Quick hits 4/20

Some things i ran across in my reading:

James Taranto, on why the left needs racism:

The political left claims to love racial diversity, but it bitterly opposes such diversity on the political right. This is an obvious matter of political self-interest: Since 1964, blacks have voted overwhelmingly Democratic. If Republicans were able to attract black votes, the result would be catastrophic for the Democratic Party. […]

To keep blacks voting Democratic, it is necessary for the party and its supporters to keep alive the idea that racism is prevalent in America and to portray the Republican Party (as well as independent challengers to the Democrats, such as the tea-party movement) as racist. The election of Barack Obama made nonsense of the idea that America remains a racist country and thereby necessitated an intensifying of attacks on the opposition as racist.

Walter Williams, concluding a superb piece on the destructive effects of minimum wage laws: “Tragically, minimum wages have the unquestioned support of good-hearted, well-meaning people with little understanding who become the useful idiots of charlatans, quacks and racists.”

Via Jay Nordlinger, this Benjamin Netanyahu quote is chilling and sad: “Iran’s leaders are barreling toward developing a nuclear weapon, and openly declaring their desire to destroy Israel. In the face of these repeated pledges to remove the Jewish state from the earth, we encounter in the best case a limp reaction, and even that is fading. We do not hear the necessary rejection, no harsh denunciation, no outcry. The world is carrying on as usual, and there are those who direct their fire at us, at Israel.”

Also via JN, a great Bill Buckley quote: “When you wished long life to Fidel Castro, were you wishing a short life to his prisoners?” Unwittingly or not, yes you were.

Obama's Iranian options

Stratfor has a must-read piece up on Obama's options in Iran (and Afghanistan).

Certainly, the naive idea that the problem with Iran stems from the US's refusal to engage in talks with Tehran or just be nicer to them has been thoroughly debunked. So where to go from here?

They suggest three possible courses:

First, he can impose crippling sanctions against Iran. But that is possible only if the Russians cooperate. Moscow has the rolling stock and reserves to supply all of Iran’s fuel needs if it so chooses, and Beijing can also remedy any Iranian fuel shortages. Both Russia and China have said they don’t want sanctions; without them on board, sanctions are meaningless.

Second, Obama can take military action against Iran, something easier politically and diplomatically for the United States to do itself rather than rely on Israel. By itself, Israel cannot achieve air superiority, suppress air defenses, attack the necessary number of sites and attempt to neutralize Iranian mine-laying and anti-ship capability all along the Persian Gulf. Moreover, if Israel struck on its own and Iran responded by mining the Strait of Hormuz, the United States would be drawn into at least a naval war with Iran — and probably would have to complete the Israeli airstrikes, too.

And third, Obama could choose to do nothing (or engage in sanctions that would be the equivalent of doing nothing). Washington could see future Iranian nuclear weapons as an acceptable risk. But the Israelis don’t, meaning they would likely trigger the second scenario. It is possible that the United States could try to compel Israel not to strike — though it’s not clear whether Israel would comply — something that would leave Obama publicly accepting Iran’s nuclear program.

And this, of course, would jeopardize Obama’s credibility. It is possible for the French or Germans to waffle on this issue; no one is looking to them for leadership. But for Obama simply to acquiesce to Iranian nuclear weapons, especially at this point, would have significant diplomatic and domestic political ramifications. Simply put, Obama would look weak — and that, of course, is why the Iranians announced the second nuclear site. They read Obama as weak, and they want to demonstrate their own resolve. That way, if the Russians were thinking of cooperating with the United States on sanctions, Moscow would be seen as backing the weak player against the strong one. The third option, doing nothing, therefore actually represents a significant action. [...]

In Iran, Ahmadinejad clearly perceives that challenging Obama is low-risk and high reward. If he can finally demonstrate that the United States is unwilling to take military action regardless of provocations, his own domestic situation improves dramatically, his relationship with the Russians deepens, and most important, his regional influence — and menace — surges. If Obama accepts Iranian nukes without serious sanctions or military actions, the American position in the Islamic world will decline dramatically. The Arab states in the region rely on the United States to protect them from Iran, so U.S. acquiescence in the face of Iranian nuclear weapons would reshape U.S. relations in the region far more than a hundred Cairo speeches.

If his history holds, Obama will choose weakness, but I still hold out hope that he will come to support tough sanctions backed by a credible threat of military action.

This is, oh, about 1000x more important than crafting and passing a health care bill, but never underestimate the tendency of this president to dust an end table while ignoring the elephant in the room.

The administration that keeps on giving

Lest you think that Carterian idiocy only emanates from the former president himself, I give you his National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski (from a Daily Beat interview):

DB: How aggressive can Obama be in insisting to the Israelis that a military strike might be in America’s worst interest?

Brzezinski: We are not exactly impotent little babies. They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?

DB: What if they fly over anyway?

Brzezinski: Well, we have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren’t just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a Liberty in reverse.

Three decades later, it's still gives you chills to think that these people ran the country for four years.

Quick hits

Some short notes, probably mostly dated due to my week plus on the shelf with the flu.

Mickey Kaus: “If you don’t want people to think that subsidized, voluntary end-of-of-life counseling sessions are the camel’s nose of an attempt to cut costs by limiting end-of-life care, then don’t put them in a bill the overarching, stated purpose of which is to cut health care costs!

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Flashback: Wal-Mart vs FEMA, private sector vs government…guess who prepared for and responded to Katrina better?

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It was nice of White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs to give the Iranian regime a PR boost by referring to Aquavelvajad (love that Dennis Miller nickname) as the “elected” president of Iran, a quote that was hyped endlessly in the Iranian state TV and press. Every regime needs their useful idiots.

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Things you would see if the left ran the world: government tracking your movement via GPS in order to tax you.

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Certainly a grain of truth in this from Moe Lane, which is actually imitating the style of anti-Bush attacks: “[T]he antiwar movement is run by racists who only like brown people when they can be used as clubs with which to beat anybody to the antiwar movement’s Right. Well, anyone to their Right, and Jews.”

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Little Green Footballs: “This [Israel pounding Hamas in Operation Cast Lead] is one of those ludicrous media memes that refuses to die: fighting against evil only makes evil stronger. You’ll see it in articles about every conflict; it’s a kind of nihilistic philosophical tic that is nearly universal, a counterintuitive observation that’s supposed to impress you with its depth.”

Appeasers are not the most creative sorts, I’ll agree.

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Your congress in action: “Just last week Washington announced it would cut $100 million from the federal administrative budgets and acted like that was some big achievement. Now this week we learn that about the same time those cuts were made public, the House OK’d the purchase of the private jets. The taxpayer money the House plans to spend is to be used to buy three Gulfstream G550s at roughly $65 million each. These are long-range business jets with large, palatial interiors and three temperature zones.”

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Government in action: The guidelines in the House-passed bill state that large SUVs and trucks, typically considered gas guzzlers in everyday conversation, qualify for the $3,500 credit, and in some cases the $4,500 credit, depending on the trade-ins that come through the door for them. New Category 2 trucks -- like the Hummer H-3, Ford Explorer, Chevy Silverado, and Toyota Tundra -- qualify if they get at least 15 MPG combined, and get at least one mile per gallon more than the car or truck being traded in.

Yawn

One of the major points of contention between right and left has been the wisdom of offering to talk without preconditions to Iran, as Obama promised during his campaign. Which is why this headline caught my eye:

Iran says Obama's offer to talk shows US failure

The open explains:

US President Barack Obama's offer to talk to Iran shows that America's policy of "domination" has failed, the government spokesman said on Saturday.

"This request means Western ideology has become passive, that capitalist thought and the system of domination have failed," Gholam Hossein Elham was quoted as saying by the Mehr news agency.

"Negotiation is secondary, the main issue is that there is no way but for (the United States) to change," he added.

May I direct your attention to the large object above the end zone...that would be the SCOREBOARD!

Depends on whose ox is being gored, etc.

So, consumers are now gouging the oil companies, do I have that right?

And speculators are artificially driving prices down, correct?

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Random factoid: Last month was the 70th warmest October in the 114 years for which we have records.

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Of the 425 Guantanamo prisoners released, 50 have been re-captured trying to kill Americans again. And I have to doubt that we’ve captured 100% of the repeat war criminals.

Yeah, closing Guantanamo sounds like a terrific idea…

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Signs of sanity across the pond:

“Italy and Germany agree that measures to cut greenhouse gases shouldn’t weigh on the economy, Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel said at a press conference Tuesday, indicating government support for tough new measures in Europe is waning.”

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Unfortunately, signs of insanity at home:

“The Governor of California has just said that the US is the greatest polluter in the world, which is manifestly untrue on any level.”

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NR offers a counter cliché on bailing out the UAW:

"We’ve heard of too big to fail. Isn’t there such a thing as too failed to bail?"

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From a must-read account of a conversation between Jay Nordlinger and the heroic Chinese dissident Jian-li Yang:

We turn back to China and the Olympics: “A park was set aside for protest,” says Jian-li — was set aside at least in theory. “But not a single application for a protest or demonstration was approved.” In addition to which, there were not as many potential protesters around as there might have been: because “everyone had been arrested before the Olympics.”

The world’s journalists letting the Olympics pass by without shining a bright light on the human rights hell that is China – shameful.

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Our conflict with Iran is becoming more intense, and looks like it will be the biggest challenge facing the Obama administration. By that I mean real, existential challenge, not a transient issue like a slowing economy.

Which is what makes French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s take so unsettling. Sarkozy calls Obama’s stance on Iran “utterly immature” and characterizes it as “formulations empty of all content.”

Sarkozy also fears that Obama will undermine the united European resistance by “arrogantly” ignoring the UN Security Council and opening direct talks with Iran with no preconditions.

Let us hope that Sarkozy underestimates the president-elect, our future depends on it.

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Did Al Qaeda number two Ayman Zawahiri really call Obama a "house Negro" in an audio tape released Tuesday? I though that was a slur used exclusively by American racists to refer to blacks who did not think the way they are damned well told to think, who choose to stray away from the ideological plantation.

How odd to hear it coming from an Arab.

Sometimes you forget to post, etc.

I ran across this file that I apparently put together and forgot to post, so if any of it seems dated realize that it's more than a week old.

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Pacifists and other assorted America-lasters tend to discount the threat of a nuclear Iran, often because they claim that the mad mullahs are many years from accomplishing anything. The problem with that spin is that last fall the head of the UN's nuclear "watchdog" said that Iran would need three to eight years to acquire an atomic bomb. And then this summer he said six months to a year.

My point is not to say that the threat is imminent, although it clearly could be and the UN thinks it is. My point is that we do not know, and this existential threat is one issue where we cannot afford to be left standing by while they complete the task.

Bottom line, the next president simply must stop Iran from going nuclear. Whether it is in his first month or well into his first term, it is a necessity and will go a long way toward how history judges his presidency.

And here’s a hint: pure diplomacy will not get the job done. They are not going to voluntarily give up their pursuit of the bomb, no matter how nicely we ask them, contrary to the fantasies of the wimpy foreign policy crowd.

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In beating SMU 34-7 in windy and rainy conditions last Saturday, Navy ran 77 rushing plays and 0 (ZERO!) passes. Have we seen that since the 1920’s, if even then?

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I’m shocked, shocked, to learn that the US tax system is not only more progressive than tax hells like France and Sweden, it is second only to Ireland as the most progressive in the Western world.

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Washington and Washington State are a combined 0-14 against the spread vs. 1-A opponents this year. No word on whether Barney Frank has proclaimed them to be in great shape.

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Possible fake name alert…did the Gainesville Sun really find somebody named Dick Hunter to feature in the lead for this story on a Gay Pride Festival?

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An odd rule in North Carolina could hurt Obama. When you cast a straight ticket vote in the state, it does not count for the presidential or (nonpartisan) judicial elections. It’s a rule that Democrats put in to help their state and local candidates.

Democrats created the straight-ticket law in the 1960s. More conservative than the national Democratic party, state Democrats feared that relatively liberal candidates at the top of the ticket might reduce their appeal among straight-ticket voters, so they made sure the presidency would be a separate question for voters.

This led to a presidential undervote of 18,000 in 2004, as straight-party voters who were not careful or were not aware of the law failed to vote for president (some could have done so by choice, but you would think that would be a very small percentage). It is ironic that the most liberal major candidate in history could be hurt by a law meant to protect state Democrats from exactly such a candidate. You reap what you sow.

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Assault with a deadly smelling weapon:

Fort Pierce woman accused of shoplifting, brandishing a female sanitary napkin
A 27-year-old woman accused of shoplifting cologne and trying to touch an officer with a “well-used and bloody female sanitary napkin” Tuesday is facing charges, according to an arrest affidavit released Wednesday.

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Three papers who endorsed McCain are booted from Obama’s traveling party. If he wins, the assault on free speech will be breathtaking, given how heavy-handed they’ve been during the campaign.

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You say you always wanted to sleep with a virgin? Are you sure? Positive?

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White Supremacists for Obama

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I’m agnostic (because I see such things as unknowable), but this is the kind of thing that makes you think there is a God, and He is a just God:

"Snow fell as the House of Commons debated Global Warming yesterday - the first October fall in the metropolis since 1922."

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No wonder Obama is so fond of big government – he categorically refuses to give any financial help to his own family, even though they apparently need it:

Zeituni Onyango, the aunt so affectionately described in Mr Obama's best-selling memoir Dreams from My Father, lives in a disabled-access flat on a rundown public housing estate in South Boston.

A second relative believed to be the long-lost "Uncle Omar" described in the book was beaten by armed robbers with a "sawed-off rifle" while working in a corner shop in the Dorchester area of the city. He was later evicted from his one-bedroom flat for failing to pay $2,324.20 (£1,488) arrears, according to the Boston Housing Court.

It gets worse: Bob Krumm notes that "The most damning part of the Obama aunt story is that once his campaign found her living in squalor they told her to not talk to the press until after the election, but they didn't try to help her."

Well, they are strapped for cash, after all.

Yes, the story is from a London paper; you know the US media is in full-blackout mode on stories unkind to Obama at this late date.

And oh yeah, did I mention she’s an illegal alien?

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I had no idea that Bill Ayers dedicated one of his books to RFK assassin Sirhan Sirhan (among others). I can see why Obama chose him as a mentor; he’s such a sweet guy.

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The Massachusetts state income tax repeal initiative: change we can believe in.

A big announcement, etc.

I’ve made it clear I’m not an Obama fan, and I’m not enamored of McCain either, so even though it’s late I’ve decided to take the plunge.

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At least he’s honest. Barney Frank, in the news lately as a habitual Fannie/Freddie apologist and enabler, and thus as one of the primary villains in the mortgage crisis, lets us know that his economic ignorance is not limited to housing: "I think at this point there needs to be a focus on an immediate increase in spending and I think this is a time when deficit fear has to take a second seat . . . I believe later on there should be tax increases.”

Fire, meet gasoline.

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I can take this college basketball player off the dribble and score at will, while shutting him down so you’ll think his half of the scoreboard is broken.

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Random envirofact: US greenhouse gas emissions are falling (EPA source document linked). They were lower in 2006 than in 2005, and are expected to be lower in 2007 than in 2006 when official figures are released next spring, And it’s hard to imagine that they would not be droping in 2008, given the significant decrease in gasoline usage.

I’m not claiming any significance, as I think that solar cycles overwhelm any human contribution to climate, just throwing out a truth that will be inconvenient for the global warmist movement. Now the next time you read that US emissions are increasing, you will know the source is lying.

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Socialism 101:

Despite having some of the world's largest energy reserves, Venezuela is increasingly struggling to maintain basic electrical service, a growing challenge for leftist President Hugo Chavez.

The OPEC nation has suffered three nationwide blackouts this year, and chronic power shortages have sparked protests from the western Andean highlands to San Felix, a city of mostly poor industrial workers in the sweltering south.

[…]

The problem suggests that Chavez, with his ambitious international alliances and promises to end capitalism, risks alienating supporters by failing to focus on basic issues like electricity, trash collection and law enforcement.

As Glenn Reynolds notes, “Too much wealth-spreading, not enough wealth-creation and maintenance.”

They say that to keep trying the same failing action over and over, hoping for a different result, is an illustration of insanity. So it is with collectivist economics and their 100% historical failure rate, but you can bet that these Utopian fantasies will keep destroying lives for another century or three.

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Great story that captures the very essence of Castro (this is real, not a joke): after losing a 1962 round to his strongman, mass murderer Che Guevara, Fidel eliminated the nation’s golf courses, turning them into schools and resorts, among other things. For some reason, one nine-hole course in Havana was spared the tyrant’s wrath, but with his death, err I mean illness (wink, wink) it appears that developers will bring the sport back to the island.

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Having secured the endorsement of Hamas months ago, Obama has now added an endorsement from Iran to his column. Et tu, North Korea?

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Michael Barone reports on hate mongering as campaign rhetoric:

Here's insight into the thinking of some Democrats. In Ohio, they're attacking state Rep. Josh Mandel for having fulfilled his military obligation to serve in Iraq. As Joel Mowbray tells the story, Democrats are saying that Mandel neglected his constituents in favor of "serving George Bush." In these Democrats' view, the war in Iraq is evidently a purely partisan cause, not one sanctioned by the U.S. Congress and ordered by the U.S. president. These people want the United States to prevail only if there is a Democratic president and take delight in American defeat if the president is a Republican. I've seldom seen such a disgusting display of partisanship over country.

Genocide averted? etc.

An attempted genocide foiled?

Russian sources are claming that an Iranian ship captured by Somali pirates was a huge dirty bomb headed for Israel on Yom Kippur:

At this writing, the MV Iran Deyanat is at anchor, watched closely by American, French and Russian naval units.

[Russian sources claim she] was an enormous floating dirty bomb, intended to detonate after exiting the Suez Canal at the eastern end of the Mediterranean and in proximity to the coastal cities of Israel. The entire cargo of radioactive sand, obtained by Iran from China (the latter buys desperately needed oil from the former) and sealed in containers which, when the charges on the ship are set off after the crew took to the boats, will be blasted high into the air where prevailing winds will push the highly dangerous and radioactive cloud ashore.

From the same post, this hilariously ironic news:

Vice President for Media Affairs Mehdi Kalhor said on Saturday that Iran has set two preconditions for holding talks with the United States of America.

In an exclusive interview with IRNA, he said as long as U.S. forces have not left the Middle East region and continues its support for the Zionist regime, talks between Iran and U.S. is off the agenda.

It turns out that Obama's promised capitulation is a one-way street.

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There’s really very little difference between the Daily Kos web community and the KKK; it’s just a difference in which groups are the targets of their hate. A common fantasy of the loony left is to criminalize dissent, to establish a leftist totalitarian police state. Here’s a sample of this line of “thought”:

I support Obama, but I disagree on some major issues. One is that we need to use major authoritarian measures against wingnuts and theocrats to save this country. That in particular includes deprogramming institutions and a Gitmo like camp to deal with the worst wingnuts. These people should be removed from general society and need to be shut up.

I have believed this for years, but the behavior of the wingnuts at the McCain and Palin rallies further underscores the need to take harsh action against these people. Lincoln and FDR had to bend the Constitution at times, and I hope Obama has the guts to do so too to deal with these third rate creatures.

Hey, they hate religion too, maybe they can take up cross burning!

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Re: the Mark Steyn passage I quoted on Monday, John Hinderaker adds:

American liberals have yearned to match Europe's supposed sophistication as long as America has existed. Maybe someone should give them the news: adopting Euro-style leftism in 2008 would be a bit like having a go at European fascism in 1945.

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Hilarious passage from a Washington Post story on the Wizards:

After players filed on to buses to take them back to the hotel following Sunday’s practice, an English-speaking Berliner who happened to be walking by tried to figure out what she was seeing.

“Who are the Wizards?” she asked.

When told that the team is from the United States and plays basketball in the NBA, the woman smiled.

“Oh, like the Lakers,” she said.

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This scouting tool sounds very cool:

The [Phoenix] scouts have a cutting edge computer program, where they can literally call up video clips of any player in the draft based on certain categories, like “transition defense” or “three-point shots” or “post-up possessions”, and the computer will run a series of clips of the good and the bad of that player in those circumstances.

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President Bush is really hurting McCain right now, but not in a way you’ll often see acknowledged.

It is because Bush has essentially won the Iraq front of the WOT, making it a non-issue in the campaign. Were it an issue, Obama’s repeated promises to surrender would be held against him, but at this point not even a hard leftist could find a way to lose this thing, so a huge liability is removed from his ledger.

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Genius satire from Sense of Events:

With the price of petroleum having fallen from almost $150 per barrel last summer to about $81, the campaigns of both Barack Obama and John McCain rushed to outline their respective plans to rescue beleaguered oil companies from nose-diving profits and earnings.

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A McCain-Obama difference I had not heard about: while neither supports a return to a military draft, they do differ on the specifics.

[T]he two presidential candidates disagree on a key foundation of any future draft: Mr. Obama supports a requirement for both men and women to register with the Selective Service, while Mr. McCain doesn't think women should have to register.

Also, Mr. Obama would consider officially opening combat positions to women. Mr. McCain would not.

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I’m shocked, shocked to learn that YouTube is using the DMCA as justification to take down anti-Obama content but not doing the same to anti-McCain content.

Although the co-sponsor of McCain-Feingold is on shaky ground making free political speech arguments.

RIP Alexander Solzhenitsyn etc.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of the great heroes of the 20th century, passed away last night in Moscow. His courage in writing and publishing The Gulag Archipelago in 1974 was immeasurable. The book itself is one of the most important in human history. Those who lived under the horrors of communism, indeed under any totalitarian nightmare, had no greater ally. RIP.

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30 years ago today, Jimmy Carter established the Department of Energy. $4.00 a gallon gas, major decreases in domestic energy production and dramatic increases in our reliance on foreign sources for our energy tells you that it worked out exactly as one would expect from a major government expansion.

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With the Olympics set to begin next week in by far the greatest polluting country in the world, there will never be a better time for Al Gore to show up and forcefully speak out. We shall see if there is any sincerity in his fire and brimstone rhetoric or if the whole thing is just a ruse designed to make him a billionaire. Tick, tock…

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While on the subject of the rotund VP cum preacher, enjoy this limerick from Scott Cram:

There once was a man named Gore,
who thought he had a climate change cure,
then things like grain and rice,
went far up in price,
now he's to blame for starving the poor!

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Why does the notion that the concept of “mutually assured destruction,” which kept the US and the Soviet Union from engaging in nuclear war in the Cold War, still have traction in some circles as being applicable to the Iran dilemma? Soviet communism was a rational (albeit evil) ideology, more interested in survival than the destruction of its enemy.

Can we really assume that Shiite fundamentalism’s apocalyptic tendencies are all just an act? It’s not like the willingness to sacrifice most of their own in order to destroy Israel is a fringe position in the Iranian government, it comes from so many including from those at the very top.

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When David Beckham moved from Madrid to Los Angeles, did he have to learn Spanish?

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Wisdom from the great Thomas Sowell on how it is that a 9/11 or the constant attacks on Israel can happen at this point in history:

There was a time when it would have been suicidal to threaten, much less attack, a nation with much stronger military power because one of the dangers to the attacker would be the prospect of being annihilated.

"World opinion," the U.N. and "peace movements" have eliminated that deterrent. An aggressor today knows that if his aggression fails, he will still be protected from the full retaliatory power and fury of those he attacked because there will be hand-wringers demanding a cease fire, negotiations and concessions.

Fall 2003...hmm, rings a bell

If we accept, for the sake of argument, that the NIE conclusion that Iran suspended its nuclear program in fall 2003, the next logical question is…why fall 2003? Why not summer 2001 or winter 2005? The timing makes the underlying cause obvious, but the precise motivation somewhat less clear.

That cause was pretty clearly the removal of Saddam Hussein from his post as Iraqi dictator for life by US armed forces. But I can see two separate threads behind that driving force.

The first is good old-fashioned fear. The removal of Saddam showed that our engagement in the War on Terror was not just going to be going after bin Laden and the Taliban and then going back into our 1990’s shell. No, we were in this thing for the long haul, and those who harbored or otherwise aided terrorists would have to answer for doing so. Qaddafi had seen the writing on the wall and, not wanting any part of a new and bolder US, voluntarily disbanded Libya’s nuclear weapons program, a happy side effect of which was the dismantling of the A.Q. Kahn nuclear black market.

It’s not hard to imagine that in this atmosphere, where the previous 12 months had seen the removal of the Taliban and Saddam and the emasculation of Qaddafi, the Mad Mullahs opted for self-preservation in deciding to back off their quest for the bomb for a spell. This is the Occam’s Razor version, the most likely scenario.

The second possibility is that the decision was made after Saddam was extracted from his hole in the ground. The thinking here is that Iran was pursuing the bomb precisely because they had a next-door neighbor who was as unstable and unpredictable as, well themselves, one who had already attempted to conquer them and another neighbor within the last two decades and change. This grave threat was clearly hell-bent on obtaining his own nuclear bomb, indeed there is a pretty good chance that he would have succeeded in doing so and used it against Iran in their war if not for the fortuitous intervention of the Israelis.

The US had finally, after over a decade of his thumbing his nose at the world and violating the Gulf War cease fire, removed this loose cannon from power in the spring of 2003. But, like the Iraqi people themselves, the Iranians had to stay pretty nervous as long as he was on the lam. Who’s to say that he would not manage to hide out until the US lost its will? They certainly had left the South Vietnamese people hanging out to dry in 1975 and the Iraqis in 1991, why would this time be different? All they had to do was flick on CNN or check out the New York Times to see cheerleading for a burgeoning anti-war movement.

No, they would not be safe until this guy was caught. And then, in fall 2003 he was. The Iraqi people, having been burned before, still greatly feared a Saddam return to power, but the Iranians probably realized that the US was not about to let him go under any circumstances. With their primary threat gone, and in a world grown hostile to rouge nations developing nukes, the time seemed right to back off for a while, making sure that aspects of the program remained and that the whole thing could be restarted in full on fairly short notice.

This is also for a very plausible scenario. It has some problems, not the least of which is that one of (the primary?) Iran’s primary foreign policy goals is to remove Israel from the map and push all Middle Eastern Jews into the ground or out of the region, a modern version of Hitler’s Final Solution. And this fantasy would obviously require the bomb if it were to have any hope of succeeding.

Further evidence against it is that Iran continues to wage hot war against the US and occasionally Israel; if they only wanted nukes to defend themselves against Saddam this makes no sense. It is more in line with the fear scenario and what they would do if they wanted to remove the source of their fear. Destabilizing Iraq and waiting for US useful idiots to help them drive the US out of Iraq would be the quickest way to do so, at which point they could get back to the business of preparing to kill millions of Jews.

So I have to ultimately side with fear as Iran’s motivation in the hypothetical that the late November NIE is correct. As the sane world certainly hopes and prays that it is.

Bush NIEd

What to make of the NIE report that that the president received November 28 and was made public December 4, suggesting that Iran suspended (not disbanded, although it will often be spun as such) its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003?

Well, if it’s true then it is great news for the world in general and the US in particular. Iran is a nation whose leaders are insane and which has been waging war against the US in various capacities for almost three decades, most recently the hot war in Iraq. Anything that would even temporarily make them less dangerous is a very good thing.

Of course, that’s the rub – if it’s true. The US really has very little intelligence capability left, having seen it weakened by a series of stupid policy decisions ranging from the Church Committee’s work to the Torricelli Principle and post-Cold War budget cuts. Human intelligence in the areas where we most need it is all but nonexistent, leading us to rely on informants (whose motivations and loyalties are often questionable at best) as primary sources. And on our end we get fuzzy analysis of this dubious data by domestic bureaucrats, who we have seen are often driven by their own political agendas. Intelligence gathering is a difficult task even if the employees are loyal to their boss and organization; when rouge agents are openly hostile to a sitting president and official US policy you get a chaotic mess.

Thus the infamous “slam dunk” of stockpiles of Iraqi WMD, which gave ammunition to anti-American demagogues around the globe (and, sadly, at home). And the current state of Iranian nuclear intelligence, where a 2007 report, by all accounts based on the word of a single defector, directly contradicts the 2005 report based on the totality of then-existing fuzzy data and analysis. Pardon me if my confidence in pronouncements which change 180 degrees in two years is not even “moderate,” much less “high.”

Adding to the doubt is a Wall Street Journal report that “the NIE's main authors include three former State Department officials [Tom Fingar, Vann Van Diepen and Kenneth Brill] with previous reputations as ‘hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials.’" CIA officials have in the (very recent) past shown a willingness to undermine US policy and endanger the lives of Americans for nothing more than scoring cheap political points against the president, so it’s not like more sabotage would be out of character.

Others share my skepticism. A senior IAEA official said "To be frank, we are more skeptical. We don't buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran." Israeli is also far from convinced, but then again their very survival probably depends on keeping Iran from going nuclear, so they have a vested interest in erring on the side of caution.

I should probably mention the political spin, which (as usual) reads like something from The Onion. The basic premise is that the president “lied” when he followed past NIE’s, and that he again “lied” because he…uhh, here’s where it gets murky, but apparently because he did not have a clairvoyant vision of what was to come in this one in the months leading up to November 28, when he actually saw the document for the first time. I will give Bush Derangement Syndrome sufferers credit here, they may be fundamentally unserious but they are extremely creative and produce some genuinely hilarious stuff. If only they would channel that creativity into something useful, like trying to figure out how college football could determine their champion by playing football games.

In summary, I fear that we are overcompensating for previous intelligence mistakes by becoming timid and risk-averse, which is even more dangerous. Or that this whole thing is just another attempt by the CIA/State axis to undermine the president. I would dearly love for this report to ultimately be proven correct, especially if the program is still in hiatus today and remains so well into the future. But I’ve heard boy crying wolf so many times that I remain somewhere between anxious and terrified of the Mad Mullahs and their insane figurehead.

The Columbia School of Genocide Enabling

Roger Simon wonders about Columbia's requirements for prospective speakers:

"I have a question for the Columbia crowd, since Holocaust deniers are welcome, would you allow a speaker in favor of a return to black slavery?"

It's a fair question. The most over the top KKK member remaining (there is still a KKK, right?) could not be any more objectionable than the Holocaust denying, genocide fantasizing, "Death to America" spouting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is, even as he is waging hot war against this country in Iraq. It is one of our greatest tragedies that our elite universities have devolved to the point that such a hate-monger can be an honored guest and given a platform for his psychotic vitriol.

Columbia's president Lee Bollinger, and the executives at CBS (where Ahmadinejad will appear on 60 Minutes the night before his speech) would have doubtless fawned over Adolph Hitler circa 1942, but lacking him are settling for the next best thing. As James Taranto quips in noting that Iran punishes gay sex by death while banning ROTC from campus due to Bill Clinton's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy:

"If the U.S. military executed homosexuals instead of merely discharging them, perhaps Bollinger would welcome ROTC back to Columbia."

The best advice I've seen on how we, as ordinary citizens, should react to this sorry situation is given by Death By 1000 Papercuts:

"In a world of perfect karma, Ahmadinejad would be captured by American "students" and held hostage for over a year, paraded before TV cameras and threatened almost daily with death."

UPDATE 9/22/07 11:15pm:
Glenn Reynolds has another excellent suggestion:

"Have some scantily-clad coed run up and give him a kiss. Make sure photos are distributed in Iran."

Iran's world war

So now Iranian military personnel have been captured in Gaza, as has happened many times in Iraq. With the frequent flyer miles they're bulding up, how long before we find them in Cleveland?

At least they are honest about their fervent desire for genocide and for establishing a global caliphate, nobody will ever be able to honestly say anything Iran does in the future catches them by surprise. Note the qualifier "honestly;" people will feign shock, but they will be lying when they do so.

Give our nukes to the mullahs!

It's probably impolite to make fun of the insane, but this is just too funny to pass up. The AP is apparently pushing a new anti-war figure, a Rosemarie Jackowski from Vermont, who has been appealing her 2003 arrest for disrupting traffic. They make her out to be a regular old gal, "not a loony tune by any means," but that turns out to be true only in the sense that "loony tune" is a huge undersell. Check out some of her fine work:

The United States owes reparations to the people of Iran. How much should be paid for the 1953 coup? How much is a democracy worth? Here’s a thought. Suppose the U.S. gave all of its nuclear weapons to Iran. Would that be a win, win, win scenario? The world would be safer because the only nation that had ever used nukes would no longer have any. The people of Iran would be compensated for the 1953 coup. The U.S. taxpayers would be spared a bill for reparations.

But she's not an anti-Semite! You hate to say that something is the funniest thing you've ever read, because the competition is so stiff, so I'll just say that this is a serious contender.

Hat tip: James Taranto.

How can you tell Hezbollah's lying?

Not just when they move their lips, as the old saying goes, but pretty much any time they communicate in any fashion. There's been a lot written lately about terrorists feeding fake stories to western journalists, as well as faking and/or staging photographs and video. An Aussie paper reports on a humorous attempt at photofakery:

http://www.moqavemat.com - an Iran-based website run by the Hezbollah terrorist group - is running this picture (above) of what it claims is the Israeli ship it hit with a missile last month.

Now look at the Royal Australian Navy’s picture below - as published by Defence Industry Daily - of its sinking of the decommissioned Australian destroyer-escort HMAS Torrens off the coast of Western Australia in 1998 . We were told at the time the Torrens was deliberately sunk by a torpedo fired by one of our own submarines, the HMAS Farncomb.

Should we now think that we were in fact attacked by Hezbollah - or is this just the latest proof that Hezbollah will lie and lie again for propaganda gain?

Whitewashing Iran

A remarkable admission from lefty blogger (one of the sane ones, which is what makes it notable) Kevin Drum, what amounts to claiming that he does not criticize Iran because it might help Bush (or the Republicans, the Neocons, or some other dreaded bogeyman).

Junkyard blog nails it with his close: "This is a journalist, by the way; someone who—though he may be biased—is supposed to have some passing acquaintance with telling the truth. Even if it helps the other party. But his conscience is troubled more by possibly helping Bush with his super-important, oracular, weighty-smart words than it is by his helping the Mullahs—the antithesis of everything he believes, and who want to kill us all—through his dishonest silence."

As many have said, it is impossible to parody the left these days.

An underreported story

I don't think this has gotten much play here, but to the surprise of nobody Iran been trying to procure uranium from Africa. This plot was foiled, but you have to doubt it is the only time they tried or will try it:

IRAN is seeking to import large consignments of bomb-making uranium from the African mining area that produced the Hiroshima bomb, an investigation has revealed.

A United Nations report, dated July 18, said there was “no doubt” that a huge shipment of smuggled uranium 238, uncovered by customs officials in Tanzania, was transported from the Lubumbashi mines in the Congo.

Tanzanian customs officials told The Sunday Times it was destined for the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, and was stopped on October 22 last year during a routine check.

I'm sure they're just trying to generate affordable electricity...