ere are some excerpts from reports posted on the Human Rights Watch Web site:

Human Rights Watch researchers have uncovered evidence that Russian aircraft dropped cluster bombs in populated areas in Georgia, killing at least 11 civilians and injuring dozens, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch called upon Russia to immediately stop using cluster bombs, weapons so dangerous to civilians that more than 100 nations have agreed to ban their use. …

Human Rights Watch said Russian aircraft dropped RBK-250 cluster bombs, each containing 30 PTAB 2.5M submunitions, on the town of Ruisi in the Kareli district of Georgia on August 12, 2008. Three civilians were killed and five wounded in the attack. On the same day, a cluster strike in the center of the town of Gori killed at least eight civilians and injured dozens, Human Rights Watch said. Dutch journalist Stan Storimans was among the dead. Israeli journalist Zadok Yehezkeli was seriously wounded and evacuated to Israel for treatment after surgery in Tbilisi. An armored vehicle from the Reuters news agency was perforated with shrapnel from the attack. (source)

And:

When Human Rights Watch entered Tskhinvali on August 13, the city was largely deserted. Human Rights Watch researchers saw numerous apartment buildings and houses damaged by shelling. Some of them had been hit by rockets most likely fired from Grad launchers, weapons that should not be used in areas populated by civilians, as they cannot be directed at only military targets and are therefore inherently indiscriminate. Also, Human Rights Watch saw several buildings that bore traces of heavy ammunition as if fired from tanks at close range. There was some evidence of firing being directed into basements, locations where civilians frequently choose as a place of shelter. (source)

Where are the howls of outrage from the American left, who are so deeply offended whenever one of our precisely targeted bombs goes off target and despite all our care, some civilians are killed?

A

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?

Here’s a recent headline in the NEW YORK TIMES: “Deals with Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back.” Read on: “Four western companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.”

There you have it. After a long exile, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP are back in Iraq. And on the wings of no-bid contracts – that’s right, sweetheart deals like those given Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater. The kind of deals you get only if you have friends in high places. And these war profiteers have friends in very high places.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, BP … well, one of those is a U.S. company. Is Moyers really comfortable with the argument that we went to war for the French and the Dutch?

Let’s go back a few years to the 1990’s, when private citizen Dick Cheney was running Halliburton, the big energy supplier. That’s when he told the oil industry that, “By 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.”

Fast forward to Cheney’s first heady days in the White House. The oil industry and other energy conglomerates have been headed [sic] backdoor keys to the White House, and their CEO’s [sic] and lobbyists were trooping in and out for meetings with their old opal [sic], now Vice President Cheney. The meetings are secret, conducted under tight security, but as we reported five years ago, among the documents that turned up from some of those meetings were maps of oil fields in Iraq – and a list of companies who wanted access to them. The conservative group Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club filed suit to try to find out who attended the meetings and what was discussed, but the White House fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep the press and public from learning the whole truth.

This all sounds quite far-fetched to me, but let’s play along. When enviros met with Al Gore in his first heady days as VEEP, the meetings were secret and under tight security, and I bet there were maps involved, showing lands the Greenies wanted the Feds to nationalize, forests they wanted the Feds to remove logging rights and roads from, and sheafs of draft regs they wanted the VEEP to get behind. All that was far more detrimental to the U.S. economy than discussions of Middle Eastern oil reserves, including those in Iraq.

And by the way, the oil tycoons must not have been very effective because it’s over five years since we toppled Saddam, and no fat oil contracts have been gifted to any of Cheney’s buddies.

Think about it. These secret meetings took place six months before 9/11, two years before Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq. We still don’t know what they were about. What we know is that this is the oil industry that’s enjoying swollen profits these days. It would be laughable if it weren’t so painful to remember that their erstwhile cheerleader for invading Iraq – the press mogul Rupert Murdoch – once said that a successful war there would bring us $20 a barrel of oil. The last time we looked, it was more than $140 a barrel. Where are you, Rupert, when the facts need checking and the predictions are revisited?

Six months before 9/11?! Do you mean Cheney, Halliburton and Big Oil were behind 9/11, Bill? Oh, yeah. That makes sense.

In the month since this column ran, President Bush rescinded the Executive Orders that prohibited much of the exploration and drilling here, sending oil prices which way, class? If the Democrats, headed by NanPo and Dirtbag Harry, would allow a VOTE on the subject (you know, the way our government is SUPPOSED TO WORK), we would be on our way towards more domestic production, and prices would fall even further.

At a congressional hearing this week, James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist who exactly twenty years ago alerted Congress and the world to the dangers of global warming, compared the chief executives of Big Oil to the tobacco moguls who denied that nicotine is addictive or that there’s a link between smoking and cancer. Hansen, who the administration has tried again and again to silence, said these barons of black gold should be tried for committing crimes against humanity and nature in opposing efforts to deal with global warming.

Do a Google search on James Hansen and discover just how effective the government has been at silencing him - I’ll spare you the electrons: A search of James Hansen and NASA yields 1,190,000 hits. Man, that Bush is is just destroying the Constitution! Unlike Hansen, who advocates stripping free speech rights from those of us who deny global warming - which, BTW, is a perfectly sound idea to the likes of Moyers.

Perhaps those sweetheart deals in Iraq should be added to his proposed indictments. They have been purchased at a very high price. Four thousand American soldiers dead, tens of thousands permanently wounded for life, hundreds of thousands of dead and crippled Iraqis plus five million displaced, and a cost that will mount into trillions of dollars. The political analyst Kevin Phillips says America has become little more than an “energy protection force,” doing anything to gain access to expensive fuel without regard to the lives of others or the earth itself.

Care to posit a world without an “energy protection force?” Wonder how China might act if its access to oil were threatened? Moyers can simplify (stupefy?) the situation to the extreme that allows him to say 4,000 of our finest died for oil - but what they died for was to keep the world’s most strategic asset from falling into the hands of terrorists.

There are a few things more valuable than oil today. Air, water, food. If our air were at risk, would it be worth fighting for? If a crazed despot was threatening to continue his historic track record of trying to seize more of the world’s supply of water or food, do you think we’d hesitate before redirecting his energies a bit? The only way one would exclude oil from this list of strategic assets is if one were anti-progress, anti-human, anti-markets. Oh … like Bill Moyers, maybe.

One thinks again of Daniel Plainview in THERE WILL BE BLOOD. His lust for oil came at the price of his son and his soul.

And Bill Moyers’ lust for climbing to the top of the Bush-hating pacifist pyramid came at the price of his losing all capability for rational thought.

T

he Chinese are hobbling the Internet for the Olympics - not a surprise. The surprise is how the left is reacting.

A couple examples of hobbling. First, BBC reports on the restrictions journalists will face when they log on in the People’s Republic:

Journalists covering the Beijing Olympic Games will not have completely uncensored access to the internet, Chinese and Olympic officials say.

Sites related to spiritual group Falun Gong would be blocked, officials said. Journalists also found they could not see some news or human rights websites.

The timing of the blockade was interesting. As the first of an anticipated 20,000 journalists descended on Beijing to cover the games, Amnesty International issued a report on how China’s miserable human rights record has gotten even worse with the Olympics. Journalists visiting China couldn’t access it, but the Beijingoists couldn’t stop people elsewhere around the globe from accessing the report, however, so the ban is comically inadequate.

Another example, from AP, is China’s forcing of foreign owned hotels to comply with China’s Public Security Service demand that they install software blocking their guests’ access to the sites of human rights, Falun Gong, Tibetan activists and others. (Chinese owned hotels don’t need any forcing by the way; they know the drill.) Senator Sam Brownback said of this:

“These hotels are justifiably outraged by this order, which puts them in the awkward position of having to craft pop-up messages explaining to their customers that their Web history, communications, searches and key strokes are being spied on by the Chinese government.”

The purpose of China’s efforts is not to protect the Chinese people from any threat, it is merely to spare the nation’s Communist rulers embarrassment on their home court. Behind the heavy-handed Olympic efforts is a much more sinister and far-flung machinery that monitors all Chinese communications from the Internet to the backyard fence that results in the arrest, imprisonment and frequent execution of anyone deemed to be an enemy of the state.

The difference between China’s use of electronic surveillance and America’s use seems to be lost on the left. In his Salon column today, Glenn Greenwald leaps effortlessly and brainlessly from the Chinese pressure on hotels to U.S. cooperation with telcom companies to monitor terrorists’ calls.

The precise financial dynamic which Sen. Brownback is impotently protesting in China — that corporations are highly incentivized to assent to and enable all government spying lest they lose extremely lucrative government contracts (and, conversely, that they’re eager to cooperate with the Government in order to receive more contracts and become further integrated in government activities) — is exactly the dynamic that drives America’s surveillance state. …

[T]o watch U.S. Senators like Sam Brownback actually maintain a straight face while protesting China’s warrantless spying on the email and telephone communications of foreigners, and lamenting that private companies feel unfairly pressured to cooperate with China’s government spying out of fear of losing lucrative business opportunities, is so surreal that it’s actually hard to believe one is seeing it.

Surreal? Exactly the dynamic? This is exactly why the left is so dangerous: It cannot make rational evaluations based on good and evil, so it ends up supporting evil.

China’s government is motivated by its will to stay in power by suppressing political resistance and keeping a tight reign on the rights and freedom of its citizens. America’s government, the Bush administration, knows it will relinquish power peacefully and democratically in January 2009 just as it remembers the attacks that occurred in September 2001, so its motivation is wholly different: to protect America, so its citizens can continue to enjoy safety, rights and freedom.

Further, the Chinese government can do whatever it wants to do because it is authoritarian, lacking all checks and balances. Grrenwald may have missed the fact that the entire matter of electronic surveillance has been vetted thoroughly by our courts and our elected representatives, so this isn’t, as Greenwald characterizes it, simply the Bush administration running renegade again.

That point is completely lost on Greenwald and his readers, as this comment makes clear:

Brownback keeps a straight face because the US does its spying in secret. The Chinese are evil because they say right in the Guest Information that they are watching. Americans would never do that.

Mere parity is not enough for these loons. The left will not stop until they succeed at placing the globe’s repressors on a pedestal and submitting America to mockery.

T

ime will tell whether patriotism matters, because we are busy setting up the test case.

Our schools, our intelligentsia, our media and our publishers are all busy setting up patriotism as an inferior, baser alternative to internationalism, and are painting soldiers of valor as victims of war, striving to create a whole generation that will believe as they believe: That America is not worth fighting for.

Tom Sowell, in what just may be the most important read of this 4th of July, shows us how history is supposed to be used - to keep us from repeating it - in his Real Clear Politics essay, Does Patriotism Matter? He turns to France in the years following WWI, when the teachers unions and academia fought to destroy patriotism in favor of internationalism, and to paint soldiers - all soldiers, French and German - as equal victims of cruel, unjustifiable war.

At the outset of the [German] invasion [of France in WWII], both German and French generals assessed French military forces as more likely to gain victory, and virtually no one expected France to collapse like a house of cards — except Adolf Hitler, who had studied French society instead of French military forces.

Did patriotism matter? It mattered more than superior French tanks and planes.

Did the American Left learn anything from this experience? Of course not! History, to them, is made to be rewritten, not learned from. So we see on this 4th of July, displays of patriotism on the Left like this one, at Daily Kos:

The Declaration of Independence was the laundry list of grievances stating America’s case for freedom. Its accusations against the King ranged from egregious (”He has plundered our seas, burnt our towns and ravaged the lives of our people”) to the trifling (”Sometimes when he sees us at a party he acts like he doesn’t know us”). But proud men would not take up arms against the Crown solely because the King had “erected a multitude of new offices.” The authors of the Declaration knew they would also have to appeal to man’s higher nature, to stir men’s souls. They needed something with some zazz. Enter a hot-shot tobacco executive from Virginia, Thomas Jefferson.

His task would be to synthesize the unique brand message of America down to something that would captivate the hard to reach “12-28 ragtag militia” demographic, all the while not offending traditional “Butterchurn Moms.” His first attempt at a Preamble was:

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AMERICA. A is for All the tea they taxed. M is for the Minutemen they shellaxed…”
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It tested poorly. But his rewrite would be win-win:

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“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
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In a scant 35 words, Jefferson had given the nation the kind of positive brand identity that tendered moot the issue of whether or not we had to live up to its ideals. Still, knowing the inherent contradiction between their noble words and the reality of a slave-owning nation, Jefferson and the Founders wisely decided to strike from the Declaration of Independence the phrase “or your money back.”

Oh, tickle me pinko. Or this, by Charles Karel Bouley at HuffPo:

I could write volumes about patriotism this July 4th. How many column inches in the last few weeks has been devoted to whether or not Barack Obama is patriotic enough, if a war record is on or off limits, and what the love of country truly means. Is anyone in government today truly patriotic?

I’m not I suppose. I don’t like the “Star Spangled Banner” as our national anthem. It’s too violent and too hard to sing for anyone except Whitney or Barbra or… get the point? I think “America The Beautiful” is a far better national anthem. So, I’m unpatriotic.

I question everything. I agree whole-heartedly with Gen. Wesley Clark about Sen. John McGoo’s war record and how just because you’re a POW doesn’t mean you’d make a good POTUS.

And I question our patriotism this July 4th. We, the People who should have seen this gas increase coming, who let a president bankrupt a nation once great, a failed war…Yes, I could rant and rave about that here for paragraphs and paragraphs.

He then links to a radio rant that is nothing but Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, of railing against the media for even questioning Obama’s patriotism - apparently an off-limits inquiry in a nation where patriots have died to protect free speech.

Contrast that with this, from 365 and a Wakeup, winner of this week’s Watcher’s Council contest:

In my first duty assignment I learned why our drill instructors focused so intently on hardening us. I needed that strength when we secured mass graves in Bosnia. I needed it when we faced refugee camps so crippled with famine that the fluid flow of the human body was reduced to hard, angular lines. And I needed that strength when we in countries where the only rules were the brutal laws of physics and ballistics. Exposure to these harsh realities could have broken our spirit, but there were joys to counterbalance the pain. Sometimes we would find it in the sing song lyrics of children chirping in high pitch squeals we couldn’t decipher. Other times we found our solace in the serenity our presence brought to areas where civilization had been stripped to its animal core. But mostly we found it in each other, and in the simple knowledge that our actions proved that life could triumph over death, if only for a moment.

Just because the Left wants to belittle and denigrate patriotism doesn’t mean we should allow it to; it doesn’t mean we can’t put up a spirited - patriotic - defense of it. We should, because if we don’t, we’ll sorrily find out the answer to the question posed in the headline of this post: Yes indeed, patriotism does matter. It matters very much.