William Arkin argues in The Washington Post that the U.S. is upgrading plans for an attack against Iran and that we should be publicizing the fact. His argument is that Iran needs to know it's playing a deadly serious game.
Unfortunately, we think they know this full well. The trouble is they think they're going to win it.
Victor Davis Hanson surveys the current controversies surrounding the prosecution of our policies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran and concludes that the criticisms are pretty much vacuous and inconclusive:
Apart from the ethical questions involved in promoting a book or showcasing a media appearance during a time of war by offering an "inside" view unknown to others of the supposedly culpable administration of the military, what is striking is the empty nature of these controversies rehashed ad nauseam.
Hanson goes on to write an outstanding piece, putting these controversies into historical perspective. He concludes with this:
What we need, then, are not more self-appointed ethicists, but far more humility and recognition that in this war nothing is easy. Choices have been made, and remain to be made, between the not very good and the very, very bad. Most importantly, so far, none of our mistakes has been unprecedented, fatal to our cause, or impossible to correct.
So let us have far less self-serving second-guessing, and far more national confidence that we are winning - and that radical Islamists and their fascist supporters in the Middle East are soon going to lament the day that they ever began this war.
Anyone interested in the debates over who should be blamed and what they should be blamed for would do well to read Hanson's essay.
Despite the almost uniform media emphasis on what's wrong in Iraq there's much happening there that is good. Bill Crawford has a summary of this week's good news from Iraq in which he notes the military and economic successes taking place there.
At the end of his post he describes some wonderful acts of American heroism. Check it out. The whole post is a good antidote to the MSM insistence that we're bogged down hip-deep in an Iraqi "quagmire."
One of the strategies that Darwinians have developed to make evolution more palatable to the masses is to insist that there is really no threat, no conflict, between evolution and belief in God. At the level of logic this is true, but in terms of human psychology it's very misleading. The number of scientists who claim that studying evolution as a student drove a stake through the heart of their religious belief is legion. To take just one prominent example consider the late John Maynard Smith who acknowledges in this brief interview the role that reading Darwin played in his journey away from the Christianity of his youth.
It is possible to be a Christian and believe in some versions of evolution, but it is simply disingenuous to deny that evolution is a "universal acid" that dissolves the faith of many of those who embrace it.
Soaring gas prices are squeezing most Americans at the pump, but at least one man isn't complaining. Last year, Exxon made the biggest profit of any company ever, $36 billion, and its retiring chairman appears to be reaping the benefits:
Exxon is giving Lee Raymond one of the most generous retirement packages in history, nearly $400 million, including pension, stock options and other perks, such as a $1 million consulting deal, two years of home security, personal security, a car and driver, and use of a corporate jet for professional purposes.
Last November, when he was still chairman of Exxon, Raymond told Congress that gas prices were high because of global supply and demand. "We're all in this together, everywhere in the world," he testified.
Yes, but as someone remarked on one of the Sunday talk shows, we're obviously not all in it in the same way.
Mahmoud Amadinejad is apparently determined to make it impossible for the U.S. to avoid war with Iran without appearing craven and weak. He's ostensibly thumbing his nose and sticking out his tongue at Israel, but the real target is the U.S:
The president of Iran again lashed out at Israel on Friday and said it was "heading toward annihilation," just days after Tehran raised fears about its nuclear activities by saying it successfully enriched uranium for the first time.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Israel a "permanent threat" to the Middle East that will "soon" be liberated. He also appeared to again question whether the Holocaust really happened.
"Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation," Ahmadinejad said at the opening of a conference in support of the Palestinians. "The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm."
Ahmadinejad provoked a world outcry in October when he said Israel should be "wiped off the map."
On Friday, he repeated his previous line on the Holocaust, saying: "If such a disaster is true, why should the people of this region pay the price? Why does the Palestinian nation have to be suppressed and have its land occupied?"
The land of Palestine, he said, referring to the British mandated territory that includes all of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, "will be freed soon."
He did not say how this would be achieved, but insisted to the audience of at least 900 people: "Believe that Palestine will be freed soon."
Ahmadinejad is taunting the world to try to stop him, perhaps because he believes that Bush is too weak politically to do it by himself and that no one else will join us in the enterprise. He may be right about the rest of the world, and he's right that Bush is wounded. Where he is very likely mistaken, however, is in his assumption that Bush will be constrained in his decisions by poll numbers.
I fear that Ahamdinejad is "misunderestimating" this president just as so many others have done in the past. Bush is going to do what he believes is right regardless of what everyone else thinks and that may well portend bad news on the doorstep for Mr. Mahmoud.
For more of the same from Ahmadinejad's underlings see here.
Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail brings us up to date on developments in the GWOT in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Go to the link and scroll down for three or four posts.
Perhaps Maryscott O'Connor is not typical of people on the left. Perhaps she's way out beyond the planet Pluto. But if so there are evidently thousands of people out there with her. Her, and their, hate and venom is, if not pathological, at least indistinguishable from it. These are despicable people, yes, but they are also pathetic and terribly sad. They may deserve opprobrium and contempt but they need our prayers. Read this from the Washington Post - you'll wonder how a human being can be so vicious:
SHERMAN OAKS, Calif. -- In the angry life of Maryscott O'Connor, the rage begins as soon as she opens her eyes and realizes that her president is still George W. Bush. The sun has yet to rise and her family is asleep, but no matter; as soon as the realization kicks in, O'Connor, 37, is out of bed and heading toward her computer. Out there, awaiting her building fury: the Angry Left, where O'Connor's reputation is as one of the angriest of all. "One long, sustained scream" is how she describes the writing she does for various Web logs, as she wonders what she should scream about this day.
She smokes a cigarette. Should it be about Bush, whom she considers "malevolent," a "sociopath" and "the Antichrist"? She smokes another cigarette. Should it be about Vice President Cheney, whom she thinks of as "Satan," or about Karl Rove, "the devil"? Should it be about the "evil" Republican Party, or the "weaselly, capitulating, self-aggrandizing, self-serving" Democrats, or the Catholic Church, for which she says "I have a special place in my heart . . . a burning, sizzling, putrescent place where the guilty suffer the tortures of the damned"?
Darfur, she finally decides. She will write about Darfur. The shame of it. The culpability of all Americans, including herself, for doing nothing. She will write something so filled with outrage that it will accomplish the one thing above all she wants from her anger: to have an effect.
"Darfur is not hopeless," she begins typing, and pauses.
"Ugh," she says.
"You are not helpless," she continues typing, and pauses again.
"Weak."
She deletes everything and starts over.
"WAKE THE [expletive] UP," she writes next, and this time, instead of pausing, she keeps going, typing harder and harder on a keyboard that is surrounded by a pack of cigarettes, a dirty ashtray, a can of nonalcoholic beer, an album with photos of her dead father and a taped-up note -- staring at her -- on which she has scrawled "Why am I/you here?"
These are mean times.
"I just want to see these [expletive] swinging from their heels in the public square," reads a recent comment from someone named Dave in a discussion about the Bush administration on a Web site called Eschaton.
Crude times, too.
"Laura Bush Talks; No One Gives a [expletive]," someone who calls himself the Rude Pundit writes on his Web site, and he continues: "The Rude Pundit doesn't give a retarded dog drool what Laura Bush has to say about the Olympics."
Loud, crass and instantaneous.
"I feel like I'm being molested everytime I hear his voice," one person writes on the Daily Kos Web site while watching a Bush news conference.
What's notable about this isn't only the level of anger but the direction from which it is coming. Not that long ago, it was the right that was angry and the left that was, at least comparatively, polite. But after years of being the targets of inflammatory rhetoric, not only from fringe groups but also from such mainstream conservative politicians as Newt Gingrich, the left has gone on the attack. And with Republicans in control of Washington, they have much more to be angry about.
"Powerlessness" is O'Connor's explanation. "This is born of powerlessness."
To what, effect, though? Do the hundreds of thousands of daily visitors to Daily Kos, who sign their comments with phrases such as "Anger is energy," accomplish anything other than talking among themselves? The founder of Daily Kos, Markos Moulitsas, may have a wide enough reputation at this point to consult regularly with Democrats on Capitol Hill, but what about the heart and soul of Daily Kos, the other visitors, whose presence extends no further than what they read and write on the site?
How about the 125,000 or so daily visitors to Eschaton? Or the thousands who visit Rude Pundit, the Smirking Chimp or My Left Wing, which is O'Connor's Web site?
Put another way, can one person sitting alone in a living room, typing her fingertips numb on a keyboard, make a difference?
"Rage, rage against the Lying of the Right" is the subtitle of O'Connor's Web site.
"If I can't rant, I don't want to be part of your revolution" is how she signs her comments, in the place other people might write "Sincerely."
"I was not like this before," she says. "I was riddled with empathy for everyone suffering in the world. Classic bleeding-heart liberal."
Before:
She signed petitions. She boycotted veal. She canvassed for Greenpeace. She donated to Planned Parenthood. She read the Nation, the New Yorker, the Utne Reader and Mother Jones. She agonized over low wages for overseas workers every time she bought a $40 leather purse.
Then George W. Bush was elected. Then came 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, the Patriot Act, secret prisons, domestic eavesdropping, the revamping of the Supreme Court, and the thought "It has come to the point where the worst people on Earth are running the Earth." And now, "I have become one of those people with all the bumper stickers on their car," she says. "I am this close to being one of those muttering people pushing a cart.
"I'm insane with rage and grief.
"But I also feel more connected than I ever have."
The people she's connected to include Shanikka, who decides one day to post on O'Connor's Web site a 737-word "open letter to President George W. Bush" that says in part: "You can't hide from the truth, Dubbya. You also can't hide from yourself. And it is YOU, Mr. President, that you need to run from. Because you are the problem. You destroy everything you touch professionally when you're left to do what you want. Everything."
To which another of O'Connor's connections, Bill, responds, "A most excelentest rant, shanikka, but don't you think you should distill this down to twenty-five words or less if you want [Bush] to read it? Or have it read to him. I'm sure he has ADD."
To which Nite74 responds, "ADD implies that some attention span is already present to be deficient."
To which Linnaeus responds, "I might say, though, that saying he has ADD is an insult to those who actually have it."
To which Bill, responding to his responders, writes, "It was rather though[t]less of me to compare the most asinine, brutal, criminal, disgusting, enraging, felonious, gross, horrendous, incompetent, jaundiced, kleptocratic, lazy, malicious, nefarious, objectional, psychopathic, quarrelsome, repulsive, sanctimonious, treasonous, unfit, vindictive, wasteful, xenophobic, yahooish, zealotic piece of [expletive] inhabiting the White House and the planet to persons suffering with a neurobiological disorder."
And on it goes, every day, around the clock, on Web site after Web site. Since its debut last July, My Left Wing has had some 450,000 visits and is now averaging about 3,000 visits and 14,000 page views a day. At any given moment, several dozen people are looking at the site, and user data shows that they are all over the world -- mostly from the United States, occasionally from overseas and often from Washington, D.C., where the log-on addresses sometimes end in senate.gov or house.gov.
All of which O'Connor finds remarkable, especially when she considers her route to this point -- the complications of which are reflected in the items she keeps close at hand.
The cigarettes are because of a personality that she describes as compulsive.
The nonalcoholic beer is because for several years she drank to excess.
The note that says "Why am I/you here?" is because she is in constant search of an answer.
And the photo album is because of a 25-year-old Marine who died fighting in Vietnam three months before she was born, which she thinks helps explain the note, the alcohol, the cigarettes and the very first piece of writing she ever published online, a rant against the war in Iraq that began, "Every single millisecond of my life was directly affected by the nightmare that was Vietnam."
As for the keyboard, it is where O'Connor finished her evolution from lost soul to angry soul, beginning with that very first rant, which concluded with a wish that Bush, "after contracting incurable cancer and suffering for protracted periods of time without benefit of medication," go to hell.
She wrote it, sent it to Daily Kos, saw it appear online, watched as people responded to it -- and learned something about the effect of being both heartfelt and vicious. "It's impactful," she says. "It gets attention."
It also felt good, she says, transforming even, and soon she was posting regularly to Daily Kos, where she became one of the more widely read diarists with attention-getters such as "Go [expletive] Yourself, Mrs. Cheney" and "Bush Must Be HIV Positive By Now (you can't [expletive] 500 million people and not get infected)."
Then, ready to try her own site, she started My Left Wing, and now she is practically banging on the keyboard as she finishes a 1,000-word piece about the need for sanctions and peacekeeping forces as ways to stop the violence in Darfur.
"You don't think you can do anything? ANYTHING? You're right. YOU can't do anything. But WE can. WE CAN," she writes.
"MAKE SOME [expletive] NOISE ABOUT DARFUR and you WILL be heard, and it WILL be addressed. Keep silent . . . and none of your future 'How could we let it happen' elegies will mean a good goddamn."
Almost finished.
She attaches a photograph she finds on the Internet of a pile of bones and skin that turns out to be a dying little boy.
"All right," she says nervously, after checking everything for spelling errors. "Here it goes."
She clicks the mouse, and "WAKE THE [expletive] UP" instantly appears on My Left Wing, where, at the moment, 57 people are signed on.
A few seconds later, to increase its chances for impact, she sends "WAKE THE [expletive] UP" to Daily Kos, where the number of viewers per hour is about 30,000.
Thirty-eight seconds later, she gets her first response.
"I'M AWAKE!!!!!!" it says.
"I'm going to be proud of this," O'Connor says, as the responses keep building. Ten now. Twenty-five.
Meanwhile, around her, the other parts of her life go on: the two-bedroom rental, the car that got egged at the grocery store because of the bumper stickers, the family.
Her husband, Adam, who works as a lighting technician in Hollywood and is generally calmer about things, comes in from the kitchen. "I have an announcement," he says.
"The disposal is fixed?" she says.
"Yes."
She gets up, hugs him, comes back, sits down, checks the latest responses.
Nearing 50 now.
The front door opens and in comes her 6-year-old son, Terry, home from school, who starts batting around a blue balloon at the other end of the living room, batting it closer to her, closer, closer. She searches through her iTunes library until she finds one of her favorite downloads -- not music, but a speech by a character named Howard Beale in the movie "Network." She presses "play" and turns up the volume. "I want you to get mad!" Beale shouts at one point. "I want you to get mad!" she shouts along, startling Terry. "What?" he says, backing away with his balloon.
Past 60 responses now, and as they keep coming O'Connor describes a trip she took to Washington last September for a rally against the Iraq war. It was a "buoyant" experience, she says, "exuberant," right up until the moment that the speakers onstage began yammering about things that had nothing to do with why they had gathered.
Free Palestine? Free some death-row inmate? End global warming? "That was when I just freaking lost it," she says. "Shut up! Shut up!" she remembers screaming into a bullhorn.
Now, as the responses near 100, O'Connor has a cigarette.
Now, as they head toward 200, she picks up the album about her father, where there's a letter from him to his wife, written three days before he died, that ends, "I love you and the baby more than I ever knew a person could love."
The baby.
He never knew her name, or that she was a girl, or that his wife weighed less on the day their daughter was born than when she was conceived. "Catatonic" is how O'Connor describes what her mother became for a while, and then the mother got better, and then the daughter got worse, and then the daughter got better by becoming angry rather than silent about a new war, so angry she began wishing her president would go to hell.
"I've got to stop looking at this," she says, putting the album away and turning back to the screen.
Meanwhile, over on Eschaton, Dave is writing, "As a matter of fact -- I do hate Bush!"
On Rude Pundit: "George W. Bush is the anti-Midas. Everything he touches turns to [expletive]."
On the Smirking Chimp: "I. Despise. These. [Expletive]!"
And on Daily Kos and My Left Wing, the responses keep rolling in.
"Thank you, Maryscott."
"Thank you for the kick in the [expletive]."
"I wrote to my [expletive] so-called representatives."
"I also wrote to my [expletive] congressman to get off his [expletive] [expletive] and do the right [expletive] thing."
"You know what?" O'Connor says. "I did a good thing today." And for a moment, anyway, she isn't angry at all.
These people don't need criticism, they need an exorcism.
Christianity Today offers a Top Ten list of the best movies ever made about Jesus. We haven't seen them all, but there really are only two films on the list that we could recommend: Franco Zeferelli's 1977 Jesus of Nazareth and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ made in 2004. Nothing else we've ever seen comes close. The others that we have seen seem too stilted, artificial, and implausible to merit a recommendation.
Jesus of Nazareth is much longer (six and a half hours) and has a wider scope, covering most of the life of Christ as revealed in the gospels. The Passion of the Christ depicts only his last twelve hours. Ironically, perhaps, our chief criticism of both Zeferelli's and Gibson's versions is the same: They both present a very unsatisfying portrayal of the resurrection. In both films this incomparable event seems almost like an "Oh, by the way" afterthought. Neither of them film it with the drama and power that one might wish for in such an astonishingly important and miraculous occurrence.
On the other hand, one of the best things about both movies is the actors who play the Christ. Robert Powell and Jim Caveziel do a wonderful job of making Jesus real and their portrayals are appealling and plausible. Both movies also have an outstanding supporting cast and both strive for a realism, or in Gibson's case, a hyperrealism, that avoids the cartoonishness of other films.
We recommend them both with two caveats: Jesus of Nazareth takes a couple of nights to watch and The Passion is not for children.
Jon Meacham of Newsweek, perhaps chastened by the criticism he received following his foray into Christian theology over Christmas, pens a much less offensive column about the Resurrection of Jesus in the current issue. He notes that the tomb of Christ was almost certainly empty that first Easter morning. If it were not, he observes, the opponents of Christ had only to produce the body to abort the religious turmoil that the sect of Christians was beginning to arouse. This they did not do, a startling historical fact, really, which leads us to the obvious conclusion that they couldn't do it. This leads us in turn to ask why not.
No naturalistic explanation of the empty tomb makes sense. The most common of these is that the disciples stole the corpse, but this hypothesis is credible only if one assumes a priori that non-natural explanations are impossible. To believe that the disciples stole the body one must believe that a band of terrified fishermen overpowered an armed military guard, a crime for which they were never arrested or charged, stole the cadaver, and eventually underwent torture and martyrdom for preaching around the world what they knew to be a lie. People will die for a lie they believe to be true, but only men suffering from some form of dementia would die for a lie they knew to be a lie, and there's no reason to think these men were demented.
Surely, if the authorities believed the disciples had stolen the body they would have brought irresistibly persuasive techniques to bear to coerce them into divulging its whereabouts. Yet there's no indication whatsoever that this was even attempted.
The skeptic says, as was noted above, that no matter how implausible a given naturalistic explanation may be it is still more believable than the claim that a man rose from the dead. This objection, however, rests on the assumption that there is no God, an assumption that is much easier to make than to defend. If, contrary to the skeptical view, it is possible that God exists then miracles are indeed also possible, and if they are possible, we have to examine the evidence for an alleged instance of one, especially one as significant as the resurrection of Jesus, to determine whether it is, in fact, credible. The evidence for the historical, physical revivification of Christ, many scholars have concluded, is at least as powerful as that for any other event in antiquity.
Other attempts to avoid the conclusion that a miracle actually occurred are equally unimpressive. Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code adopts a version of the swoon theory, that after some thirty six hours without medical care, Jesus somehow recovered from his wounds, including the spear thrust, with sufficient vigor to roll away the heavy stone blocking the tomb. He accomplished this astonishing feat without being detected by the Roman guard, and subsequently appeared to the disciples and dozens, even hundreds, of others, looking so hale and hearty that they believed that he had conquered death and was the very Son of God.
Even if something like this could have happened, the disciples would have known that Jesus had not "risen from the dead" in any theologically significant sense. He would have eventually died (or, as Brown has it, absconded to France with his beloved Mary Magdalene), and his dead body would be proof that he was not the Messiah. This, then, brings us back to the question above: Why would people have been willing to be tortured and martyred for a man they would have realized was a false messiah?
Skeptics scoff at miracles, but the most important miracle in the history of Christendom is one which defies any attempt to explain away. The most plausible explanation for the empty tomb, unless one holds an a priori commitment to atheism, is that God actually did raise Jesus from the dead just as we are promised that we will be. Because death did not result in the annihilation of His being we have the hope that neither will it result in ours.
This is the wonderful significance of the event Christians celebrate every Easter. Happy Resurrection Day.
David Ignatius, writing in the Washington Post, demonstrates that he's a heavyweight political pundit by warning the president that he darn well better do what he's already been doing with regard to Iran:
[John] Kennedy's genius was to reject the Cuba options proposed by his advisers, hawk and dove alike, and choose his own peculiar outside-the-box strategy. He issued a deadline but privately delayed it; he answered a first, flexible message from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev but not a second unyielding one; he said he would never take U.S. missiles out of Turkey, as the Soviets were demanding, and then secretly did precisely that. Disaster was avoided because Khrushchev believed Kennedy was willing to risk war -- but wanted to avoid it.
The Bush administration needs to be engaged in a similar exercise in creative thinking. The military planners will keep looking for targets (as they must, in a confrontation this serious). But Bush's advisers -- and most of all, the president himself -- must keep searching for ways to escape the inexorable logic that is propelling America and Iran toward war. I take heart from the fact that the counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Philip Zelikow, is an expert on the Cuban missile crisis who co-authored the second edition of Allison's "Essence of Decision."
[Zbigniew] Brzezinski urges President Bush to slow down and think carefully about his options -- rather than rushing to stop Iran's nuclear program, which by most estimates is five to 10 years away from building a bomb, even after yesterday's announcement. "Time is on our side," says Brzezinski. "The mullahs aren't the future of Iran, they're the past." As the United States carefully weighs its options, there is every likelihood that the strategic picture will improve.
The Bush administration has demonstrated, in too many ways, that it's better at starting fights than finishing them. It shouldn't make that same mistake again. Threats of war will be more convincing if they come slowly and reluctantly, when it has become clear that truly there is no other choice.
Now what does Ignatius mean by that last sentence? When has the president said anything about going to war with Iran? The only people talking publically about war are bloggers like me and pundits like Ignatius and Seymour Hersh. Bush has tried to do the opposite, in fact, by playing down the war talk that the media has been stoking. The media gets all aflutter about war and then they admonish the president, who hasn't said a word about it, to calm down and take it easy. Nice.
It's also odd that Ignatius turns to a Carter national security advisor for advice on Iran. The man who helped preside over the fall of the Shah, the ascendency of the Ayatollahs, the kidnapping and incarceration of American embassy personel, and the belated and failed attempt to rescue them just doesn't strike us as the most qualified person to be giving the current White House suggestions on how to handle the Iranians.
Nor is it reassuring that Ignatius points to JFK's relinquishment of U.S. missiles in Turkey as a sign of genius. Is he suggesting that it would be a brilliant move if the U.S. should give up some strategic asset in its dickering with Iran? What if the Iranians demand that we get out of the Middle East in return for halting their nuclear weapons production? Would it be a brilliant move, worthy of the sainted JFK himself, to say no, but to quietly do it anyway? More to the point, what do people like Ignatius say the U.S. should do if the Iranians refuse to yield at all?
No matter. Bush must stop the saber-rattling, slow down, take a deep breath and do better. Uh huh. Very constructive advice. We wonder how much the Washington Post pays for this sort of thing.
Byron responds to Bill's post of 4/9:
Just looking over some older posts (sorry---I was out of town) and Bill notes Mulholland's book "A Deeper Journey." I couldn't agree more; it is a marvelous study of deeper spirituality. The previous one, "Invitation to a Journey" is excellent as well. I might quibble just a little (maybe, I'm still mulling it over) with his emphasis on authentic selfhood--which begins to sound like psychobabble at some points, in similiar authors---but it is, still, one of the best books of its kind. It is great to see it mentioned here. Thanks.
Anyone interested in learning more about either of these books is invited to contact the good folks at Hearts and Minds Bookstore who will be glad to help.
The culturally sensitive folks at Comedy Central have refused to allow South Park to show an image of Mohammed out of concern for the sensitivities of Muslims, substituting instead a depiction of Jesus defecating on George Bush and the American flag. Evidently this was judged to fall within the parameters of acceptable social commentary, but showing a cartoon Mohammed was not.
What an odd courage they seem to have at CC. These intrepid souls, who pride themselves on being bold and "edgy," are prepared, if they must, to brave the howling mobs of Christians and Republicans who will surely seek to breach their offices with bombs strapped to their bodies. They are ready to risk their all for their "art" and their freedom to challenge the orthodoxies of the day, but these stalwart heroes of free speech blanche at the thought of offending the gentle devotees of the religion of peace.
Very peculiar, but we're sure they must have had good reasons for caving to the sensibilities of the Islamists while being as crude and insulting as they could toward the beliefs of millions of Americans.
On the other hand, maybe they're just despicable moral invertebrates.
Kenneth Timmerman has a piece at Newsmax wherein he discusses how an attack on Iran might unfold and how Iran might respond. His article opens by quoting retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney:
According to the man who helped plan the first air war against Saddam in 1991, U.S. aircraft, armed with conventional bunker-buster bombs, would be more than enough to wipe out Iran's nuclear and missile facilities, and cripple its ability to command and control its military forces.
McInerney believes that U.S. air power is so massive, precise, and stealthy, it can effectively disarm Iran with just limited assistance from covert operators on the ground whose task would be to light up enemy targets.
In his "Big George" scenario, the United States would attack 1,000 targets in Iran. Fifteen B2 stealth bombers based in the United States and another 45 F117s and F-22s based in the region would carry out the initial waves of the attack, crippling Iran's long-range radar and strategic air defenses.
Massive, additional waves of carrier-based F-18s, as well as F-15s and F-16s launching from ground bases in Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, and Bahrain, would take out Iran's known nuclear and missile sites.
"Big George" would also target command and control facilities - Revolutionary Guards command centers, key clerics, and other regime-sensitive sites - in the hope of triggering a revolt against the clerical regime by opposition groups inside Iran.
The massive strike scenario could be carried out in just two days, McInerney told an audience of intelligence specialists recently in Washington. "We must destroy and damage Iran's nuclear capability for at least five years," McInerney said.
Timmerman goes on at some length to discuss possible Iranian counter-measures and other difficulties, including the Sy Hersh allegations about alleged American plans to use nuclear weapons. It's a very informative article.
We reiterate something we've said previously on the matter of war with Iran. Before any military option is exercised the administration needs to be sure that the Democrats have gone on record as either opposing the use of force or endorsing it. If they are not compelled to announce their position on what should be done in the event that diplomatic efforts to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons fail, it is certain that whatever Bush does, the Dems will split the country and seek to undermine his policy by proclaiming that he should have done the opposite. They cannot be allowed the rhetorical space to do this.
It is time to insist that they take a stand on what course of action they recommend to the president should diplomacy fail, as, of course, it almost surely will.
My daughter and I observed Good Friday with Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. Despite the excessiveness of the portrayal of the physical punishment that Jesus absorbed - no one could have survived what Gibson depicts in the flogging scene, much less all the other punches and maltreatment - and despite the cavils of those critics who thought the movie was anti-semitic, I think it's a powerful and important depiction of what is perhaps the most critical event in all of history. Indeed, Jesus' death would doubtless be the most momentous event ever recorded even if Christians are mistaken about his divinity.
One of the most powerful scenes in the movie, in my opinion, was at the end when Jesus has been taken down from the cross and Mary (Maia Morgenstern) cradles his body in her lap. She stares out at the camera - not at the Romans, not at the Jews but at the viewer -with a look on her face that says, "See what you have done!" The camera holds her in that stare for several moments and the effect is gripping. The bloody, shredded body of Jesus is a consequence not merely of the perfidy of the Pharisees and the brutality of the Romans, but of the selfishness and cruelty that lies in the heart of each of us. It was not just Peter who disavowed him and not just Judas who sold him out. It was each of us, and Mary's silent gaze convicts us of our guilt more effectively than could 10,000 words.
In Christian theology, Jesus endured the hell of crucifixion so that each of us might have our hearts washed clean of the selfishness, pride, carnality, and hurtfulness they harbor. The cross presses upon us a forced option, an inescapable question: How do we respond to this astonishing act of complete selflessness?
This is a meditation I posted on Good Friday last year:
I sit at my computer on this Good Friday listening to Bach's St. Matthew's Passion and Henryk Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, looking forward to this evening when I have a "date" with my daughter to watch Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, and I wonder. I wonder if I, or anyone, can possibly understand the significance of Good Friday. Can I ever comprehend what it means that God, the creator of worlds, would care enough about me to endure what He did, so that I could have the hope that death does not have the final word about human life.
My existence, the existence of each of us, is astonishing enough. That mere matter could be so arranged as to generate a consciousness, a self-awareness, a rational mind, is, when one thinks about it, a truly amazing thing. That this consciousness might survive death in another reality, another world, is even more astounding. For some it's too astounding to be credible.
And yet if it's true...if it's in fact true that our eternal survival is a gift from God, purchased by Jesus Christ at a cost we may never be able to fully appreciate, it is a breath-taking, ineffable truth.
Some people think the Christian narrative is simply the apotheosis of an ancient myth, that a truly sophisticated, omniscient God would have found some way other than a primitive blood sacrifice to usher us into eternal joy. I don't know if there were other means at God's disposal or not, but it seems to me that the way the Bible tells us He chose is perfect for what He wanted to accomplish.
In the Christian account, God made us as an object of His love. He desires to live in a love relationship with us, but for whatever reason we often want no part of such a relationship. It's too confining, it involves too much self-abnegation, it entails too much of a constraint on our Dionysian appetites, it's too much of an affront to our pride, reason and dignity. Confident in our independence, we don't need God. In our autonomy we distort God's purposes and design plan for human life in order to suit and pursue our own selfish ends.
Nevertheless, God would not be dissuaded or put off. He persists in His relentless attempts to show us that all of our rationalizations for demanding our Promethean emancipation are just so many childish and foolish masks we put on to conceal the fact that we just don't want Him in our lives. He chooses to woo us to Himself not with threats or fear but with love. He chooses to demonstrate in an extraordinarily vivid way that His love for us is deeper than we could ever imagine.
To this end he does something totally unexpected and supererogatory. He becomes a man like one of us, shares in our humanity, our sufferings and joys, and ultimately endures the pain and horror of crucifixion. His life and death is the price that He is willing to pay, for reasons that we cannot understand this side of eternity, to secure eternal life and to make it available to everyone. He didn't have to do it, He could have left us alone to destroy ourselves and our planet, to fade into the cosmic oblivion that rejection of our Creator would have warranted. But because He did do it, He shows us not only that He is not simply some abstract deity, too transcendent to matter, but that He is personal and immanent, and that His love is not just a theoretical exercise, but has consequences which can change a life now and forever.
Charles Dickens captures something of the Divine love in the climax of his Tale of Two Cities when he has Sydney Carton, moved by his deep love for Lucie, smuggle himself into prison to take the place of Charles Darnay, the man Lucie really loves, knowing full well that his love is ultimately going to bring him to the guillotine. Carton substitutes himself for Charles and goes to the death to which Charles was sentenced in an expression of almost superhuman love.
Out of the depths of His love, God substituted Himself for us, submitting to torture and humiliation at the hands of His own creation, and enduring a horrific death so that we could live. He asks of us in return only our love.
We are in the position of a man clinging by his fingers to the edge of a cliff and slowly, inexorably losing his grip. The abyss of nihilism, of meaninglessness, emptiness and death, lies far below, but because of the cross there's a chance to be rescued. God stands above the struggling man, kneels and holds out His hand, urging the man to seize it. It's up to the man about to die, it's up to us, to accept the rescue that God offers. God has done all He can to persuade us, but He won't force us to grasp His hand. He won't override our will. He allows us to make the final decision whether to live or die.
That, at any rate, is the best I can do to explain my own wholly inadequate understanding of the Christian story and the meaning of Good Friday.
Elliot Sober thinks so and believes that that entailment makes Intelligent Design a religious hypothesis. He also states that, unlike ID, evolution is silent on the matter of whether there is a supernatural designer of the universe.
Here is an outline of his argument for concluding that ID entails a supernatural designer. He states that he doesn't advocate the argument himself, but that it is nevertheless one to which ID theorists need to respond:
1. If a system found in nature is irreducibly complex, then it was caused to exist by an intelligent designer.
2. Some of the minds found in nature are irreducibly complex.
3. Therefore some of the minds found in nature were caused to exist by an intelligent designer.
4. Any mind in nature that designs and builds an irreducibly complex system is itself irreducibly complex.
5. If the universe is finitely old and if cause precedes effect, then at least one of the minds found in nature was not created by any mind found in nature.
6. The universe is finitely old.
7. Causes precede their effects.
8. Therefore, there exists a supernatural intelligent designer.
In this argument, Sober writes, apparently non-religious premises lead to an apparently religious conclusion.
There are a couple of problems with this. For example, what does Sober mean by "supernatural"? He seems to be saying that any designer which transcends this universe would be ipso facto supernatural, but would it? Many physicists speculate about the existence of other universes besides our own. Some are inclined to think that there may be a nearly infinite number of such worlds. Are these scientists engaging in religious speculation when they hypothesize the existence of other worlds? Are these other universes supernatural ab defino?
If they are not supernatural then why must a designer who, like those other worlds, transcends this world and who may, for all we know, be an inhabitant of one of those other worlds, be considered a supernatural being?
And if those other worlds are supernatural realms then we can safely conclude that it must be appropriate for scientists to talk about and study the supernatural because they do it all the time, at least cosmologists do. Why would it be "scientific" to talk about supernatural worlds but not scientific to talk about supernatural beings?
At any rate, whether Sober's argument works or not he is clearly mistaken when he says that evolution is silent on the matter of whether there is a supernatural intelligent designer. He writes:
"the Darwinian theory of evolution is silent on the question of whether a supernatural intelligent designer exists. This is not true of the mini-ID theory. In terms of the contents of theories, it is ID theory, not evolutionary theory, that has implications concerning the existence of supernatural designers."
But this is clearly mistaken. Darwinian evolution states that living things were not designed by an intelligent agent, that they are wholly explicable in terms of unconscious mechanisms. Thus Darwinian evolution most certainly has implications for the existence of an intelligent designer of life, i.e. it states flatly that there isn't one.
Darwinian evolutionists might not (or at least should not) take a position on whether a God exists, but they do take a position on whether a God has designed the living things of the biosphere. To the extent that they deny that living things are intentionally designed, they deny the existence of a supernatural designer. One simply can not deny that living things are designed without denying that there is a designer of living things.
I see that oil today hit $70 per barrel and at the local gas station I paid $3.00 per gallon to fill up the car. Last month I posted an article on energy that can be found here.
It seems like the price of gasoline is going back up to the days after hurricanes Katrina and Rita. This is odd unless one believes that the threat of an imminent attack on Iran might be driving gasoline prices higher and the markets are betting that way. And that may be.
So let's looks at this possibility a litter closer. As I have stated before, oil is denominated in U.S. dollars. Every country in the world that buys oil must pay for their oil with U.S. dollars. This creates demand for dollars which ultimately increases the value of the U.S. dollar. Keep this thought in mind.
It's a known fact that the entire world is either diversifying their reserves out of dollars or considering to do so. This would negatively impact the value of the dollar and result in the dollar losing value against international currencies.
But if the price of oil continues to climb upward, foreign countries would have to forgo their plans to diversify out of the dollar so as to have sufficient dollars to enable them to acquire their oil. Either that or there is a re-pricing by oil producing countries of oil in another, more "friendly" currency like the euro.
Wouldn't it be amazing if it's the case that our government leaders are intentionally driving the price of oil higher via the Iran threat simply to create demand for and to protect the dollar? Perhaps this is the true reason for the U.S. belligerence towards Iran. Whether we strike Iran or not, the dollar is preserved...at least for the time being.
If all of this sounds bizarre, consider that the SUV, the greatest gas guzzler in America today, is classified by our government as a truck and therefore not subject to emission standards applied to all other passenger vehicles. As a matter of fact, if you buy a great gas guzzler like a Hummer, you can be eligible for a tax credit!
All speculation aside, one thing is for certain, any military action on Iran is certain to drive the price of oil much, much higher.
It's amazing how real life sometimes patterns itself after fiction. Tom Clancy writes a novel that features a terrorist flying a jet airliner into the Capitol Building (Debt of Honor) and a couple of years later real-life terrorists attempt the same thing, succeeding in New York and at the Pentagon but failing to strike the Capitol.
A couple of years ago Tom Wolfe wrote a novel (I Am Charlotte Simmons) about privileged athletes and sexual licentiousness at DuPont U., a thinly disguised stand-in for Duke, and a month ago that very campus was set awhirl by allegations of group rape of a black stripper by Duke lacrosse players.
Actually the accounts of the goings-on at Duke take us back to another Wolfe book of years ago called Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers. Wolfe describes in this early work how militant blacks exploit white liberal guilt essentially to extort money, favor, and status from them. A similar type of pressure may be what we're seeing happening at Duke. We might call it the Cynthia McKinney-Tawana Brawley strategy.
Anyway, Peter Bradley at The American Thinker offers up a nice summation of the apparent travesty enmeshing the Duke University lacrosse team. He notes that a month after the original allegations there is still no evidence that the woman's claims to have been assaulted and raped have any merit, but that hasn't stop the true believers among the politically correct from all but castrating the Duke athletes.
He points out that there's been a long and ignominious history of gullible, guilt-ridden whites happy to swallow almost any accusation of racist, sexist, elitist impropriety. For example:
During the 40th anniversary of the integration at Ole Miss, two black students found racial insults scrawled on the doors of their dorm rooms: "F**g Nigger" and "F**g Hoe [sic] Nigger." Similar messages turned up in other locations across the campus. Students organized a "Say No to Racism" march, and race activists demanded "programs and procedures" to instill racial sensitivity. A spate of national news coverage commented on how little Ole Miss had changed in 40 years.When the perpetrators were found to be black students, Ole Miss chancellor Robert Khayat made it clear there would be no criminal charges, even though the students caused over $600 worth of damage and harmed race relations at the school.
When a hate crime was reported last year at Trinity International University near Chicago there was a flood of indignation on campus. Students at the mostly white school wore yellow shirts to symbolize solidarity with blacks who had received a stream of hate mail. Jesse Jackson spoke on campus. Over 40 students were evacuated to an unnamed hotel for their own safety and security was beefed up at the college. Counselors were made available and students held prayer vigils.
But when the culprit turned out to be Alicia Hardin, a black student who wanted to transfer out of Trinity to be closer to her friends, the story-and the campus outrage-faded away. University president Greg Waybright even announced that he felt "a sense of relief" because the incident was "resolved." He warned that the hoax should not reflect on any particular ethnic group.
Also last year, students at Wooster College in Ohio awoke to find swastikas and racist messages written on dorm walls. Angry protestors raged against "typical white males" until the writers of the slurs turned out to be a group of lefty students led by a black studies major.
A similar incident happened at the University of Louisville in 2004. Students endured racial graffiti and racist fliers passed out on cars. Protesters held rallies and handed a list of demands to U of L president Jim Ramsey. The incident quietly faded away when black students admitted to passing out the fliers as a "prank."
And then, of course, there was the infamous Tawana Brawley episode which so disgraced, or should have disgraced, were he capable of it, Al Sharpton. It seems there is no shortage of white naivete and gullibility nor is there a lack of black cynicism and willingness to exploit the dread whites have of being labelled racist.
We're not saying that no crime was committed in the Duke affair. We don't know, but we do know that there is supposed to be a presumption of innocence, and the reaction of a lot of people in this incident, from the Duke administration to many in the Durham community, suggests that that presumption has, for whatever reason, in this instance been waived.
Indeed, there's no doubt that the lacrosse players indulged in disgraceful conduct, but disgraceful conduct is not necessarily criminal conduct. There's a lot of doubt that they actually did what their accuser claims they did and not much reason yet to indict them of having committed anything that rises to the level of a crime. Bradley's essay explains why.
Does this sound like the talk of people who have just made a breakthrough on peaceful, non-lethal uses of nuclear fuel?
A defiant Iran vowed that nothing could halt its controversial nuclear program, in a direct challenge to the UN Security Council that could risk international sanctions.
With the country basking in national pride after regime scientists successfully enriched uranium to make nuclear fuel -- a milestone in its atomic drive -- officials pledged to move rapidly to industrial-scale work.
"When a people master nuclear technology and nuclear fuel, nothing can be done against them," boasted armed forces joint chief of staff, General Hassan Firouzabadi.
"The nuclear fuel cycle is complete, the beginnings of a powerful Iran," the conservative Iranian daily Resalat trumpeted, calling for a week of "national celebration" and a new annual public holiday to mark the event.
State television was broadcasting non-stop images of nuclear sites accompanied by rousing patriotic music.
The question needs to be put to the Kennedy/Kerry/Pelosi/Gore/Dean wing of the Democratic party: What precisely should the U.S. do if all diplomatic efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capability fail? Should the U.S. acquiesce in Iran's possession of these weapons or should they take steps to eliminate them, even if this necessitates the use of military force? Nobody's asking them this, as far as we know, but they very much need to be put on record.