The End of Faith

Sam Harris’s The End of Faith is a well-executed polemic of a kind that, in retrospect, has been curiously absent in the West over the last fifty years. Not since I read Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian in the early 1970s have I seen an attack on organized religion as clear, uncompromising,… Continue reading The End of Faith

If the Shoe Fits…

From Confederate Yankee comes the story that an Iraqi journalist named Ali Fadhil claims U.S. soldiers invaded and shot up his home, then hustled him off for questioning before inexplicably returning him unharmed. What’s supposed to make this especially shocking is that he was working for a British newspaper, the Guardian.

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The smell of victory, part deux

Aha. The Sunnis say they want to work with US. This comes hard in the heels of reports that the Baathist dead-enders protected al-Qaeda polling places from jihadis during the just-concluded elections, in which turnout pushed 70% even in the heart of the Sunni triangle.

Is that victory I smell?

The last two days have seen a triple whammy for the Islamofascists and their Western quislings. The Iraqi elections were a thumping success; congressional Democrats voted in a resolution supporting prosecution of the Iraq war; and the Patriot Act failed to be renewed.

Secret prisons

I’m having real trouble understanding the current flap over allegations that the CIA is running secret overseas prisons for terrorists and enemy combatants. I would prefer not to believe this is just another outbreak of reflexive anti-Americanism, but I don’t see any principled case against what is being alleged. Can anyone explain it to me?

Just desserts

There comes to us from Iraq the news that a terrorist group calling itself Sword of Truth has kidnapped four people from a group called Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) and has threatened to kill them unless some demands for the release of certain terrorists from Iraqi jails are met. What makes this interesting is that… Continue reading Just desserts

Suicidalism

The most important weapons of al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist terror network are the suicide bomber and the suicide thinker. The suicide bomber is typically a Muslim fanatic whose mission it is to spread terror; the suicide thinker is typically a Western academic or journalist or politician whose mission it is to destroy… Continue reading Suicidalism

Getting Orwell Wrong

The interpretation of George Orwell could be a paradigm for how dead literary figures get knocked from pillar to post by the winds of political interpretation. During his lifetime, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm went from darling of the left to exile for having been willing to write the truth about Communist totalitarianism… Continue reading Getting Orwell Wrong

Libertarian realism

I hate war. Even when the results of defeat would be worse than the results of war, I hate war. It kills people and makes government stronger. But when the results of defeat would be worse, I face reality and support war. Our Islamist enemies want to kill us all — starting with Jews and… Continue reading Libertarian realism

Kurds in the Coal Mine

How will we know if the attempt to reconstruct Iraq is failing? This is a serious question. With as much hysterical anti-Iraq-war, anti-Bush-Administration fabrication going in the media as there has been, it’s tempting for a rational person to dismiss every negative report as just another load of Michael Mooronism and dismiss it. That would… Continue reading Kurds in the Coal Mine

Sowing Dragon’s Teeth

David Lucas’s op-ed in the Knoxville News-Sentinel combines with this story about active-duty military personnel criticizing Edward Kennedy and Dick Durbin’s “gulag” rhetoric about Guantanamo Bay to suggest something interesting about the long-term political impact of the Iraq War. Historically, one of the major byproducts of American wars is politicians. While it’s rare for a… Continue reading Sowing Dragon’s Teeth

The Hollywood Left is from Venus?

David Koepp, the screenwriter behind the current blockbuster movie War of the Worlds has said: “the Martians in our movie represent American military forces invading the Iraqis.” As InstaPundit observed, you just can’t make this stuff up. It’s hard to lampoon the Hollywood left any more, because they keep uttering inanities that venture beyond far,… Continue reading The Hollywood Left is from Venus?

How the Left Betrayed Iraq

Every opponent of the war in Iraq must read this essay by an Iraqi, How The Left Betrayed My Country. Short, sweet, and devastating.

War is the Continuation of Journalism

StrategyPage reports that Baathist dead-enders in Iraq are now using press credentials as cover. Some Iraqis working for Reuters were arrested after an attack on U.S. troops guarding a downed helicopter. Reuters is now protesting that this was an error. Considering the virulently anti-American slant of Reuters coverage, this is bleakly funny. Those Iraqi employees… Continue reading War is the Continuation of Journalism

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Lessons of Libya

Muammar Qaddaffi, Libya’s dictator and long-time terrorist sugar-daddy, has agreed to dismantle his WMD programs and allow international inspections. The NYT’s December 20th article Lessons of Libya, covering this development, is unintentionally hilarious. An honest account would probably have read something like this: When Qaddafi saw the Hussein capture pictures they must have scared him… Continue reading Lessons of Libya

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Dehumanization

A reader, responding to the suggestion that we call the Baathist holdouts in Iraq werewolves, asked rhetorically whether the intent was to dehumanize them. Lurking behind this question was the theory that war supporters like me need to make our enemies into un-persons in order to justify continuing to kill them. This question displays a… Continue reading Dehumanization

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Call them Werewolves

The blogosphere has shown some ability to change the terms and terminology of the terror-war debate in the U.S. It’s time for a bit of meme-hacking. Let’s see if we can displace terms like “insurgent” or “Saddam loyalist” with one that conveys the true depth of evil we are facing. I have a candidate to… Continue reading Call them Werewolves

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Attack of the Malaysian Moonbats

Today, a bunch of prominent warbloggers were hit by a denial-of-service attack apparently orchestrated by a bunch of comically incompetent al-Qaeda affiliates in Malaysia — and I wasn’t a target. I’d ask what I’ve been doing wrong with my life that I missed out on the honor of being personally targeted by Osama’s fuckwit brigade.… Continue reading Attack of the Malaysian Moonbats

No Flies On The U.S.

In his recent article Flypaper: A Strategy Unfolds, Andrew Sullivan trots out some confirming evidence for the theory that the U.S. is pursuing a “flypaper strategy” in Iraq — encouraging the Islamist terror network to fight American soldiers there so they won’t be attacking American civilians here. Mr. Sullivan’s analysis is plausible. Plausible enough that… Continue reading No Flies On The U.S.

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