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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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Welcome To The World Of Idiots

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here’s a fire! Quick, grab the fire extinguisher! … No, wait … we’re too stupid to use a fire extinguisher!

At least that’s how the world’s ultimate nanny state, the once-proud global empire of the United Kingdom:

Fire extinguishers could be removed from communal areas in flats throughout the country because they are a safety hazard, it has emerged.

The life-saving devices encourage untrained people to fight a fire rather than leave the building, risk assessors in Bournemouth decided.

Dorset Fire and Rescue defended the move, saying: ‘Obviously, in some cases, an extinguisher could come in useful but, with new building regulations, every escape route should be completely fireproof.’

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents backed their removal because different extinguishers should be used on different types of fire. (Source, via What Bubba Knows)

Yeah, that’s definitely too much for mere citizens like us to understand. Better we burn up than try to fend for ourselves without the help of our state-employed saviors, who are are smart enough to save us.  Bring on the Nannies. Continue Reading »

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et’s return now to Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School), with two more lies from this solid review of what liberal history profs are doing to revise the past and pollute the minds of the next generation.

Lie #11 – No Terrorists or Weapons of Mass Destruction were Hiding in Iraq

A systematic search found no active production facilities or stockpiles for chemical, nuclear, or biological weapons of mass destruction, refuting one of the basic justifications for the war. – David Goldfield et al., The American Journey

Did the failure to find “active” WMD evidence in Iraq really refute one of Bush’s three justifications for the war? Ever heard of a murder conviction that came without a murder weapon or a body? Of course you have, but David Goldfield et al. would rather ignore the complex and hang on the simplistic – as would many of his colleagues.

First, the lib revisionists need to deal with who else was involved in the WMD “deception” – the French, British, Spanish, Australian, Japanese, German, Israeli intelligence services, the Egyptian and Russian presidents, the king of Jordan, and the United Nations Security Council, all of whom stated that Hussein had or was pursuing weapons of mass destruction.

Then, of course, you’d have to overlook his gassing of the Kurds, which led Hans Blix of the UN to state Hussein had 6,500 WMDs. And there were Saddam’s two sons in law, who during their brief defection testified about Iraqi WMD programs. They were executed upon their foolish return to Iraq. (So foolish that I’ll go ahead and accept that their testimony may be discounted since they were obviously idiots.)

Then there’s little niggles like this:

In 2003, a UN weapons inspector confidently stated that Ira had an ongoing nuclear program, and that he knew personally of uranium reporcessing at a facility six miles from Tarmiya. A twenty-gallon barrel found in northern Ira tested positive for Sarin, and another tested positive for mustard gas.

And Goldfield et al. conveniently ignore the tape recordings found of Hussein discussing his WMD program, and the need to hustle the evidence out of Iraq prior to an invasion – and the 56 “sorties” ‘of commercial jetliners, their seats removed, between Iraq and Syria prior to the war.

As for terrorists in Iraq, Schweikart runs through the same sort of sources – our own State Dept., evidence found in Iraq, respected publications like Janes and less respected news sources like CBS, etc. – to prove that Hussein was supporting terrorists in general and al-Qaeda in particular.

There’s plenty more in this chapter; real, hard evidence, as opposed to cute “Bush Lied, People Died” sloganeering.

Lie #12 – The Founders Envisioned a “Wall of Separation” Between Church and State, Keeping Religious Influence out of Government

The Founding Fathers did not intend to establish the United Sttes of America as a Christian nation [and] the assertion that the United States … was founded as a “Christian Nation” is itself a myth. – Mark Weldon “Whitten, The Myth of Christian America

I found myself using my Kindle’s highlighting function multiple times on every page of this chapter because its stuffed full of rebuttal of the vapid claims of the separation of church and state fanatics. If, for example, America’s founding fathers didn’t see America as a Christian nation, how come the colony’s own constitutions saw it as one. Here’s Virginia’s:

We, greatly commending, and graciously accepting of, their Deisres for the Furtherance of so noble a Work … in propagating the Christian Religion to such People [native Americans] as yet live in Darkness and miserable Ignorance of the true knowledge and Worship of God [establish the colony of Virginia.

The Charter of New England (1620) stated that the main objective of the colony was "the enlightenment of the Chrisitan religion, to the Glory of God Almighty."

Why, if America was not a Christian nation, did some colonies have statutes requiring attendance at church? (The sort of thing correctly precluded by a proper interpretation of separation of church and state.)

In 1812, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment allowed Christianity to "receive encouragement from the state, so far as was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience, and freedom of religious worship." In 1892, SCOTUS found unanimously:

Our laws and institutions necessarily are based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind ... [In] this sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian. … This is a Christian nation.

And it remains one to this day, if you check any national polling or any compilation by government or religious organizations.

The Chapter also delves into Jefferson’s letter, which is the basis of fraudulent interpretations of separation of church and state, effectively dismissing the arguments as misinterpretations or outright frauds.

The Lies They Teach: #9 and #10
The Lies They Teach – #8
The Lies They Teach: #6 And #7
The Lies They Teach: #4 And #5
The Lies They Teach: #1 – #3

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Hot! Hot! Not!

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t’s one of those cognitive dissonance moments: They tell you this October was the hottest October ever recorded – excuse the pandering Paris photo – and you’re asking yourself, “Yeah, but wasn’t I freezing my fanny off for most of the month?” Yes you were, and you should believe your fanny, not Warmie “scientists,” who live to feed bogus data into the global warming industrial machine.

Fortunately, they don’t get away with this malarkey like they used to. Here’s Christopher Booker from the UK Telegraph, with emphasis added by Okie:

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

As the Okie says,

Innocent error, or intentional manipulation of the data sets because the reality of the situation just doesn’t fit into the Anthropogenic Climate Change catechism? Shoot, I don’t know. But, the Global Warming proponents have been willing to use funny numbers before. At the very least it’s sloppy work that went unnoticed by GISS because the information was exactly what they wanted to see.

Yup. And there’s much, more more. Read the Okie’s post. Continue Reading »

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his week’s non-Watcher’s Council winner in the Watcher of Weasel’s weekly running of the blogs underscored the points I’ve been making in my “The Lies They Teach” series based on Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School.

Writing in American Thinker, Paul Kengor details How the Academic Left Elected Obama.  In the piece, Kengor details the youth vote:

MSNBC’s exit polling, which is consistent with other exit polling, showed that voters aged 18-29, who made up nearly one in five voters — or about 25 million ballots — went for Obama by more than two to one: 66 to 32 percent. Those voters alone well exceeded Obama’s overall popular vote advantage, which was roughly eight million.

These voting bands of Obama youth are largely parallel with the kids who are in college today, released by their parents into the tutelage of professors who can’t be trusted with American history or culture.  To illuminate the point, Kengor writes:

I’m reminded of the statement from the late atheist philosopher Richard Rorty, who said that the job of professors like him was “to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own” and “escape the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.”

To these liberal profs, Obama was the realization of a dream they have taught could never be attained in racist, classist, white-dominated America.

Thus, when the university community was presented with Barack Obama, a charismatic, impressive, seemingly excellent Democratic presidential candidate — who happened to be African-American — the reaction was nearly reverential, bordering on idolatry. The good senator’s bracing radical associations — enough to deny any other American a security clearance — and which were not coincidental to a man ranked the most leftist member of the most leftist Senate in U.S. history, didn’t matter to the academic world. Quite the contrary, those who dared to point out these associations — FoxNews, talk-radio, the McCain-Palin ticket — were deemed loathsome Neanderthals deserving of being burned in effigy from the nearest dorm.

Today’s college kids were born after Reagan confronted Communism and ended the Cold War. They have no experience with the Soviet threat and have been taught little or nothing about the horrors of Stalin, the Gulag and life under the Soviet thumb. Instead, they’ve been taught about the evils of anti-Communist crusaders in the U.S.  Kengor points out that McCain’s heroic suffering as a POW didn’t resonate with students who had been taught Vietnam was a war of American imperialist aggression, and that Sarah Palin stood opposed to the false teachings they had received about separation of church and state.

This is no longer child’s play.  Liberal indoctrination on college campuses has achieved its ultimate goal of electing an American president.  We must see that this is the zenith of that movement, and it progresses no further.

Elsewhere in the Watcher’s Winners, on the Watcher’s Council side of the slate, Joshuapundit won with a clear and helpful analysis of the challenges that face Obama’s Afghanistan policy in The Afghanistan Blues.

You can see all the winners, plus some nifty commentary, at Watcher of Weasels.

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nward through Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School) we go,with two more lies from this solid review of what liberal history profs are doing to revise the past and pollute the minds of the next generation.

Lie #9 – Michael Gorbachev, Not Ronald Reagan, Was Responsible for Ending the Cold War

Gorbachev’s revorm policies led not only to the collapse of the Soviet empire but also to the breakup of the Soviet Union itself. – James West Davidson et al., Nation of Nations

This is one of the lies that appals me the most, since I remember the incidents in such detail, it having been one of the most riveting times of my life – but living memories or not, liberal profs hate Reagan for his successes and his enduring popularity and are doing all they can to strip away his greatness.

First, let’s dispense with the notion that Gorbachev willingly put a stop to Russian imperialism, which is a part of this myth. Schweikart reminds us that Gorby kept Soviet forces in Afghanistan until their losses were no longer supportable, then unhappily pulled them out. He also tried to pull off Cuba II, the Soviet-supported Cuban take-over of Grenada, which Reagan put a quick end to.

This chapter is the most fascinating so far, describing the National Security Decision Directives issued by the Reagan administration starting in 1982 that spelled out how the US would bankrupt the USSR: attacking Soviet expansionism in Afghanistan and elsewhere, limiting sources of cash (like delaying the gas and oil pipeline to W. Europe), and limiting high-tech exports the Soviets desperately needed because they couldn’t come close to matching our technology.

“You have declared war on us, economic war,” said Gorby’s precessor, Leonid Brezhnev. Part of that war was NSA’s “Farewell Dossier,” a collection of punches using the Soviet’s never-ending efforts to steal our technology by sending fake technologies their way – including one that trashed their pipeline for a time.

Schweikart concludes:

As president, the Gipper played the [arms race] card. Across the board, using American banks and bullets, money and missiles, tehcnology and diplomacy, the United States put a full-court press on the Soviet Union. The best tha tcan be said for Garbachev was that he was open to defeat.

Lie #10 – September 11 Was Not the Work of Terrorists: It Was a Government Conspiracy

Don’t ask me to tell you want happened on 9/11. All I know is that the official account of the buildings’ collapse is improbable. – Paul Craig Roberts, Gullible Americans

This is another pre-emptive chapter in the book. Schweikart was unable to find a quote from an existing textbook for the beginning of the chapter, but as I said earlier, profs do allow and encourage outside reading – often from a prof-chosen list – so he feels compelled to attack these lunatic conspiracies as well.

C-SM readers don’t need a rehash of the disgusting and fantabulous arguments proffered by the 9/11 Truthers Dingbats, but like me, they might need a reminder of what our Sec of State-apparent did on the floor of the Senate:

In May 2002, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Hillary Clinton waved a copy of that day’s edition of the New York Post with the headline, BUSH KNEW.  The story claimed the president had been given a briefing warning of impending terrorist attacks.  “The presidnet knew what?” she asked. “My constituents would like to know the answer to that and many other questions.

Questions like what, Hillary?  That steel doesn’t melt at those temperatures? (It loses tensile strength and bends.) That thousands of pounds of explosives were packed into the building by the CIA or Mosad?  That the missing passengers of the four planes have all been quietly, willingly secreted away to some unfindable destination, where they’ve stayed mum for seven years out of fervid love of George W. Bush?

Hillary just might look good in a tinfoil hat.

The Lies They Teach – #8
The Lies They Teach: #6 And #7
The Lies They Teach: #4 And #5
The Lies They Teach: #1 – #3

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ontinuing with Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School) here are the next two lies Schweikart lists in his review of what liberal revisionist history profs are doing to despoil the proud history of our nation and pollute the minds of the next generation with their drivel.

Lie #8 – Ronald Reagan Knew “Star Wars” Wouldn’t Work but Wanted to Provoke a War with Russia

Nicknamed “Star Wars” after a popular science fiction film, it spent billions of dollars trying to establish a space-based defense system. Most scientists contended that the project was as fantastic as the movie. – James West Davidson et al., Nation of Nations

Despite the flip dismissal of SDI technology by the Left, when Reagan announced the program in 1983, most of the technologies needed were in place, Schweikart says. The Left should have loved it because they hated the Cold War strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction which SDI sought to deconstruct – but because it came from Reagan and was directed at the Soviets, no such normalcy was evidenced.

Recently released National Security Council docs from 1982 lay out a U.S. goal of not just containing the Soviets, but reversing their expansion, with tapping out USSR military spending as one of several tactics to be employed. The strategy cunningly used the Soviet’s great respect for our technology so that “you leverage their perceptions dramatically” through technology investments.

Contrary to the Davidson quote above, it was the media not the scientists who pegged the Star Wars moniker on the program. The Soviets, fearful of our computer technology, certainly didn’t see the system as fantasy – and subsequent tests (carried out within Reagan’s original 20-year timeframe) proved that ultimately it was anything but Hollywood scriptwriting. Schweikart provides these quotes;

Inside the Kremlin, the top Soviet generals were terrified. They knew SDI had the potential to work. Nikolai Leonov said “it underlined still more our technological backwardness.” Gen. Makhmud Gareev, the deputy chief of the Soviet General Staff, agreed, saying it was “beyond our power” to compete with the Americans technologically. In 1981, a Soviet arms negotiator said, “Oh, you Americans! … You are going to make us spend and spend to keep up and our lousy standard of living will go down and down and in the end you will win.”

And we did. And not soon after, during the first Gulf War, Patriot Missiles shot incoming Scuds out of the air, and in 1992, space-based interceptors – real Star Wars stuff – were successfully tested, just 10 years, not 20, after Reagan’s speech. By 2008, an SDI antimissile missile shot a falling satellite to smithereens – but no one’s revising the textbooks yet.

The Lies They Teach: #6 And #7
The Lies They Teach: #4 And #5
The Lies They Teach: #1 – #3

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Continuing with Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School) here are the next two lies Schweikart lists in his review of what liberal revisionist history profs are doing to despoil the proud history of our nation.

Lie #6: Richard Nixon Expanded the Vietnam War

[I]n April 1970, Nixon sent American forces on a sweek through Cambodia … A seeming Escalatino of fighting, this move electrified the anti-war movement.” – Irwin Unger, These United States

A brief history of Vietnam:  Kennedy put the first troops in, and there were probably about 25,000 American troops in Southeast Asia, primarily Vietnam, when he was assassinated.  In 1969, when Lyndon Johnson left office after deciding not to run for a second term, there were 553,000.  That is an expansion.

By 1971, Nixon had cut the number of troops down to 200,000, and down to 155,000 in 1972.  At this time, 65 percent of Americans approved of the way Nixon was handling the war – way up from Johnson’s ratings, which forced him not to consider a second term.  By 1973, Nixon  had withdrawn all but about 50,000 troops.

Still, in American text books on Vietnam, it is Nixon how is the villain of the war, not Johnson and certainly not Kennedy, who, Schweikart points out, “receives almost no blame or criticism for his actions, while the man who extracted us – in line with, supposedly, the wishes of the liberals – is routinely portrayed as though he started, rather than ended, the conflict.

Lie #7: The “Peace Movement” Activists Were Not Dupes of the KGB

During 1983, the antiwar and nuclear disarmament movements, in exlipse since the end of the Vietnam War, revived explosively. … [T]here were demonstrations in major cities to protest the arms race adn demand a “nuclear freeze.” – Irwin Unger, These United States

This is the most fascinating chapter in the book thus far.  Personally, this was the point where I began to see the leftists, with whom I had previously affiliated, as dangerous loons, so the chapter illuminates that gut decision – which leads to the second thing that makes it fascinating:  It is based in large part on KGB documents smuggled out of Russia by a KGB archivist, Vasili Mitrokhin.

Mitrokhin’s documents show the KGB worked to spread rumors that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for “the military industrial complex,” that the AIDs virus was invented in Fort Detrick MD and spread by us to third world countries, and that they invested heavily in funding the left to discourage further development of American nuclear campability.

This money – including $2 million to the Communist Party here, 5 million deutsch marks annually from East Germany’s Stasi to the German Peace Union and $50 million a year to the World Peace Council – may explain why the left was so quick to attack America while leading the totalitarian Brezhnev regime uncriticized.

The Lies They Teach:  #4 And #5

The Lies They Teach: #1 – #3

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arry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School) is continuing to infuriate me, which is a good thing.

I’m providing quick summaries of the lies, but the book is rich in detail and I strongly suggest you read it.

The title is almost self-explanatory. Let me just add that it is a review of college-level history text books. Here are lies four and five:

Lie #4: Harry Truman ordered the atomic bombing of Japan to intimidate the Soviets with “Atomic Diplomacy.”

Truman agreed with [James] Byrnes that use of the bomb would permit them to “out maneuver [sic] Stalin on China,” that is, negate the Yalta concessions in Manchuria and guarantee that Russia would “not get in som much on the kill” of Japan or its occupation. – Arnold Offner, “Another Such Victory,” 1999

The theory that Pres. Truman used the bomb to intimidate the Soviets instead of conquer Japan is a theory, Schweikart shows, that only an academic could concoct.

The revisionists start by revising the estimates of U.S. war deaths that would occur Operation Olympics by first declaring the stated estimates wildly over-estimated – the “casualty myth,” they call it – then conjuring up their own, lower, estimates based on numerous  false assumptions.  They also reject actual documents in Japanese and Soviet archives in favor of their own conclusions – even the Japanese deputy chief of staff of the Japanese Army General Staff, who wrote, “There is nothing we can do about the … atomic bomb.  That nullifies everything.”

Schweikart didn’t go into it, but I believe this lie is fired by elitist fires.  Truman had the misfortune of assuming office, unelected, following the most elite of all elites, FDR.  This haberdasher from the Midwest could not be allowed to do anything right, and liberal elite historians have worked hard to miscast him.

Lie #5: John F. Kennedy was killed by LBJ and a secret team to keep him from getting us out of Vietnam.

This is another of the lies Schweikart includes not so much because it is dwelt on in college texts, but because liberal profs, fearful of being called part of the education establishment, frequently let students go to sources beyond the required text books – books like Barr McClellan’s Blood, Money & Power:  How L.B.J. Killed J.F.K.

I’m sure I don’t have to re-hash this for C-SM’s audience; suffice it to say that Schweikart presents five different JFK myths and quickly dispatches them all in a flood of big facts and juicy details, including good stuff on Jack’s real position on Vietnam vs. the recasting of that position for the benefit of Bobby.

Previous in this series:

The Lies They Teach: #1 – #3

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L

arry Schweikart’s book, 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School) is one infuriating read. It leaves you feeling impotent and frustrated, knowing that the liberals and their revisionist history are doing more to win the next generation than we are. But it’s an important read, so I’ll share quick summaries of the 48 lies here over time. I strongly suggest, however, that you read the book.

The title is almost self-explanatory. Let me just add that it is a review of college-level history text books. Here are lies one through three:

Lie #1: The first presidents intended for the United States to be isolationist.

In his farewell address, [George] Washington urged that the United States stay out of European affairs and make no permanent alliances, a principle that would be a hallmark of American foreign policy for a century and a half. – James West Davidson et. al., Nation of Nations

Of course, Washington spent much of his administration seeking foreign alliances, so any historian should ponder that line from Washington’s final address before drawing such a simplistic conclusion. Schweikart shows that Washington wanted about 25 years of breathing room without hard set alliances so the nation could get strong enough to stand alone, without alliances, if need be. Washington was particularly concerned with alliances entangled by old European prejudices, that he wished to leave to the Old World.

The chapter also deals with the leftist historians’ penchant for turning Jefferson into a pacifist, debunking that theory by reminding us that Jefferson sought, in effect, “an alliance of the willing” to fight the Barbary pirates, and when Europe cowed in fear, he pursued unilateral action. Sound familiar?

Lie #2: The Mexican and Spanish-American wars were imperialist efforts drummed up by “corporate interests.”

Ordering troops to the Rio Grande, into territory inhabited by Mexicans, was clearly a provocation … [The Mexican War] was a war of the American elite against the Mexican elite. – Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States

Liberal historians want to look at wars like the Mexican American War and our campaign in the Philippines as proof of our societal racism, because we wage war against brown people.  And when we leave when we’re done, in order to not allow us to be disproved as imperialists, these historians make the case that we left because … you guessed it:  We don’t like brown people.

To make their case, liberal historians “ignored the eagerness with which our foes entered the wars,” Schweikart says.  Mexico’s army was four times larger than ours, and Europe was betting on Mexico as the winner.  Wrong.  We did win, but the books minimize the brilliance of our campaigns, like how Commodore George Dewey destroyed the Spanish flotilla without losing a single man.

Lie #3: FDR knew in advance about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor

Schweikart thoroughly debunks this old myth, but fails to make the case for it actually being taught in college textbooks.  Still, I appreciated the chapter because it revealed the same ugliness we see in the 9/11 Truthers Dingbats:  That for their theory to be correct, hundreds of Americans would have had to conspire, and stay quiet after the fact.

That’s an atrocious view of America, and Pearl Harbor and 9/11 conspiracists are both beneath contempt.

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