the end of the book is an unfortunate and transparent attempt to reaffirm his leftist bona fides. Nevertheless, both conservatives and liberals will profit from reading this work. You can obtain a copy of Terror and Liberalism by contacting our good friends at Hearts and Minds Bookstore here.

The Good News Continues

Anyone who would like an update on the progress the new Iraq is making on its road to viable nationhood should check out the very comprehensive research done by Chrenkoff, an Australian blogger who has been posting updates on the good news from Iraq every two weeks for several months now. Chrenkoff's labors, he tells us, are motivated mostly by frustration with a press that seems to find only bad news to be newsworthy. His reporting is yet another example of the kind of analysis that the mainstream press should be providing but chooses not to, evidently preferring to continue its slide into irrelevancy.

NorthWest Flight 327 Update

Annie Jacobsen has an update on her report Viewpoint recommended to its readers two days ago. Apparently the national media are on to the story, but nothing has come out yet.

For those who might have missed it, Jacobsen was on a NorthWest Airlines flight that was also occupied by fourteen Syrian men whose behavior onboard raised very deep concerns and considerable fear. Jacobsen's description is riveting and if you haven't read it, you should. You can find it here.

Some commentators have dismissed Jacobsen's experience as nothing to worry about, but, as Jacobsen reports in the current update, a number of airline officials and pilots say that there is a strong likelihood that the Syrian passengers were making a terrorist practice run.

Read both columns for yourself and let us know what you think.

Liar, liar...

Yesterday Viewpoint carried a piece based on a Fox News story supporting the veracity of president Bush's claims that Iraq had been seeking uranium ore from Niger for use in nuclear weapons production and suggesting that Joe Wilson, who had been vociferously accusing Bush of lying about this, had himself been lying.

Mark Steyn has a fine piece on Wilson's prevarications in the Chicago Sun Times, and Jonah Goldberg at National Review refutes a couple of Wilson's lame attempts to defend himself in the Washington Post.

The important question is how Kerry will respond to this development. Kerry's campaign sponsers Wilson's web site and Wilson has been campaigning with Kerry, calling Bush a liar at Kerry campaign events. Doesn't Kerry owe Bush an apology?

Steyn writes that this isn't going to happen. Wilson was useful in discrediting Bush, whether his allegations were truthful or not, and now that his usefulness has expired he will be quietly allowed to fade into the oblivion of media amnesia.

Steyn puts it this way:

It would be nice to hear his media boosters howling en masse, "Say it ain't so, Joe!" But Joe Wilson's already slipping down the old media memory hole. He served his purpose - he damaged Bush, he tainted the liberation of Iraq - and yes, by the time you read this the Kerry campaign may well have pulled the plug on his Web site, and Salon magazine's luxury cruise will probably have to find another headline speaker, and he won't be doing Tim Russert again any time soon. But what matters to the media and to Senator Kerry is that he helped the cause of (to quote his book title) The Politics Of Truth, and if it takes a serial liar to do that, so be it.

Read the whole piece. It's worth it.

Nukes

NewsMax.Com has a couple of sobering reports today. The first claims that it is a widely shared opinion in Washington that an Israeli airstrike/ special operations effort is in the works for Iran's nuclear facilities. The only question seems to be whether it will be timed to take place before or after the November election. The article offers some speculation as to how Iran might retaliate should such an attack occur.

The second piece is even more disturbing. Apparently there is some evidence that al Qaida has obtained as many as ten suitcase-type nuclear weapons each powerful enough to level half of Manhatten. There is concern that at least some of these may have been smuggled into the U.S. with the intention of detonating them in either Boston or New York during the political conventions soon to be held in those cities.

Let us pray to God that our Homeland Security Department is better than its critics have been telling us.

A Legacy of Freedom

Nikita Demosthenes has an interesting observation on the legacies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush:

In the encyclopedias and history books on the shelves 100 years from now, Bush will be rightly seen as being the one to finally turn the tide of tyranny and intolerance in the Middle East toward democracy and freedom. With more freedom in the Middle East, the terrorist groups will slowly decline as their potential members get real jobs and real careers.

This has always been the answer to Middle East unrest - which the left almost never admits: we don't need to throw money at existing dictatorships, we need to foster democracy.

One hundred years from now the left will be seen to have missed the boat on this issue just like they missed the boat on Ronald Reagan's courageous stand resulting in the demise of Soviet communism.

When it comes to the actual number of people freed from tyranny, the records of President Ronald Reagan and President George W. Bush are unmatched in world history. President Reagan's stand against Soviet communism led to the freedom of over 700 million people behind the Iron Curtain. President George W. Bush's stand against Middle East tyranny has already resulted in the freedom of over 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Almost a billion people have tasted freedom for the first time due to these two American Administrations. When is the last time your heard an American network anchor - or a European leader - site these numbers? They're breathtaking.

We might add that the 50 million people liberated so far is a number that may well increase in the years ahead as other Middle Eastern tyrannies, Iran, for example, begin to realize that they are on the wrong side of history and begin to move toward granting their people more freedom. Or, perhaps more likely, the people begin seizing freedom for themselves.

It should also be noted that Bush is achieving this marvellous historical accomplishment at tremendous political risk to himself. There were no guarantees that the military operation in Iraq would be a success, and the outcome of that undertaking is still uncertain. Bush didn't do this because it was politically popular or expedient. He did it because he believed it was right, and if doing what was right costs him reelection then he is prepared to suffer that consequence.

This is one of the things about him that I personally find so admirable, and it certainly distinguishes him from the current challenger and any number of other focus group politicians for whom the phrase doing what's right is synonomous with doing what'll get me elected.

<i>Who </i>Lied?

According to a story at FoxNews.com it's beginning to look like George Bush told us the truth after all about Iraq's attempts to buy uranium from Niger and that Joe Wilson, winner of The Nation's truth-telling award, lied. Raise your hand if you're surprised.

Apologies are expected to start pouring in at any moment from all those who have been insisting for the past year that Bush lied to us about Iraq's attempts to obtain nuclear fuel.

Northwest Airlines Flight 327

Back from ten days in glorious Costa Rica! Many thanks to Bill () for his provocative pieces on the gold standard and economic policy in general in my absence.

I didn't look at a newspaper the entire time I was gone so I suppose I have some catching up to do on what's going on in the world. For example, this astonishing story may have been featured prominently in the news. If so, please forgive me for calling it to your attention here. In case it wasn't, however, don't miss this article. If you're a flier, or even if you're not, it'll give you a knot deep in your stomach. One wonders how the FAA can justify passenger screening procedures that elevate an incredibly stupid adherence to political correctness above the safety of those who travel by air.

Unless the Bush administration shakes itself free of the ridiculous pretense that ethnic profiling is somehow sinful and wakes up to the fact, obvious to all but the most rationally impaired bureaucrats in the upper echelons of the Department of Transportation, that the threat to the lives of our loved ones and ourselves is primarily a threat posed by swarthy Islamic Middle Eastern men, and unless it determines that people fitting this description should come under extra scrutiny from airport security, there is almost certainly another horrific episode aboard an American airliner in our future. Surely the Islamists haven't given up trying.

If this story hasn't broken yet I'd like to know why. Thanks to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit for the tip.

Ok, just one more post...

In A Primer - Part V, I talked about the fiscal irresponsibility of governments once they have the freedom to inflate their currency and spend with abandon, placing the burden of the consequences on the next generation.

I just came across this link to Running On Empty by Mr. Pete Person that speaks to the subject. What I find refreshing is that he is someone from the Republican Establishment, Nixon Secretary of Commerce, a personal friend of the Alan Greenspan, secretary Snow and others and yet he has the integrity to articulate and explain the very dangerous road we are on, i.e. a $44 trillion debt in unfunded liabilities. His motivation for writing the book was "to protect our children". I don't know about you but that catches my attention.

He holds the Republican and Democratic parties equally responsible yet I wonder if, like Mr. Kotlikoff who wrote The Coming Generational Storm, Mr. Peterson isn't just another "voice crying in the wilderness".

And isn't it interesting that you don't hear about this crisis in the popular media.

WSC

A Primer - Part VII

In Closing...

I have enjoyed this opportunity to post some of my thoughts regarding the importance of gold to all Americans but my time is running out and I concede I haven't exerted the effort the topic deserves. I had little notice to adequately prepare and my thoughts were hastily written for which I apologize. The articles were somewhat disjointed and lacked continuity. I'm not a writer, I'm a software engineer.

But I'd like to leave you with one more thought: The Lord admonished the Hebrews to always maintain honest weights and measures. I believe he did this because, in his wisdom, he knew that any system that was based on dishonesty of economic standards was destined to become further corrupted morally and ethically and lead to its eventual downfall.

Fiat currency is the antithesis of honesty.

Today, the Arab world is moving toward commerce and settlement in the Islamic dinar, a gold coin, in there attempt to break away from the U.S. dollar hegemony even as the U.S. demonstrates via Iraq how such efforts will be met. Europe had a chance to do likewise but they decided on just another fiat currency, the euro. Yet these developments bring us ever closer to the possibility of a universal currency.

From the link below...

"For a half-century, the Keynesians have harbored a Dream. They have long dreamed of a world without gold, a world rid of any restrictions upon their desire to spend and spend, inflate and inflate, elect and elect. They have achieved a world where governments and Central Banks are free to inflate without suffering the limits and restrictions of the gold standard. But they still chafe at the fact that, although national governments are free to inflate and print money, they yet find themselves limited by depreciation of their currency. If Italy, for example, issues a great many lira, the lira will depreciate in terms of other currencies, and Italians will find the prices of their imports and of foreign resources skyrocketing.

What the Keynesians have dreamed of, then, is a world with one fiat currency, the issues of that paper currency being generated and controlled by one World Central Bank. What you call the new currency unit doesn't really matter: Keynes called his proposed unit at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944, the "bancor"; Harry Dexter White, the U.S. Treasury negotiator at that time, called his proposed money the "unita"; and the London Economist has dubbed its suggested new world money the "phoenix." Fiat money by any name smells as sour."

www.mises.org/econsense/ch76.asp

Then consider this quote from one of history's most notorious bankers...

"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws."
Mayer Amschel Bauer (Rothschild)

It may not be a one world government we have to fear, but rather a one world currency.

The good news is that, today, gold is readily available to those interested in purchasing it. I list numerous sources for investment in gold bullion, gold mutual funds, and gold mining stocks at my Gold Page.

In closing, I would like to add this piece of information as illustrated by the last two graphs at the bottom of the page of the previous link.

It shows the value of the gold vs. the value of the dollar since the year 2000. Note that my comment there is that while it appears that the price of gold is going up, actually, it's the purchasing power of the fiat U.S. dollar that is declining...govern yourself accordingly.

I have thoroughly enjoyed this opportunity to share some of my thoughts with you, our viewpoint readers, and sincerely hope you found the topic interesting but the time has come to turn the helm over to who should be returning on or about the 16th.

Thanks for reading...

A Primer - Part VI

Who is John Galt?

The Chairman of the Federal Reserve is Alan Greenspan...arguably the single most powerful man on the planet as he directs the monetary policy of the United States. Historically, the official reserve currency throughout the world has been gold since most if not all countries settled their trade accounts with gold. In other words, if country "A" imported more goods from country "B" than it exported, then country "A" paid the balance to country "B" in gold.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned in a previous post, President Nixon terminated the Bretton Woods Agreement by reneging on the redeemability of dollars for gold in 1971.

Today, countries have accumulated huge numbers of dollars with which to settle their trade accounts but the dollar is reaching the end of its time line. As Voltaire said: "Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value - zero."

Visit Gold and Economic Freedom to see what Mr. Greenspan thought of gold and those who print paper money. Given Mr. Greenspan's eloquent dissertation on the subject, I can only see two possible conclusions, either Mr. Greenspan has sold out and become one of the very statists he railed against in his now famous speech at the link above or he sees himself as Ayn Rand's hero, John Galt, who's mission it was to stop the economic engine of the world and thereby forcing everyone to come to their senses.

Time may tell.

A Primer - Part V

The War Enabler...

When country "A" decides to declare war on country "B", its ability to do so is directly correlated to its ability to pay for its war machine. Troops, tanks, guns, an air force, bombs, a navy, and on and on.

When a country's currency is tied to a real asset such as gold and there isn't enough gold in the treasury, it simply can't pay the expense of waging war and alternative solutions are found.

A country on a fiat currency system has no problem printing the money to pay for the war machine so war it will be. For example, some say the US government has already spent $100 billion on the war in Iraq. Additional costs are estimated to be anywhere from another $50 to $200 billion. Where does all this money come from?

The simplified answer is probably something like: The U.S. Treasury prints paper Treasury Bonds that they "sell" to the Federal Reserve which prints the paper dollars required to pay for the T-Bonds. Now the government has the dollars to pay for efforts in Iraq and the Federal Reserve uses the T-Bonds as an asset against which they can print many more dollars (principal of fractional reserve) to be lent to banks across the country.

See this link for a graphic flow chart of the process:

Perhaps the most dramatic example of what this can lead to is from the Weimer Republic after World War I. It's instructive to realize that in the beginning, the Weimer Republic's currency was the 20 Mark gold piece, a coin about the size of one of our quarters. After World War I, the Weimer Republic was decimated and they fell into the trap of embracing a fiat alternative to honest money, the new currency became the 20 Mark paper note and as could have been predicted, the inflation began.

This was no ordinary inflation though, as the original 20 Mark paper notes eventually inflated to 4,000,000,000,000 Marks. That's 4 trillion Marks to buy what the original 20 Mark gold piece would buy only several years earlier. I have seen pictures of women loading wheelbarrows of paper Marks into the fireplace to burn for heat and cooking because they were worth less than wood. The government was printing them so quickly and in such numbers that, to conserve the ink, they only printed one side of the paper note.

I am reminded of an exchange with a women who lived through those times in the Weimer Republic after World War I in which she was asked, "how could you possibly support someone like Adolph Hitler through his rise to power?" The lady's response to the question put to her was quite simple, "when you have to catch rats to eat for food, any alternative appears more attractive."

I'm not saying this will be the fate of America, but visit this link for a candid assessment of the state of matter today. This article sheds some light on the financial mess our politicians have created:

The $44 Trillion Abyss

Scroll down to 12/13/2003 Interview on the left of the page for the Real Audio and MP3 links to listen.