The legacy of Britain's socialized medical system is a growing reliance on foreign doctors, like seven of the eight suspects arrested in the failed London car bombing and Glasgow airport attack.
I disagree. It's common enough in the U.S., as well. It's a function of prosperity. The original immigrant shows up and if he doesn't have a hard skill he digs ditches and scrimps so his kids will. The hard skills are marketable and they make the family. The post-hard skill generation goes into something a little less demanding of intellect; the MD's child becomes a lawyer, the engineer's child an MBA. The generation after that, the kids major in modern dance or ethnic studies. Tour most American hospitals and count the number of African, Asian, and probably even Antarctic accents among the staff. Take a tour a nursing homes and the native American accents are likely outnumbered even by the Micronesians.
The IMGs (international medical graduates, and we can't call them 'FMGs' any more) are here because a) we have openings in our graduate medical education system (i.e., residency programs), b) we have hospitals that run these residency programs that make money and gain certain other benefits from having residency programs, and c) we have IMGs who'd rather be a doc in the U.S. than in Peshawar. Many of the American programs that cater to IMGs are rather low on the food-chain of training programs in terms of respect and are usually located in innner cities. The programs work hard to provide decent (not outstanding, but decent) clinical training and meet local community needs, and for the most part the IMGs pick up on that and work to serve the community they're in.
I admire the IMGs as a group, and the events at Glasgow have really saddened and angered me. The IMGs who make it to the U.S. are generally among the best and brightest of their home countries -- they have to be in order to score well enough on the ECFMG exam, the English exams, and the clinical performance exam to get into an American residency program. And they have to have the moxie to decide to leave the home country behind and come to a new culture. I'd like to think that the Muslim IMGs are, as a group, more reasonable, more moderate, and more willing to get along with Western culture than the average Muslim -- that's what I believed until Glasgow.
I also note that we now have the children of these IMGs, American citizens all, who are competing for American medical school admissions -- and winning. We have a fair number of them in our own program, and they are, as a group, simply outstanding. Most are either Hindi or East Asian, thoroughly American, and smart as all get out. Some of their siblings are lawyers and engineers.
There are many things wrong with U.S. health care, as there inevitably are with any health care system. The question is whether America wants to go down the British-Canadian-Cuban route, to name three government medical systems that Michael Moore admires in his new film "Sicko." Cuba, of course, is a totalitarian state, and even Hollywood celebrities, though they like to visit, wouldn't want to live there. (Incidentally, the best health treatment available on Cuba is at Gitmo.) The United Kingdom, by contrast, is a free society, but last week's incendiary Jeep Cherokee at Glasgow Airport has shone a rare light on the curious character of its government health system.
Of the eight persons arrested as of Friday in the terrorist plot, seven are doctors with the National Health Service (the eighth is the wife of one, and a lab technician at the same hospital). The bombs failed to go off because a medical syringe malfunctioned. I don't mean it malfunctioned as a syringe (even in the crumbling NHS, the syringes usually work) but as a triggering mechanism, to which it had been adapted, though evidently not too efficiently.
Does government health care inevitably lead to homicidal doctors who can't wait to leap into a flaming SUV and drive it through the check-in counter? No. But government health care does lead to a dependence on medical staff imported from other countries.
Does government health care inevitably lead to homicidal doctors who can't wait to leap into a flaming SUV and drive it through the check-in counter?
A part of the problem is also attributable to tightening and revising qualifications standards. While dullards might be discouraged from entering the medical field at the MD level in the U.S., where med schools are terribly competitive, so are perfectly acceptable folk who aren't particularly brilliant. Hence the proliferation of medical schools in places like Grenada.
Ah yassss, Saint Georges University, home to American kids from New Joisey and New Yolk who can't quite get into an American med school (that includes some of the children of IMG docs!). I've worked with a few; turns out they're perfectly acceptable docs once they get the chance, and they're usually grateful for any teaching you give them.
To fill the gap, we now have physicians' assistants and nurse practitioners, who function more like the family practitioners of the days of my youth. RNs are now at a premium for the same reason. Their position in the heirarchy has become elevated, while the Licensed Practical Nurse and the LVN are now mostly extinct. RNs don't have to touch a bedpan anymore; that's left to medical assistants and medical technicians and such folk, much lower on the caduceus.
A hundred years ago, if the ambulance came for you there was a doctor driving. 50 years ago doctors still made housecalls. Today you get an EMT (6 months training, not full time) driving, with a paramedic if you're an advanced life support case, otherwise another EMT. When you get to the emergency room, you're likely to be seen by someone born in Mumbai if you're lucky, Peshawar or Zarqa if you're not.
Emergency medicine is fairly popular with American medical grads (AMGs); interesting work, decent money, and a scheduled life. That appeals to docs with outside interests or family needs. So you might actually be seen by someone from Boston :-)
Some 40 percent of Britain's practicing doctors were trained overseas and that percentage will increase, as older native doctors retire, and younger immigrant doctors take their place.
The answer would seem to be to open more domestic medical schools and take the competent along with the brilliant, but that might impinge on domestically-raised MDs' status. The exclusive private practice guys are more likely to be named Charles or Richard, or at least Irving or Milton than they are to be named Mahmoud or Ahmed.
Ahem. Most of us American docs would like to open more domestic medical schools, and/or expand the existing ones -- that would provide more academic jobs, more opportunities for medical care and medical practice, and would generally improve our status. The roadblock isn't the medical profession, it's the state legislatures that would have to finance the expansion.
According to the BBC, "Over two-thirds of doctors registering to practice in the UK in 2003 were from overseas the vast majority from non-European countries." Five of the eight arrested are Arab Muslims, the other three Indian Muslims. Bilal Abdulla, the Wahhabi driver of the incendiary Jeep and a doctor at the Royal Alexandra Hospital near Glasgow, is one of over 2,000 Iraqi doctors working in Britain.
Many of these imported medical staff have never practiced in their own countries. As soon as they complete their training, they move to a Western world hungry for doctors to prop up their understaffed health systems: Dr. Abdulla got his medical qualification in Baghdad in 2004 and was practicing in Britain by 2006. His co-plotter, Mohammed Asha, a neurosurgeon, graduated in Jordan in 2004 and came to England the same year.
And again, most of these IMGs understand the difference between a practice in Birmingham and a practice in Zarqa. The U.S. has had rules on J-1 and H-1B visas for a while to get IMGs who are finished with their training to return to their countries of origin, and let me tell you, the IMGs are very creative, motivated and desparate to beat those rules. And they usually do.
When the president talks about needing immigrants to do "the jobs Americans won't do," most of us assume he means seasonal fruit pickers and the maid who turns down your hotel bed and leaves the little chocolate on it. But in the United Kingdom the jobs Britons won't do has somehow come to encompass the medical profession.
See my opening statements. The fruit picker, if he doesn't take the pittance and run, has kids who'll either become barrio thugs or will work hard to get into medical or engineering school. America has remained great because of immigration. If we were still a nation of Knickerbockers and Virginia planters we'd likely still be technologically and economically on par with Mexico -- the same par we started on.
You bet. Each generation complains about immigration, and the succeeding generation takes as the normal state of affairs the immigrants who came before.
Aneurin Bevan, the socialist who created the National Health Service after World War II, was once asked to explain how he'd talked the country's doctors into agreeing to become state employees: "I stuffed their mouths with gold," he crowed. Sixty years later, no amount of gold can persuade Britons to spend their working lives in the country's dirty, decrepit hospitals (they spend enough of their nonworking lives there, waiting to be seen, waiting for beds, waiting for operations). According to a report in the British Medical Journal, white males comprise 43.5 percent of the population but now account for less than a quarter of students at UK medical schools. In other words, being a doctor is no longer an attractive middle-class career proposition. That's quite a monument to six decades of Michael Moore-style socialist health care.
Men are less common in American medical schools today than thirty years ago: back then the ratio was about 3:1 favoring men, and today it's just under 1:1. Women are a majority in American medical schools; women see medicine as an acceptable career, they have opportunities they didn't have in the past (when the general guidance on careers was, "go be a nurse, young lady, and forget any dreams of being a doctor"), and -- let's be blunt -- more women than men are in college today. You can't get into med school if you don't compete as an undergrad, and we have fewer men on campus today.
So today the NHS is hungry for medical personnel from almost anywhere on the planet, so hungry that the government set up special fast-track immigration programs: Mohammed Asha, Mohammed Haneef and their comrades didn't even require a work permit to come and practice as doctors in state hospitals. You don't have to be the smartest jihadist in the cave to see that as an opportunity, any more than it required no great expertise for the 9/11 killers to figure that the quickest place to get the picture IDs with which they boarded the planes was through Virginia's "undocumented worker" network. Everyone else from the Venezuelan peasantry to the Russia mafia knows the vulnerabilities of Western immigration systems, so why not the jihadists?
Maybe their mistake was trying to blow up the airport instead of wreaking subtler havoc on the infidels. Did you see this week's scare-of-the-week from the Chinese health system? "About 420 bottles of fake blood protein, albumin, were found at hospitals in Hubei province but none had been used to treat patients, said Liu Jinai, an official with the inspection division of the provincial food and drug administration."
Well, this being China, where public lies about public health are routine, we just have to take Liu Jinai's word that "none had been used to treat patients." But imagine what Doctor Jihad could get up to if he stopped trying to use the syringe as a detonator and just resumed using it as a syringe?
And that's the scariest thought of all -- to the extent that we have Muslim IMGs who are or become susceptible to 'sudden jihad syndrome', we'll eventually face a situation in which a smart jihadi physician decides that the best way to wreak havoc in America is one patient at a time.
But beyond that the Glasgow Jeep story symbolizes a more basic reality. The NHS is the biggest employer in Europe, and it's utterly dependent on imported staff such as Dr. Asha and Dr. Abdulla. In the West, we look on mass immigration as a testament to our generosity, to our multicultural bona fides. But it's not: A dependence on mass immigration is always a structural weakness and should be understood as such. In the socialized health systems of the Continent, aging, shrinking populations of native Europeans will spend their final years being cared for by young Muslim doctors and nurses. Indeed, in the NHS, geriatric medicine is a field overwhelmingly dependent on immigrant staff.
Immigration is not dependence or weakness so long as the immigrants are assimilated into the culture of the country. That's been the biggest weakness of the Y'urp-peons -- the acceptance of a social theory that mandates separateness, group identity and an enforced social equality instead of a single culture, individual identity and personal liberty. Most of the IMGs coming to America are from India and East Asia. They get it real fast, and their children are completely American. They aren't a threat to us. If we take more and more Muslim IMGs, that might be okay, but we have to make damned sure they assimilate.
And what of the other end of the medical business? Take Japan, a country with the same collapsed birth rates as Europe but with virtually no immigration. In my book, I note an interesting trend in Japanese health care: The shortage of newborn children has led to a shortage of obstetricians. For in a country with deathbed demographics, why would any talented ambitious med-school student want to go into a field in such precipitous decline? In Japan, birthing is a dying business.
Back at the Royal Alexandra Hospital, three doctors were under arrest, and the bomb squad performed a controlled explosion on a vehicle in the parking lot. Pulled from the flaming Cherokee, Dr. Kafeel Ahmed is now being treated for 90 percent burns in his own hospital by the very colleagues he sought to kill. But at one level he and Dr. Asha and Dr. Abdulla don't need to blow up anything at all. The fact that the National Health Service the "envy of the world" in every British politician's absurdly parochial cliché has to hire Wahhabist doctors with no background checks tells you everything about where the country's heading.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/09/2007 00:00 ||
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The NHS recruitment crisis that was exploited by an al Qaeda terror cell has ended in hundreds of British-trained doctors seeking work abroad. In contrast, Australia has recruited thousands of British doctors to address its own shortage while maintaining a high level of security.
Record numbers of junior doctors are expected to leave the UK this year because of a lack of training posts. Figures show that up to 12,000 British junior doctors will be left without training posts after botched reforms. Many are already planning to leave. Dr Mark Pinkham, a 26-year-old junior doctor, is leaving for Brisbane in August to train in accident and emergency medicine.
He said: "We are all fed up with the chaos and I just decided to get out. There has been nothing but bad news about the system and it seems sensible to leave."
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Does government health care inevitably lead to homicidal doctors who can't wait to leap into a flaming SUV and drive it through the check-in counter
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I don't buy the argument that there aren't enough British doctors because they are going into ethnic studies. I'm not disagreeing with all of the informed points above - just that one. It is the same as saying we need Mexicans because they do the jobs that Americans won't do. It's a common talking point but in reality they get hired because slave shadow underclass labor doesn't get paid a living wag since the employers force the taxpayers to pick up their welfare/healthcare/low-cost housing costs instead of paying for it themselves.
My opinion is that these are system problems that make it unattractive for the citizens to follow specific career paths.
On a second point - after seeing that video of the British cleric saying that you can fight jihad in sly ways, like a dentist making it painful for his infidel clients, I will no longer use doctors who could possibly be Muslim. It's not that I think all Muslim doctors are bad - far from it. It is just that I can't tell the difference and it is frightening to think that your doctor could want to do you harm.
The day after the United States celebrated its Independence, two American soldiers were killed in south Baghdad by an explosive projectile provided to Iraqi insurgents by Iran; in June, NATO officials caught Iran shipping heavy arms and C4 explosives to the Taliban in Afghanistan; earlier this year, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for the annihilation of Israel. With these facts, there can be little doubt about Irans virulent intentions. However, as the evidence against the Islamic Republic mounts, so are the groups speaking out in its defense, and now those same people who so fervidly defended Saddams Iraq are once again working to protect another unholy terror.
In 2004, radical activist Medea Benjamin announced that her group Code Pink, which was started to seek the end the war in Iraq, would help in donating a combined $600,000 in cash and medical supplies to the families of the terrorist insurgents who were fighting American troops in Fallujah. In recent months, Code Pink has begun a new campaign, titled Prevent War with Iran! In recent years, Code Pinks website states, the media has damaged Irans image so badly that when people hear the name of Iran, they only picture black chadors, terrorism, and ayatollahs. These stereotypes are being constructed to make it easier for governments to attack Iran with public approval. With this belief, the organization is distributing flyers urging individuals to call their Congress members to vote against a war with Iran. One Code Pink activist is currently on a hunger strike, following Senator Joe Liebermans expressed belief that the U.S. should be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq.
Other groups have initiated petitions in an effort to thwart an attack on another Middle Eastern country. Peace Action, the nations largest grassroots peace and justice group, as well as the groups collegiate arm, the Student Peace Action Network, has begun a national petition drive against a military attack on Iran. The pre-written letter, which Peace Action is asking individuals to sign, is addressed to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and states:
Irans current nuclear energy program is within [the Iranians] rights under international law. Even if Iran decided to build a nuclear weapon, experts agree that it would take several years. There is no crisis, and our government should not create one with inflammatory rhetoric or military threats that increase the incentive to develop nuclear weapons rather than reduce them.
Its more than paradoxical that Peace Action would give a pass to Irans eagerness to develop nuclear weaponry, when the organization itself grew out of two organizations vehemently opposed to nuclear proliferation: the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, both Soviet-sponsored initiatives which sought to strip the U.S. of its defense arsenal during the Cold War. Peace Action, were also at the forefront of the movement against a war with Saddam, coordinating anti-Gulf War marches in 1991, and civil disobedience actions and protest rallies in 2002 and 2003.
Following in the footsteps of the anti-war and anti-sanctions group Voices in the Wilderness, which in the 1990s made regular trips to Iraq, the social, economic and environmental justice organization Global Exchange has been conducting Reality Tours to Iran since 2000. The organization states that its Reality Tours endow participants with a new vantage point from which to view and affect US foreign policy. Their next trip, which costs participants $2,150, is slated to begin on July 7th and is being titled Citizen Diplomacy. Global Exchanges write-up on the expedition states:
In this time of increased political tension between the U.S. and Iran, American travel to this misunderstood country helps establish the people-to-people ties that facilitate understanding and peace between the countries.
In its promotion of such trips to Iran, which the group believes is extremely hospitable to Americans, Global Exchange fails to mention Irans recent detention of four American peace activists who had been visiting the country. They also fail to address the status of former F.B.I. agent Robert Levinson, who has been missing in Iran since March. In their efforts to promote alternative, educational travel, the organization also coordinates additional Reality Tours to Afghanistan, Cuba, Palestine, and Venezuela.
The Fellowship of Reconciliation, a Christian pacifist group, has as well made a number of trips to Iran in recent years. Of one recent tour, Rev. Barbara E. Dua said, Those making the trip to Iran believe that it is more important now [than] ever to support dialogue between Iran and the U.S. We desire peace and do not want the U.S. to go to war again based on erroneous information. In the lead-up to the 2003 war against Saddam, the organization regularly condemned U.S. aggression but fell short of mentioning the seventeen United Nations Security Council Resolutions Saddams regime violated which, had they been followed, would have prevented the Iraq War. They also denounced the deaths of Iraqi civilians, whose blood they believe is on U.S. hands, but failed to deplore Saddams murdering of hundreds of thousands of his own countrymen.
Also contemplating a visit to Iran this October is Michael Moore. Iran has purportedly invited the leftist documentary filmmaker to take part in the countrys Reality Cinema film festival, where hes been asked to show his film Sicko. According the Huffington Post, the invitation to attend had been handed down by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself. Moores sympathies have always lay with Americas enemies: The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation, he has declared, are not insurgents or terrorists or The Enemy. They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow and they will win.
Meanwhile, while Global Exchange, Michael Moore, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation are planning trips to the Islamic Republic, a group of Iranian athletes are traveling across the globe, including stops in the U.S., to spread Irans message of peace. Miles for Peace is an assemblage of Iranian cyclists that is traveling to cities in Italy, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. to communicate the pacifist message of Iranian people to other nations around the world. In an interview, one of the cyclists, Ali Nasri, said:
We do not want a single bomb to drop on Iran. We don't want a single human killed Perhaps before the attacks on Iraq, the Iraqi community did not have the facilities to speak out against the war by going to the US or they were not as strong as the Iranian community. There was talk of Saddam being behind 9/11 which many believed. Yet the Iraqis themselves were not as loud in saying how evidence was being fabricated to justify the attack and the invasion of their country. We are in the same situation today. Because of some undiplomatic rhetoric from certain politicians in Iran the whole country is shown as if it has built a nuclear bomb and its finger is on the red button ready to push.
Ironically, two weeks earlier, on June 3rd 2007, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad touted the pressing of a countdown button which would bring about the destruction of the Zionist regime of Israel. By Gods will, Ahmadinejad pronounced, we will witness the destruction of this regime in the near future. This is certainly not the talk of a peace-loving people.
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In 2004, radical activist Medea Benjamin announced that her group Code Pink, which was started to seek the end the war in Iraq, would help in donating a combined $600,000 in cash and medical supplies to the families of the terrorist insurgents who were fighting American troops in Fallujah.
Aren't there laws against this? Shouldn't this Code Pinko asshole, Medea Benjamin, be jailed for treason? Is our government asleep?
Instead of a celebration of independence, maybe we need a celebration of unity. Maybe we need a massive weeklong Impeach Cheney and Take Back America rally in front of the White House, fueled by celebrities, and heavily promoted by the media, who owe us one big time.
Maybe we need Bono and Brad and Angelina there, to focus on the crisis in America and not the crisis in Africa, at least for a few months.
It's like a neutron star of inanity, that line; like a neutron star, it collapses into a dot so dense that the editor's pen is forever stuck on the event horizon, unable to move forward and cross it out.
Maybe we need Martha Stewart and Paris Hilton there, because no one says "reality based" and "superior intellect" quite like Paris Hilton
to call on Scooter to do his time like a man.
Maybe we need the Dixie Chicks and White Stripes there, and George Clooney and Oprah, and any of the so-called "American Idols" and Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan there, and the younger sports stars and TV stars and rap stars and celebs I've never heard of, to put down their cell phones and Mohitos and hie their well-heeled fannies to D.C. I can imagine the recording sessions now:
"Yo! Check it out!
George Dubya Bush, he a son of a bitch
He an' Dick Cheney otta be im-pitched--"
"CUT! You're pronouncing it wrong. It's im=peach, not im-pitch."
"'Peach' don't rhyme with 'bitch,' ho!"
Maybe we need James Earl Jones, the voice of Darth Vader, to speak truth to power, and Maya Angelou to speak strength to cowardice, and for old time's sake, Pete Seeger to lead us in a chorus of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land," sparklers and flags all around.
Posted by: Mike ||
07/09/2007 06:25 ||
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I read this today after connecting from The Bleat. You really need to read the whole article. The term "moonbat" seems to be used a little less these days than it was four years ago, but the moonbats haven't gone away. They are still there, emoting instead of thinking. And they are hell bent on bringing us another hippy-yippie-1968 era combined with global warming, multiculturalism, and great effort to make the U.S. indistinguishable from dying socialist Europe.
As much as W and a good sized chunk of the GOP have turned out to be a disappointment in the past year or so, this column offers up ample evidence as to why voting D is simply not an option. Imagine swaths of politicians elected by the likes of this writer? Articles like this one need to be read by every conservative/libertarian, disillusioned or not. Reading this sort of thing will remind us of why we need at least some level of loyalty to our cause, and hopefully inspire reform in the GOP simultaneously.
I just hope the GOP can nominate enough new candidates who get it on illegal immigration by next November. If not, we're looking at this Strib lunatic and her type running the country.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
07/09/2007 7:00 Comments ||
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This columnist thinks that Tiger Woods would participate in such an event. I'm sorry, but I'm giggling too much to say anything coherent. Well, I'm glad she gave Mr. Lileks some material.
The Gnat could have done a better job.
Posted by: Eric Jablow ||
07/09/2007 7:04 Comments ||
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Unfortunately, the Gnat can't vote yet - but this idiot and her like can.
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"So ya wanna have a Revolution, well you know, we all wanna change the World."
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
07/09/2007 14:12 Comments ||
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Moonbat "Kumbaya" approach. Once you start talking about Angelina, Brad, Paris Hilton, Martha Stewart, George Clooney, Dixie Chicks, and rap stars to lead a revolution, you are in serious need of head shrinking. These people can't manage their own lives. Sean Penn, Alec Baldwin are missing from the moonbat list.
But then you have to ask yourself, which is better? Impeachment, or Sheehan vs. Pelosi. Sheehan vs. Pelosi, or impeachment? The toughest of candy store choices. Maybe more of a less-filling, tastes-great kind of moment. It’s like, which Coors twin is hotter? Maybe more of Coke or Pepsi, McDonalds-Burger King thing. It comes down to personal preference, or how you feel on any given day. Do you want your anti-war Dems with secret sauce or flame-broiled in a sesame seed bun?
Sister Toldjah dashes my hopes. Obviously Pelosi isn’t going to move to impeach Bush. Doing an end-run around the foreign policy of the United States to treat with lying, murderous dictators is one thing, but even Pelosi knows there’s no upside to a Bush impeachment. And Toldjah reminds us Cindy has tantalized us with false campaign promises before.
But this time could be different. Cindy has been in the wilderness. It’s cold and lonely and meaningless out there. She announced she was leaving, and nobody cared. She needs to come back. For Casey. Or whatever that was all about.
Blue Crab notes brevity of AP report, wonders if Sheehan’s worn out her welcome with the Bush-bashing press.
Gateway reminds us she actually announced her comeback last week, proclaiming her dream of American concentration camps full of political prisoners, and with a footnote addressing that “Attention Whore” canard.
It’s all so absurd that Tigerhawk wants to know who’s behind the curtain pulling the levers and what does that evil being want? Interesting thought, but I’m a firm believer in the perversity of random idiocy.
Posted by: Mike ||
07/09/2007 10:40 ||
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According to Kos, Cindy sez,
We are going to walk from Atlanta, GA to Congress beginning July 13th and ending up in DC on July 23rd to send the mis-leaders back home to face the music of justice in their own districts.
That's over 600 miles in 11 days, or 55 miles per day, or walking at a fast pace (almost 3.5 mph, average) for 16 hours every day for all eleven days.
Or maybe catching a ride here and there.
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/09/2007 14:18 Comments ||
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Much like her fast, she probably means they are going to walk from the hotel to their SUV, catch a quick snack at Dennys, and then off to DC.
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Well...yes, you silly Bushitlerite neocon tool of Halliburton Zionist facist pig. Walking in July heat from Atlanta to DC is for the little people, not the "galvanizing force of the antiwar movement". I will however be available to wave from the RV, for photo ops with the little people, and token arrests...
Let's say you're a Republican president, a bit more than midway through your second term. You're scrambling to salvage what you can of a deeply unpopular war, you're facing a line of subpoenas from Democrats in Congress and your poll ratings are in the basement. What do you do? You estrange the very Republicans whose backing you need the most.
Republicans aren't mad at Bush for the same reasons that Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and the devotees of MoveOn.org are; there's no new anti-Bush consensus among left and right. Conservatives are unhappy because the president allied himself with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) over an immigration deal that leaned too far toward amnesty for illegal immigrants. They're unhappy because Bush has shown little interest in fiscal responsibility and limited government. And they're unhappy, above all, because he hasn't won the war in Iraq. All of this has left Republicans saying, at least among themselves, something blunt and devastating: It's over.
The problem is there for anyone to see: Bush's approval ratings could not have collapsed to 30 percent unless a lot of his base deserted him. In a number of recent polls, his job-approval rating among Republicans has been in the low- to mid-60 percent range. Despite all this, the president has behaved in recent weeks like a man with political capital to burn. On immigration reform, he defied the GOP base as if his well of support were so deep that he could draw out as much of it as he liked.
He also gave himself the worst of all worlds in the case of Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff. By commuting Libby's prison sentence -- as opposed to pardoning him outright -- for perjuring himself to CIA leak investigators, Bush outraged his Democratic opposition while leaving his base vaguely disappointed. But for the base writ large, the case wasn't about Libby. It was about the politics of the Iraq war. A lot of conservatives had hoped for a full pardon because they wanted a strong White House statement that the CIA leak investigation had spun out of control, that it had grown from a set of crazy political circumstances and that the whole mad imbroglio should never have gotten as far as it did. In short, they wanted something like the impassioned statement President George H.W. Bush issued in December 1992, when he pardoned former defense secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, former national security adviser Robert C. McFarlane, former assistant secretary of state Elliott Abrams and three other participants in the Iran-contra affair.
So the commutation won no more than tepid approval from the base. And it certainly didn't offset the terrible damage the president did to himself during the immigration debate by backing a bill that would have put millions of illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship. Many conservatives are still hopping mad over the president's description of the bill's opponents as people who "don't want to do what's right for America." Things got so bad that a top White House aide recently tried to reassure a group of conservative journalists that the president isn't out of touch. "He gets it," the aide said. "He gets it." But he didn't get it enough to avoid a major defeat -- one that probably sounded the official death knell to Bush's attempts to turn his brand of compassionate conservatism into law.
So now the president has 18 months left in office, and they won't be quiet ones. Absent the committed backing of his party, he will be forced to exercise power based not on his political clout but rather on the authority the Constitution gives the office of the president: He is commander in chief. He can veto bills. He can issue pardons. And that's about it.
The deterioration of the base will be particularly critical when it comes to the Iraq war. September will bring the most important moment of the president's second term, when Gen. David H. Petraeus is set to report to Congress on progress in Iraq, thereby starting an intense and protracted debate over funding and withdrawal timetables. If Bush cannot convince conservatives who are already unhappy with him about domestic issues that his Iraq plan is working, he'll see Republicans in Congress -- and on the presidential campaign trail -- peel away. That would put him in danger of losing control of the war.
If Bush is energetic with his vetoes, he might see a bit more enthusiasm from the base. It's always good to have an enemy, after all. "These days, the only time he gets support is when Democrats attack him," says one Washington-based GOP strategist. But that will take him only so far. George W. Bush's time to get big things done has passed. Even his most ardent fans, the ones who wish him the best, are looking forward to Jan. 20, 2009.
Byron York is National Review's White House correspondent and the author of "The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy."
#1
Save Baghdad, save the intervention. Allow the Tigris River to form an ethnic dividing line between Sunnis and Shiites. When that happens, Sunnis won't send suicide bombers into Shiite areas, and Shiites won't encroach. It is my belief - and there is evidence in Anbar and north Baghdad - that when ethnic conflict abates, locals will turn against the terrorists. It ain't over until September. Pullout would be catastrophic. Iran will move in and consolidate around Basra, and then move northward to the Kurdish oil patch. With little more than a tiny naval base in Bahrain, US forces couldn't prevent an invasion of the Saudi oil patch. Ergo: failure in Baghdad is NOT an option.
#2
Everybody get disgruntled and act like 8 year olds and punish the Republicans again next election and we can have a repeat of the result of 2006. The image I will most remember that symbolizes 2006 is Rosie laughing at the GOP as she left for a Barbara Streisand concert. And then Pelosi was in charge.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
07/09/2007 1:16 Comments ||
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#3
In other words, Suck it up. You have nowhere else to go. Who you gonna vote for - the Libertarian?
#4
The article states the obvious. What it doesn't say is that Bush is an elitist. So too are Kennedy, Pelosi, Kerry, Barbara Streisand, Alec Baldwin, Paris Hilton, Lindsey Graham, Trent Lott, and yes, even some of our presidential candidates. Therefore, we had better choose carefully who we want to lead us in the future. I'd say it's time to expose the elitists and replace them with normal people.
#5
A populist/realist President - Ronald Reagan - had cruise missiles lobbed directly at Gadhafi's residence, and leveraged the Soviets to reduce Euro-missiles. And he ordered invasions of Grenada and Panama, without even veiled notice to the UN. And he gained popularity for so doing.
Would Reagan have allied with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in the war on terror? Would he have nation-built in gutter states? Would he have declared that "islam is peace"? Would he have proferred a 2-state solution for the Israeli-Arab problem, in face of Paleo support for terrorists? Would Ahmadinejad be threatening to destroy Israel and the American homeland, and doing so with absolute impunity? Would CAIR be in existence? Would an invasion of Iraq be followed with 3500 US deaths? Would be-heading videos be sold a few blocks from a secure area (Green Zone) for US troops and diplomats? Would Venezuelan fascists be in power? Doubt it.
#6
As I recall Reagan was willing to do illegal arms deals with the Ayatollahs to supply freedom fighters in Central America. He was willing to deal with wacko Islamists through Pakistan to oppose the Russians in Afghanistan. When 271 Marines got killed living in an ineffectively defended hotel in Beirut, he turned tail and ran. Reagan was also pretty much a lame duck in his last two years. The big difference is that Reagan could communicate effectively to large numbers of people. Bush can't.
#7
Everybody get disgruntled and act like 8 year olds and punish the Republicans again next election and we can have a repeat of the result of 2006
You know at a certain point the rot is so deep, you may have to put up with the discomfiture and displacement for a while in order to rip the damn place down to the foundation to rebuild. When the building is no longer attached to its base, you probably have serious structural problems. Time for 'Extreme Party Makeover'tm?
#9
If you don't like the RINOs, vote against them during the Primaries. That is where the change needs to take place. Bush, for me has turned out to be a major disappointment, but he still is a hell of a lot better than Kerry would have been. He is still better than any of the dhimocrats running. Fortunately, we have another choice for the republican this time. We may be mad at Bush. We may be mad at the RINOs. But they are still better than the alternative. At this point.
But the elites in DC need to understand that the majority of the Red state voters are really getting sick of their crap. And we are cleaning our guns and watching them.
#10
I always turn to the WaPo, Eugene Robinson, E.J. Dionne, et al to find out what the Republican base wants and thinks.
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/09/2007 10:25 Comments ||
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#11
Byron York is a pinch-hitter this time, but the WaPo has been running a series of "why the Republicans are Soooooo screwed!" columns
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/09/2007 10:26 Comments ||
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#12
I could not agree more with the anger at the vacillation of this supposedly hard-line President. But for the love of God, as a foreigner who cannot vote in your elections, do not hand the White House over to the Dhimmis. Civilization is counting on you.
#13
And we are cleaning have cleaned our guns and are watching them.
Fixed it.
Posted by: Natural Law ||
07/09/2007 10:34 Comments ||
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#14
"A populist/realist President"
"The big difference is that Reagan could communicate effectively to large numbers of people. Bush can't."
Every president since Carter got it wrong in part about the ME, and has been at least in partial denial, including Reagan. W was the first to really start speaking language regarding what needs to be done, although he has dropped the ball.
But Reagan was unique, because he was a populist who was also conservative. This combination is vanishingly rare, happening once in a lifetime or less.
He pulled it off because, as noted, he was a terrific communicator. This is W's Achilles heel. If W was half the communicator that Reagan was, the WoT would be in a very different place now, I think.
"Time for 'Extreme Party Makeover'tm? "
Not even close. See the other threads today to see what would replace W et al should the D's take over. With rare exceptions even RINO's are preferable to this. Excalibur's right - staying home to make a point might have disastrous effects on Western civilization. I wish that weren't the case, but it's the reality we face.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
07/09/2007 10:45 Comments ||
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#15
This isn't a hit piece for once. Its the truth.
Bush is NOT a conservative - like his father, he never has been, never will be.
Hi is done - put a fork in him. He's simply the latest "its your turn" establishment candidate to come out of the Country Club set (c.f. his father, and Bob Dole). Its the "its your turn" gang that never seems to change that is at fault here. Trent Lott and his ilk, 40 years in DC, they think they are entitled.
Time to throw them all out. Starting with primary challengers. Hit their fund raising -that gets their attention. do not give a single dime to the RNC, the NRSC - they are the backers of the old-boy network - they funded Chaffee against his primary aopponent, etc.
Choke the life out of the self-satisfied self-entitled beasts from the Country Club elite, and get the power back in the hands of the base, the Sam's Club Repubs - the ones Ronald Regan won with.
Time to clean house, and it may cost us in the short run. But it has to be done.
#17
I really wish everyone would stop with the comments about Reagan and the Middle East.
There was such a huge overriding difference in the world at that time that any comparison is pointless. The difference? It's spelled USSR.
The best metaphor I can think of is....
"A man dying of thirst and a man with his house on fire put a different value on a glass of water."
Yes there were seeds of the present situation sown then, but, there were much bigger things to think about and situations to imagine.
Please tell me what the situation in the Middle East would be today if Gorbachev had been more like Brezhnev and NOT taken down (or allowed it to be taken down) that wall? What if the Soviets had really cracked down on the Poles and Solidarity?
#18
"Choke the life out of the self-satisfied self-entitled beasts from the Country Club elite, and get the power back in the hands of the base, the Sam's Club Repubs - the ones Ronald Regan won with."
This is the goal, and it's nice to talk about in quick sentences, but how to do it without giving huge power (even for two or four years) to the Dems, and perhaps wreaking irreparable harm to our nation and the West in doing so?
If it weren't for a roaring economy, I can only imagine what the period 1993-1995 in those first Clinton years might have been like. The idea of a similar setup with perhaps another more left-of-center Clinton, compounded with Democrats in the House and Senate who are way more left-fringe than they were in 1992 and an uncertain economy, in power for two seconds, let alone two or more years, should give all of us a pause.
I like your idea of winning through nominating better Repubs at the primary level. "Self-entitled beasts" is the perfect phrase, and they must go eventually. But savage them to the point where you hand total control to the Dems, and I think you have left the path of wisdom.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
07/09/2007 11:21 Comments ||
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#19
I think the problem with Bush is that he thinks we elected him to be king - to make the big decisions. No. We've made the big decisions. We elected him to put into effect these decisions.
#20
"Please tell me what the situation in the Middle East would be today if Gorbachev had been more like Brezhnev and NOT taken down (or allowed it to be taken down) that wall? What if the Soviets had really cracked down on the Poles and Solidarity?"
This almost sounds wistful, AlanC. You're skeerin' me.
Look, Reagan's handling of the barracks bombing in no way diminishes my admiration for the guy. He was a product of the times. But he definitely was part of the progression that led to today's ME situation, whether he had bigger fish to fry or not. Pointing that out isn't a hit on the guy, it's an historical reality.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
07/09/2007 11:26 Comments ||
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#21
#15 OldSpook's way of thinking will give us a matching set of President Hillary to go along with Pelosi and Reid.
You have to win the small battles in American politics to achieve the big goals. Gradualism i.e. controlling the issues and shifting power in your side's direction beats revolution for getting what you want any day.
And yes, sometimes you even have to hold your nose and pull the lever for the least bad real choice rather than cede authority to those who you know will lead us into disaster.
#22
Thank goodness we can choose our candidate in the primaries, otherwise Mr. Soros' bank account would have the White House sewn up. ;-) I agree with Frank G; the Washington Post is trying to pursuade the War Party that we've already lost. Whereas on NPR this morning they were agonizing over the fact that most of the troops are registered Republicans, and for whom will they vote this time round? I found that particularly interesting, 'cause in 2004 military votes had a tendency to be misplaced before they were counted.
Excalibur dear, sadly for those of us who'd like to see a strong Democratic war candidate, Hillary Clinton is too polarizing even amongst the Democrats, and Barack Obama is awfully green... although admittedly he has gorgeous teeth. At this point the leading Republican candidates are Rudy Guiliani and Fred Thompson, both of whom want to prosecute the war much more aggressively than President Bush is doing. So the Republican ticket should come down to either the more conservative or the more centrist of the two warmongers. Versus a weak Democratic candidate. It's just that we Americans need to talk everything through -- passionately -- which can be distressing for observers. I shouldn't worry until the primaries are over and we see who the final candidates for each party are... about this time next summer. In the meantime try to relax and enjoy the show.
#23
I concur w/DV. I was never a huge Bush fan myself (one of the worst speaking presidents I remember) though I did vote for him in both elections - I would've voted libertarian but they were anti-war and open border. Much better than either dem obviously. Two things he will be remembered for positively - peace and prosperity. Since 9/11 we have had no terror attacks in contrast to popular opinion that an attack would definitely take place by 2007. We have also had an unbelievable economic resurgence since 9/11 reaked havoc on our economy coupled w/the clinton hangover. I thank him for sticking to the tax cuts.
OTOH - his immigration stance is insane - and Trent Lott can kiss my @ss. Talk Radio defended this ungrateful f*ck during his Strom Thurmond dixie-crat fiasco and now he's talking fairness doctrine - what a baby. I agree w/OS about having a goal of getting rid of these rino country club clowns. I may have some different views on the tactics to get there, but get there we must. We can either try to get there incrementally like GP suggests or go w/kicking out all the bums en masse like OS suggests. Both are frought w/their own merits and vulnerabilities.
#25
no mo, no cause to be skeered. Wistful is the last thing I am.
The problem I see is too much of a concentration on the past. Reagan was the best president AFAIC
of the last century (granted I only saw half of it).
I, too, think that the Lebanon barracks thing was a mistake. In some respects Somalia was similar BUT Reagan always had to worry about the USSR!!!!!
Clintoon had no such worry!!! The issue with Leb. versus Somalia is that they can't be compared. Anything the RR did has to be viewed through that HUGE microscope of the cold war. While it certainly can be brought up, and it certainly was a mistake, bringing it up now is pointless.
Let's ditch all comparisons with anything that happend before the wall fell and concentrate on the 20 years since.
#29
It's the primaries where the change has to be done. Goober Graham and Chuckles Hagel come to mind for stooges to dump. By next Spring the hit list of Rino's will be longer than the RNC can support with zero conservative donations. From there, it's off to the 'least worst' races....
The Democrats can't be trusted with the defense of the country. They can't even be trusted to respond if a 911 event comes along.
The war on terrorism has to be won. Bush is correct that if we don't win, these people will be bringing the Middle East to America.
The enemy on the home front has to be minimized. The main stream media are elitists and they are intent on shaping the world in a leftish image. The same for the Democrats.
The economy has to remain vibrant and strong.
We need someone to be able to communicate this war to the American people. Someone that doesn't try to sell us a bunch of self-serving bullshit. All the other issues such as the Democrats parading out distractions such as global warming are just sideshows and not particularly important. I think most common people see the threat of islamofacism.
Old Spook is correct in that the elitists country club entitlement mentality set needs to be driven from Washington. We have too many politicians that gather moss in DC. There are too many that are not straight-thinking and straight-talking. They do not trust the American people. They don't level with us. They need to go.
Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton, Murtha and others represent the leadership of the Democratic Party and are what's wrong with the Democratic Party. There is no will or backbone or ideas there.
However, all that being said, I would make an argument for gradualism. Fred Thompson looks like a good candidate. He must be worrisome to the Democrats because they are beginning the demonization process already. He seems to stir something in the common person. He seems bright enough. He can speak and articulate positions. He has positions and doesn't stick his finger in the air to sample the win as the Clintons always have. He just might be the candidate with the greatest potential for winning in 2008.
#32
Need to elevate those conservatives in the Senate who listened to the people both times that Kennedy and Bush tried ram the immigration bill down our throats. The Senators who stood up for the people were about
Sessions, Hutchisons, etc, etc.
Giving those Senators a promotion is what we owe them. They listened to us.
#33
Bush isn't running in 2008. The approval rating of the Congress is lower than the president's approval rating(around 13%).
Funny, this writer predicting doom for the GOP, failed to consider that it is the Congress, left and right, who is going into the next election wildly unpopular. Bush won't be running.
It is up to all of us not to sit on our as@@es and to get involved in selecting new candidates for 2008 primaries. For this next election, we all have to do more than sit back and select from the bad choices presented to us in the primaries. We all need to get involved in who is placed on the primary ballot in 2008. I'm not sure exactly how to do that. But we all need to figure out how and make sure it happens. The Dems are in deeper doo doo than the GOP - a fact that this piece of Bush bashing, fair though it may be, fails to note.
#34
This could get interesting. Maybe a couple hundred of the Rantburg Militia can make a difference. We should start a pool now on who we think will be candidate and who would actually make the best candidate. Winner gets all $8.32 in my pocket right now.
Shhhhhh, AT1904 - we don't want the DemoncRats to find out too soon....
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
07/09/2007 22:19 Comments ||
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#36
My solution is worse than the Ted Kennedy aligned insiders? Worse than RINOS like Hagel stabbing our troops in the back? Worse than idiots like Lindsey Graham insulting the base over immigration?
Nope - we can and MUST replace those defective republicans. Its not liek SC is goign to send a Dem to the senate, nor Missisippi if we can roll Trent Lott.
Plus the "gradual" that you favor got us into this mess today. Some things need rapid change. This is one of them.
#37
The problem with thbe gradual solution is that we don't have a party that will take advantage of the small victories. Both parties are against us. The only way to do that is rebuild one of the parties. No matter how loud we yell, the establishment trunks still think they're better than the people.
Posted by: Mike N. ||
07/09/2007 23:03 Comments ||
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Genocide preferred. NYT should be applauded for its honesty. An outcome that is even bloodier and more chaotic further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows power grabs is better than continuing the path of progress toward eliminating al-Qaeda, exposing and hopefully acting against Irans influence, training increasingly effective Iraqi troops, working with a nascent democratically elected government in its fits and starts.
Posted by: Mike ||
07/09/2007 08:52 ||
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An NYT editiorial. Brace yourselves and take your blood pressure meds ...
It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.
The New York Times, an organization that believes that it is a bastion of defense for the poor, the unpowered, the infirm, and (of course) minorities, now wishes to condemn 26 million such people to hell. For hell is where Iraq would go if we withdraw.
Like many Americans, we have put off that conclusion, waiting for a sign that President Bush was seriously trying to dig the United States out of the disaster he created by invading Iraq without sufficient cause, in the face of global opposition, and without a plan to stabilize the country afterward.
So the NYT starts with multiple lies, and the first is that we invaded Iraq 'without sufficient cause.' This is the prelude to complaining about the lack of WMD, of course, and it ignores the other reasons why we invaded. Saddam had flouted sanctions, indeed was bringing sanctions to an end, he had continued to flaut the 1991 ceasefire agreement, he had dealing with international terrorists, and -- most importantly -- he had become too dangerous in a post 9/11 world.
At first, we believed that after destroying Iraqs government, army, police and economic structures, ...
which is what you do when you go to war
... the United States was obliged to try to accomplish some of the goals Mr. Bush claimed to be pursuing, chiefly building a stable, unified Iraq.
I don't know if we'll see a 'stable, unified' Iraq. That might be beyond our ability, or anyone's ability, to create. What matters here was that it had to be tried. The Iraqis, we're told, were the most secular, best educated, most adaptable of the Arab peoples to building a democratic, peaceful state. If they couldn't do it, no one could, was the arugment. So we had to try, and while one can fairly criticize the Bush administration for its mistakes and blunders, it indeed attempted a huge undertaking, one that the chickenhearts at the NYT would never try.
When it became clear that the president had neither the vision nor the means to do that, we argued against setting a withdrawal date while there was still some chance to mitigate the chaos that would most likely follow.
While Mr. Bush scorns deadlines, he kept promising breakthroughs after elections, after a constitution, ...
... both of which were breakthroughs ...
... after sending in thousands more troops. But those milestones came and went without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal. It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bushs plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost.
The chickenhearts have no knowledge of history. How long did it take for the U.S. to become a stable democracy after our revolution? How long has it taken others? How much blood was shed before France became a stable democracy? The Iraqis have had four years now, that's all, and the chickenhearts declare them to be a lost cause.
The political leaders Washington has backed are incapable of putting national interests ahead of sectarian score settling. The security forces Washington has trained behave more like partisan militias. Additional military forces poured into the Baghdad region have failed to change anything.
Even their own reporter in Iraq, John Burns, disagrees with that statement.
Continuing to sacrifice the lives and limbs of American soldiers is wrong. The war is sapping the strength of the nations alliances and its military forces. It is a dangerous diversion from the life-and-death struggle against terrorists. It is an increasing burden on American taxpayers, and it is a betrayal of a world that needs the wise application of American power and principles.
A majority of Americans reached these conclusions months ago. Even in politically polarized Washington, positions on the war no longer divide entirely on party lines. When Congress returns this week, extricating American troops from the war should be at the top of its agenda.
That conversation must be candid and focused. Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows could hit Jordan and Syria. Iran and Turkey could be tempted to make power grabs. Perhaps most important, the invasion has created a new stronghold from which terrorist activity could proliferate.
In other words, a withdrawal would lead to a bloodbath, so we must ... withdraw. The bloodbath will be blamed on Bush as well, thus allowing the chickenhearts to have their cake and eat it.
The administration, the Democratic-controlled Congress, the United Nations and Americas allies must try to mitigate those outcomes and they may fail.
Now seriously, does anyone think that the U.N. could mitigate these terrible outcomes, even if it wished to do so? Does anyone look on the U.N.'s role in Darfur, in Rwanda, and indeed in Iraq shortly after the major operations ended in 2003 with any sort of confidence? Any U.N. peacekeepers that would be sent to Iraq -- and name a first world nation that will contribute its soldiers -- would simply diddle the local women, steal everything that isn't nailed down, and ignore the bloodbath.
And if America cuts and runs, why should any of our allies jump in? Can anyone imagine France, or Spain, or Greece trying to stop the bloodbath? Pshaw. Won't happen. We'll get sanctamonious speeches from the Euros and that's all.
Finally, how would the administration 'mitigate these outcomes' if not do exactly what it's doing now? Does the NYT editorial staff even understand how stupid that sounds?
But Americans must be equally honest about the fact that keeping troops in Iraq will only make things worse. The nation needs a serious discussion, now, about how to accomplish a withdrawal and meet some of the big challenges that will arise.
The Mechanics of Withdrawal
The United States has about 160,000 troops and millions of tons of military gear inside Iraq. Getting that force out safely will be a formidable challenge. The main road south to Kuwait is notoriously vulnerable to roadside bomb attacks. Soldiers, weapons and vehicles will need to be deployed to secure bases while airlift and sealift operations are organized. Withdrawal routes will have to be guarded. The exit must be everything the invasion was not: based on reality and backed by adequate resources.
If only Rummie had consulted with the NYT before the invasion ...
The United States should explore using Kurdish territory in the north of Iraq as a secure staging area. Being able to use bases and ports in Turkey would also make withdrawal faster and safer. Turkey has been an inconsistent ally in this war, but like other nations, it should realize that shouldering part of the burden of the aftermath is in its own interest.
Why would the Kurds cooperate with such a plan? They'd correctly see this as their being sold down the river. They'd know that within a few months we'd be gone and they would be alone -- again. Why would the Kurds allow us to use their territory for a withdrawal? They'd be much more likely to create as many problems as possible with a withdrawal in an effort to keep us there, and especially between them and the Turks. And the Iranians.
And why would Turkey have an interest in cooperating with us? If we're completely discredited in the Middle East -- and we would be if we followed the course urged by the NYT -- Turkey could try to step into the resulting vacuum. They could, for example, try to occupy the Kurdish north and get their hands on Mosul. Who would stop them? The EU? This might be the nudge the Turks would need to tell the EU to kiss off in their expansion plan. The Russians and Chinese wouldn't care, they'd just plan to 'develop' the new Turkish oil and gas resources. The UN? Please.
Accomplishing all of this in less than six months is probably unrealistic.
Oh, you think?
The political decision should be made, and the target date set, now.
Because it wouldn't be fair to al-Qaeda to keep them guessing about the target date.
The Fight Against Terrorists
Despite President Bushs repeated claims, Al Qaeda had no significant foothold in Iraq before the invasion, which gave it new base camps, new recruits and new prestige.
The President did not say that al Qaeda had a significant foothold in Saddam's Iraq -- this is another NYT lie. The administration noted the cooperation that was there between the Mukhabarat and al Qaeda, cooperation that was amply documented, and noted that Saddam would attempt to use such relationships and cooperation to his advantage, just as he had his relationship with Palestinian terrorist groups. Given al Qaeda's ultimate goals, such cooperation was untenable in a post 9/11 world.
This war diverted Pentagon resources from Afghanistan, where the military had a real chance to hunt down Al Qaedas leaders.
Nonsense. This is another liberal lie, that somehow we've failed in Afghanistan because resources weren't available. First, we haven't failed: militarily we've succeeded quite nicely, to the point that even the Taliban admits publicly that they can't stand against our forces. Second, the ultimate goal of our involvement in Afghanistan is to ensure that said country can't be used as a terrorist base against us. And on that point, we've been spectacularly successful with the force mix we've had. Afghanistan isn't a place for the 1st Armor, or the 4th Infantry, and not invading Iraq would have changed nothing in how we've conducted operations in Afghanistan.
It alienated essential allies in the war against terrorism.
Who were already alienated against us. Remember the list: Chirac. Schroeder. Prodi. Zapatero. These were European leaders who have been and continue to be against everything we do in the world, for the simple reason that we're not European. We're not and won't ever be like them.
It drained the strength and readiness of American troops.
More nonsense, but if you think it's true, support an increase in the standing military. We had a military nearly twice as large in 1990 as in 2002, and we supported it then.
And it created a new front where the United States will have to continue to battle terrorist forces and enlist local allies who reject the idea of an Iraq hijacked by international terrorists. The military will need resources and bases to stanch this self-inflicted wound for the foreseeable future.
One of the key ideas in the invasion of Iraq is exactly that: that we'd stay for the long-term, help the Iraqis build a stable, democratic society, and work with them to demonstrate to other Arab peoples the advantages of leaving theocratic loons and brutal thugs aside.
The Question of Bases
The United States could strike an agreement with the Kurds to create those bases in northeastern Iraq. Or, the Pentagon could use its bases in countries like Kuwait and Qatar, and its large naval presence in the Persian Gulf, as staging points.
Again, why would Kuwait and Qatar do that? If we withdraw from Iraq, the very next thing these two countries will do is evict us from their countries. It's not hard to understand why: they'd understand that the United States lacks the courage of its convictions, that it won't keep its word when times are difficult, and that it won't be there should the Iranians come calling (and calling they would). They'd have to scramble to make an accommodation with the Iranians, and the absolute minimum price they'd have to pay is a complete eviction of the U.S. So don't count on any of the Gulf states helping us should we stage an NYT-style withdrawal.
There are arguments for, and against, both options. Leaving troops in Iraq might make it too easy and too tempting to get drawn back into the civil war and confirm suspicions that Washingtons real goal was to secure permanent bases in Iraq. Mounting attacks from other countries could endanger those nations governments.
Especially since we'd never get permission from said countries.
The White House should make this choice after consultation with Congress and the other countries in the region, whose opinions the Bush administration has essentially ignored. The bottom line: the Pentagon needs enough force to stage effective raids and airstrikes against terrorist forces in Iraq, but not enough to resume large-scale combat.
But we wouldn't have the strength in the region to do that, as I've noted, we certainly wouldn't have the support of other countries in the region, and most importantly, we wouldn't have the will. What member of the Democratic party would support a bombing campaign against terrorist targets in Iraq? How quickly would such an attack be seized upon by the far-left loons as being part of a different, darker, sinister agenda?
The Civil War
One of Mr. Bushs arguments against withdrawal is that it would lead to civil war. That war is raging, right now, and it may take years to burn out. Iraq may fragment into separate Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite republics, and American troops are not going to stop that from happening.
We might not. It might be better for Iraq to be three republics, not one, but that's not our decision to make: it belongs to the Iraqis, and certainly not to Joe Biden and the NYT.
It is possible, we suppose, that announcing a firm withdrawal date might finally focus Iraqs political leaders and neighboring governments on reality. Ideally, it could spur Iraqi politicians to take the steps toward national reconciliation that they have endlessly discussed but refused to act on.
But it is foolish to count on that, as some Democratic proponents of withdrawal have done. The administration should use whatever leverage it gains from withdrawing to press its allies and Iraqs neighbors to help achieve a negotiated solution.
What leverage would that be? The Iraqi politicans would realize very quickly that they've been hung out to dry, and they'd even more quickly cut deals to protect their lives and their standing. The various tribes and clans would do the same. Outsiders such as Iran and Syria would jump in, knowing that there would be no American will to stop them. What 'negotiated solution' would we see? None. What we'd see instead would be the emergence of a new strongman, a new brutal thug, very likely an Iranian-backed, Shi'a thug (e.g., Mooki), at which point the blood would really begin to flow.
Iraqs leaders knowing that they can no longer rely on the Americans to guarantee their survival might be more open to compromise, perhaps to a Bosnian-style partition, with economic resources fairly shared but with millions of Iraqis forced to relocate. That would be better than the slow-motion ethnic and religious cleansing that has contributed to driving one in seven Iraqis from their homes.
See above. The Iraqi pols would first ennsure their own survival, then that of their tribes and clans.
The United States military cannot solve the problem.
No one said they could. They are and remain, however, absolutely required in any feasible solution to the problem.
Congress and the White House must lead an international attempt at a negotiated outcome. To start, Washington must turn to the United Nations, which Mr. Bush spurned and ridiculed as a preface to war.
For which he was correct, and let's be clear, he would be correct today. The U.N. will do nothing whatsoever to solve the problems of Iraq, for the simplest of reasons: it is not in the interests of the Russians and Chinese to help solve those problems. The NYT has a foolish and (as typical for the left) saintly belief in the U.N. That's the one organization in the world that could make things worse for the Iraqis.
The Human Crisis
There are already nearly two million Iraqi refugees, mostly in Syria and Jordan, and nearly two million more Iraqis who have been displaced within their country. Without the active cooperation of all six countries bordering Iraq Turkey, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria and the help of other nations, this disaster could get worse. Beyond the suffering, massive flows of refugees some with ethnic and political resentments could spread Iraqs conflict far beyond Iraqs borders.
Kuwait and Saudi Arabia must share the burden of hosting refugees. Jordan and Syria, now nearly overwhelmed with refugees, need more international help. That, of course, means money. The nations of Europe and Asia have a stake and should contribute. The United States will have to pay a large share of the costs, but should also lead international efforts, perhaps a donors conference, to raise money for the refugee crisis.
Once again, the saintly belief in international action. A donors' conference? Show me a country that would give a farthing to the Iraqis right now. Explain the stake to the European left, most of whom would delight in watching Iraq burn. The Chinese would contribute only in return for a lock on Iraqi oil production. Good for the Chinese, I suppose, but how does that help the Iraqis?
Why should Kuwait help in hosting refugees? They have their own memories of Iraqis and those memories aren't fond ones. And the Saoodis would help only if the Iraqis would wash clothes and repair the streets.
Washington also has to mend fences with allies. There are new governments in Britain, France and Germany that did not participate in the fight over starting this war and are eager to get beyond it. But that will still require a measure of humility and a commitment to multilateral action that this administration has never shown. And, however angry they were with President Bush for creating this mess, those nations should see that they cannot walk away from the consequences. To put it baldly, terrorism and oil make it impossible to ignore.
Terrorism is why we went there in the first place.
Notice the slap against Blair. Gordon Brown has no interest in Iraq and will seek to get his country out of there at the first opportunity. He's not going to help us with 'international will.' Sarkozy is a good man but he can't take on any major action with regard to Iraq, or he'll find his popularity gone. If the United States commits to 'multilateral action', what exactly would the French put up, other than words?
The United States has the greatest responsibilities, including the admission of many more refugees for permanent resettlement. The most compelling obligation is to the tens of thousands of Iraqis of courage and good will translators, embassy employees, reconstruction workers whose lives will be in danger because they believed the promises and cooperated with the Americans.
Yeah, suckers! It won't be necessary for us to admit a couple million Iraqis if we instead see this through and help those Iraqis build the country they want to have.
The Neighbors
One of the trickiest tasks will be avoiding excessive meddling in Iraq by its neighbors Americas friends as well as its adversaries.
Just as Iran should come under international pressure to allow Shiites in southern Iraq to develop their own independent future, Washington must help persuade Sunni powers like Syria not to intervene on behalf of Sunni Iraqis. Turkey must be kept from sending troops into Kurdish territories.
Once again: just how do we do that if we've thrown away all our credibility? If we withdraw from Iraq, pressure will be such that we'll have to withdraw from the entire region. Not a single friend there will trust us any longer, and each and every enemy will be emboldened.
For this effort to have any remote chance, Mr. Bush must drop his resistance to talking with both Iran and Syria.
Just what exactly do we 'talk' about with a murderous thug and the Mad Mullahs? What pressure would we exert? Negotiating implies our having some leverage. Again, we wouldn't have any, so what would there be to 'talk' about, other than our humiliation and surrender in the region?
Britain, France, Russia, China and other nations with influence have a responsibility to help. Civil war in Iraq is a threat to everyone, especially if it spills across Iraqs borders.
'Threat to everyone'? More likely an opportunity to many.
President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have used demagoguery and fear to quell Americans demands for an end to this war. They say withdrawing will create bloodshed and chaos and encourage terrorists. Actually, all of that has already happened the result of this unnecessary invasion and the incompetent management of this war.
You've already admitted that it could -- that is, would -- be worse if we withdrew. The President has been clear about the consequences of withdraw because, well, the consequences are clear. We'd be humiliated. Not just the President, not just Republicans, we -- America -- would be ruined in the world. If your goal is to cause our friends never to trust us again, if your goal is to precipitate a bloodbath in Iraq, if your goal is to sow defeat and discord in our own country -- then by all means, follow the counsel of the NYT.
This country faces a choice. We can go on allowing Mr. Bush to drag out this war without end or purpose. Or we can insist that American troops are withdrawn as quickly and safely as we can manage with as much effort as possible to stop the chaos from spreading.
Or we could get the job done. We made a decision, one that was popular both with the country as a whole and in the Congress. The opponents of war had their say in 2002, and the country rejected their arguments. None of us likes war, and all of us want this war to be over -- but not by walking away and condemning 26 million people to hell. In the end, the NYT's call is childish in its irresponsibility. Americans are many things, but we won't be irrresponsible. We did that once in a place called Vietnam -- turned our backs on a decent people -- and we learned from that mistake. We won't do that again.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/09/2007 00:00 ||
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#1
You get some sort of award for being able to wade through that sophomoric, delusional crap, Steve. Alarmingly, the always-mediocre GOP Senate rank-and-file are showing signs of above-average cowardice and cluelessness. The administration continues with its silent, invisible act, while the military does its best with a vastly better yet still practically impossible strategy in Iraq. (impossible because the ideological fanaticism about not using violence, intimidation, and power to change facts and minds still haunts and shapes and limits things, from what I can tell - just imagine the enemy or our Iraqi allies reading Kilcullen's musings in translation and trying to comprehend the parts where magic and persuasion fill key roles).
I still think there's a better than even chance Congress won't pull the plug in the fall (cowardice will continue to exceed cluelessness for now). But it's hard to be optimistic when the boldest, most realistic leadership in 50 years has morphed into dead-end shopworn policies (Palestinians), timidity (Iran, both within Iraq and regarding nukes), cowardly and disastrous abandonment of top-rate water-carriers (Bolton, Wolfowitz, et al) to the lynch mobs of the utterly despicable global elites and domestic idiot/opponents, with a delusional domestic policy jeremiad (immigration "reform") tossed in for good measure.
Remember - this is probably the BEST crew we're likely to have in power. We'll survive, but thousands who gave all will be dishonored, moral insanity will have blossomed without effective response (barbarous mass terrorism in Iraq? yawn .... microscopic misbehavior by US troops? epochal crisis!), and many who felt engaged by 9/11 will be more alienated and cynical than they ever thought possible (count me in).
#2
If the President were to withdraw our troops, there is only one statement he could make that would deflect blame from him by the Dhimmicrats. That being the same statement the UN General Secretary made regarding the cuase of genocide in Africa...
Blaming "Global Warming" for losing in Iraq. OH!! DHIMMICRATS WOULD LOVE HIM for using that excuse.
#4
That conversation must be candid and focused. Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide.
Interesting to note the NY Times offers "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide" as potentially acceptable effects of a US pull out. Apparently the events in the last century at places like Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzek and Majdanek have escaped the memory of the "Times." Inshallah, it would only be the peasants who would suffer (as always), most of the wealthy have already fled Iraq and become "Times" subscribers. On the one to ten rubbish scale, the times rates a solid TEN for this piece of perd kak.
#5
Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide.
But that's nothing at all, right? These morally pretentious liberals are more concerned with pleasing deranged antiwar activists like Cindy al-Sheehan than with preventing another Cambodia circa 1975.
#6
If the Sunnis hate the Shiites and the Shiites hate the Sunnis that much then it is hopeless anyway.
Yeah, and them Rebs and Yankees ain't never gonna git over it, neither.
But we don't kill each other too much, anymore.
Steve - I'd rather read your editorial, but it is interspersed with too much rotting tripe delivered by an idiot, who apparently never read what he/she wrote.
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/09/2007 6:06 Comments ||
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#7
If there was a mistake it was in thinking arabs could participate in a democracy. The jury is not - quite - back yet on that one. And if that was the mistake the answer would have been to break everything and quarantine all countries with too many moohamheads. I include England and France in that list until they face facts and deal with it.
#8
I'm thinking that soon, we'll see an unofficial "season" on Liberals. Maybe along the lines of .com's oft mentioned H/K teams, but NOT sanctioned by the Government, of course.
Faster, faster, the lights are turning red...
-The Eagles
Posted by: Natural Law ||
07/09/2007 9:58 Comments ||
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#9
The moderate Republicans are running for cover. They don't need the full monty withdrawal, just something they can take to the folks at home to show that they are "concerned." Timetables do that trick. First there will be voluntary timetables attached to a funding bill. W will veto that bill. His veto will be overridden. That will be August/September. The next salvo will be mandatory timetables. That will be harder, but could happen. W will probably get a veto on that sustained, but not by much. That will be October/November. They will try again after the new year, hoping to squeeze real, legislated timetables in before the primary season gets in full swing. If Bush loses just one or two more "moderate" Republicans, there will be mandatory timetables, either by Thanksgiving or just after the new year. And then the only thing that will save Iraq will be a stupid move by Iran.
Like I said before: barring something unforeseen, Saigon 1975.
Posted by: Jonathan ||
07/09/2007 10:29 Comments ||
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#10
I believe the only real control the Congress has over the war effort is the funding. They can timetable themselves into a lather, but have no power to enforce timetables. Why it's the perfect RINO talking point, like global warming is to the socialists.
#11
Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave.
So...that's why we should leave?
Makes about as much sense as the rest of this pile of NYT crap. The ignorance and naiveity in this thing is mind numbing...
#12
I believe the only real control the Congress has over the war effort is the funding. They can timetable themselves into a lather, but have no power to enforce timetables.
If there are timetables, and W ignores them, the Dems might consider that grounds for impeachment. (Stranger things have happened.) Impeachment means legislation grinds to a halt in the House until articles of impeachment are sorted out. No legislation means no funding bills. No funding bills means defunding of the war without actually going on record as doing so. For the DemonRats, it's win/win.
Posted by: Jonathan ||
07/09/2007 13:09 Comments ||
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#13
The donks don't want President Cheney, so ignore impeachment.
And the donks can't override a veto of a mandated deadline, so ignore that.
And the donks don't want to take responsibility for defeat by cutting off funds, so ignore that.
Which means that Bush will do pretty much what he is doing now.
And the donks will get to beat on him for it for the next 18 months. They'll get a lot of pleasure out of it and the rest of the country will become discomfitted, and ignore them.
#14
The road home goes thru IRAN, NORTH KOREA, TAIWAN, AFRICA, etc. and all sides know it. The DemoLeft-MSM like to talk to pullout and withdrawal, but as Leftists-Govtists don't mean it, becuz for one nuthin excites them like new resources for the Present and Future Global Welfare-Army State, which is what Dubya-US led entrenchment in the ME means to the Left, and why Moud can no longer rely on the anti-US, pro-OWG/Globalist US-Western Lefts. THE WAR FOR THE WORLD, WAR FOR GLOBAL DEMOCRACY = GLOBAL ANTI-DEMOCRACY, .........@ETAL. THAT BEGAN ON 9-11 WILL LIKELY HAVE TO BE BEEN SEEN TO ITS BITTER END BY ANY AND ALL SIDES, whether they like it or not. Osama and Radical Islam INTENDED FINAL GLOBAL WAR TO THE DEATH AGZ AMERICA + WEST WHEN THEY FIRST PLANNED 9-11. INTENT > The USA-West dies, or Radical islam = Islam in general dies.
Iraqis call Ali Hassan al-Majeed "Chemical Ali," and few wept when the notorious former general received five death sentences last month for ordering the use of nerve agents against his government's Kurdish citizens in the late 1980s. His trial came as a reckoning and a reminder -- summoning up the horrors of Saddam Hussein's rule even as it underscored the way today's heated Iraq debates in Washington have left the key issue of human rights on the sidelines. People of goodwill can certainly disagree over how to handle Iraq, but human rights should be part of any responsible calculus. Unfortunately, some leaders continue to play down the gross violations in Iraq under Hussein's republic of fear and ignore the potential for a human rights catastrophe should the United States withdraw.
As the hideous violence in Iraq continues, it has become increasingly common to hear people argue that the world was better off with Hussein in power and (even more remarkably) that Iraqis were better off under his fist. In his final interview as U.N. secretary general, Kofi Annan acknowledged that Iraq "had a dictator who was brutal" but said that Iraqis under the Baathist dictatorship "had their streets, they could go out, their kids could go to school."
This line of argument began soon after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. By early 2004, some prominent political and intellectual leaders were arguing that women's rights, gay rights, health care and much else had suffered in post-Hussein Iraq.
Following in the footsteps of George Bernard Shaw, Walter Duranty and other Western liberals who served as willing dupes for Joseph Stalin, some members of the human rights community are whitewashing totalitarianism. A textbook example came last year from John Pace, who recently left his post as U.N. human rights chief in Iraq. "Under Saddam," he said, according to the Associated Press, "if you agreed to forgo your basic freedom of expression and thought, you were physically more or less OK."
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/09/2007 00:00 ||
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#1
Enjoy totalitarian nostalgia do you?
According to documentation from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, the SS helped finance Nazi war criminal Haj Amin Muhammad al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and his efforts in the 1936-39 uprising in Palestine. Adolf Eichmann actually visited Palestine and met Husseini at that time and subsequently maintained regular contact with him later in Berlin. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, took Husseini on tours of Auschwitz and financed his Moslem academy in Dresden, set up by the Nazis as a training ground for their envisioned Nazi/Muslim puppet government. Husseini recruited Bosnian Muslims in Nazi occupied Yugoslavia in his efforts to ethnically cleanse their country of Jews. When the Red Cross offered to mediate with Eichmann in a trade between German citizens and 10,000 Jewish children being sent from Poland to the Theresienstadt death camp, Husseini directly intervened with Himmler and was successful in canceling the exchange.
#2
I am beginning to think we should not rule out the bloodbath option. If you can guarantee me all out war between Turkey, Iran and some mish-mash of Arabs then I say arm all sides and let popcorn time begin. Even another Clinton presidency might have this silver lining.
The article is too long to post in it's entirety, but it is definitely interesting on different levels. Section 4 caught my eye.
Human nature is one of those things that everybody talks about but no one can define precisely. Every time we fall in love, fight with our spouse, get upset about the influx of immigrants into our country, or go to church, we are, in part, behaving as a human animal with our own unique evolved naturehuman nature.
This means two things. First, our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are produced not only by our individual experiences and environment in our own lifetime but also by what happened to our ancestors millions of years ago. Second, our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are shared, to a large extent, by all men or women, despite seemingly large cultural differences.
Human behavior is a product both of our innate human nature and of our individual experience and environment. In this article, however, we emphasize biological influences on human behavior, because most social scientists explain human behavior as if evolution stops at the neck and as if our behavior is a product almost entirely of environment and socialization. In contrast, evolutionary psychologists see human nature as a collection of psychological adaptations that often operate beneath conscious thinking to solve problems of survival and reproduction by predisposing us to think or feel in certain ways. Our preference for sweets and fats is an evolved psychological mechanism. We do not consciously choose to like sweets and fats; they just taste good to us.
The implications of some of the ideas in this article may seem immoral, contrary to our ideals, or offensive. We state them because they are true, supported by documented scientific evidence. Like it or not, human nature is simply not politically correct.
From last month.
Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre recently participated in a conference with editors and journalists from all over the world on how to report diversity in a non-offensive manner, with Arab News from Saudi Arabia as one of the moderators. The Cartoon Jihad the year before had prompted Indonesia and Norway to join forces and promote a Global Inter-Media Dialogue. In June 2007 this was held in Oslo.
Agnes Callamard from free speech NGO Article 19 voiced her concern that it could prove difficult to implement the ideal of equal representation and visibility of all groups in society if we do not control what is presented in the media. Diversity ethnic, cultural and religious has to permeate the media if we are to succeed in promoting the Multicultural society. Article 19 is supposedly a human rights organization with a specific focus on the defense of freedom of expression.
As they define it, of course, and they've decided that diversity must 'permeate' our 'free' speech.
Callamard, its Executive Director, has according to their website evolved a distinguished career in human rights and humanitarian work, formerly worked for fellow human rights NGO Amnesty International, has been published widely in the field of human rights and holds a Ph.D. in Political Science.
#1
Diène said that it is a dangerous development when increasing numbers of intellectuals in the West now believe that some cultures are better than others.
In a triumph of intellectual denial Diène declares advanced cultures to be more evil than the philosophical felony of moral relativism. Those in the West who continue to elevate brutal and archaic socieites to the same status as ones that enshrine constitutional law should one day go on trial for crimes against humanity. These traitors are are hacking at the drawbridge's ropes in order to submerge Western culture in a flood of barbaric savages. This is self-loathing writ large and externalized into a hatred of one's own society.
The Villain Class of Multiculturalism seems to be Western culture and persons who happen to be born with a white skin. Any problems will automatically be blamed on white racism, which will ensue more suppression of free speech for whites.
Politically Correct politics are the beachhead of this assault upon America's constitutional liberties. In the guise of liberal tolerance these scum give preference to even the most vicious totalitarians just so long as they are not American or white.
Doesnt this mean that the Swedish state and its cultural elites are indirectly responsible for driving their own people away from their homes? I think it does, and I think future generations will view this policy as an example of pure evil. I also think they will find it difficult to understand how the Villain Class could in this case be the majority population, not a minority. There are several reasons for this, but I find it hard to believe whether this would have been possible without the incessant ridicule and demonization of whites and their culture that has now become an established part of the mainstream ideology.
Just as no good deed goes unpunished, so has whiteman's burden been twisted into an intolerable millstone of constant apology for America's undeniable success as an economic powerhouse. These are the Zero-Sum cultists attempting to pervert capitalism's triumph into a war-cry for all victim cultures wherever they may be.
#2
Its sad, however, that Europeans appear to be more agitated over and willing to demonstrate against capitalism than against the Islamization of their continent.
Because the demonstrators are cowards. They know if they demonstrated against the current Islamizaton of Europe, they would be inciting violence against themselves by Islamists.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
