John T. Miller at NRO has been swamped with more suggestions for conservative themed rock songs, and he lists the latest recommendations here. The top fifty can be viewed here.
I think the second group may be even better than the first although I was disappointed that I didn't see Where Did Our Love Go by the Supremes or Cat's in the Cradle by Harry Chapin on the list. Maybe they don't qualify as classic rock.
Lowell Ponte has an outstanding article at FrontPage Mag which lays out for the reader precisely what sort of man Hugo Chavez is and where he's taking Venezuela. After Iran, and perhaps North Korea, Venezuela under Chavez is perhaps the most troublesome country on the globe. Ponte explains why. His essay is an education. Here's a piece of it:
Democracy has ended in Venezuela, replaced by blatantly rigged elections and strong-armed Chavista mobs and spies in the streets. Venezuelans now face the presence in their midst of perhaps 20,000 of Castro's secret police and an epidemic of soaring violence and crime committed by keftist thugs who know the regime seldom makes arrests for the robbery and murder of bourgeois victims. Caracas, reports The Times of London, "now has the world's highest murder rate per capita."
Chavez has turned Venezuela into a police state in which the press is intimidated and vague new "Social Responsibility" sedition laws make it a crime to criticize the government. Those who speak out or sign petitions challenging Chavez's dictatorial rule and his "Bolivarian Revolution" are blacklisted and risk losing their jobs or becoming targets of government harassment and mob attacks.
Hugo Chavez now rules by decree and via a rubber stamp legislature and judiciary. He has indicated he might not step down when the Constitution's term limits would end his presidency. This May he said he might seek "indefinite" re-election, i.e., the de facto position of "dictator for life," through a referendum.
Like Napoleon, Chavez wants no other gods above himself. He has expelled Christian missionaries from Venezuela, putting Cuban "teachers" in their place to proselytize for the pagan religion of Marxism. In this predominantly Roman Catholic country he has called this church's leadership a "tumor." Venezuelan Cardinal Rosalio Castillo Lara accused Chavez of leading the country towards dictatorship.
But Catholic "Liberation Theologians" and others on the religious ultra-Left have treated socialist Chavez like "Saint Hugo." One poster popular with Chavistas depicts Hugo Chavez as a holy figure riding at the side of an approving Jesus Christ. And Chavez seems to delight in his Marxist "Cult of Personality."
This wouldn't threaten us as greatly if Hugo Chavez were imposing his egomaniacal Marxist dictatorship on a poor Third World nation. Venezuela, however, is the fifth largest oil producer in the world and a major supplier to the United States.
We have two words of advice for Mr. Chavez which we hope he'll take under advisement: Manuel Noriega.
Thomas Sowell sets the record straight about the alleged glories of the sixties and explodes more than one progressive shibboleth about those pivotal years. The short version is that the fruits of the sixties were, despite the mythology clung to by those responsible for that chaotic decade, for the most part thoroughly rotten. Sowell's essay is worth reading in full:
In Shelby Steele's new book, "White Guilt," he mentions an encounter with a white liberal who fiercely defended the welfare state programs and policies of the 1960s. "Damn it, we saved this country!" he all but shouted. "This country was about to blow up. There were riots everywhere. You can stand there now in hindsight and criticize, but we had to keep the country together, my friend."
Before we turn to facts, we need to understand the vision. This is a vision of the world more precious than gold. To those who believe it, this vision is a treasure beyond price because it is also a wonderful vision of themselves -- and they are not likely to give it up for anything so mundane as grubby facts.
For those liberals who lived through the 1960s, that was often also the springtime of their youth, increasingly treasured as a memory, as the grim realities of old age settle down upon them today. It is expecting an awful lot to expect them to consider any alternative vision of the world, especially one that shatters the beautiful picture of themselves as wise and compassionate saviors of society. But what are the facts?
While liberals may think of the 1960s as the beginning of many "progressive" trends in American society, cold hard facts tell a very different story. The 1960s marked the end of many beneficial trends that had been going on for years -- and a complete reversal of those trends as programs, policies, and ideologies of the liberals took hold.
Teenage pregnancy had been going down for years. So had venereal disease. Rates of infection for syphilis in 1960 was half of what it had been in 1950. There were similar trends in crime. The total number of murders in the United States in 1960 was lower than in 1950, 1940, or 1930 -- even though the population was growing and two new states had been added. The murder rate, in proportion to population, in 1960 was half of what it had been in 1934.
Every one of these beneficial trends sharply reversed after liberal notions gained ascendancy during in the 1960s. By 1974, the murder rate had doubled. Even liberal icon Sargent Shriver, head of the agency directing the "war on poverty," admitted that "venereal disease has skyrocketed" even though "we have had more clinics, more pills, and more sex education than ever in history."
Liberals looking back on the 1960s take special pride in their role on racial issues, for civil rights laws and the advancement of blacks out of poverty. Those riots that threatened to tear the country apart were race riots -- and supposedly the liberals saved us all. But what do the facts show?
Both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had a higher percentage of Congressional Republicans voting for their enactment than the percentage of Congressional Democrats. You can check it out in The Congressional Record.
As for black economic advances, the most dramatic reduction in poverty among blacks occurred between 1940 and 1960, when the black poverty rate was cut almost in half, without any major government programs of the Great Society kind that began in the 1960s. Liberals love to point to the rise of blacks out of poverty since 1960 as proof of the benefits of liberal programs, as if the continuation of a trend that began decades earlier was proof of how liberals saved blacks.
As for saving the country from riots, the facts show the direct opposite. It was precisely when liberals were in power that riots rocked cities across the country. There were never as many riots during the two presidential terms of Ronald Reagan as during one term of Lyndon Johnson. Even during the 1960s, riots were far more common and deadly in liberal bastions like New York City than in Chicago, where the original Mayor Daley announced on television that he had given his police orders to "shoot to kill" if riots broke out.
Daley was demonized for saying such a thing, even though Chicago did not have the loss of life suffered in liberal cities where mayors pandered to grievance-mongers and pleaded for restraint. In other words, the net effect was that Daley saved lives while liberals saved their vision.
The hardest thing for a person to face is the truth that everything they've believed in their whole life is wrong. Liberals will never admit that so far from moving this country forward, their policies and prescriptions during the 1960s plunged us into a twenty year dark age from which we didn't begin to recover until Ronald Reagan became president in 1980. The period from JFK's assassination in 1962 to 1980 was, aside from the Civil War, perhaps the most socially destructive era in our history, and it was, not coincidentally, simultaneously the highwater mark of radical liberalism.
David Frum's book How We Got Here: The 70's: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life - For Better Or Worse is an excellent account of the devastating effects of the ideological commitments of the left during the latter half of the American dark ages.
Recently I noticed that Viewpoint went online in May 2004 which makes last month our two year anniversary and I wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you to all of our readers for continuing to visit our site.
The idea of Viewpoint was conceived one day as brother Dick and I sat with the rest of our siblings in a hospital waiting room while our mother was recovering from a surgical procedure. In a diversion from the weightier matters of the moment I suggested that a forum on the internet where intelligent commentary by him could be easily accessed was something to be considered.
I possessed the technical know-how to make the website happen and he possessed the ability to articulate the issues that confront us on a daily basis. And Viewpoint was born.
I would be remiss if I didn't also mention that the success of Viewpoint is totally due to the tireless efforts of Dick who, without a support staff to gather relevant information, continues to publish timely, cogent, and articulate content that challenges the intellect of our viewers. Aside from my occasional rants, Viewpoint reflects our world and universe as Dick sees it. And I'm happy to have been a part of making that possible.
Thanks, bro.
With 3500 votes having been cast Powerline's Best American Novel contest shows Huckleberry Finn in the lead so far. You can still vote for your choice here (The poll is in the far right margin of the page).
Summer is a good time to get caught up on the books I wanted to read during the school year and the movies I wanted to watch. One of the latter is Woody Allen's Match Point. Allen often gives the viewer's intellect something to chew on in his films, and I generally enjoy his stuff, even if it sometimes is gratuitously salacious, as Match Point is.
Match Point is really a conflation of Allen's earlier Crimes and Misdemeanors with Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. The main character, Chris Wilton, is a British Raskolnikov, a Nietzschean Uber Man who faces a problem quite similar to that faced by Martin Landau in C&M. A woman with whom he has been having an affair threatens to spill the beans to his wife.
At the outset of the story Wilton observes that "It seems scientists are confirming more and more that all existence is here by blind chance; [there's] no purpose, no design." Allen returns to the idea of life being just a matter of chance or luck several times throughout the movie and ties it together brilliantly at the end.
In the same conversation another character opines that, "Despair is the path of least resistance." To which Wilton responds, "I think that faith is the path of least resistance."
Chris Wilton is a modern man for whom religious faith is never considered except once and then only to be dismissed with derision: A man who lost both legs subsequently found Jesus, Chris tells us. To which Chris' brother in law-to-be responds "Sounds like a poor trade."
But by the end of the movie Wilton is himself in despair, having, like Raskolnikov, drunk deeply of the cup of his nihilistic convictions. It is only incredible good luck that saves him from utter ruin. He recognizes that, given his disdain for faith, his life is meaningless and that there is no justice in the world:
"It would be fitting if I were apprehended and punished. At least there would be some small sign of justice - some small measure of hope for the possibility of meaning."
But for Chris life is without purpose, meaning, or justice, and consequently there's no moral obligation, either. All is chance, sheer luck. So it is for modern man without God. If God is dead, as he is for the Chris Wiltons of the world, then life is a great yawning emptiness that nothing can fill. It is day after day of meaningless, grindingly pointless existence. It is the life of Meursault in Camus' The Stranger.
Chris' wife chirpily proclaims that she doesn't care, she loves life anyway, but she is a woman who thinks little about anything beyond how to get herself pregnant. She plays Marie to Wilton's Meursault.
Wilton turns out to be indeed incredibly lucky (the movie's very clever ending is based on this), but one wonders whether his luck has saved him or whether it has condemned him to the hell of existing without purpose or meaning.
In Hannah and Her Sisters Allen says that he "doesn't want to go on living in a Godless universe. The only thing we can know for certain is that life is meaningless." Allen seems to have spent a career wrestling with the modern predicament. He doesn't want to believe there is a God, but he finds it difficult to live with the existential consequences of unbelief. Man has to believe in something, but if there is no God there's nothing worth believing in.
Ben Stein offers up a great article on corporate malfeasance that dovetails nicely with my post from the other day.
From the link:
Isn't there ever enough for you guys? You're already rich in every single case. You already have immense corporate perks. Isn't that enough? Do you also have to steal?
...
This country is at war. It's an outrage that while we're at war, executives who are already fabulously rich are stealing and are at liberty. America is humiliated by its brightest and most ambitious looting it, while its young men and women die for it.
The ACLU is all for free speech, or so we have been told. It turns out, though, that this is only true when the speech is such as is deemed acceptable to the membership of the ACLU, even if the dissenting voices are directors on the ACLU's governing board:
The ACLU has always been a strong First Amendment advocate, but the pro-abortion group is planning to toss aside the free speech rights of its board members after some of them criticized the group for supporting a Congressional abortion bill that would unfairly target pregnancy centers. The ACLU joined leading pro-abortion organizations last month in backing a measure that would threaten to shut down pregnancy centers that abortion advocates say deceive women because they don't do abortions.
Members of the ACLU board gave various media interviews saying they disagreed with the groups decision to support the bill and say the board should have been consulted. Now the pro-abortion group is asking for board members to remain silent and not give public interviews about such disagreements.
An ACLU committee has proposed new standards for its board members and says they should no longer speak to the media and be mindful of the financial costs of public disagreement. "Where an individual director disagrees with a board position on matters of civil liberties policy, the director should refrain from publicly highlighting the fact of such disagreement," the committee proposes, according to a New York Times report.
Nat Henthoff, a former ACLU board member who is pro-life and a nationally syndicated columnist, told the Times: "For the national board to consider promulgating a gag order on its members -- I can't think of anything more contrary to the reason the ACLU exists."
"I find it quite appalling that the ACLU is actively supporting this," board member Wendy Kaminer told the New York Sun in an interview shortly after the ACLU supported the bill. "I think this is precisely the kind of legislation we should be opposing, not supporting."
"I am troubled by the assumption in the legislation that abortion services, as a matter of linguistics and a matter of law, cannot include discussing with a woman why she shouldn't have an abortion," Kaminer said.
This is rich. Someone needs to explain to idealists like Hentoff and Kaminer that, contrary to their fervent asseverations, many leftists simply don't see free speech as a good in itself. It is only a good insofar as it can be used to weaken the social fabric that has held this country together for 200 years. It is certainly not prudent, in their view, to so liberalize speech that it be a potential impediment to the work of the ACLU itself as it seeks to undermine the institutions of this nation. Such a freedom would be, well, reactionary.
William Dembski quotes this astonishing passage from a speech given this spring by uber-Darwinist and atheist Daniel Dennett:
The late Steve Gould was really right when he called Richard and me Darwinian fundamentalists. And I want to say what a Darwinian fundamentalist is. A Darwinian fundamentalist is one who recognizes that either you shun Darwinian evolution altogether, or you turn the traditional universe upside down and you accept that mind, meaning, and purpose are not the cause but the fairly recent effects of the mechanistic mill of Darwinian algorithms. It is the unexceptioned view that mind, meaning, and purpose are not the original driving engines, but recent effects that marks, I think, the true Darwinian fundamentalist.
How can such heartless culling produce the magnificent designs that we see around us? It seems just about impossible that such a simple mechanical sieve could produce such amazing design in the biosphere.
Francis Crick called Orgel's Second Rule. "Evolution is cleverer than you are."
Again and again evolutionists, molecular biologists, biologists in general, see some aspect of nature which seems to them to be sort of pointless or daft or doesn't make much sense - and then they later discover it's in fact an exquisitely ingenious design - it is a brilliant piece of design - that's what Francis Crick means by Orgel's Second Rule.
This might almost look like a slogan for Intelligent Design theory. Certainly Crick was not suggesting that the process of evolution was a process of intelligent design. But then how can evolution be cleverer than you are?
What you have to understand is that the process itself has no foresight; it's entirely mechanical; has no purpose - but it just happens that that very process dredges up, discovers, again and again and again, the most wonderfully brilliant designs - and these designs have a rationale. We can make sense of them. We can reverse-engineer them, and understand why they are the wonderful designs they are.
It would help us to understand how this is possible if we could break all this brilliant design work up into processes which we could understand the rationale of, without attributing it to the reason of some intelligent designer. [In other words, it would help if there were a shred of evidence for Darwinian algorithms having the creative power that Dennett attributes to them. -WmAD]
These processes are arms races. Not just arms races between armies of intelligent people, but arms races between trees, and between bacteria, and between any form of life you want to name. We can watch an arms race generate more and more design, more exquisite solutions to problems, in ways that are strikingly similar to the more intelligently (but not very intelligently) guided arms races that give us the metaphor in the first place.
Of all the species on the planet, Homo sapiens, is exceptional: it is the only species that has evolved that can understand that it's one of the fruits on the tree of life.
It's hard to read this without getting the feeling that Dennett is trying with all his might not to admit that living things certainly appear to be intelligently designed. Indeed, were it not for Dennett's a priori committment to atheism he would probably not even bother to engage in such a laborious struggle. He gives the game away in this paragraph where he tries to convince us that a blind, mecahnical process is even more brilliant, more ingenious, than the most clever of human engineers:
What you have to understand is that the process itself has no foresight; it's entirely mechanical; has no purpose - but it just happens that that very process dredges up, discovers, again and again and again, the most wonderfully brilliant designs - and these designs have a rationale. We can make sense of them. We can reverse-engineer them, and understand why they are the wonderful designs they are.
Dennett's confidence that, despite all appearances to the contrary, living things are not really intelligently designed rests upon his confidence that there is no intelligent designer. In philosophy this sort of thinking is called begging the question, or less technically, putting the cart before the horse.
Any literature enthusiasts out there? Powerline is taking a poll on the greatest American novel. They have twenty one nominations and directions for voting here. I am sorry to admit that I have only read about half of them so I don't feel qualified to vote. If I were to vote on the one's I've read, however, I think I'd have to pick Moby Dick first and Uncle Tom's Cabin second. They were both, in different ways, very powerful reads.
No. The Da Vinci Code is not on the list.
If Stuart Taylor at National Journal were playing horseshoes almost every sentence of his essay about the Duke lacrosse team would be a ringer:
My rogues' gallery does not (in all probability) include any Duke University lacrosse player. That's because the available evidence leaves me about 85 percent confident that the three members who have been indicted on rape charges are innocent and that the accusation is a lie. (Some evidence was in my April 29 column; some is below.)
The gallery does include more than 90 members of the Duke faculty who have prejudged the case, with some exuding the anti-white racism and disdain for student-athletes that pollutes many college faculties.
The gallery also includes former Princeton University President William Bowen and civil-rights lawyer Julius Chambers. They went out of their way to slime the lacrosse players in a report on the Duke administration's handling of the rape scandal -- a report that is a parody of race-obsessed political correctness.
Many members of the national media have published grossly one-sided accounts of the case while stereotyping the lacrosse players as spoiled, brutish louts and glossing over the accuser's huge credibility problems.
Then there is Mike Nifong, the Durham, NC, district attorney who is prosecuting the case. In addition to the misconduct detailed in my April 29 column, he has shielded his evidence (if any) from public scrutiny while seeking to keep the rape charges hanging over the defendants by delaying any trial until next spring....
....Am I prejudging the case myself? Yes, in that I have not yet seen all of the evidence. And yes, in that there could be an innocent explanation for the recent arrest of the cabbie by rape-case investigators under a two-and-half-year-old, apparently frivolous shoplifting warrant.
But when a petty-tyrant prosecutor has perverted and prolonged the legal process without disclosing his supposed evidence, and when academics and journalists have joined in smearing presumptively innocent young men as racist, sexist brutes -- in the face of much contrary evidence -- it's not too early to offer tentative judgments.
I'll start with Houston Baker, a Duke professor of English and of African and African-American studies. In a public letter dated March 29, he assailed "white ... male athletes, veritably given license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech" and "sport their disgraced jerseys on campus, safe under the cover of silent whiteness." He all but pronounced them guilty of "abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white, male privilege loosed amongst us" against a "black woman who their violence and raucous witness injured for life." And on he raved, oozing that brand of racism which consists of falsely smearing decent people as racists.
If you're interested in this case you should read the rest of Taylor's piece at the link. It's the best single article on this episode that I've seen.
The Heritage Foundation has released a study on "low-skill" immigration that concludes that it will substantially raise welfare costs and poverty levels. They recommend the following:
1. The influx of illegal immigrants should be stopped by rigorous border security programs and strong programs to prevent employers from employing illegals.
2. Amnesty and citizenship should not be given to current illegal immigrants. Amnesty has nega�tive fiscal consequences and is manifestly unfair to those who have waited for years to enter the country lawfully. Amnesty would also serve as a magnet, drawing even more future illegal immigration.
3. Any guest worker program should grant tem�porary, not permanent, residence and should not be a pathway to citizenship. A guest worker program should not disproportionately swell the ranks of low-skill workers.
4. Children born to parents who are illegal immi�grants or to future guest workers should not be given citizenship status. Granting citizen�ship automatically confers welfare eligibility and makes it unlikely the parent will ever leave the U.S.
5. The legal immigration system grants lawful permanent residence to some 950,000 per�sons each year. This system should be altered to substantially increase the proportion of new entrants with high levels of education and skills in demand by U.S. firms. Under current law, foreign-born parents and siblings of natu�ralized citizens are given preference for entry visas. The current visa allotments for family members (other than spouses and minor chil�dren) should be eliminated, and quotas for employment- and skill-based entry increased proportionately.
Meanwhile, LaShawn Barber links us to Politics of Prudence which notes that a Columbuia University study found that over a 5-year period it would cost $340 billion to accomodate illegals, but only $206 billion to deport them.
LaShawn also dug up an editorial from the Gulf Times, a Qatar newspaper. Read this excerpt:
The estimated 1.1 million illegal immigrants currently in the nation's public school system cost taxpayers' $9.6 billion every year in an attempt to educate them (despite the illegal immigrant community's epidemic-scale dropout rates). The 2.2 million children of illegal immigrants in America, often referred to as "anchor babies" to ensure the parents can stay, add an additional $20 billion to that tab.
In California, the 2004-05 state budget spent $9,811 per pupil in the classroom. An estimated 425,000 illegal immigrants in the state's classrooms during that period cost taxpayers' more than $4bn - a figure that does not include the "anchor baby" population in the classroom.
More than 40,000 illegal immigrants jammed California's prison system in 2004, costing taxpayers $1.5 billion in tax funds not reimbursed by the federal government.
In one of the cruellest jokes played on the American taxpayers, illegal immigrants are allowed to claim children living back in Mexico and qualify for the earned-income tax credit that traditionally has helped the American poor (my emphasis).
These numbers are just the tip of a fiscal iceberg that government officials have slammed the American ship of state into - and now they are striking up the band and rearranging the deck chairs.
Americans hear the mantra every day that without illegal immigrants working in jobs that citizens are too lazy to do, everything from a clean hotel room to a head of lettuce would skyrocket in price.
A day without a Mexican - the refrain now goes - would literally lead to the collapse of the American economy. To the contrary, a year without the crushing weight of millions of illegal immigrants on communities and their budgets just may save the American working and middle class.
Yet there is precious little discussion of how a family of six Mexican nationals living in Pomona, California, who soak up nearly $40,000 annually in taxpayer funds just to educate their four children, is contributing more back into the economy. Consider even if the primary wage-earner in this family grossed $35,000 annually, a fortune back in Mexico, most of that income is likely to be off-the-books and under-taxed.
But education is only one part of the social services system meant for at-risk and in-need Americans that illegal immigrants have drilled into: heath-care costs and subsidised housing are two other areas where the crushing cost of illegal immigration is destroying the system.
It is arguments like this that have convinced many Republicans that George Bush, whatever his merits in fighting the GWOT, simply cannot be counted on to do the right thing to preserve this nation from the tsunami that is washing across the Rio Grande. Neither can about a dozen Republican senators and virtually all of the Democrats. That's why some are taking it upon themselves to raise the money and undertake the construction of a border fence.
If you'd like to help construct that fence go here.
There's an interesting interview at BeliefNet with Ralph Winter the producer of, inter alia, "X-Men". Winter is setting a great example for young Christians to follow by leavening the culture. He's influencing it from within rather than trying to change it from outside.
People who are upset with Hollywood's slide into the sewer sometimes call for legislation to restore a modicum of decency to our entertainment industry, but laws are at best a temporary palliative. They're a finger in the dike. The culture will only be redeemed when more young people who are committed to being disciples of Christ, prepare themselves for careers in those institutions of our society and culture which have been historically ceded to people whose values and assumptions are alien to the gospel.
The more Christians who are making music and movies, who are writing television scripts and novels; the more Christians who are serving in government, education, law, business, finance and the military; the more Christians who are doing philosophy, science and history in the academy - the healthier our society will be and the brighter the future will be for our children and grandchildren.
All of American culture is a mission field, and although there is certainly a need for top-notch people in explicitly religious roles, there is an even greater need for waves of talented young men and women with a vision to redeem the culture for Christ to begin what the Marxists called the "long march through the institutions."
People like Ralph Winter are showing the way.
In order that we not forget what is at stake, why our young men and women are risking so much in Iraq and Afghanistan, Victor Davis Hanson gives us an essay for this Memorial Day that is simply superb:
There may be a lot to regret about the past policy of the United States in the Middle East, but the removal of Saddam Hussein and the effort to birth democracy in his place is surely not one of them. And we should remember that this Memorial Day.
Whatever our righteous anger at Khomeinist Iran, it was wrong, well aside from the arms-for-hostages scandal, to provide even a modicum of aid to Saddam Hussein, the great butcher of his own, during the Iran-Iraq war.
Inviting the fascist Baathist government of Syria into the allied coalition of the first Gulf War meant that we more or less legitimized the Assad regime's take-over of Lebanon, with disastrous results for its people.
It may have been strategically in error not to have taken out Saddam in 1991, but it was morally wrong to have then encouraged Shiites and Kurds to rise up-while watching idly as Saddam's reprieved planes and helicopters slaughtered them in the thousands.
A decade of appeasement of Islamic terrorism, with retaliations after the serial attacks-from the first World Trade Center bombing to Khobar Towers and the USS Cole-never exceeding the occasional cruise missile or stern televised lecture, made September 11 inevitable.
A decade was wasted in subsidizing Yasser Arafat on the pretense that he was something other than a mendacious thug.
I cite these few examples of the now nostalgic past, because it is common to see Iraq written off by the architects of these past failures as the "worst" policy decision in our history, a "quagmire" and a "disaster." Realists, more worried about Iran and the ongoing cost in our blood and treasure in Iraq, insist that toppling Saddam was a terrible waste of resources. Leftists see the Iraq war as part of an amoral imperialism; often their talking points weirdly end up rehashed in bin Laden's communiqu�s and Dr. Zawahiri's rants.
But what did 2,400 brave and now deceased Americans really sacrifice for in Iraq, along with thousands more who were wounded? And what were billions in treasure spent on? And what about the hundreds of collective years of service offered by our soldiers? What exactly did intrepid officers in the news like a Gen. Petreus, or Col. McMaster, or Lt. Col Kurilla fight for?
First, there is no longer a mass murderer atop one of the oil-richest states in the world. Imagine what Iraq would now look like with $70 a barrel oil, a $50 billion unchecked and ongoing Oil-for-Food U.N. scandal, the 15th year of no-fly zones, a punitative U.N. embargo on the Iraqi people-all perverted by Russian arms sales, European oil concessions, and frenzied Chinese efforts to get energy contracts from Saddam.
The Kurds would remain in perpetual danger. The Shiites would simply be harvested yearly, in quiet, by Saddam's police state. The Marsh Arabs would by now have been forgotten in their toxic dust-blown desert. Perhaps Saddam would have upped his cash pay-outs for homicide bombers on the West Bank.
Muammar Khaddafi would be starting up his centrifuges and adding to his chemical weapons depots. Syria would still be in Lebanon. Washington would probably have ceased pressuring Egypt and the Gulf States to enact reform. Dr. Khan's nuclear mail-order house would be in high gear. We would still be hearing of a "militant wing" of Hamas, rather than watching a democratically elected terrorist clique reveal its true creed to the world.
But just as importantly, what did these rare Americans not fight for? Oil, for one thing. The price skyrocketed after they went in. The secret deals with Russia and France ended. The U.N. petroleum perfidy stopped. The Iraqis, and the Iraqis alone-not Saddam, the French, the Russians, or the U.N.-now adjudicate how much of their natural resources they will sell, and to whom.
Our soldiers fought for the chance of a democracy; that fact is uncontestable. Before they came to Iraq, there was a fascist dictatorship. Now, after three elections, there is an indigenous democratic government for the first time in the history of the Middle East. True, thousands of Iraqis have died publicly in the resulting sectarian mess; but thousands were dying silently each year under Saddam-with no hope that their sacrifice would ever result in the first steps that we have already long passed.
Our soldiers also removed a great threat to the United States. Again, the crisis brewing over Iran reminds us of what Iraq would have reemerged as. Like Iran, Saddam reaped petroprofits, sponsored terror, and sought weapons of mass destruction. But unlike Iran, he had already attacked four of his neighbors, gassed thousands of his own, and violated every agreement he had ever signed. There would have been no nascent new democracy in Iran that might some day have undermined Saddam, and, again unlike Iran, no internal dissident movement that might have come to power through a revolution or peaceful evolution.
No, Saddam's police state was wounded, but would have recovered, given high oil prices, Chinese and Russian perfidy, and Western exhaustion with enforcement of U.N. sanctions. Moreover, the American military took the war against radical Islam right to its heart in the ancient caliphate. It has not only killed thousands of jihadists, but dismantled the hierarchy of al Qaeda and its networks, both in Afghanistan and Iraq. Critics say that we "took our eye off the ball" by going to Iraq and purportedly leaving bin Laden alone in the Hindu Kush. But more likely, al Qaeda took its eye off the American homeland as the promised theater of operations once American ground troops began dealing with Islamic terrorists in Iraq. As we near five years after September 11, note how less common becomes the expression "not if, but when" concerning the next anticipated terror attack in the U.S.
Some believe that the odyssey of jihadists to Iraq means we created terrorists, but again, it is far more likely, as al Qaeda communiqu�s attest, that we drew those with such propensities into Iraq. Once there, they have finally shown the world that they hate democracy, but love to kill and behead-and that has brought a great deal of moral clarity to the struggle. After Iraq, the reputation of bin Laden and radical Islam has not been enhanced as alleged, but has plummeted. For all the propaganda on al Jazeera, the chattering classes in the Arab coffeehouses still watch Americans fighting to give Arabs the vote, and radical Islamists in turn beheading men and women to stop it.
If many in the Middle East once thought it was cute that 19 killers could burn a 20-acre hole in Manhattan, I am not sure what they think of Americans now in their backyard not living to die, but willing to die so that other Arabs might live freely.
All of our achievements are hard to see right now. The Iraqis are torn by sectarianism, and are not yet willing to show gratitude to America for saving them from Saddam and pledging its youth and billions to give them something better. We are nearing the third national election of the war, and Iraq has become so politicized that our efforts are now beyond caricature. An archivist is needed to remind the American people of the record of all the loud politicians and the national pundits who once were on record in support of the war.
Europeans have demonized our efforts-but not so much lately, as pacifist Europe sits on its simmering volcano of Islamic fundamentalism and unassimilated Muslim immigrants. Our own Left has tossed out "no blood for oil"-that is, until the sky-rocketing prices, the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal, and a new autonomous Iraqi oil ministry cooled that rhetoric. Halliburton is also now not so commonly alleged as the real casus belli, when few contractors of any sort wish to rush into Iraq to profit.
"Bush lied, thousands died" grows stale when the WMD threat was reiterated by Arabs, the U.N., and the Europeans. The "too few troops" debate is not the sort that characterizes imperialism, especially when no American proconsul argues that we must permanently stay in large numbers in Iraq. The new Iraqi-elected president, not Donald Rumsfeld, is more likely to be seen on television, insisting that Americans remain longer.
A geography more uninviting for our soldiers than Iraq cannot be imagined-7,000 miles away, surrounded by Baathist Syria, Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, and theocratic Iran. The harsh landscape rivals the worst of past battlefields-blazing temperatures, wind, and dust. The host culture that our soldiers faced was Orwellian-a society terrorized by a mass murderer for 30 years, who ruled by alternately promising Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish collaborationists that cooperation meant only that fewer of their own would die.
The timing was equally awful-in an era of easy anti-Americanism in Europe, and endemic ingratitude in the Muslim world that asks nothing of itself, everything of us, and blissfully forgets the thousands of Muslims saved by Americans in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Somalia, and the billions more lavished on Jordanians, Palestinians, and Egyptians.
And here at home? There are few Ernie Pyles in Iraq to record the heroism of our soldiers; no John Fords to film their valor-but legions to write ad nauseam of Abu Ghraib, and to make up stories of flushed Korans and Americans terrorizing Iraqi women and children.
Yet here we are with an elected government in place, an Iraqi security force growing, and an autocratic Middle East dealing with the aftershocks of the democratic concussion unleashed by American soldiers in Iraq.
Reading about Gettysburg, Okinawa, Choisun, Hue, and Mogadishu is often to wonder how such soldiers did what they did. Yet never has America asked its youth to fight under such a cultural, political, and tactical paradox as in Iraq, as bizarre a mission as it is lethal. And never has the American military-especially the U.S. Army and Marines-in this, the supposedly most cynical and affluent age of our nation, performed so well.
We should remember the achievement this Memorial Day of those in the field who alone crushed the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, stayed on to offer a new alternative other than autocracy and theocracy, and kept a targeted United States safe from attack for over four years.
For this we owe our veterans and their leadership, both civilian and military, an unpayable debt of gratitude.
On this Memorial Day weekend it's appropriate to call to mind the courage of the American young men whose memories and service we honor. To this end we might read this citation on the Navy Cross awarded to Corporal Jeremiah Workman, United States Marine Corps:
For extraordinary heroism while serving as Squad Leader, Mortar Platoon, Weapons Company, 3d Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, Regimental Combat Team 1, 1st Marine Division, US Marine Corps Forces, Central Command in support of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM on 23 December 2004. During clearing operations in Al Fallujah, Iraq, Corporal Workman displayed exceptional situational awareness while organizing his squad to enter a building to retrieve isolated Marines inside. Despite heavy resistance from enemy automatic weapon fire, and a barrage of grenades, Corporal Workman fearlessly exposed himself and laid down a base of fire that allowed the isolated Marines to escape. Outside the house, he rallied the rescued Marines and directed fire onto insurgent positions as he aided wounded Marines in a neighboring yard. After seeing these Marines to safety, he led another assault force into the building to eliminate insurgents and extract more Marines. Corporal Workman again exposed himself to enemy fire while providing cover fire for the team when an enemy grenade exploded directly in front of him causing shrapnel wounds to his arms and legs. Corporal Workman continued to provide intense fire long enough to recover additional wounded Marines and extract them from the besieged building. Although injured, he led a third assault into the building, rallying his team one last time to extract isolated Marines before M1A1 tanks arrived to support the battle. Throughout this fight, Corporal Workman's heroic actions contributed to the elimination of 24 insurgents. By his bold leadership, wise judgment and complete dedication to duty, Corporal Workman reflected great credit upon himself and upheld the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and the United States Naval Service.
Thanks to Chester for the info.
From the link:
Amnesty [International] claims at least 50 "prisoners of conscience" in China have been arrested with the help of Yahoo. Among them, civil servant Li Zhi, who was jailed for eight years in 2003 after posting comments that criticized government corruption.
And the position of Yahoo is:
It is beyond my ability to comprehend that any individual would invest money in any of the companies mentioned in the article linked above. The fact that they do indicates that their moral judgment is lacking or they are completely ignorant of world affairs. If corporations, under the concept of globalization, are permitted to behave in such a way with impunity it's only a matter of time before we, here in America, will most certainly be subject to the same abuse.
It's clear that the leadership of much of corporate America is morally bankrupt. Consider the recent convictions of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. While the judgment on their behavior was long over due, it appears that at last justice has finally been served concerning them yet it's apparent that these miscreants are so deluded that they don't believe they did anything wrong. Ken Lay said "I am stunned with the findings of the jury"! Personally, I'm stunned that no victim of the Enron debacle who lost their life savings in terms of pension and investments because of his lies hasn't put him in the crosshairs of a telescopic, high-powered rifle and squeezed the trigger.
Dear readers, given all of the above, don't believe for a minute that this won't effect you. You may not have any stock in Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia or a host of others but it really doesn't matter. It's about the moral character of the people in charge of corporate America as well as the moral fabric of the politicians in office. Together they are surely controlling where this once great country is headed. Unfortunately, too many of them have been weighed in the scales and have been found sorely wanting.
Ultimately, the moral content of the American individual will determine the future of America. Isn't it interesting that America, the greatest super power, the wealthiest nation on the planet, is nowhere referenced in the Biblical book of Revelations?
Robert T. Miller replies to my letter in First Things with a number of arguments which, in my opinion, fall short. His response appears in block quotes below and my replies follow:
Richard L. Cleary runs together several things that ought to be kept separate. Multiverses, strings, and multiple dimensions are unobservable entities posited to explain observed phenomena, such entities are no less scientific posits than subatomic particles or gravitational fields, which are equally unobservable.
A designer is also an unobservable entity posited to explain observed phenomena. In this it is analogous to multiverses, etc. To state that other worlds, strings, and so on are "no less scientific posits" as particles and fields is simply false. Particles and fields are detectable and measurable, which is why they are part of empirical science. Other worlds, dimensions, etc., like a designer, are not measurable, or at least at present we know of no way to quantify them.
Discussions of the scientific method or standards of scientific reasoning, while not scientific posits, are properly part of science education, which not only conveys scientific knowledge but teaches the methods and principles by which such knowledge is gained.
In other words, the undergirding philosophical principles of science, i.e. the content of the discipline of the philosophy of science, is a legitimate topic for science education. Intelligent Design is, at least, a philosophical hypothesis with implications for the work of science. Why then should it not be a suitable topic for a science classroom? Mr. Miller offers an answer:
The philosophy of science by contrast, is a subdivision of philosophy that treats philosophical questions arising from science, like whether scientific laws are mere regularities or metaphysically necessary truths.
This is incorrect. The questions he mentions comprise only part of the philosophy of science. Discussions of the methods and standards scientists observe and practice are also part of the philosophy of science and Miller is making an illicit distinction here by trying to separate them. The point is that science is often, in practice, inseparable from the philosophy of science. Mr. Miller wants to exclude the latter from the teaching of the former in order to quarantine ID, but what he's proposing is heuristically undesirable. It would reduce science instruction to the sheer presentation of facts and eviscerate it of everything that gives it life and fascination.
All of these are different from Intelligent Design, which is a philosophical theory in direct competition with a scientific theory.
This is also incorrect. ID is in conflict or competition with no scientific theory. It is in direct competition, rather, with the metaphysical claim that the cosmos and life are exhaustively and plausibly explicable, in principle, solely by reference to physical forces and processes. If Mr. Miller thinks that this claim is a scientific assertion then I would ask him to explain how it can be tested. Furthermore, even were he correct that it is a scientific assertion he would be in the awkward position of assigning the claim scientific status while arguing that the denial of the claim is philosophical.
As a I have already said, as a matter of policy, we ought not to teach philosophical theories in science classes; as a matter of constitutional law, if for religious purposes we teach nonscientific theories in public schools, or even scientific theories not accepted in the scientific community, we also violate the establishment clause.
What Mr. Miller does not seem to realize is that everything a Christian does is done for religious purposes. For the Christian there is no sacred/secular dichotomy. All of life is lived in service to God. What is "secular" is whatever the Christian happens to do that non-Christians also do. Christian school board members who serve their school district do so because they believe that they are thereby serving God. Mr. Miller's interpretation of the establishment clause would constitutionally exclude Christians from making curriculum decisions, or, indeed, any decisions about the governance of a school. It would indeed, followed to its logical conclusion, exclude Christians from serving on school boards altogether.
Moreover, if Mr. Miller's interpretation of the First Amendment is correct why does it apply only to theists? After all, many atheists have a religious motivation for demanding that only materialist explanations be taught in schools. Mr. Miller seems willing to allow the atheist's religious motivation while excluding the motivations of those who might wish to avoid giving Christian students the impression that their school's teachers reject some of their basic beliefs about the world. Is that what the framers of the constitution intended?
You may not have noticed it, but the man whose nomination to head the CIA we were told was going to catalyze a tough examination of the NSA eavesdropping program, the man whose nomination would lead to a public outing of the truth about Bush's perfidious spying program, Air Force general Michael Hayden was quietly approved by the Senate yesterday 78-15. So much for Democrat outrage over "domestic spying."
Meanwhile, another conservative judge was successfully ushered through the confirmation process. White House aide Brett Kavanaugh only had to wait for three years until the Democrats finally wearied of resisting the inevitable and went along with approving him as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
And George Bush, with approval numbers down around those of Harry Truman, continues to pile up the congressional victories. The only time he seems to lose is when he angers conservatives. The liberal Democrats are at present a political irrelevancy, which fact simply fuels their anger and frustration. It's fun to watch.
Andrew Sullivan and at least some of his readers are so anxious to discredit any Christian who opposes them on the matter of gay marriage that they're willing to say the vilest things to accomplish their mission.
James Dobson, who opposes gay marriage, has evidently been encouraging people to go to the Focus on the Family web-site to get a prefabricated letter to send to their congressman to express support for a Marriage Protection Amendment.
We think using a form letter is not the best way to influence one's representatives, but Sullivan and some of his readers have called it plagiarism, which Dobson denies. Because he denies that he is encouraging plagiarism Mr. Dobson is sent a letter like this one which Sullivan approvingly posts on his blog:
Why do "Christians" reserve the right to lie, cheat and steal when it suits their purposes, while turning around and decrying situational ethics and denial of truth?
I am referring to you and your organization's organized plagiarism campaign. Focus on the Family, under your direction, is encouraging people to copy material from its website, assemble it into letters and submit the letters to the editors of various newspapers under their signature.
Webster's Dictionary defines plagiarism as to "present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source." This is exactly what someone who copies material from your website, fashions it into a letter and submits it as their own work does.
When you tell people that what they're doing isn't plagiarism, you are lying. But then you're a "Christian," and as such you believe that the rules apply to everyone but yourselves. How sadly typical.
What's sadly typical is the puerile willingness of so many people to use invective as a substitute for lucid argument. Webster's College Dictionary defines plagiarism not as the mere use of someone else's material but rather as the unauthorized use of that material. Focus on the Family, as I understand it, is authorizing others to use their material. What they're doing may be counterproductive, it may be dumb, but it's not plagiarism.
This seems like such an obvious distinction that even a junior high student could understand it, but apparently it is complicated enough to have exceeded the cognitive powers of some of those, like Sullivan's reader, for whom insult is the polemical weapon of choice.
Another disaster has struck Muslim Indonesia, killing almost 3000 people, and, as they did in the wake of the 2004 tsunami, the non-Muslim world is mobilizing to assist. We're sure that the absence of any mention of assistance from the Arab Muslim world is just an oversight.