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s I mentioned yesterday, liberal blogger Dan Chmielewski and I have been in a “wall war” on facebook over Gitmo and, with his last post, the whole raison d’etra of the Iran war.  Chmielewski posed a two-parter:

You didn’t answer the question Laer; what did we win? Seton Hall researchers put out an announcement that the ARMY got the numbers wrong with the 61/now 63 former detainees having rejoined the fray.

Al Qaeda was never in Iraq during Saddam’s reign and where there only on a token level after we invaded. Disagreements between the Sunni and the Sh’ia will more likely turn Iraq into a theocracy than a Democracy.

Let’s start with the numbers, then turn to what we’ve won in Iraq.

UPDATE: I’ve now added the discussion on what we won in Iraq.

Why would Chmielewski expect the number of detainees returning to battle to be low? Why would released detainees not go back to fighting us?  Did they learn the beauty of the American system in Guantanamo?  Did they renounce jihad as war against the infidel and accept it as war against inner demons?  Some, maybe, but more likely the detainees would respond the same way our servicemen and women would respond if the shoe were on the other foot.

If the Islamists were enlightened enough to even have prisoners instead of considering our captured soldiers to be nothing more than beheading and mutilation targets, and if they bent to the shrieks of the libs and released them, the released soldiers and Marines would be aching to get back into the fight.  Chmielewski is either not thinking this through, or he’s ascribing to the Islamists character traits I see no evidence of them having: pacifism, doubts about Islam, flexibility, complacency, love of America.  Is he giving the detainees some sort of hero status like Sacco, Vanzetti and the Rosenbergs, and thereby misreading what they’ll do upon release? Quite possibly.

So there’s clearly a basis justifying the acceptance of the numbers – but are they accurate?  Here’s the base report, as reported on Voice of America:

The United States Department of Defense says the number of former Guantanamo Bay detainees returning to terrorist activities is on the rise.

Pentagon Spokesman Geoff Morrell told reporters on Tuesday that 61 former detainees from the U.S. military facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba have returned to the fight against the United States and its allies.

Morrell said that a Defense Department report compiled in December found a substantial increase in the number of detainees returning to terrorism.

“Prior to this report, the rate had been about seven percent of those who had been held at Guantanamo and released and those that had been confirmed or suspected of returning to the fight. At that point, we suspected that 37 former detainees had returned to the fight,” said Morrell. “We now believe that that number has increased and that the overall known terrorist re-engagement rate has increased to 11 percent.”

Morrell said that of the former detainees who returned to terrorism, 18 are confirmed and 43 are suspected of participating in terrorist activities. He says fingerprints, photographs and intelligence materials were used to tie some of the former detainees to terrorist activities.

Chmielewski may be going with the confirmed number and I – and most other non-libs – are going with the confirmed and suspected total.  Before he chimes in that one can hardly trust a Voice of America report (as if VOA hasn’t been swallowed up whole by libs), let me add this from the VOA story:

But Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall University Law School has represented some of the detainees and says the Pentagon has failed to produce evidence of early claims that former detainees have returned to the battlefield.

“The numbers are wrong about who has returned to the fight; their numbers and names are wrong about who has been in Guantanamo. And, of course, the characterization of ‘returned to the fight’ is far broader than they would like to admit,” said Denbeaux. “What they would like is to be understood to mean as ‘return to the battlefield,’ but, of course, that hasn’t happened. So what they mean by ‘return to the fight’ is engaging in propaganda battles and criticisms of the United States at home and abroad.”

Weasels. If someone comes out of Gitmo and becomes, instead of a footsoldier, a general, a recruiter, a fundraiser, or a weapons procurer, then Prof. Denbeaux of Seton Hall won’t count them as “returned to the fight.”  That’s like saying David Petraeus is no longer a military asset to the U.S. because he’s now in Tampa, not Baghdad.  Denbeaux is proving my point by this argument.  If the detainees released from Guantanamo aren’t returning to the battlefield, then those that still are engaged in jihad against us are fighting at a higher level in the command structure – increasing the likelihood that they were significant enough assets to begin with to require continued detention.

It’s not the least bit surprising that Denbeaux would question the numbers, or that libs would flock to him as a more believable source than the Pentagon.  He doesn’t hide his contempt for Guantanamo and the U.S. military. Here’s the lead of his bio:

Professor Mark Denbeaux, one of Seton Hall’s most senior faculty members, is also the Director of the Seton Hall Law School Center for Policy and Research, which is best known for its disseminatino of the internationally recognized series of reports on the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. Denbeaux’s interest in the conditions of detainment arose from his representation of two detainees there.

Following his visits to GITMO, and his participation in amicus briefs arising from the rules governing the hearings for “enemy combatants,” Denbeaux realized the need for an analysis of the government’s assumptions and the principles governing the detention process. The Guantánamo report series are primarily produced by Seton Hall Law students of all levels. Several graduates have remained research fellows, as well.

So Denbeaux is on the side of the detainees, not the military (note the all-telling quotes around “enemy combatants”). It’s not the least bit surprising hat since he’s dedicating his life to freeing these scum, he does not want to admit that they are, in fact, scum.  He’s espoused his theories on Rachel Maddow’s show and at teach-ins, so he’s got to be more believable than the U.S. government.  No word on who, exactly, his observers in the field are and why they’re more accurate than the U.S. military.

So you have the U.S. military, which obviously has an agenda but is also an open society with internal checks and balances, and which also has extensive resources in the field, up against a guy who’s sided with (“alleged”) terrorists, is prejudiced against Guantanamo and the war, and has no resources to draw information from than the detainees themselves.

Yet Chmielewski sides with Denbeaux and supports his position on the war in part by believing what Denbeaux believes – that the detainees aren’t such a bad bunch of fellows, really.  And with that in mind, we turn next to Chmielewski’s next question: What did we win in Iraq?

[The following is being added over my lunch break]

Perhaps the best place to start seeking what we have won in Iraq is to consider what we lost in Vietnam, when we followed the Lib’s lead and left the country when victory was in hand.

Obviously, the most important point is not about what we lost, but what the people of Southeast Asia lost.  They lost millions of lives in South Vietnam and Cambodia as the Communists imposed first their brutal and illegal retaliation against those who fought them (a war crime the Left did not protest), and then, in Cambodia particularly, their bizarre visions of utopia.  For those who survived, most lost wealth, health and opportunity.  Their lives would have been better under a capitalistic society.

For us, we lost the opportunity to have another strong partner in Southeast Asia, creating a vacuum filled first by the Chinese communists, and subsequently by totalitarians (Burma) and, more recently, Islamists (Indonesia). If Vietnam had become a free capitalist democracy on the southern flank of China, would the development of repressed-market capitalism there had grown so quickly?  Might not all of Southeast Asia, including Hell-holes like Burma, flourished because there was a local model to emulate?

I won’t speculate on the regional changes that could have occurred with our victory because we’ll never know, but if you want a model, look at how the quality of life in Eastern Europe has improved since we defeated communism there. It’s s easy to see that there was a lot of lost potential in Southeast Asia.

The obvious next step is to consider what we won in World War II.  The answer of course is that winning sometimes isn’t all it’s cut out to be, but it’s still pretty good.  On the up side, we eliminated the threat  Germany, Japan and Italy posed to our democracy, and freed their people from regimes that were condemning them to starvation at best and death at worst.  We saw Democracy spread, and with it trade opportunities for us and a better quality of life for them.  We kicked off a period of fantastic growth in our economy and global influence.

On the downside, Russia got its cut and with it decades of grief for Eastern Europe and Cuba; China wasn’t dealt with at all, leading to decades of poverty for the Chinese under communism and the Korean war; and in the Middle East, the whole multifaceted, bloody conundrum got established anew.  Like I said, winning isn’t always what it’s cut out to be.

There certainly could be similar downsides to a victory in Iraq, but Chmielewski’s Sunni/Shia bloodshed isn’t as likely a one of them as it was a few years back.  With each passing day, there is more reason for Iraqis to stick together and fewer reasons for it to descend into violence, and there’s more power and capability in the central government to hold the country together.

Iran, Syria and the states on the Saudi peninsula could respond in all sorts of bizarre and negative ways to having a free Iraq – but how is that different from how they act today?  The chances are more likely there would be profound cross-Gulf business alliances that could lead to more pressure for the repressive Iranian and Syrian regimes to change.

That’s all speculation about the future and any lefty can speculate right back at me with all sorts of black and depressing scenarios, so let’s look instead at what’s already in the “won” column.

The first big win is for the Iraqis, who no longer must live under Saddam Hussein, who fomented Sunni attacks on Shi’a and Kurd populations, starved his people so he could build palaces, let millions die in his madcap wars, and conducted a reign of terror in which no one felt safe.  Now they have a democracy and their economy is picking up.  Violence is way down.  Women can run for office. And just about everybody can hate al Qaeda and their senseless violence.

There’s another win in there for dozens of other countries and the U.N.  By stabilizing the Gulf (and we did – there’s only been one, contained war there, unlike how things were while Hussein was in power), we ensured continuous oil deliveries to the benefit of the world’s economies.  And we stood up for the UN’s resolutions.  And (with a wink here) we taught the intelligence services of Russia, France, Britain and a host of other countries that they had to sharpen their skills, since they, like we, missed it when Hussein shipped off his WMDs to Syria, buried them in the sand … or just made the whole thing up, fooling us all.

For us, for a start, other countries have seen this.  That has its downsides, but they’re overrated.  Liberals around the world don’t like Bush or us much, but the world is made up of more than mere liberals.  Even though a neocon-dream of rapidly spreading democracy hasn’t happened, when we leave Iraq and people see it continuing to function as a democracy, they will notice, they will scratch their heads and wonder why if we’re imperialists we’re leaving, and most will appreciate what the Iraqis have … what we gave them.

We also have a stable source of oil.  We didn’t take it; we’re buying it (as are others) and the iraqis are producing it.

Iraq will restore oil exports to 2.0 million barrels per day in 2009 and increase its refining capacity to become self sufficient in oil products by the end of the year, Oil Minister Hussain al-Sahristani said on Monday.

“We have pledged in the 2009 budget to raise daily crude production and export an average of 2 million barrels per day, which means a 150,000 bpd increase compared to 2008,” Shahristani told a small group of reporters. (Reuters)

After the first Gulf war, Iraq’s production was 500,000 million barrels per day; it grew to a very sporadic 2.5 MBD just before the start of the current war – but with considerable deferred maintenance that has been slowing Iraq’s recovery in the area of oil.  With a free democracy, Iraq is now investing in its major source of revenue instead of presidential palaces, and production will continue to increase, especially when demand starts to grow again.

We have tested and proven new alliances.  The war on terror – both in Afghanistan and Iraq – has tested our relations with Muslim countries from Turkey to Turkmenistan.  There has been some fall-out for sure, especially in Turkey early in the war, but we have seen that when we need to form an alliance with an Islamic country to fight another Islamic country, we can.  The war has also helped us build alliances in Eastern Europe, which will prove very helpful as Putin stirs.

As for Putin, he may not stir so quickly because of the war.  Our success in overthrowing the Taliban regime in about two minutes was a huge embarassment to the Russians, and our ability to work with Uzbekistan has got to be a nightmare for the Kremlin.  And as we fight to free a large Muslm population, he must look at his Muslim population (10 to 15 percent of Russians are classified as active Muslims by the CIA) and grit his teeth.

But the biggest benefits of the war for us all have to do with the global war against the jihadists who declared war on us on 9/11.

The war has allowed us an opportunity to force our enemy into a two-front war, and we have vanquished them in the Western front, Iraq, and if Obama’s worth his salt, will vanquish them in Afghanistan as well.  This may not have been our intent, as Chmielewski points out – “Al Qaeda was never in Iraq during Saddam’s reign [Never say never, Dan] and where there only on a token level after we invaded.” – but the first intent and the final intent of wars are rarely the same. Al Qaeda flocked to Iraq after the war began, intent on a glorious, Afghanistan-like victory over another great Satan, but it was they who were defeated – thoroughly, embarassingly, and at great cost.  We broke their infrastructure, killed them by the thousands, hurt their recruiting capabilities and gained knowledge in how to gather intelligence about them.

Most importantly, the western front in the war on terror kept them busy over there so they weren’t as busy over here, and one of the great unmeasurable benefits of the war is the attacks on America that didn’t happen because al Qaeda’s resources were tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Finally, and the Left will contest this until they’re blue in the face, the war in Iraq brought back our military and our respect for our military.  Sure, the loons protest and try to kick ROTC off campus and recruiting stations out of Berkely, but the rest of America swells with pride over our young warriors and the great work they’ve done in Iraq and Afghanistan.  They know a selfless commitment to bettering others and protecting us when they see it, and as a result, our military has gotten stronger, with better recruits and broader support.

And with that, I end with a salute to the biggest losses of all in the War on Terror – those who died on 9/11 and the young American and allied men and women who have lost their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq since then – and with a prayer that President Obama will not let these deaths to have been in vain.

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“[Obama] asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington.” – Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari

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ohn McCain took a lot of heat for implying that Barack Obama was willing to lose the war in order to win the election. Now it turns out that wasn’t just political rhetoric but historical truth.

Read more on Amir Taheri’s NY Post interview with Zebari here. Ed Morrissey quibbles with some of Taheri’s conclusions on Zebari’s statements about timing, but other than that, the report stands up to Capt. Ed’s scrutiny.

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Co-authored with Jim

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bit more than month has passed since Bill Moyers and Michael Winship penned their column It Was Oil, All Along. I missed it when it came out, and not very many bloggers have posted on it in the interim, so let’s set the Wayback Machine to June 27, 2008 and have some fun!

It Was Oil, All Along
By Bill Moyers & Michael Winship

Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn’t a war about oil. That’s cynical and simplistic, they said. It’s about terror and al Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire, and ashes. And now the bottom turns out to be….the bottom line. It is about oil.

Shiver me timbers! Terror … al Qaeda … toppling Hussein … democracy in Iraq … all up in smoke! I missed that somehow. But then I never saw them as concocted, either.

Alan Greenspan said so last fall. The former chairman of the Federal Reserve, safely out of office, confessed in his memoir, “…Everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” He elaborated in an interview with the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, “If Saddam Hussein had been head of Iraq and there was no oil under those sands, our response to him would not have been as strong as it was in the first gulf war.”

What one word best describes oil? To a lefty, it’s probably “pollution.” To a realist, it’s “strategic.” Were it not so, but it is so. Would they have us not make any effort to protect the world’s largest oil reserves from falling into the hands of a ruthless, anti-American despot? The Left would like everyone to believe that the US was out to steal the region’s oil, and they have convinced the most simpleminded among us.

Remember, also, that soon after the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, told the press that war was our only strategic choice. “…We had virtually no economic options with Iraq,” he explained, “because the country floats on a sea of oil.”

What’s not true about that statement?

Shades of Daniel Plainview, the monstrous petroleum tycoon in the movie THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Half-mad, he exclaims, “There’s a whole ocean of oil under our feet!” then adds, “No one can get at it except for me!”

No wonder American troops only guarded the Ministries of Oil and the Interior in Baghdad, even as looters pillaged museums of their priceless antiquities. They were making sure no one could get at the oil except… guess who?

Would someone please name me a war in which the victorious army immediately dispatched troops to guard museums? Continue Reading »

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he Washington Post editorial page is not where you’d expect to see an essay that condemns the Dem prez nominee as hopelessly confused and wrong-footed, but there it is, Mr. Obama in Iraq.

The editorial stands out on a day that finds much of the media trying valiantly, but not too effectively, to cover their O-swoon – see Mo Doud’s Cocky or Commander-in-Chiefly? in today’s NYT for an example – or are focused on McCain’s criticism of Obama on the surge (that “he’d rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign”), like this from Joe Klein:

I can’t remember a more scurrilous statement by a major party candidate. It smacks of desperation. It renews questions about whether McCain has the right temperament for the presidency. How sad.

What do you say we measure Klein’s criticism of McCain against WaPo’s criticism of Obama? The editorial winds up for several paragraphs before delivering this closer:

Yet Mr. Obama’s account of his strategic vision remains eccentric. He insists that Afghanistan is “the central front” for the United States, along with the border areas of Pakistan. But there are no known al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, and any additional U.S. forces sent there would not be able to operate in the Pakistani territories where Osama bin Laden is headquartered. While the United States has an interest in preventing the resurgence of the Afghan Taliban, the country’s strategic importance pales beside that of Iraq, which lies at the geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world’s largest oil reserves. If Mr. Obama’s antiwar stance has blinded him to those realities, that could prove far more debilitating to him as president than any particular timetable.

Other than choosing the word “eccentric” when so many other words would have worked better (thick-headed, flabbergasting, laughable, cro-zo), that pretty much nails it. You have in Obama a candidate who is clueless regarding the threats we face and the best means to face them, who wants so much to not be Bush that he refuses to acknowledge reality.

I for one would rather have a president who makes the mistake of calling out a fool all by himself instead of assigning the task to a surrogate, than one who tramples over Pakistan – a nuclear-armed nation that’s just barely holding off an Islamist uprising – to hunt for Osama bin Laden, who latelyhas done nothing more threatening than issuing tapes that are, to borrow a word from above, cro-zo.

Photo: AP

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es, of course the quote of the day is this, from Barack Obama, answering ABC’s Terry Moran:

“Here is what I will say. I think that, I did not anticipate, and I think that this is a fair characterization, the convergence of not only the surge but the Sunni awakening in which a whole host of Sunni tribal leaders decided that they had had enough with Al Qaeda, in the Shii’a community the militias standing down to some degrees. So what you had is a combination of political factors inside of Iraq that then came right at the same time as terrific work by our troops. Had those political factors not occurred, I think that my assessment would have been correct.”

So, Obama still refuses to call the surge a success, despite the evident truth that since the surge, Iraq has become a very different place. Did we ever think he would reverse his core position?

His new position can be restated as this:

“The bravery and competence of the American armed forces had little or nothing to do with the improved situation in Iraq. We have the Sunni awakening to thank, because even though our troops did terrific work, it wasn’t that terrific work that changed things.”

Well, he just might be right. And oh so wrong.

There was a certain political, not military, factor that is primarily responsible for the change we see in Iraq. It was George Bush’s commitment to doing it right, even after the 2006 GOP melt-down. Instead of reading the cards that had been dealt and waffling, Bush sent more troops to Iraq. The number wasn’t all that much, but the psychological message to the Iraqi government and those who would overthrow it couldn’t have been more overwhelming: We are going to stay until it’s right, no matter what.

For Maliki and the Iraqi government, it meant breathing room that was needed to carry out new initiatives and check off the boxes on Congress’ checklist for progress.

For al Qaeda it meant their terror efforts building up to the election got them nothing, and they were on the ropes.

For Iran it meant that their continued support of anti-US efforts in Iraq would come at a price to dear for them to pay.

For the Dems in Congress, it meant that America would continue to put the troops and victory first for at least another two years, and there was nothing they could do about it. (And Lord knows, they tried.)

And for our military it meant a green light to continue to work with Shi’a and Sunni alike to create a new set of alliances that Obama merely passes off as Iraqis deciding a new way to go on their own – as if the groundwork laid by military officers in Iraq over the past several years had nothing to do with it.

Maliki’s infamous quote is being passed off as the end of the McCain campaign. Witness Matthew Yglesias today, under the title McCain’s Waterloo:

[McCain had] spent several weeks with the main theme of his campaign being, quite literally, to criticize Barack Obama for not having been physically present in Iraq recently. This (of course) got Obama to go to Iraq, thus setting up a dilemma. Either Obama would survey the “progress” in Iraq and change his position, thus making him a flip-flopper, or else he would refuse to change his position, thus making him obstinate and out of touch with reality. But instead of either of those things happening, Obama went to Iraq and Iraqi leaders said he’d been right all along!

That’s about as close to “game, set, match” as you get in terms of real world events influencing your political campaign.

So it might seem, as long as you’re looking at the world the way Barack Obama does. But about half of us U.S. voters don’t see it that way, and what I, as just one of that group, now see happening is this: Obama will get a false confidence from his trip because he hadn’t been right all along, he just happened to be right at this perfect moment of time, and had he been “right” about the surge as a doomed prospect, Maliki wouldn’t be in a position to be calling for short timeframes today.

Thus, once again, Obama is developing a false read on certain things we hold dear – our military, our commitment to victory – and therefore he has considerable opportunity to plunge from today’s high peak. He is, today, the hare in the race, with McCain plodding along far behind but steady.

The finish line is a long ways away, and my bet’s on the tortoise.

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Update: Bloomberg reports:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki hasn’t endorsed any specific plan for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, a government spokesman said, a day after a magazine report that he backed Barack Obama’s proposal.

Al-Maliki supports a “general vision” of U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq and has not backed a plan by Obama, the presumptive U.S. Democratic presidential candidate, for a 16- month withdrawal window, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in an e-mailed statement in Baghdad today.

This has certainly set off a swirl of controversy, but it hasn’t changed the core of this post.

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he blogosphere is a very, very prejudiced place because we surround ourselves with like-minded sorts and shun those who hold another view. The stories we bloggers select to write about suffer the same way; we ignore stories that trouble us, and pounce on those that confirm our beliefs, either that we’re right or others are wrong.

Case in point: Spiegel’s interview with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in which Maliki says that Barack Obama’s 16-month timeframe for a withdrawal from Iraq is the right one, and appeared to encourage people not to vote for candidate with an Iraq plan like … oh … John McCain’s:

“Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of US troops in Iraq would cause problems.”

The irony of this, of course, is that everything that Obama opposed – foremost the surge – is what’s made it possible. Without the policies endorsed by Bush and McCain, Maliki would not have so optimistic a view of his country’s future. But all that matters politically is that now he does have that view, and Obama will be able to strut about looking brilliant, as if his view on Iraq was always the right view on Iraq.

That makes this story bad, bad news for anyone who feels McCain is better (even marginally) for America’s future than Obama. Maliki’s comments could effectively end the war debate, with Obama’s “See, I told you so” much more resonant than McCain’s “Wait! It was me!” And that makes this story one the leftybloggers love and we conservatives have largely ignored.

Just check out memeorandum. It headlines about a half dozen different news articles and blog posts on the story, including the Spiegel story and a Reuters story that seems to have scooped Spiegel internationally, then links to about 40 news and blog posts on the story. Yes, there are some posts from the conservative side making points similar to those I’ve made above, like this, from The American Mind:

First, realize Maliki sees Obama as the Presidential front runner. It’s rational not to rock the boat. Second, Iraq and the U.S. wouldn’t be in this situation if it weren’t for the surge that quelled violence.

But many many more leftyblogs are listed, making comments like this:

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki found a pony and it’s name is Obama. While John McSame was busy questioning Obama’s foreign policy credentials the Iraqi Prime Minster was endorsing them.

Or this one from Polimom that cues off the post from The American Mind above:

That is absolutely the McCain campaign’s narrative on Iraq. It has to be, since it’s all they’ve got now. And you can bet your bottom dollar that many millions of Americans will recall — with or without the reminders that are surely coming — that the dire situation that led to the surge was predicated by an incredibly stupid invasion.

Hmmm. How is it that she’s forgotten that Maliki would not be speaking at all about the progress towards a secure democracy in Iraq, were it not for the invasion she still calls “incredibly stupid?” How is it that she’s conveniently dropped the Butcher of Baghdad from her memory? Here’s why: Because, like most of us, she primarily reads the posts and news items she wants to read and ignores the ones she doesn’t.

The blogosphere is not the great equalizer, in which we all graze widely on the field of ideas (oh wait – look, even the grazing sheep are bunched together); rather it is a cafeteria, where we’re free to move about, selecting only the items that appeal to us, and never tasting the ones that don’t. (There are also those strange beings who actively scout out opposing views and leave aggressive, obnoxious comments to irritate the inmates of that particular asylum. That’s a bizarre human dynamic since they are forever assigning themselves losing battles.)

I, too, am guilty of treating the blogosphere as a cafeteria, and it’s easy to understand, since opposing points of view irritate the gut, chafe the senses … and even, occasionally, challenge opinions that are too hard-set. That’s why I do spend a bit of time perusing the opposition, but I confess, I don’t do it often enough.

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he Bush-bashing scribes at AP must have gritted their teeth and ached with every keystroke when writing this story:

AP Exclusive: US removes uranium from Iraq

Here’s the gist of the story (Protect me from the AP copyright demons, most merciful God!): A joint international operation has succeeded in removing 550 metric tons of Saddam Hussein’s yellowcake – that’s 1,212,543 pounds for the metric-impaired – from Iraq to Canada where it will be used to produce reactor fuel.

Of course Saddam had no WMD programs and it never would have occurred to him to spin the yellowcake into reactor fuel … or something richer. No, not nice Mr. Husseiny-weiny.

Still, it was troublesome, and the article tells us that “diplomats” and “military leaders” rejected “the idea” of shipping the stuff overland to “Kuwait’s port on the Persian Gulf” (let’s not bother looking up the name of the place) because the route passes through the “heartland” of Shiites and “extremist factions,” including some in cahoots with “Iran.” (Die AP bots!)

Why worry? Hussein had nothing for us to worry about – that’s just Bush fear-mongering.

While the article speculates on the use of the yellowcake as dirty bombs or panic-inducers, it rambles on with a reference to a certain unnamed diplomat who postulated that Iraq had not purchased yellowcake in Africa. Odd that when Joe Clark was making the claims he was a media celebrity; now that there’s 1,212,543 pounds of the stuff to deal with, he’s just “a former U.S. ambassador.” Curious.

For more fun read Protein Wisdom’s take on the story, Chimpy McHitlerburton’s smirky rodeo ride through history, 25: the last slice of Saddam cake eaten by secret greedy killbots.

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The NY Times Vs. Health And Truth

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recent NYT expose on the horrors of CT scans included this paragraph:

Some medical experts say the American devotion to the newest, most expensive technology is an important reason that the United States spends much more on health care than other industrialized nations — more than $2.2 trillion in 2007, an estimated $7,500 a person, about twice the average in other countries — without providing better care.

Without providing better care? Says who? Name me a country with better medical care – better results – than the good ol’ US of A!

Fortunately, there’s the internet with places like Stats Blog that provide answers to back up my jingoistic enthusiasm:

Last year, the journal Lancet Oncology published a huge comparative study of cancer survival rates in European countries and contrasted them with United States. The results:

Colon and rectal cancer: 65.5 percent in the U.S. vs 56.2 percent in Europe.
Breast cancer: 90.1 percent in the U.S. vs 79 percent in Europe.
Prostate cancer: 99.3 percent in the U.S. vs 77.5 percent in Europe.

All cancers (age adjusted), Men: 66.3 percent in the U.S. vs 47.3 percent in Europe.
All cancers (age adjusted), women: 62.9 percent in the U.S. vs 55.8 percent for women.

No individual country surpassed the U.S. on any of these measures – and these percentage differences add up to lives saved. If that doesn’t amount to “better care,” what does?

Not only to the stats show the inherent anti-American bias that runs rampant and untreated like a staph infection throughout the NYT and the MSM that mock it, it also shows the inherent weakness of socialized medicine. Europe is dominated by Big Brother with a Band-Aid programs of the sort the Dems would ape, yet they ignore the truth for the feeling and continue pushing us down that hopeless road. Continue Reading »

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hose Supreme Court justices who look in vain in our perfectly clear constitution for something to hang a gun control hat on are pretty good at shooting, it turns out – shooting off their mouths.

From Bookworm’s analysis of today’s excellent (and no-brainer) SCOTUS decision declaring the DC handgun ban unconstitutional:

Interestingly, thinking about it, the worst writers are always the activists: Ginsberg, Stevens, O’Connor, etc. I suspect that, since their arguments are so often not bounded by actual American law, they have to throw up huge, wordy, impenetrable smoke-screens to hide that fact. The strict constructionists, who are writing within a sound framework, have no need to hide or dissemble.

And true to form, the Left is outraged, hypocritical and fully engaged in ad hominem attacks:

If Fat Tony Scalia comes anywhere near your home, shoot the m***********.

That jihad-like call for the assassination of anyone with an alternative point of view was found by Confederate Yankee.

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Web designer extraordinaire, the ol’ Okie Dale, has been hard at work on a total redesign of C-SM and is now in the process of transferring four years of C-SM-ing into the new layout.

Check back — the new url will be posted as soon as it’s ready; ’til then, Dale’s asked me not to put up new stuff.

For this week’s Watcher of Weasels nominees, click here.

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