"Yes, Buts" and "Neverthelesses"

Democrats find themselves in an unenviable position in the current political climate. They can't advocate the things they are for - higher taxes, weaker military, more deference to the U.N., gay marriage (whatever happened to that?), etc. - because they know that pluralities of voters will never buy what they're trying to sell. So they're reduced to talking only about what they are against, which is pretty much anything George Bush supports. Their gloomy rhetoric, however, is equally unhelpful, and just pushes them further toward the political margins. People, as Reagan knew, don't like negativity, but that's, unfortunately, all the Left has to offer.

Listen to political spokespersons like Kennedy, Boxer, Biden, Reid, and Pelosi. Visit web sites like Democratic Underground, Truth Out, and Move On. Listen to the MSM news outlets. All one hears from any of these pols or venues is just relentless, teeth grinding, mind-numbing negativism. It's all about "yes, buts", "remains to be seens", "on the other hands" and "neverthelesses". Reason after reason is adamantly put forward as to why we shouldn't do this or can't do that, accompanied by sophistical discourses on why this demarche or that program will never work and why everyone in the Bush administration has nefarious motives and intentions.

Meanwhile the world is changing under the nay-sayers feet, and they find themselves in the insufferable position of being irrelevant to that change. The blow to their egos produces resentment and the resentment spawns an inveterate pessimism and cynicism. The Bush administration's detractors are left pathetically scrambling to salvage their sense of self-importance by insisting that since they themselves had no hand in what is happening, since they opposed it from the start, it therefore is doomed to failure.

They're like sportswriters who never strapped on a helmet but who constantly criticize everything the coaches and players do even though their team keeps winning. They wholly unwittingly offer themselves up to the public and to future historians as objects of amusement and curiosity. For that role, sadly, they are well-suited.

Jon Leo makes a similar point with humor and style beyond the abilities we have at our command, and we commend to you his column titled Time for a Dose of Dr. No.

GWOT Scorecard

Strategy Page provides us with a scorecard for marking progress in the global war on terror (GWOT).

Al-Qaeda was originally built like a large corporation. It has a board of directors of 24, with Osama bin Laden as the CEO (official title is Emir-General). Bin Laden also has 15 people in what could be described as his "inner circle" of aides. Al-Qaeda also had training camps in six countries in September, 2001 (Afghanistan, Indonesia, Chechnya, Albania, Sudan, and the Philippines), with eight commanders. Al-Qaeda also maintained cells in numerous Arabian and European countries.

Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the United States and allies have been hunting down the leadership of al-Qaeda. Among the big fish (the "Board of Directors"), seven are dead and ten are in custody. Four members of the "inner circle" are also in custody. This is 53 percent of the senior leadership for al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden is still at large, along with Ayman al-Zawahiri (the deputy commander of al-Qaeda) and Abu Mohammed al-Masri (the planner of the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania). However, five out of the eight training camp commanders are dead or in custody.

Other statistics of note: Eighteen al-Qaeda financiers are dead or in custody. Among those still at large, though, are two of bin Laden's sisters, two of his brothers-in-law, and a Swiss banker by the name of Ahmed Huber. Huber also has extensive connections with neo-Nazis in Europe. The real financial resource for al-Qaeda remains untouched - the dozen or so Saudis who are called the "Golden Chain." All are at large, and all can still provide enough resources for bin Laden to regroup and strike again.

Al-Qaeda's military committee has also been decimated. One is dead (killed by a CIA Predator firing Hellfire missiles), fourteen, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef, have been captured. These include the commanders in Singapore, Java, Southern Europe, and Japan. Several are at large, including the operations chiefs in Kosovo, Tunisia, and Somalia.

Subordinate networks in several countries have been rounded up or decimated. In Jordan, five out of the six major al-Qaeda figures are in custody; in Syria, only five major terrorist figures are still at large - dozens of al-Qaeda members are currently incarcerated, but three major Hezbollah figures are still on the loose. Syria, however, remains a sponsor of Hezbollah. Egypt has rounded up all of the major al-Qaeda figures, as have Italy, Belgium, Germany. The United Kingdom, Spain, and France have rounded up many al-Qaeda figures as well.

Many of the major al-Qaeda figures in Saudi Arabia are dead or apprehended, but a number of figures involved in the Khobar Towers bombing are still at large - some with connections to Hizbollah. In Turkey, 75 percent of the big fish connected with al-Qaeda are dead or in custody. Most of the support structure for the 9/11attack, including Mukhabarat agent Ahmad Khalil Ibraham al-Ani (who the Czechs insist met hijacker Mohammed Atta in Prague), are in custody.

But in some places, the network is pretty intact. Many major Taliban figures are still on the loose. So are all three members of al-Qaeda's WMD Committee, and all of those involved in a Bolivian hijacking plot.

Short version, al-Qaeda is on the run throughout most of the globe. Even Abu Musab Zarqawi, in charge of all al-Qaeda elements in Iraq, is on the run - as elements of his infrastructure are taken apart. Eight of Zarqawi's top aides are dead. Twenty others have been captured. Zarqawi was unable to disrupt the elections on January 30, a serious loss for the terrorists. Al-Qaeda is still potent, as the attacks in Madrid proved, but they are clearly reacting to the multi-pronged offensive in the United States.

The Cold War against the Soviet bloc lasted seventy years. The GWOT, despite the successes noted above, will probably last as long, unless the West decides it lacks the will to fight it. If this happens, though, the West will cease to exist as a cultural entity, and Islam will stand on the cusp of achieving its dream of a worldwide caliphate.

Hunting the Big Rat

Australian Broadcasting Company's News OnLine reports that an intense search for Abu al-Zarqawi is underway in Samarra north of Baghdad:

Iraqi commandos and United States soldiers have stepped up operations in Samarra, north of Baghdad, in search for top wanted militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a senior Iraqi security official said.

"We have information that Zarqawi may be hiding in Samarra or this region and this operation is aimed at checking that out," the officer said on condition of anonymity.

The official said 66 suspects have been arrested in the operation, which is expected to last a week with the goal of rounding up 250 wanted suspects working for seven armed groups in the area.

On the ground all entrances leading to Samarra were sealed as Iraqi and US forces conducted their searches. No vehicles were allowed to circulate inside the city where most businesses, schools and government institutions were closed for a second day.

The US military confirmed the operation. "Elements of the Iraqi Ministry of Interiors 1st Commando Brigade began operations to kill or capture insurgent elements in the city of Samarra this weekend," said Major Richard Goldenberg of the 42nd Infantry Division, adding that US soldiers are providing a supporting role. He said the operation was based on Iraqi intelligence.

Sounds like even if they don't get the big rat lots of lesser vermin are being taken out of service which can only further erode Zarqawi's ability to project terror. Let's hope, though, that they find the big rat as well.

Two Tales of Suffering

A friend of mine, reflecting on his father-in-law's cancer as well as a couple of our posts on the Culture of Death, was moved to write a beautiful meditation that deserves to be placed before all of our readers:

Pope John Paul II and Hunter S. Thompson have been in the news a great deal lately, reminding me of how much these two dynamic men had in common - as authors, as keen observers of contemporary mores, as charismatic countercultural figures who have inspired loyal followings.

They also shared something else: advancing age and declining health. But their responses to that condition have demonstrated just how little they have in common on the most important matters of all - that is, the meaning of suffering and, by extension, the meaning of life. On one hand, we have the frail Pope, assailed by Parkinson's disease and the flu, straining mightily to carry on his duties at the Vatican; and then we have Thompson, hounded by degenerating joints and constant pain, sitting down in his kitchen chair and shooting himself through the mouth.

Some commentators have called Thompson a coward for what he did. I won't say that. I've seen enough suffering among friends and family to know that people who attempt suicide or even contemplate it are most likely in a terribly dark place physically or mentally or both. They deserve our comfort and prayers, not our judgment. But in Thompson's case it appears that his death was entirely consistent with his philosophy of life.

"It was just like Hunter wanted. He was in control here," his wife, Anita, told a Colorado newspaper shortly after his suicide. "This is a triumph of his, not a desperate, tragic failure." Historian and author Douglas Brinkley, who edited some of Thompson's work, said in an Associated Press story, "I think he made a conscious decision that he had an incredible run of 67 years, lived the way he wanted to and wasn't going to suffer the indignities of old age. He was not going to let anybody dictate how he was going to die."

At that very time, Pope John Paul II was setting an example of his own, exhibiting a lesson handed down through centuries of Christianity - that suffering has tremendous spiritual value, that it can be more of a blessing than a curse, that it is, in fact, the bedrock of salvation. As he shuttled back and forth from the hospital, the Pope lived out the meaning of a recent Lenten message he delivered on euthanasia: "What would happen if the people of God yielded to a certain current mentality that considers these people, our brothers and sisters, as almost useless when they are reduced in their capacities due to the difficulties of age or sickness?.... Thou shalt not kill applies even in the presence of illness and when physical weakness reduces the person's ability to be self-reliant."

And that's really what it comes down to - it's about who is really in control and on whose terms we're really living. Simply put, Thompson lived on selfish terms and the Pope has lived on God's. Thompson took the easier path, the one defined by his will, not by God's - and most, if not all of us, are guilty of that to some extent. Trying to live any other way is a monumental battle, particularly in a consumer society that places premium value on getting what we want, when we want it. I don't like suffering any more than anyone else, and I certainly don't wish for it. But it's clear that the Pope has chosen the harder way, and the fruits of putting God first, rather than himself, show it to be the better way as well.

He is a man, after all, who engaged in dangerous underground work against the Nazis, forgave his would-be assassin and played a leading role in ridding his native Poland - and the world - of the Soviet regime. His unilateral leadership style and stances on hot-button issues in the Roman Catholic Church have infuriated some, but his personal example is sterling. Thompson, though clearly a gifted writer and a discerning journalist, reveled in drug and alcohol use, built a cult of self around those experiences and ultimately shot himself with his wife apparently on the phone and other family members in the house.

In his best-selling novel The Thanatos Syndrome, Walker Percy, a great cultural diagnostician of our times, examined a world that is consumed with a death-wish manifested through the unending pursuit of self-indulgence and self-gratification. We all live in that world today, and I think it's fair to say that Hunter Thompson helped create it by glamorizing excess and celebrating reckless individualism before showing us how it all ends - with a bang and a whimper.

Meanwhile, the Pope, who was once a magnificent athlete, is now so weak that strong winds literally threaten to knock him down during his travels. The man fluent in several languages often has trouble speaking at all. The many gifts God has given him are being taken away a little bit at a time, stripping him bare as death nears. In Hunter Thompson's world, that's an indignity. I can't shake the feeling and the hope that it's really a sign of grace.

Steve M.

Moral Non-Sense

John Rawls in his A Theory of Justice writes:

Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals, and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil. The capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the form of life of which animals are capable clearly impose duties of compassion and humanity in their case.

Rawls may be certain that cruelty is wrong and that extirpation of a species is an evil, but where on earth does his certainty come from? Exactly why is cruelty to animals or humans evil? Because it's wrong to cause gratuitous pain and suffering? Why is it wrong to do that?

Rawls seems to be asking us to consult some sort of moral sense that is hard-wired into the human species and which condemns such acts, but we might well ask where such a sense comes from and why we should pay it any heed.

There are really only two plausible accounts of the provenience of such a sense. Either the moral sense is instilled in us by an intelligent, omniscient, perfectly good creator, or it is the product of physico-chemical forces which blindly and purposelessly selected them to suit us for life in the environment we found ourselves in during the paleolithic period of human history.

I don't know which of these Rawls would opt for, although I suspect he would choose the latter. Whatever his choice, why should anyone who holds that our moral sense is the product of some purely physical Darwinian process believe that cruelty to animals is evil? Why should they believe that anything at all is evil? If our moral sense is simply an epiphenomenon of our evolutionary history then there is no such thing as evil.

If human moral values are somehow a genetic phenomenon which evolved to assist us in the survival of our species, if that's all they are, then why should anyone feel bound by them? Why should an individual person care about the survival of the species? More to the point, what does the survival of some animal species like the snail darter have to do with the survival of humans?

A reader might reply that an individual should reject all forms of cruelty for the simple reason that he wouldn't want himself to be treated cruelly. It is no doubt true that most people wouldn't want to be treated cruelly, but that is not a reason why the individual in question should not be cruel to others, especially if he can get away with it, and it is certainly not a reason why he shouldn't be cruel to animals.

Rawls' belief that cruelty to animals is evil is intelligible only if our moral sense was "written on our hearts" by God. Otherwise, it is completely illusory and might just as well be treated like some vestigial appendix whose retention is purely optional. Absent a transcendent moral authority, moral judgments such as Rawls makes are utterly meaningless except that they reveal something about the subjective states of the person who makes them. They are not unlike declaiming that it is evil to prefer chocolate ice cream to almond swirl.

It is ironic to read naturalists like Peter Singer, and perhaps John Rawls, condemn the mistreatment of animals while simultaneously rejecting the only plausible basis they could have for making such moral judgments. Naturalists frequently perform a moral piggy-back on theism, tacitly using the assumptions of theism to support their moral claims, while at the same time declaring in vociferous accents that the belief system they're exploiting in order to smuggle in their asseverations that cruelty is wrong, is really just myth and superstition.

Naturalists are like heavy cigarette smokers. They know their habit is killing them but they just can't give it up. Naturalists know that they can't live with the logical entailments of their atheism, but they refuse to quit. Instead, like parasites unable to provide their own moral sustenance, they fasten on to the hide of theism and ride it as long as they can, sucking their nourishment from it. Then, just before they have to admit to what they're doing, they leap off and proceed to boast about what free-thinkers they are and how unnecessary the steed whose life they've been depending upon is. They act as if neither they, nor anyone else, recognizes the metaphysical free-loading they've just been engaged in.

And these folks teach at places like Princeton and Harvard.

Courage - Real and Imagined

A Syrian blogger shares his fears and hopes for the future of his country and his people. The courage of the people in the Middle-East who yearn for freedom and are willing to risk their lives for it is astonishing. In an atmosphere of arrests and imprisonments this man makes it just too easy for the Baathist thugs to find him and his family. He fully identifies himself on his blog. It's hard to find words to express the depth of one's admiration for this kind of bravery.

Consider by contrast the number of times we've heard someone in this country, someone for whom there is no risk of anything except becoming rich and famous, called courageous merely for expressing a dissenting political opinion. People who, at no cost to themselves, buck the political powers that be are deemed brave, bold, and heroic for doing something which places them in no jeopardy whatsoever.

It took courage, we were informed, for Michael Moore to make Fahrenheit 9/11. It took courage, his supporters told us, for Ward Churchill to blame America for the 9/11 attacks. If Moore and Churchill are exemplars of courage then the word has become so debased as to mean nothing at all, and the genuine courage of those who live defiantly under real tyranny is trivialized.

Those who are complicit in this trivialization should be deeply ashamed and embarrassed.

The Least Bad Option

Jeffrey Bergner at The Weekly Standard argues that the military strike option against Iran's nuclear production facilities is the least bad of several bad options. It entails numerous risks that the other options don't, but, unlike them, it also has a singular benefit: It is the only course of action, short of a military invasion, that has any chance at all of ending or delaying Iran's quest for nuclear weapons.

The Armanious Murders

Here's the story of the brutal murders of the Armanious family in Jersey City, New Jersey late last year. It turns out that fears, including our own, that this horrific crime was committed by Muslims for religious reasons were unfounded. The perpetrators were two low-lifes looking for easy money. Both of them should have been in prison at the time but were out on the streets. The New York Post reports that:

The pair met at the federal prison in Fort Dix, N.J. Sanchez was sent there in 2000 after being sentenced in 1995 to 121/2 years in prison for conspiracy to import more than three kilos of cocaine and a kilo of heroin. McDonald was sent there after a 2001 drug conviction.

So why were they not in jail? The story doesn't tell us, but it prods us to make a suggestion. Perhaps one of the legal reforms Republicans ought to enact this session is the establishment of civil liability for any official who releases a convicted felon from prison prior to the conclusion of his sentence, if that individual commits another felony before his sentence would have expired. If the victims of felons who were granted early releases could sue the people responsible for turning these predators loose, two things would ensue: It would hold the bureaucrats accountable for their decisions and force them to be much more thorough and circumspect in selecting the people to be returned to the streets, and it would, therefore, severely reduce the number of criminals living among us.

It would also, of course, please trial lawyers whose universe of potential litigants would expand handsomely, but that's an unfortunate and unavoidable side-effect.

The Post's story has details of the crime and explains who the two slugs were who perpetrated it. Thanks to Powerline for the tip.

The Dominos Keep Falling

Adventures With Chester tips us to an article in The American Thinker titled The Next Domino. In the essay Douglas Hanson discusses elements of the United States' war on terror that the media apparently know nothing about. There are interesting operations afoot both in the Horn of Africa and Abu Musa Island off the coast of Iran in the Straits of Hormuz. Here are some highlights from the article:

With virtually no attention from the mainstream media, the United States has been taking actions calculated to ratchet-up pressure on the mullahs of Iran. A complex plan has been carefully crafted to avoid a direct military attack on Iran, which would inflame nationalism and build support for the mullahs. Once again, the scope, subtlety, and vision of President Bush's foreign policy confounds his carping critics.

Iran has been aggressively moving to export terror and build-up its ability to threaten the world in two places: the Horn of Africa, and the vital Straits of Hormuz, where the Persian Gulf's oil riches must pass on their way to market. There are now some serious indicators that the Coalition, including both French and German military elements, has been deftly executing a combined political and military operation to roll back Iranian gains from the last 12 years.

There are strong indications that the efforts of Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) are starting to push Iranian operators out of the Horn, if they have not gone already. United States naval and ground forces, French commandos, and Die Deutsche Kriegsmarine (German Navy), through a combined series of special and conventional operations, naval power, and humanitarian assistance projects, have established the conditions for the introduction of up to 7,500 troops from the African Union and the Arab League. This is a watershed event for the Coalition in this area, and shows that the Somali people are anxious to finally rid their country of bandits, terrorists, and Iranian agents, and are looking forward to having the government-in-exile return to Mogadishu.

The other prong of CENTCOM's operations against Iran involves Abu Musa Island. The island had been the object of a long-running dispute between Iran and the UAE because of its oil reserves and its strategic location midway in the narrow channel of the Straits of Hormuz. In 1992, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps took complete control of the island , and proceeded to fortify it and deploy thousands of troops, modern air defense batteries, sophisticated anti-ship missile systems, and, according to former SecDef William Perry, chemical weapons. For over a decade, the Iranians have had the capability of shutting down the shipping lane and paralyzing shipment of over one-fifth of the world's oil supply.

This past week, Expeditionary Strike Group 5 (ESG-5) completed an amphibious exercise on the coast of Kuwait. Keep in mind that a rehearsal is a phase of any amphibious operation, and allows the afloat Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) and the Navy to test the communications links, practice disembarkation, exercise the procedures for naval surface fire support and air support, and, of course, practice the assault itself.

Rather than risk a popular backlash by the citizens of Iran against the US by conducting a direct air or land campaign against the Iranian homeland, seizure of an island that has been disputed for decades would show the Iranians we were willing to support their fight against the mullahs without putting their lives at risk or destroying their infrastructure. The mullahs launched their gambit as an act of aggression; reversing it would demonstrate strength, but indicate no hostility to the Iranian people.

This analysis doesn't even include any possible covert Special Operations Force activities designed to foment rebellion in what is viewed as an increasingly restive Iranian population. Because of the pressure being applied in the Horn of Africa and the Persian Gulf, it may require only a slight push from the freedom-loving people in Iran to rid themselves of this oppressive regime, following through on the very visible promise to them made by President Bush in his State of the Union Address.

Bush's critics often seem to assume that because they're not informed by the MSM of any developments in the GWOT that therefore the administration must not be doing much. One might think that they'd learn not to "misunderestimate" the man, but in the hearts of some of them there is an invincible hope that he'll turn out to vindicate all their declamations of his utter ineptitude. Nevertheless, the dominos keep falling. Let's pray that that happy state of affairs continues.

The Ten Commandments

The Supreme Court will spend several months deciding whether it wants to ban the ten commandments from all public property. It apparently will take that long for them to check with the European Union to get their opinion on what our laws should be.

Some commentators have envisioned phalanxes of bulldozers unleashed all across the land this summer smashing existing monuments to powder, while others think this scenario is too alarmist:

The bigger danger to society would be if the monuments were allowed on public land, putting a huge crack in the wall between church and state, say opposition groups. "Our concern is that they would start increasing and the religious right would start marking places," said Christopher Arntzen, chair of the Gay and Lesbian Atheists and Humanists. "There's a danger to civil liberties. A lot of the religious right is directed against non-believers."

Christopher Arntzen has a point. If we allow the Ten Commandments to grace our public spaces as we have for the last two centuries, why, then the wall of separation between Church and state will surely crumble. Indeed, it's a miracle that it hasn't collapsed before now since all sorts of people have been inspired to turn this country into a theocracy by public displays of the Ten Commandments.

Why, we heard of a gentleman on a tour of the Supreme Court building where, ironically enough, the Ten Commandments are in evidence, who upon seeing them with his own eyes fell to his knees and swore an oath that he would single-handedly, if necessary, restore Christendom to the throne of government. We've also heard of countless schoolchildren who have let their gaze fall upon the Ten Commandments and consequently reverted to thumb-sucking and bed-wetting at night. We simply can't tolerate this sort of thing in a pluralist society.

Once the Court has banned the Ten Commandments, of course, there will be no stopping it. It will have no grounds for failing to abolish the under God phrase in the pledge, it will certainly have to ordain that all currency bearing the motto In God We Trust be removed forthwith from circulation, and it will perforce be compelled to prohibit all prayer, all mention of God, in public spaces and public events.

Thus will the secularists have succeeded in imposing their vision of a sanitized public square, scrubbed free of all residue of religious belief, upon the rest of the nation. A glorious future awaits us.

More on the Guiliana Sgrena Story

Little Green Footballs is all over the Guiliana Sgrena story, a story which seems to be something of a work in progress.

Segrena had originally insisted that the car in which she was traveling was moving at "normal speed", but now she acknowledges that they were swerving to miss puddles and going fast enough that they had almost lost control of the vehicle at one point.

She had also earlier denied that there were any lights or signals from the troops who opened fire, but now admits that the Americans had shone a flashlight at them as they approached the checkpoint.

She also claims that the soldiers fired 300 to 400 rounds from an armored vehicle at their car, but that many rounds would surely have shredded the vehicle and killed everyone inside.

If this keeps up her story and the account we've been given by American authorities (that the vehicle was rapidly approaching the checkpoint and failed to respond to commands and signals to stop) will be indistinguishable.

Giuliana Sgrena

That an Italian secret service agent died in the horrific events on the road to Baghdad airport is tragic. That Giuliana Sgrena, the released hostage and journalist who works for the communist daily Il Manifesto, is saying the things she is is execrable:

"The fact that the Americans don't want negotiations to free the hostages is known," Sgrena told Sky TG24 television by telephone, her voice hoarse and shaky. "The fact that they do everything to prevent the adoption of this practice to save the lives of people held hostages, everybody knows that. So I don't see why I should rule out that I could have been the target."

When the firing began she said that she remembered her captors' words, when they warned her "to be careful because the Americans don't want you to return."

Sgrena wrote that her captors warned her as she was about to be released not to signal her presence to anyone, because "the Americans might intervene." She said her captors blindfolded her and drove her to a location where she was turned over to agents and they set off for the airport.

She thinks she might have been the target. To what end? On whose authority? How did the soldiers know that she was in that car? If she was indeed the target then why did they let her survive and why did they render her first aid? Why does she credit the vague words of terrorists who kidnapped her and threatened her life, but discount the explanation of the Americans.

Sgrena states in the article that she thinks she may have been the target because the Italians apparently paid a high ransom for her release and the American policy is to not negotiate with terrorists. Does she think that therefore she was targeted for assassination? What would be the point? Does she really think Americans were willing to kill agents of an allied government, one which has been fairly steadfast in its support of the American effort in Iraq, out of pique?

Even if someone in the American chain of command did resent her and knew she would be in that vehicle, does Sgrena really think they would be so stupid as to risk being exposed by the troops who carried out the order? Does she really think that an American commander would be willing to risk an international incident by killing her? Does this woman even think at all?

She's a woman of the Left so we expect her to be eager to discredit the U.S., but to slander American military personnel with no evidence and without offering any answers to the above questions is simply beneath contempt.

The Metastasizing Culture of Death

There was a time when everyone, even the pro-choice proponents of abortion on demand, agreed that abortion was unfortunate, perhaps even tragic. They would nevertheless argue, of course, that the mother should have the right to terminate a pregnancy to avoid even greater tragedy. The victim, they maintained, was just a blob of tissue. It wasn't as if an actual child were being destroyed. They would never support such a horrific practice as infanticide nor would anyone but a moral monster ever imagine doing such a thing.

Well, times have changed. Now we're being told that abortion should no longer be seen as a necessary evil, nor even something regrettable. Instead, it is, the pro-choice spokespersons now declare, meritorious, something to be celebrated, a deed worthy of boasts.

The culture of death is metastasizing through the body politic. Read these excerpts from a piece by George Neumayr of The American Spectator and reflect upon how children are being dehumanized, delegitimized, and stripped of their worth:

Even in extending a thorn branch to pro-life groups, Hillary Clinton draws gasps, head shaking, and troubled silence from pro-abortion activists. So reported the press after she said earlier in the week that "We can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic, choice to many, many women." Notice that she didn't say it is a tragic choice for the aborted babies, only for the women who get abortions.

But this was still too much for the crowd. To them abortion is a cause not for tears but for sighs of relief. After the speech, Martha Stahl, director for public relations and marketing for Northern Adirondack Planned Parenthood, disputed the characterization of abortion as a tragic choice, telling the New York Times that "we see women express relief more than anything else that they have the freedom to choose."

This sentiment, not Clinton's rhetorical repositioning in the wake of a bewildering defeat [in November], represents the real feeling on the pro-abortion side. In fact, leading pro-abortion theorists have been arguing recently that unless abortion is seen as an unambiguous good the movement will die. They reason that if abortion is increasingly seen as a tragedy, then society will question the practice and ultimately ban it. Feelings of remorse invite the political order to scrutinize the source of the remorse. So Planned Parenthood is urging women to take pride in their abortions.

The "I Had An Abortion" T-shirts Planned Parenthood sold online last year were an attempt to "demystify and destigmatize it," said a spokesman for the group. The strategy here is to normalize abortion, make it so commonplace that no one will think to question it. If you can talk happily and casually about your abortions - as Barbara Ehrenreich did in the New York Times last year in a piece titled "Owning Up to Abortion" -- then how bad can the practice be?

Understanding this psychology, Alexander Sanger, the grandson of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, has been emphasizing that abortion advocates should go beyond "choice" - an insipid, evasive rhetoric, he thinks - and celebrate abortion unapologetically. After all, he says, the unborn child is an interloper who deserves death. "The unborn child is not just an innocent life," he writes, but a "liability, a threat, and a danger to the mother and to the other members of the family."

Imnotsorry.net is a website that reflects the culture of abortion without apology that Sanger believes essential to the movement's survival. According to its founders, the website - which allows women to post testimonials expressing their "relief" and "joy" after an abortion - "was created for the purpose of showing women that exercising their legal right to terminate their pregnancy is not the blood-splattered guilt trip so many make it out to be."

Ron Fitzimmons, president of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, has told the press, "We have nothing to hide. The work we're doing is good. We are there to help women, and it's important to talk about abortion so that it's not a stigma." Like Sanger, Fitzimmons eschews "choice" talk as too weak and vague to protect abortion. He implies that since everybody now knows that abortion means killing a child abortion advocates will have to sell the public on abortion not just as a choice, but as a good choice - it is better that unborn babies die. "We can no longer respond to [pro-life arguments] with 'it's your right to choose.' We need to recapture the notion that abortion is a difficult moral choice for women, but one that is, in fact, a moral choice."

Whatever happened, we wonder, to the Clintonian rhetoric of making abortion safe, legal and rare?

Sanger's claim that "The unborn child is not just an innocent life," but a "liability, a threat, and a danger to the mother and to the other members of the family," is shocking and repulsive, but it's also an expression of the logical evolution of the culture of death. His words are like distant thunder presaging the coming storm, a storm which will bring with it a concerted assault by the Left on the right to life of newborns, infants, and the elderly.

Alexander Pope penned these lines in his Essay on Man some two hundred and seventy years ago, and they are as apposite today as they were then:

Evil is a monster of such frightful mein, that to be hated needs but to be seen; But seen too oft, familiar with her face, First we endure, then pity, then embrace.

Free Lecture Tapes

Evangelical Outpost tips us to an extensive collection of MP3 audiotapes of past lectures at the MacLaurin Institute available for free download. These lectures cluster around themes dealing with the reliability of the Bible, philosophical and scientific issues which bear upon religion, faith in the marketplace, and what they call the heart of the matter. The speakers are mostly A-list, and the topics are intriguing. Check it out.

Unimagined Consequences

Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters offers this assessment of the developments in Lebanon:

CNN reports that the Lebanese Army has taken positions around the Syrian intelligence headquarters in Beirut, an ominous development in the Cedar Revolution.

This could mean one of two things. It could mean that the Lebanese Army plans on protecting Syrian intelligence assets as the Syrian Army pulls out, a scenario that appears most likely given the close nature of the Syrian and Lebanese military up to this point. It could, however, also mean that the Lebanese Army has decided to impose its own will on the Syrians to up the pressure on Bashar Assad to not only withdraw all of its army but their spies as well.

If the former is the case, the demonstrators in the streets of Beirut should redouble their peaceful efforts to remove the last vestiges of the collaborationist government and elect new leaders as soon as possible. They need to know if the Army can be trusted not to start taking orders from Syria's Mukhabarat and attempt a military coup to put Assad back in the driver's seat by proxy.

On the other hand, if this move by the Lebanese Army demonstrates that they intend to throw in with the Cedar Revolution, Assad and his Mukhabarat are finished, and not just in Lebanon. Getting chased out of Beirut in three weeks by a few thousand civilians and the Lebanese Army will destroy any credibility Assad has left, including domestically, leaving him vulnerable to enemies across the spectrum of Syrian and Arabian politics. There won't be any more talk of a pullback or phased withdrawal - the Syrians will have to retreat, and retreat quickly, in order to avoid a military clash that would threaten to bring in the Americans from the east and possibly the French from the west, over the Mediterranean.

Either way, the situation has just about reached critical mass in Beirut. The rest of the weekend should provide some answers.

Let's hope that the Lebanese army has had its fill of its Syrian masters and are signaling that they've overstayed their welcome. A Syrian retreat in Lebanon will reverberate across the entire Arab world, giving oppressed people throughout the region genuine hope that they too can breathe free.

We bet that Osama never envisioned the magnitude of the fallout he was bringing upon the Islamic world when he was planning his attack on a couple of American skyscrapers.

Well-Qualified for Axis of Evil Status

If you've ever wondered why George Bush lists North Korea as part of the Axis of Evil check out this report from the U.S. Commission on Human Rights in North Korea. Following is just a small portion of the total report:

There are between 5,000 and 50,000 prisoners per kwan-li-so (prison compound), totaling perhaps some 150,000 to 200,000 prisoners throughout North Korea. Both perceived wrongdoers and up to three generations of their extended families are "arrested," or, more accurately, abducted by police authorities and deposited in the kwan-li-so, without any judicial process or legal recourse whatsoever, for lifetime sentences of extremely hard labor in mining, timber-cutting, or farming enterprises. The prisoners live under brutal conditions in permanent situations of deliberately contrived semi-starvation.

The encampments include self-contained, closed "village" compounds for single persons, usually the alleged wrongdoers, and other closed, fenced-in "villages" for the extended families of the wrongdoers. Some of the camps are divided into sections called wan-jeon-tong-je-kyuk (total-control zones), where the sentences are lifetime, and sections called hyuk-myung- hwa-kyuk (best translated as "revolutionizing zones"), so-called "re-education" areas from which prisoners eventually can be released. In the total-control zones, if the families are together, only privileged prisoners are allowed to marry and have children.

With the only known exception of Camp No. 18, prisoners have no correspondence or contact with the world outside the political penal-labor colony, except for news provided by newly arriving prisoners. The kwan-li-so are also sometimes referred to as teuk-byeol- dok-je-dae-sang-gu-yeok, which translates as "zones under special dictatorship." The most strikingly abnormal feature of the kwan-li-so system is the philosophy of "collective responsibility," or "guilt by association" - yeon-jwa-je - whereby the mother and father, sisters and brothers, children and sometimes grandchildren of the offending political prisoner are imprisoned in a three-generation practice.

[P]risoners are not arrested, charged (that is, told of their offense), or tried in any sort judicial procedure, where they would have a chance to confront their accusers or offer a defense with or even without benefit of legal counsel. The presumed offender is simply picked up and taken to an interrogation facility and frequently tortured to "confess" before being sent to the political penal-labor colony. The family members are also just picked up and deposited at the kwan-li-so, without ever being told of the whereabouts or wrongdoings of the presumed wrongdoer.

The most salient feature of day-to-day prison-labor camp life is the combination of below-subsistence food rations and extremely hard labor. Prisoners are provided only enough food to be kept perpetually on the verge of starvation. And prisoners are compelled by their hunger to eat, if they can get away with it, the food of the labor-camp farm animals, plants, grasses, bark, rats, snakes - anything remotely edible.

Persons who try to escape and other major rule-breakers are publicly executed by hanging or firing squad in front of the assembled prisoners of that section of the camp.

Former prisoners - mostly those from the "revolutionizing zone," at Kwan-li-so No. 15 Yodok - and former prison guards report that upon arrival, they were struck by the shortness, skinniness, premature aging, hunchbacks, and physical deformities of so many of the prisoners. They also report that there were large numbers of amputees and persons disabled from work accidents, and persons with partial amputations owing to frostbite of the toes, feet, fingers, and hands.

The report goes on to say that these conditions go back to the 1950s, and that most of the prisoners receiving the harshest treatment are political opponents of the regime.

Of course, these atrocious conditions are ignored by the Left around the world. They are perfectly content to pretend that they don't exist while working themselves into a lather over Americans photographing humiliated Iraqi terrorists at Abu Ghraib and shackling other terrorists at Guantanamo. We can imagine what they would say if they took the trouble to read this report:

"If one wishes to see real abuse one need only look at the Americans who use methods like sleep deprivation and sexual insults, for heaven's sake. They actually threaten people sometimes and, if you can imagine it, deny them access to their Korans if they misbehave. Before we condemn the North Koreans for their unfortunate system we better first remove the log from our own eye." And so on.

Thanks to Hugh Hewitt for the tip.

New Radiation Detector

Wretchard at Belmont Club tips us to an an article in the Chicago Tribune that describes a new device developed by scientists at Los Alamos to detect fissile material in shipping containers and vehicles. Use of the detector would take only twenty seconds per shipping container or truck, and it is expected to go into production this summer at a cost of one million dollars per unit. We expect they'll have trouble keeping up with demand.

The Tribune article includes a description of how the detector works as well as some other pertinent information.

The Iraqi Security Situation

Strategy Page offers some insight into how a suicide bomber was able to get a car close enough to a crowd of police recruits to kill 125 of them last week.

Vive La Revolutione

Michael Ledeen gives us a good lesson in the recent history of democratic revolutions and urges that we pick up the pace:

It was the beginning of the Age of the Second Democratic Revolution. Spain inspired Portugal, and the second Iberian dictatorship gave way to democracy. Spain and Portugal inspired all of Latin America, and by the time Ronald Reagan left office there were only two unelected governments south of the Rio Grande: Cuba and Surinam. These successful revolutions inspired the Soviet satellites, and then the Soviet Union itself, and the global democratic revolution reached into Africa and Asia, even threatening the tyrants in Beijing.

The United States played a largely positive role in almost all these revolutions, thanks to a visionary president - Ronald Reagan - and a generation of other revolutionary leaders in the West: Walesa, Havel, Thatcher, John Paul II, Bukovsky, Sharansky, among others.

There was then a pause for a dozen years, first during the presidency of Bush the Elder, who surrounded himself with short-sighted self-proclaimed "realists" and boasted of his lack of "the vision thing," and then the reactionary Clinton years, featuring a female secretary of state who danced with dictators. Having led a global democratic revolution, and won the Cold War, the United States walked away from that revolution. We were shocked into resuming our unfinished mission by the Islamofascists, eight months into George W. Bush's first term, and we have been pursuing that mission ever since.

[T]he defeats of the fanatics in Afghanistan and Iraq, followed by free elections in both countries, destroyed two myths: of the inevitability of tyranny in the Muslim world, and of the divinely guaranteed success of the jihad. Once those myths were shattered, others in the region lost their fear of the tyrants, and they are now risking a direct challenge. The Cedar Revolution in Beirut has now toppled Syria's puppets in Lebanon, and I will be surprised and disappointed if we do not start hearing from democratic revolutionaries inside Syria - echoed from their counterparts in Iran - in the near future.

For anyone to suggest to this president at this dramatic moment, that he should offer a reward to Iran for promising not to build atomic bombs, or that we should seek a diplomatic "solution" to Syria's oft-demonstrated role in the terror war against our friends and our soldiers, is a betrayal of his vision and of the Iranian, Israeli, Lebanese and Syrian people.

Our most lethal weapon against the tyrants is freedom, and it is now spreading on the wings of democratic revolution. It would be tragic if we backed off now, when revolution is gathering momentum for a glorious victory.

These are exciting times, but we must not lose sight of the fact that success is far from assured. It will take perseverance and steady resolve to carry us through the inevitable setbacks ahead. Yet who can doubt the rightness of the cause? Who can seriously argue that we should give up, turn around, and go home, that a free and democratic Middle East and a severely truncated terrorist threat is not worth the cost? Who can today insist that our intervention, as clumsy as some aspects of it may have been, was a mistake?

If things fall apart, of course, then there will be recriminations aplenty, but if freedom really is "on the march" and if down the road Iran and Syria become true democracies at relative peace with their neighbors, the Bush administration, despite its mistakes, is going to go down as the most visionary, the greatest, administration in the history of this country.

Snare and Delusion in the Middle East

The more things change with the Palestinians the more they stay the same. This article in the Jerusalem Post suggests that everything in the Middle-East is back very nearly to square one. Syria and Iran are sponsoring the murders of Israelis, and the PLO isn't inclined to do much about it:

Delegations from the Israeli defense establishment embarked Monday to Washington, Paris and London, in order to present intelligence information which Israel has collected against Syria revealing its role in the deadly bombing in Tel Aviv Friday night, which killed five people.

Israel said Sunday that it would use intelligence information to prove Syria was behind Friday night's suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told the cabinet Sunday.

"We have intelligence information that the orders came from the Islamic Jihad in Syria," a senior source close to Sharon said. "We know where the orders for the attack were issued, we know where they were sent, and we know Syrian intelligence was involved and provided logistical support."

Mofaz told the cabinet that an Islamic Jihad cell in Jenin recruited the bomber from Tulkarm under orders from Damascus. Mofaz said that Israel had arrested Islamic Jihad operatives in Tulkarm, but both Mofaz and Sharon emphasized that the PA had taken no action yet against the group, even though Israel had given the PA names of wanted Islamic Jihad operatives.

"Although we know for a certainty that the orders came from Islamic Jihad elements in Syria, that fact is not enough to absolve the PA of its responsibility for the departure of the terrorist and of its obligation to act against his partners in the crime," Sharon said.

Sharon told US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Sunday that Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas had not taken any practical measures against terror. He said that without active steps on the part of the Palestinians, there would be no transition towards implementing the first stage of the road map.

Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) chief Avi Dichter told the cabinet that the timing of the attack was set by Islamic Jihad officials in Syria to send a message to Abbas's new government. He said intelligence officials had enough information about the bombing even to know where the bomb was made.

In pointing a finger at Islamic Jihad, Israeli security officials noted that the movement receives millions of dollars from Iran. "The headquarters in Damascus sends instructions to operatives in the West Bank regarding the type of attack and how it should be planned. Local operatives then begin preparing the explosives and plot the route and recruit the suicide bomber who will carry out the mission. The entire operation from beginning to end is funded by Iran," an official said.

So much for the hope that somehow now that Arafat is gone things would be different for the Palestinians and Israelis. The only way genuine change will occur in the Middle-East is if the tyrannical regimes in Syria and Iran are overthrown and replaced by functioning democracies. The end of the Baathists in Damascus and the mullacracy in Tehran is a necessary condition for peace in the region, and it's the only hope for both the Israelis and the Palestinians. Everything and anything else is simply a snare and a delusion.