It’s probably not going to have much negative impact on her pretty much washed up career, but Sharon Stone is persona non grata in China:

LOS ANGELES (AP) – Sharon Stone’s “karma” is having an instant effect on her movie-star status in China.

The 50-year-old actress suggested last week that the devastating May 12 earthquake in China could have been the result of bad karma over the government’s treatment of Tibet. That prompted the founder of one of China’s biggest cinema chains to say his company would not show her films in his theaters, according to a story in The Hollywood Reporter.

“I’m not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans because I don’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else,” Stone said Thursday during a Cannes Film Festival red-carpet interview with Hong Kong’s Cable Entertainment News. “And then this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and then I thought, is that karma? When you’re not nice that the bad things happen to you?”

Ng See-Yuen, founder of the UME Cineplex chain and the chairman of the Federation of Hong Kong Filmmakers, called Stone’s comments “inappropriate,” adding that actors should not bring personal politics to comments about a natural disaster that has left five million Chinese homeless, according to the Reporter.

UME has branches in Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Hangzhou and Guangzhou, China’s biggest urban movie markets.

It’s easy to ridicule the supercilious inanity of Stone’s world view — “I don’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else” — but, hey, anyone who smacks down China, no matter how inanely, is OK with me.

But Sharon, do you think maybe you could add a bit of criticism to the Beijingoists for “being unkind” to China’s long-suffering Christians? Don’t they deserve the attention of your all a-glitter Hollywood self?

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I‘m not sure if I’ve got that third acronym right — Mad Mullahs For Nuking Israel, right? — but the first one sure undercut the second one yesterday, much to the detriment of the third one.

The NIE, National Intelligence Estimate, gave the MMFNI a bunch of breathing room when it came out last December, claiming that to the best of the combined knowledge of the U.S. intelligence community, Iran was not currently pursuing a nuclear weapon. Or at least we were “moderately confident” that was the case.

Israel, for whom mere “moderate confidence” could spell death, was not so sure.

Now it turns out that the IAEA, the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, isn’t so sure either. Its report, released yesterday goes way beyond “moderate confidence” to say Iran’s nuclear weapons program is “a matter of serious concern” because of:

• Willful lack of cooperation
• 18 documents that indicate the Iranians are working on explosives, uranium processing and warhead design — activities the NYT bravely reports “could be associated with constructing nuclear weapons.” Duh.
• Failure to report R&D activities on faster, more productive centrifuges
• Iranian denial of access to sites where centrifuge components were being manufactured and where research of uranium enrichment was being conducted

In short:

“The Iranians are certainly being confronted with some pretty strong evidence of a nuclear weapons program, and they are being petulant and defensive,” said David Albright, a former weapons inspector who now runs the Institute for Science and International Security. “The report lays out what the agency knows, and it is very damning. I’ve never seen it laid out quite like this.”

To which Baghdad Bob Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s ambassador to the atomic energy agency, responded

… that the report vindicated Iran’s nuclear activities. It “is another document that shows Iran’s entire nuclear activities are peaceful,” the semi-official Fars News Agency quoted him as saying.

Anyone who still believes the NIE presented an honest assessment of Iran’s nuke-quest has two choices when confronting the IAEA’s actions: They can admit they were wrong, and that at a minimum we can be “moderately confident” that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, or they can align themselves with the MMFNI.

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The other day, I heard a caller on a talk radio show suggest Joe Lieberman as John McCain’s running mate. I almost ran off the road.

Lieberman gets a lot of conservative love because of his position on the war, but only an ignoramus would want him anywhere within a thousand miles of a GOP ticket since he’s very liberal on everything but the war — an indisputable fact made even less disputable by Lieberman-Warner.

The bill, co-authored by John Warner, would impose on the US a cap and trade system to save the world from industrialization and all the evils (health, prosperity, efficiency, sufficiency) it brings. Stated more honestly, it is the largest statist wealth and power grab to come down the pike (via a Prius) in decades.

The bill seeks to place caps on industrial greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and create a market that would allow clean companies to sell their excess GHG capacity to the highest bidder, with the stated goal of returning to 2005 GHG emission levels by 2012, and to reduce that by 30% by 2030.

Even free-market people have come to accept these cap and trade approaches as acceptable, but they are anything but. Here’s how the WSJ breaks it down:

And for the most part, the politicians favor cap and trade because it is an indirect tax. A direct tax – say, on gasoline – would be far more transparent, but it would also be unpopular. Cap and trade is a tax imposed on business, disguising the true costs and thus making it more politically palatable. In reality, firms will merely pass on these costs to customers, and ultimately down the energy chain to all Americans. Higher prices are what are supposed to motivate the investments and behavioral changes required to use less carbon.

The other reason politicians like cap and trade is because it gives them a cut of the action and the ability to pick winners and losers. Some of the allowances would be given away, at least at the start, while the rest would be auctioned off, with the share of auctions increasing over time. This is a giant revenue grab. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that these auctions would net $304 billion by 2013 and $1.19 trillion over the next decade. Since the government controls the number and distribution of allowances, it is also handing itself the political right to influence the price of every good and service in the economy.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that this meddling would cause a cumulative reduction in the growth of GDP by between 0.9% and 3.8% by 2030. Add 20 years, and the reduction is between 2.4% and 6.9% – that is, from $1 trillion to $2.8 trillion.

Where is global warming amidst all this swirling money and power? Nowhere. If India and China don’t get cleaner, everything we do will be utterly inconsequential. If they do get their act together, everything we do will be almost completely inconsequential.

As long as Bush is in office, this bill will go nowhere. But with all three prez wannabees professing to be deeply engaged in Warmie mysticism (a.k.a. Hystericology), a bill like this will pass in a year or two … unless, miracle of miracles, the elected masses discover that it’s getting cooler, not warmer, both climatically and economically.

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The Peacekeepers are back at it again — “piece-seeking,”‘ not peacekeeping — with their disgusting focus on the children they are sent to protect in war-torn nations. BBC reports on a report from Save The Children:

Save the Children says the most shocking aspect of child sex abuse is that most of it goes unreported and unpunished, with children too scared to speak out.

A 13-year-old girl, “Elizabeth” (pictured here) described to the BBC how 10 UN peacekeepers gang-raped her in a field near her Ivory Coast home.

“They grabbed me and threw me to the ground and they forced themselves on me… I tried to escape but there were 10 of them and I could do nothing,” she said.

“I was terrified. Then they just left me there bleeding.”

No action has been taken against the soldiers.

Don’t let that last sentence pass you by, because it’s the standard operating procedure. Under current Peacekeeping protocols, the UN has no criminal jurisdiction over Peacekeepers; it must rely on the offending Peacekeeper’s home country to prosecute. That’s the excuse, anyway. The UN could conduct a prosecutorial investigation of each alleged crime, forward the file to the Peacekeeper’s home judicial system, and pressure for prosecution. But it rarely does.

You can read the Save The Children report here and the organization’s press release on the report here. Some excerpts from the release:

A new report released today by Save the Children UK shows that children living in conflict-affected countries fear to report sexual exploitation and abuse by UN peacekeeping troops and humanitarian aid workers.

Despite recent political commitments by governments and international organisations to tackle this problem, the report exposes the chronic under-reporting of such abuse, which leaves many children around the world suffering in silence. …

Save the Children UK’s research in Ivory Coast, Southern Sudan and Haiti shows that children as young as six are being abused by adults working for the international community. The children interviewed highlighted many different types of abuse, including trading food for sex, rape, child prostitution, pornography, indecent sexual assault and trafficking of children for sex.

“People don’t report it because they are worried that the agency will stop working here, and we need them”, explained a teenage boy in Southern Sudan….

The report reveals that the perpetrators of sexual abuse of children can be found in every type of humanitarian, peace and security organisation, at every grade of staff, and among both locally recruited and international staff.

For its part, the UN (shown here, looking the other way) said it “welcomed” the report … as it has welcomed numerous reports in the past, dutifully commissioning studies and investigations, all of which have been beautifully bound and carefully set on shelves, but all of which have failed to stop the rapes. Claudia Rosette gets it right:

Oh, great. The UN can add this report to its research collection of previous reports on UN peacekeeper rape in Liberia and Sierra Leone and the Congo and so forth; and we can look forward to more UN statements on the issue, such as Kofi Annan’s “zero tolerance” policy of 2005, or his zero-zero tolerance policy of 2006 (when he “strengthened” the zero tolerance of 2005), and Assistant-Secretary-General Jane Holl Lute’s zero-zero-zero “zero tolerance” promises of 2007 …

Here are the 18 stories I’ve written previously on this topic. Outside of the blogsophere, good luck finding this level of reporting on the Peacekeeper rape crisis.

Imagine, if you will, the press coverage there would be if the abusers at Abu Ghraib kept coming back year after year, with ever more horrific abuse of the prisoners in their care. Even though Abu Ghraib is full of hardened terrorist fighters, not innocent under-age children, the press would be covering it in dozens of front-page stories.

But you don’t see that. You won’t see that. This latest report will slip beneath they tide of type because the media has more important things to do than protecting children from UN Peacekeepers. Yes, it’s a full-time job denigrating America — who has time for anything else?

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Who do they die for, the soldiers we honor today?

Is it the past; for our traditions, our foundations of freedom, our long-burning light for the world?

Is it the present; for brothers and sisters and children and folks who need protection now to secure their futures?

Or is it our future; for the opportunity to live in a world where there is more freedom and less warfare?

All that matters of course is the sacrifice, the tens of thousands of greatest sacrifices of all that we honor today. And for that, I’ll turn to my past, present and future, my first born, back when I was young, who works with me today, and who I pray will be carrying some part of me forward when I’m gone. She is in Washington DC now and I am borrowing my Memorial Day post from the photos she has posted on her trip blog.

Every star on this long, long wall represents one soldier, sailor or marine who lost his or her life in WWII. One of them is for my mom’s cousin Christopher Fassnacht, who’s bomber was shot down over Germany. Thankfully, one is not for my father, who survived submarine warfare in the Pacific to return and live out his part of the Greatest Generation.

I would like someday to help place the 260,000 memorial flags at Arlington — but that honorable task is assigned to the Third United States Infantry Regiment (the Old Guard), not mere civilians like me.

The Vietnam War Memorial moved my daughters greatly, as it does so many. ID #1 has many, many photos of it up on her blog; here’s a selection.

The note says, “I love you — you are my light. I’ll miss you as long as the Sun turns in the sky. Ann.” Michael H. Cavanaugh, you died for your country many years ago and still your light burns, as do so many lights, so many flames of freedom whose lives may have been cut short, but whose flames burn on.

I’ll close with this powerful photo. The Korean War troops patrol in the shadows, their faces etched with the sharp attention they are focusing on their duty; it is as if they are eternally on a dark and dangerous patrol to protect America, who you see in the background, swathed in bright sunlight.

God bless our troops.

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Here’s how most Europeans think about American elections, according to the Financial Times Deutschland:

American politics have undergone drastic change in the past decades except for one thing: we Europeans and especially we Germans hope for a Democrat at every election. We dream of a Kennedy and are then disappointed when we get a Nixon, a Reagan, or a Bush. We thought Reagan was an actor and George W. Bush was a lunatic. And we celebrate each time the Americans bring out a Clinton, a Gore, or an Obama. We celebrate because these candidate’s politics come closest to resembling our nebulous European sentiments.

So of course they’re all giddy over Obama … all except for this same Financial Times Deutschland:

As a European, I can’t really imagine why we would want a President Obama. His “Invest in America” policy can hardly be topped as protectionist mindset, and his “Fair Trade” policies would lead to a restriction of world trade. All this under the cloak of social justice for his constituents.

If it’s all about the economy, stupid, we need a president who can bring us out of the current economic transitional period — and that won’t be the guy who ignores the free market and attempts to force the world economy into a protectionist, non-cooperative box.

On foreign policy, Obama will talk to anyone. On the economy, he’ll talk to no one; his mantra is to talk to no one, no Fair Trade, no foreigners allowed. All that means is that the world will move along without us.

It’s just the stuff to expect should you be foolish enough to elect a neophyte as president.

Hat-tip: Watching America

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A Memorial Day Miracle

This Memorial Day weekend, it would not be right if tears did not well up at least once over a memory or a story of a brave warrior who fell in battle defending our freedoms.

The story of Marine Sgt. Merlin German isn’t really such a story. After all, he fell three years after the IED explosion that starts this story. Sgt. German was, no doubt, a great Marine. But the public story of his greatness began after Iraq, as he was treated for the burns and injuries he sustained in that explosion. His true heroics were found in his will to survive, and to help others survive, and to lift up everyone around him.

Like this:

But he was closest to his mother. When the hospital’s Holiday Ball approached in 2006, German told Norma Guerra [a hospital worker and mother of a serviceman in Iraq] he wanted to surprise his mother by taking her for a twirl on the dance floor.

Guerra thought he was kidding. She knew it could be agony for him just to take a short walk or raise a scarred arm.

But she agreed to help, and they rehearsed for months, without his mother knowing. He chose a love song to be played for the dance: “Have I Told You Lately?” by Rod Stewart.

That night he donned his Marine dress blues and shiny black shoes — even though it hurt to wear them. When the time came, he took his mother in his arms and they glided across the dance floor.

Everyone stood and applauded. And everyone cried.

AP reporter Sharon Cohen writes a wonderful tribute to Sgt. Germany today, ‘Miracle’ Marine refused to surrender will to live. It is a must-read for this Memorial Day weekend.

Many must be reading it, because the web site for the foundation Sgt. Germany set up to help children with burns, Merlin’s Miracles, has crashed. Make a point of going back when it’s up, and if it looks worthy, make a contribution in his memory.

Meanwhile, In Iraq

Sgt. Miracle would have been pleased with this report:

BAGHDAD (AP) – … Rear Adm. Patrick Driscoll, a military spokesman, said violence has dropped some 70 percent since a U.S. troop buildup began nearly a year ago. …

“You are not going to hear me say that al-Qaida is defeated, but they’ve never been closer to defeat than they are now,” Crocker said, speaking in Arabic to reporters during a visit to the Shiite holy city of Najaf.

Driscoll said the number of attacks in the past week had “decreased to the level not seen since March 2004,” due to recent military operations against Shiite militias in Baghdad’s Sadr City and the southern city of Basra, as well as Sunni insurgents in the northern city of Mosul.

Did you catch that last bit? Iraqi military actions (with our support) against both Shi’ites and Sunnis. How can the Left say we’re not making progress in Iraq?

Governor Romney … Of California?

Mitt Romney has an oceanfront house in escrow in San Diego’s toniest seaside town, La Jolla. San Diego Union Tribune columnist Diane Bell asks:

The question of the day: Could Romney be planning to establish residency in California with an eye on the governor’s seat? Gov. Schwarzenegger is forced out by term limits in 2010. Stay tuned . .

The Death Of Global Warming?

Skeptics haven’t been able to kill it. Ten consecutive years of cooler weather since the last hotest year hasn’t been able to kill it. But politics just might kill global warming.

In England Warmie fanatic and premier Gordon Brown is being counseled to drop extremely unpopular taxes to discourage car use:

Gordon Brown is being urged by ministers to scrap rises in car taxes and petrol duty as he struggles to regain popularity after a humiliating by-election defeat. …

Cabinet colleagues are privately urging him to tackle the issue of motoring costs as a way of helping households struggling with rising fuel, energy and food bills. (Guardian)

And in Japan:

These rugged green mountains, once home to one of Asia’s most productive coal regions, are littered with abandoned mines and decaying towns – backwaters of an economy of bullet trains and hybrid cars. But after decades of seemingly terminal decline, Japan’s coal country is stirring again. With energy prices reaching record highs – oil settled above $135 a barrel on Thursday – Japan’s high-cost mines are suddenly competitive again, and demand for their coal is booming.

That’s from the NYT that also tells us:

In recent months, South Korea has experienced calls to create a domestic coal industry in order to reduce dependence on imports. In the United Kingdom, where coal’s decline became a symbol of withered industrial might, companies are increasing production and considering reopening at least one closed mine as demand for British coal rises.

This is getting good! Just as Greenie politics are getting successful enough to actually impact the economy, politicians are trying to figure out how to bring government facilitation of Warmie fanaticism to an end.

hat-tip: Greenie Watch

Dead Revolutionary

Ah, the romance of the revolutionary life!

The leader of Latin America’s largest and longest- surviving insurgency group, Manuel “Sureshot” Marulanda, died from a heart attack at the weekend, raising hopes in Colombia that a 44-year-old civil war which has claimed 200,000 lives may finally be drawing to an end. (Times of London)

Let’s recap. Marulanda spent his early life trying to try to overthrow a government so he could be another Castro. He failed miserably in that effort, but continued the obviously failed effort for no other reason than to stay employed, bringing death to thousands in the process.

Were the people made better by his life? Was the world? Of course not. The revolution was nothing more than a means to his ends, and how he’s ended, a failure, an evil that is no more. Now can the rest of FARC join him?

Hysterical Mommies At The NYT

Nervous, nail-biting mommies most have overtaken the NYT editorial board. Here’s what they had to say last week:

Anybody worried about the potential danger from plastic bottles and cups, especially for the very young, should take note. The Canadian government has announced plans to restrict the use of bisphenol-a, or BPA, a chemical used to make hardened plastics. The government would prohibit the sale of baby bottles made with BPA. (Those are the ones with the numeral 7 in the triangle stamp on the bottom).

The editorial goes on to call on Congress to push for a ban of BPA in baby bottles or cups, and to authorize investigations into the use of BPA in bike helmets and baby seats.

I’m sorry, but moms are already too worried about far too many things that don’t deserve their worry, and the NYT should be more careful … more reportorial … before they heap another worry on them. Here’s the Stats Blog on just how unfounded the NYT hysteria is:

There are moments when you wonder whether the world is going insane over the wrong health risks. Take BPA. There is no study showing that BPA harms humans or that BPA leaching from baby bottles poses an actual, measurable risk.

The European Union’s Food Safety Authority conducted a risk assessment focusing on the threat to infants in 2006; it was carried out by 21 independent scientists; it raised the Tolerable Daily Intake (TDI) by a factor of five; in other words, it found BPA considerably safer than it first thought – so safe a mother could give her baby four times the normal number of bottles per day before reaching the threshold of safe consumption (which has an additional safety factor of 100).

The Japanese government also conducted a risk assessment: no risk; a non-profit international consumer safety organization NSF did a risk assessment under the guidance of Calvin Willhite of the California EPA which was published a couple of months ago: again, no risk. The Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction did a risk analysis last year, and dismissed most of the risks activists had been complaining about for years; but they did have some concern over certain animal studies. Oddly, these studies and the effects were not the one’s commonly touted by anti-BPA activists. The National Toxicology Program agreed with the CERHR, but said there was no cause for alarm.

One common thread in these risk assessments is that some of the scientific research has been rejected. In fact, the same scientific research keeps getting rejected no matter which country is doing the risk assessment.

The Stats Blog, from George Mason University, receives no industry funding. It’s just dedicated to trying to get people to report on statistical analyses more accurately.

Surely, readers deserve editorial writers that do a little bit more in the way of reporting, that are a bit more scientifically savvy, that have the nerve to exercise the journalistic equivalent of the precautionary principle, before igniting panic and telling Congress what it should be doing?

Amen.

Incredible Wife says it’s all well and good, but that glass bottles are better in any case, and if BPA makes them more available again, so much the better. But that’s another story.

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While doing some reading up on North Korea I found a particularly thorough 2003 article in New Republic that included this fascinating tidbit about the Korean People’s Army:

… the height requirement for new recruits is now 1.3 metres, reflecting the effects of nearly two decades of malnutrition.

For the metric impaired, that’s 4′ 3″. In 2005, the average American male was 5′ 9 1/2″ and the average woman was 5′ 4″ (source). The New Republic article doesn’t make it clear whether the 4′ 3″ height is there mainly to capture NoKo women into the army, and it is a minimum height, not an average height, but its extreme shrimpiness is proof positive that the poor people of North Korea are being starved by their regime.

The article also makes it clear the NoKo cult culture is fanatical and allegiance to Li’l Kim is practically molecular among the long-suffering people. It is not a country where we can expect a people’s uprising … or, at least, expect a people’s uprising to succeed.

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I‘m reading Douglas Feith’s War and Decision on my Kindle, and am finding myself periodically “cutting” pages electronically for filing and future reference, and adding notes regularly — excellent features that make the Kindle a good little reference tool.

This morning, I read Feith’s summary of Rumsfeld’s “Strategic Thoughts” memo that presented to President Bush the Pentagon’s thinking at the conclusion of initial planning for the war in Afghanistan. It’s fascinating to read today, so I’ll present Feith’s narrative and excerpts here. Italicized sections are from the actual memo; non-italicized indented sections are from Feith.

In the “Strategic Thoughts” paper, our main point was that the United States should be focusing on the state actors within the enemy network, which could create a strategic and humanitarian nightmare for us by giving a terrorist group a biological or nuclear weapon that could kill hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps even millions.

This purpose, so vivid in the days after 9/11, has faded now for many, but continues to be very real as Iran pursues its bomb, Islamists struggle to take over Pakistan, and intelligence reports of terrorist queries into various WMD components continue to trouble those who think rationally.

One way to disrupt terrorist groups was to compel their state sponsors to change policies on terrorism and on weapons of mass destruction. This could be done, we reasoned, through military action against some of the state sponsors, and pressure– short of war — against others. The effectiveness of the diplomatic pressure would hinge to some extent on the success of our military actions.

Contrast that with Obama’s no preconditions, no military presence in Iraq approach.

In some cases, we would get leverage by aiding local opposition groups, rather than sending U.S. forces to take the lead in overthrowing foreign regimes. The regimes that supported terrorism tended to be oppressive domestically as well as aggressive internationally, so there were opposition groups in various countries that we could assist as a way of pressuring the leaders there. The U.S. “strategic theme,” Rumsfeld advised the president, should be “aiding local peoples to rid themselves of terrorists and to free themselves of regimes that support terrorism.”

We are seeing this work in Iraq today as local citizens are contributing information that is putting al-Qaeda on the run, but in general, the long war in Iraq is preventing us from implementing enough of this strategic theme elsewhere in Repressistan.

The United States could set up the pattern in Afghanistan by supporting the anti-Taliban and anti-al-Qaeda militias:

Air strikes against al Qaeda and Taliban targets are planned to begin soon. But, especially in the war’s initial period, I think US military action should stress:

• indirect (through local, non-US forces) action, in coordination with and in support of opposition groups;

• direct use of US forces initially primarily to deliver logistics, intelligence and other support to opposition groups and humanitarian supplies to NGOs and refugees, and subsequently
• on-the-ground action against the terrorists as individuals — leaders and others …

This is not at all as the war turned out, although it is pretty much how the war is today.

Rumsfeld cautioned that the United States should be restrained on air strikes until we had sufficient intelligence to mandate “impressive (worthwhile) strikes” against al Qaeda and other targets. In an especially remarkable passage, he also advised the President that victory in in the war on terrorism would require geopolitical changes substantial enough to cause every regime supporting terrorists to worry about its vulnerability:

If the war does not significantly change the world’s political map, the U.S. will not achieve its aim. There is value in being clear on the order of magnitude of the necessary change. The USG [U.S. government] should envision a goal along these lines:

• New regimes in Afghanistan and [some other states] that support terrorism (to strengthen political and military policies elsewhere.

• Syria and Lebanon.
• Dismantlement or destruction of WMD in [key states]
• End of many other countries’ support or tolerance of terrorism.

Feith does not reveal the other states where regime change and destruction of WMD capabilities were envisioned; presumably they are Iraq, Iran and North Korea (and Syria and Cuba to a lesser extent). Two of the three biggies still exist and there is little sign that we have moved them one bit off their positions immediately post 9-11. We have done much, but not enough, to stop other countries’ support of or tolerance for terrorism, but these bullets are still largely unrealized.

Rumsfeld again raised the idea of deferring military strikes in Afghanistan:

• It would instead be surprising and impressive if we built our forces up patiently, took some early action outside of Afghanistan, perhaps in multiple locations, and began not exclusively or primarily with military strikes but with train-and-equip activities with local opposition forces and humanitarian aid and intense information operations.

• We could thereby:

• Garner actionable intelligence on lucrative targets, which we do not now have.

• Reduce emphasis on images of US killing Moslems from the air.
• Signal that our goal is not merely to damage terrorist-supporting regimes but to threaten their regimes by becoming partners with their opponents.
• Capitalize on our strong suit, which is not finding a few hundred terrorists in caves in Afghanistan, but in the vastness of our military and humanitarian resources, which can strengthen the opposition forces in terrorist-supporting states.

I am impressed with the clarity and visionary quality this original strategic framework for the GWOT. It is a decidedly American strategy, predicated on our military capabilities, for sure, but also on the belief that people will strive for freedom. It is also typically American in that it is designed to avoid unnecessary deaths and promote humanitarian responses.

It is not, unfortunately, entirely as the war has worked out. “Misunderestimating” the distrust of America in Muslim lands and the ability of Sunni and Shi’ia terror groups to exploit that misunderstanding in the early years of the war ended up focusing our efforts almost exclusively on only two theaters of war, and on war more than humanitarianism. (Yes, of course the humanitarianism is there, but it is not the world’s focus due to the successful efforts of our enemies to refocus attention on violence.) As a result, we are seen too much as occupiers and not enough as liberators; a false perception, but much of the world’s perception nonetheless.

Feith’s book is showing me that there was much more careful thought going into the GWOT than the left would have us believe. There were no cowboys. But it also shows that war is not as much about well laid plans as it is about what really happens once forces are set into action — and if we made more of that in our strategic planning, we might not be as likely to get into difficult, almost intractable situations, as we have in Iraq.

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If you’re feeling particularly American this Memorial Day weekend, you might want to spend some time at DC & NYC Trip, the blog Incredible Daughter #1 is putting up for the trip she and Incredible Daughter #2 are taking of the two cities in the title.

They’re in DC now and ID #1′s commentary is, as usual, full of facts, great photos and emotions (she had me choked up about the 9-11 display at the Newseum in DC). Here are a few of her photos:

Just so you can see she knows how to take a good memorial picture.

This was the last frame on the destroyed camera of the only news photographer killed in the collapse of the WTC on 9/11.

And just for fun, this is Incredible Daughter #2 telling the guy at the head of the soup line at the FDR Memorial, “No soup today!” (I wonder if the memorial makes it clear that all of FDR’s programs combined did little or nothing to end the depression, but they were very effective in forever ending small government in the US. Probably not.)

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