Petrified Truth

Today is Memorial Day 2004

President Bush spoke in his Saturday radio address about the War on Terror and Memorial Day:

Those who have fought the battles of the war on terror and served the cause of freedom can be proud of all they have achieved. And these veterans of battle will carry with them, for all their days, the memory of the ones who did not live to be called veterans. Each man or woman we have laid to rest had hopes for the future, and left a place that can never be filled. Each was the most important person in someone's life. For their families there is terrible sorrow, and we pray for their comfort. For the nation, there is a feeling of loss, and we remember each name.

Through our history, America has gone to war reluctantly because we have known the costs of war. And in every generation, it is the best among us who are called to pay that price. Those who have paid those costs have given us every moment we live in freedom, and every living American is in their debt. We can never repay what they gave for this country. But on this holiday, we acknowledge the debt by showing our respect and gratitude.

Casualties in war and the defense of freedom did not begin with Iraq and Afghanistan.

The World War I St. Mihiel American Cemetery and Memorial is located at the west edge of Thiaucourt, France. This cemetery, forty acres in extent, contains the graves of 4,153 American military dead from World War I. Most of these gave their lives in the great offensive which resulted in the reduction of the St. Mihiel salient that threatened Paris.

Chalabi reconsidered

Michael Ledeen has been watching the torrent of criticism and innuendo directed at Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, and sees both rampant CYA and apparent utter disregard by the Washington establishment for the biggest risk: Iran.

[This story is] about the failure of the intelligence community to do its job properly, and the fear that they may be held to account. By now everybody knows that the IC failed to appreciate the significance of al Qaeda, failed to see 9/11 coming, failed to develop reliable information about Iraq, whether it be about internal political realities (those failed coups, remember?), or the WMD facts, from their existence to their location, and so forth. The spooks must be wondering if some political or budgetary axe is hovering over them, and so they need a scapegoat. They picked Chalabi, a man they have always disliked, ever since he exposed one of their coup plots as amateur night. So now they say that they really knew better all along, but they were "duped" by the diabolical genius Chalabi.

Oh really? If Chalabi's handful of defectors hornswoggled the entire U.S. intelligence community, then why are we spending tens of billions of dollars on it each and every fiscal year? What happened, the polygraphs had some moisture? They are now even trying to blame him for the "mobile labs" story. Good luck with that one. Among their sources were foreign intelligence services and their own human recruits.

Finally, if Chalabi is so unreliable why is it that General Myers praised INC intelligence for saving American lives? Is he a dupe, too? Doesn't he know what's happening on the battlefield?

In my view, the worst of the dupes are those who refuse to see what is in front of our collective nose. Somehow, despite a torrent of evidence, this administration refuses to recognize that Iran was, and is, the greatest menace to us, the greatest sponsor of the terror network, and either in possession of atomic bombs or soon to have them. Even if Chalabi turns out to be a master spy, he cannot be blamed for this enormous intelligence and policy failure. Yet we still have no Iran policy. And the nuclear clock continues to tick in Tehran.

Faster, please.

Get ready

Well, it's disturbing to see this news...

U.S. intelligence officials received "several" credible reports that terrorist groups like Al Qaeda may be planning an attack during one of the major events scheduled for this summer, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said Wednesday.

The intelligence was described Tuesday by another senior counterterrorism official as extremely credible and backed by an unusually high level of corroboration.

The intelligence does not include a time, place or method of attack but is among the most disturbing received by the government since the Al Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the official said.

"There is clearly a steady drumbeat of information that they are going to attack and hit us hard," said another senior federal counterterrorism official, who described the intelligence as highly credible.

... following an earlier report from strategic intelligence firm Stratfor that Houston is the most likely target. The opportunities here do include a "major event" - major league baseball's All-Star Game on July 13.

The FBI has scheduled a news conference later today to announce more details about the threat. Just in case, the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security has a website that gives advice on how to prepare for a terrorist attack.

UPDATE: Atty. General Ashcroft and FBI Director Mueller did hold their news conference today. In an act of unrelenting cynicism, a national co-chair of the Kerry campaign promptly accused them of a publicity stunt.

In a conference call with reporters arranged by the presidential campaign of Democrat John Kerry, who is challenging U.S. President George W. Bush, leaders of two police and firefighter unions said they suspect the timing of the warning had more to do with Bush's political standing than with any recent revelation by U.S. intelligence.

"I'm not accusing them of making it up," said Harold Schaitberger, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters and a national co-chair of Kerry's campaign. "My understanding is that the information, the chatter they refer to, has actually been available for a number of weeks. I find it incredible that it is only now that it is being brought forward."

That drew this response:

Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, said the comments by the union heads were "very disturbing" and showed a "serious misunderstanding of the threat of global terror."

Well, no kidding. The word "serious" should not suffer from guilt by association with the Kerry campaign.

Risk and responsibility

The omniscient InstaPundit has been looking at recent studies and polls about journalism and journalists, and has some sobering thoughts.

What happens if the public comes to regard the press as untrustworthy and un-American? Will the First Amendment continue to be regarded expansively? Maybe. Maybe not. And if you look at the various journalistic scandals, from Jayson Blair to fake Iraq photos, and at polls like these, coupled with others showing decreased respect for journalists, and reduced viewership and readership for major media outlets, the risk seems genuine.

Press freedom is in the Constitution, but so are a lot of rights that don't get nearly as much actual protection out in the world. Members of the press have often warned business people that malfeasance and self-serving behavior puts capitalism at risk. Malfeasance and self-serving behavior by the press puts free expression at risk, too.

A morally hazardous position

WSJ's James Taranto makes this excellent point while discussing President Bush's Army War College speech on Iraq.

American public opinion is now the most important front in the war, and it's high time the president began waging the battle. An American election is approaching, which the Democrats--having lost all three elected branches of government for the first time since before the Baathists seized power in Iraq--are positively desperate to win. With the economy going great guns, disaster in Iraq is the Dems' only hope for defeating President Bush.

The Democratic Party is in a morally hazardous position: Its interests coincide with the interests of America's enemies. We get e-mails from Bush-haters who are positively giddy at every setback in Iraq, which they see as setbacks for President Bush--never mind that they're also, and more importantly, setbacks for America and for the Iraqi people.

Unlike some of his colleagues (Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd), John Kerry has been careful not to disparage America or urge defeat. But it's hard to see how he can win the presidency unless Americans lose confidence in the Iraq effort--and thus hard to see how a President Kerry would enter office with a mandate to succeed, rather than to get out.

Report card

Writing last week, scholar and teacher Victor Davis Hanson has handed out a report card on the war on terror, including Iraq. His assessment: A for strategy, B- for tactics, and a D for message.

Here at home we have not explained the terrible ironies of this war to the American public. More civilians in our cities were incinerated than all the soldiers who have died fighting abroad—and al Qaeda promises a worse toll to come through the unleashing of weapons even more horrible than crashing airliners.

Americans do not grasp that should a constitutional government emerge in Iraq, al Qaeda is faced with an enemy far more formidable than the United States. The old false choice between strong-armed dictators and Islamic fascists will start to crumble with a third option that says to the Arab Street: “Look to your own elected government—that is, yourselves—not the United States or Israel, when the sewers back up and the power fails.” So, yes, what happens in the next two or three months is the most critical event since September 11.

We need to accept that our enemy is not a fleet of bombers or subs, but something far more insidious and formidable. He is a stealthy foe that so far has killed more Americans in their home streets than all of Hitler’s Storm Troopers, Tojo’s carriers, or Stalin’s Migs—and more eerily still, with far less furious a response from Americans than was true during the last sixty years.

His conclusion?

Our strategy is still inspired and our military is superb. But we need to let them win and then tell the world why. And if we don’t, we may very well lose.

Cosby continued

African-American pundits are weighing in on Bill Cosby's "rant-sermon" at a recent event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Clarence Page says Cosby violated "BPC," black political correctness, but also says that isn't the entire issue.

No, it is not news when blacks admonish other blacks to work harder. But when anybody from one race accuses or offends somebody of another race, stop the presses!

Cosby's view, by contrast, offers a side of black life that seldom is seen on the news, a self-reliance liberalism. Right-wing ideologues pretend that self-reliance liberalism does not exist. But most successful African-Americans are intimately familiar with it. The message, as Cosby might say, is simple: Those of us who have made it need to help those who have not, but poor black folks need to "hold up their end in this deal," too.

Cosby was saying the same thing backstage when I interviewed him during my college days. It was 1968, but he didn't want to talk about black power, Black Panthers or cultural revolutions. He wanted to complain about why so many young blacks of my generation were wasting the great opportunities that hard-won civil rights victories had brought us.

In those politically polarized times, I was disappointed by his traditionalist attitude. But I appreciate its wisdom today with new eyes, the eyes of a parent.

Leonard Pitts, Jr. seems to be on a similar wavelength:

Blacks and whites have a way of talking past each other.

The fact is, Cosby said nothing about black underachievement that black people have not said before. His mistake, if you want to call it that, was in speaking publicly. Because publicly, we — black and white — prefer to stick to the script that makes it easiest on us, demands the least from us.

So let me say something for the record. Much as some white folk pretend otherwise, racism didn't vanish one fine day long ago. It lives, here, now, still. And it isn't something black people can cure through self-improvement. Racism doesn't care how educated, wealthy or decent you are. It will still call you ignorant, deny you a loan and throw you in jail. It will still give white people unearned advantages on the basis of their whiteness.

And yet this also is true: For all the woe it brings, racism is not the proximate source of all the ills that beset the black underclass. We do not need white people's approval or even their involvement to correct much of what ails us — to require that our children spend less time with BET and more with BOOK, to reconnect our fathers with their families, to abandon the misbegotten mind-set that equates ignorance and thuggery with authentic blackness.

Poverty and miseducation are a petri dish for dysfunction, no matter what color you are. If you don't believe that, go hang around a neighborhood of poor and miseducated white people sometime.

So we ought to be able to raise these issues without it being seen as a sop to bigotry. In pitting racism against self-inflicted dysfunction, we embrace a false dichotomy. These are not contradictory truths but the indispensable halves of a complex whole.

More Cosby

According to The New York Times, Bill Cosby's "inflammatory" comments last Monday in Constitution Hall continue to roil the waters of conventional thought.

Bill Cosby, known mostly as a genial father figure who contributes to a wide range of black philanthropic causes, found himself immersed in controversy this week. After making inflammatory remarks on Monday about the behavior and values of some poor black people, Mr. Cosby said yesterday that he had made the comments out of concern and because of his belief that fighting racial injustice must also include accepting personal responsibility.

Mr. Cosby spoke yesterday after a week of discussion on the Internet, on talk shows, on radio programs and in newspaper columns about his comments Monday night at a gala at Constitution Hall in Washington commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation decision. He has been attacked and applauded for saying that "the lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal."

Michael Bowen is bemused by the public reaction, especially what he's hearing from the Right.

Lots of conservative commentators show how few blackfolks they know by being dead flat shocked by such talk. Over here in the Old School it was our bread and butter.

Actually, Cosby seems to be drawing more shock from the other side of the cultural divide. Again, via The New York Times:

... cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson said that Mr. Cosby's comments "betray classist, elitist viewpoints that are rooted in generational warfare." Mr. Dyson, a professor of religious studies and African studies at the University of Pennsylvania, said Mr. Cosby was "ill-informed on the critical and complex issues that shape people's lives."

Mr. Cosby's comments, he added, "only reinforce suspicions about black humanity."

On this topic, and many others, misunderstandings and public posturing abound, but Bowen offers a useful reminder from the real world.

Cosby is not engage[d] in [class] warfare, it's simply the kind of thing you hear from blackfolks with strong families and values... I may or may not get into a detailed analysis of the statements and the reactions, but all I'm saying right now is this. This is not new.

"An elephant in the living room"

Today is Ascension Sunday and the Rev. Donald Sensing has some things to say about why the Ascension is an essential part of the Christian faith.

The story of Jesus' ascension is sort of an elephant in the living room of North American Christianity. Clergy of mainline churches like the UMC know what dominates this story but we usually pretend it isn't there. In previous years on Ascension Sunday, I ignored the elephant, too, but today I'm coming clean. What dominates this story is Jesus' bodily ascension into Heaven.

A miracle, in other words. That's the elephant.

The 21st-century Western mind pretends the miracle isn't there. We search for the moral of the story or its implied meaning for our day and ignore the miracle. Lay people are taught, by implication, to do that in our secular school systems and colleges. Clergy are taught to do that in mainline seminaries and divinity schools. Every mention of biblical miracles in my classes at Vanderbilt Divinity School was to show how the event itself wasn't really important and wasn't the real point of the story, anyway. Don't dwell on the miracle - with the unspoken implication being that the miracle didn't really happen or that the event was really an ordinary event that occurred in unordinary circumstances and was mistaken for a miracle. Besides, the people who wrote the Bible were educated for their day, but not for ours, and did not enjoy the benefit of the scientific method as a way of understanding reality.

I certainly do not attack science and some of you may even remember that I have defended science and the scientific method against religious fundamentalism and have exposed the holes in what is inaccurately called "scientific" creationism.

But we have to face the elephant in the living room of 21st-century, North American Christian faith, the fact that the entire Christian religion inescapably rests on miracles. And whatever other points the Ascension stories may have for us in our day, the central part of the story is that Jesus ascended bodily into Heaven.

There is a lot more to the Ascension story than the Ascension itself, but without the Ascension itself, there isn't much else about the story that matters.

Houston next?

Fred Burton of Texas-based strategic intelligence firm Stratfor comes out and says what has been discussed many times in my office: Houston may be the next major target for terrorism.

Al Qaeda likely has a number of sleeper cells still embedded in the United States, and logic dictates that Houston, Texas, is high on their target list.

Merely cursory security probes have already shown that Houston's airports, the Port of Houston, and the nearby nuclear South Texas Project are vulnerable to penetration. Not reassuring.

Analysis

In our last Terrorism Intelligence Weekly, Stratfor discussed improvements in intelligence-gathering efforts that have aided the ability of Western governments to predict or pre-empt attacks. At the same time, however, the threat within the continental United States -- where al Qaeda is likely to attempt a major strike before the presidential elections -- also has intensified. Logic dictates that Washington, New York, Dallas, Houston or Austin, Texas, could be targeted in an attack that quite possibly would involve a "dirty bomb."

Continuing with this line of reasoning, Houston appears to be the most likely target.

Sleeper Cell Tactics

Concerns over the safety of U.S. citizens are legitimate. Well-placed U.S. government counterterrorism sources have confirmed the presence of al Qaeda "sleeper cells" within the country. Although it is not known how many cells could be in place, intelligence indicates that militant operatives are in place, to be deployed for the next Sept. 11- or Madrid-style attacks. Analysis leads us to believe that a cell could be in place in Houston.

Sleeper cells are difficult to ferret out -- with profiles that do not differ greatly from those of the rest of the public. Like the Sept. 11 attackers, militant operatives do not hesitate to violate Islamic custom by shaving, dressing and behaving so as to blend into their temporary communities. As a group, they are overwhelmingly male, they are typically physically fit, and they often practice martial arts -- sometimes in formal school settings. Their identities may be false, but not always.

However, it is their actions -- not their appearance, ethnicity or religion -- that can expose sleeper cells and help intelligence and law enforcement agencies to disrupt attacks.

First, these militant units are not totally independent: Courier services are used to send money and orders to operatives, whose leaders frequently have had contact with members of other cells. If one operative is arrested, pocket litter and phone records can lead authorities to other cells.

And there certainly are opportunities for arrests. Sleeper cells fund some of their activities through credit card and financial fraud, and members often use false identification documents. Elements of these crimes are much easier than terrorism charges to prove in court, which gives police and federal officials some traction in disrupting attack planning. Other activities also provide clues: The premier example, of course, is that the Sept. 11 team had to learn how to fly airplanes -- but more universally, virtually all terrorist attacks follow a period of eyes-on surveillance of the target.

At the tactical level, counterterrorism experts have observed that members of al Qaeda's sleeper cells carry out many duties within their units -- which increases the chances that an arrest could throw off a planned attack. For example, analysis of past attacks has revealed that the same members tasked with carrying out preoperational surveillance for a strike also work on the logistics and attack teams. Operationally, this places them at greater risk than groups who use highly trained, specialized cells for each function.

Moreover, a study of past al Qaeda attacks and training manuals reveals that the group carries out extensive preoperational surveillance. This renders militants vulnerable to detection by countersurveillance teams, who could trail them back to the rest of their cells -- the bomb-makers and attack teams. For intelligence and law enforcement agencies, this is the best time to pre-empt a terrorist attack: If one militant can be caught conducting preoperational surveillance, the entire cell can be uncovered and destroyed.

In the two-and-a-half years since the Sept. 11 attacks, the efforts of the FBI and CIA to root out these cells have paid dividends. FBI Director Robert Mueller asserts that federal officials have disrupted dozens of planned attacks, and sleeper agents have been uncovered and deported. However, we do not believe that all of al Qaeda's sleeper cells have been identified or crippled. In addition to pre-existing cells, al Qaeda also has had plenty of time to infiltrate more operatives into the United States.

In the span since Sept. 11, al Qaeda also has had opportunities to conduct surveillance of its next target, plan out the attack and fine-tune operational details. In the past, al Qaeda attacks have occurred at a particular pace: Stratfor on several occasions has noted a two- to three-year span between major actions by "al Qaeda prime," interspersed with numerous, smaller strikes that likely are carried out by affiliated groups, with or without al Qaeda's support. Within those operations, there also are predictable patterns of activity. The pre-operational surveillance period is the most effective phase in which to interrupt an attack -- but few law enforcement and corporate security agencies have the expertise to take advantage of this weakness.

Why Houston -- and How?

For the next major al Qaeda strike, preoperational surveillance is likely under way.

The timing for an attack within the United States is nearly perfect: while Americans are engrossed with Iraq, presidential politics and the rising price of oil. Logic dictates that cells are in place and awaiting a signal to act; as in the recent attack in the Saudi city of Yanbu, operatives could have had time to infiltrate the potential target, observing the lay of the land and the routines of security forces.

Although Stratfor believes that strikes could be carried out against multiple targets of opportunity, certain factors -- including time and al Qaeda's targeting criteria -- lead us to conclude that Houston, Texas, is near the top of the list. Not
only is it home to much of the nation's oil infrastructure, which carries significant economic implications, but it also is a city of 5 million people -- and the home of former President George H.W. Bush. A strike here would lend a personal nature to the attack that would send a clear message across the desk of President George W. Bush.

In our view, the strike would be sophisticated and spectacular. It likely would involve either a dirty bomb deployed within the city, or a conventional attack against oil infrastructure, carried out on the scale of Sept. 11.

In this case, we believe a truck bomb is the most likely delivery mechanism -- perhaps a stolen delivery van, helping to mask the driver's intentions. This scenario was discussed by a sleeper cell in New York City before the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, and al Qaeda has shown a tendency to return to previous attack plans. The assailants might use a ramming car to break through perimeter fences while either shooting or running over security guards. However, it also is feasible that they could use legitimate company identification cards in order to slip past the guards. Once near the target, the explosive would be detonated, killing the attack team.

A truck bombing would succeed in taking out only a small portion of an oil complex, whereas a stolen or hijacked airplane could cause much greater damage. At an oil processing facility, this type of strike would have a psychological impact on the American public -- creating a smoky explosion that would be broadcast far and wide.

Strikes against supertankers also are plausible. Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden recognize that oil drives the U.S. economy. Returning again to proven tactics, they could choose to strike at platforms in the Houston Ship Channel -- much like the successful strikes against the French tanker Limburg and the USS Cole, and the failed attempt against the USS The Sullivans.

This scenario is a classic asymmetrical operation: The sleeper cell, roused to activity, will operate as a military unit and will overcome the immediate response by police or security forces. A short time is all the militants will need. Because it is asymmetrical, the strike will target and overcome security forces at their weakest point. It would be over before a strong response could be mounted.

This forecast is not cheerful, but if corporate security forces can learn new skills -- quickly -- that allow them to disrupt attacks early in the surveillance stage, this outcome could be thwarted.

(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.

Heroes

While the mass media continues its dogged obsession with anything dishonorable that Americans have done (or that our enemies can claim we've done) in Iraq, other accounts remind us about American heroism, sacrifice, and loyalty.

One example: Jarob D. Walsh, U.S. Army Specialist, Army Reserve 724th Transportation Company, was riding shotgun in the fuel convoy that led to the much-noted capture of civilian contractor Thomas Hamill. Walsh's harrowing first-hand account is a tribute to raw courage under fire. One brief excerpt (but read the whole thing):

I looked back towards the rear of the truck to see if it was on fire. There was about a six foot hole in the tanker trailer, fuel was spewing out everywhere, and a small fire was building inside the trailer and on the tires.

I turned and looked towards the front of the truck, down the bridge. But before I turned my head all the way toward the front, something hit me in the chest. It hit so hard it felt like Sammy Sosa hitting me with a bat. It knocked me off of my feet, back into the truck. As I laid there, I looked down and saw a round (bullet) buried in the vest on my chest smoking. It smelled awful. I pulled it out of my vest and it burnt the hell out of my hand.

I pulled myself back up and got out of the truck. I looked down the bridge in front of my truck and saw two little kids on the bridge, about a hundred to a hundred-fifty meters away. They both had AK-47s; one kid was about ten years old and the other was about seven. The seven-year old was holding his weapon upside down by the magazine, and the ten-year old was firing three rounds at a time at me. His first round hit the driver's side windshield on the truck - right next to my head. I turned around to grab my gun, and when I did, he shot me two more times in the back; the rounds went through me and into the cab of the truck.

It infuriated me as he kept shooting me. I grabbed my weapon, jumped out, and fired two rounds over their heads; I didn’t want to shoot them - they were just l'il kids. After I fired over their heads, they turned around and ran down the bridge. Then I fell down onto my hands and knees; I couldn’t breathe or move. I had been shot four times!

Walsh is back home recovering from his wounds. What does he want to do next?

If I heal fast enough, I will get sent back over to Iraq. I hope I do get to go back. I left a lot of friends behind. And I lost a couple good friends on the day of the attack.

Tip via Donald Sensing

The Houston Chronicle alerts us to the fact that U.S. Marine Joseph Perez, a Houston native, was awarded the Navy Cross recently. Here's what how the Marines told the tale:

Marine Pfc. Joseph B. Perez received the Navy Cross Medal from the Commandant of the United States Marine Corps, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, during an awards ceremony Thursday at Marine Corps Air-Ground Training Center, Twentynine Palms, Calif.

Perez, 23, a Houston, Texas, native, received the naval service's second highest award for extraordinary heroism while serving as a rifleman with Company I, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom April 4, 2003. The Medal of Honor is the highest military award.

Three other Marines received medals for valor at the same ceremony.

"They are the reflection of the Marine Corps type who's service to the Marine Corps and country is held above their own safety and lives," said Gen. Hagee, commenting on the four Marines who received medals during the ceremony. "I'm proud to be here awarding the second highest and third highest awards for bravery to these great Marines."

"These four Marines are a reflection of every Marine and sailor in this great battalion," said Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps, Sgt. Maj. John L. Estrada.

1st Platoon came under intense enemy fire while clearing near Route 6 during the advance into Baghdad. Perez, the point man for the lead squad, and therefore the most exposed member of the platoon, came under the majority of these fires.

Without hesitation, he continuously fired his M16A4 rifle to destroy the enemy while calmly directing accurate fires for his squad. He led the charge down a trench destroying the enemy and while closing and under tremendous enemy fire, threw a grenade into a trench that the enemy was occupying.

While under a heavy volume of fire, Perez fired an AT-4 rocket into a machine gun bunker, completely destroying it and killing four enemy personnel. His actions enabled the squad to maneuver safely to the enemy position and seize it.

In an effort to link up with 3rd Platoon on his platoon's left flank, Perez continued to destroy enemy combatants with precision rifle fire. As he worked his way to the left, he was hit by enemy fire, sustaining gunshot wounds to his torso and shoulder.

Despite being seriously injured, Perez directed the squad to take cover and gave the squad accurate fire direction to the enemy that enabled the squad to reorganize and destroy the enemy.

The Chronicle further reports:

Perez, stationed at Camp Pendleton in California, said earning the Navy Cross was "unreal," the Press Enterprise newspaper in Riverside reported after he was awarded the medal in a May 6 ceremony. "When you're out there, you don't think about any of this stuff. I was thinking about keeping the boys alive and keeping out of trouble."

His mother, Sharon Desimoni of Houston, said she wasn't surprised her son earned the medal. "It's quite typical," Desimoni said Thursday. "He never wanted to be in the back. He always wanted to be a leader."

What are they talking about?

Daniel Henninger says we need to focus the currently vacuous political debate. He's quite correct, and has some detailed questions that need answers.

President Bush should lead on this, not be led, even though it cuts against the grain of conventional poltical wisdom. The war on terror and America itself are suffering from an obfuscation crisis.

The war against global terror should be the paramount issue on which George Bush and John Kerry contest the 2004 American presidential election. Nothing else is remotely close. Jobs, the economy, taxes--it's all suddenly background noise.

The reactions to Abu Ghraib in the United States, coming on the heels of the 9/11 Commission hearings, have shown there are important issues in the war on terror that need to be settled. And only a presidential election can settle them. Presidential elections are the one institution we trust to deliver mandates. That was never more needed than now.

In the days after September 11, the country came together in a way not seen since perhaps the assassination of John Kennedy. Now, from the distance of more than two and a half years, it is hard to say anymore what the nation agrees on--beyond the mere fact of global terrorism.

Since September 11, and especially the past few weeks, we have seen and heard enough political rancor to know, at a minimum, that the nation is confused about its role in the war on terror--if it believes it has a role. Let me stipulate that it was the Democratic Party--or at least John Kerry, Howard Dean and John Edwards in pursuit of the presidency--who chose to turn a major American war into a partisan dispute, and therefore a voting issue.

Those who oppose the Bush presidency and its foreign policy are entitled to their beliefs. But those who agreed that the world after September 11 was an intolerably dangerous place, worth the sacrifices of war, deserve to know what the terms of this country's engagement with that world are going to be. If the terms of engagement are being altered, everyone with interests from Main Street to Wall Street should know that. In a serious democracy, disclosing that information is the purpose of an election.

Selective Press

According to the Washington Post, comedian Bill Cosby was shockingly candid at a recent public event.

Bill Cosby was anything but politically correct in his remarks Monday night at a Constitution Hall bash commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. To astonishment, laughter and applause, Cosby mocked everything from urban fashion to black spending and speaking habits. "Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal," he declared. "These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids -- $500 sneakers for what? And won't spend $200 for 'Hooked on Phonics.' . . .

"They're standing on the corner and they can't speak English," he exclaimed. "I can't even talk the way these people talk: 'Why you ain't,' 'Where you is' . . . And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk. . . . Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. . . . You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth!"

The Post's Hamil Harris reports that Cosby also turned his wrath to "the incarcerated," saying: "These are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake and then we run out and we are outraged, [saying] 'The cops shouldn't have shot him.' What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand?"

However, the AP reported the story a bit differently.

Comedian Bill Cosby wants black Americans to follow the example of civil rights leaders in improving their neighborhoods and reaching out for higher education.

"These people marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education and now we've got these knuckleheads walking around," he said Monday evening at an NAACP gala commemorating the anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision 50 years earlier.

"Take the neighborhood back," Cosby said, chiding parents who do not take an active role in caring for their children.

Tip via Best of the Web Today

Very thoughtful of the AP to spare us the unseemly details. Glad the society reporter was there.

Stopping moral equivalence

Russian chess grandmaster and pro-freedom activist Garry Kasparov has a few thoughts about the war on terror.

While al Qaeda may not have a headquarters to bomb, there is no shortage of visible adversaries. What is required is to name them and to take action against them. We must also drag into the light those leaders and media who fail to condemn acts of terror. It is not only Al Jazeera talking about "insurgents" in Iraq, it is CNN. Many in Europe and even some in the U.S. are trying to differentiate "legitimate" terrorism from "bad" terrorism. Those who intentionally kill innocent civilians are terrorists, as are their sponsors. No political agenda should be allowed to advance through terrorist activity. We need to identify our enemy, not play with words.

We are dealing with an enemy who considers the concessions and privileges of democracy to be weaknesses. To prove them wrong we must follow through.

The Islamic public-relations offensive is focused on proving that the West is corrupt and offers no improvement on the despots in charge throughout the Islamic world. At the same time, Al Jazeera isn't examining Vladimir Putin's war against Muslims in Chechnya. All of Chechnya is one big Abu Ghraib, but the Islamic world pays scant attention to the horrible crimes there because Mr. Putin shares their distaste for liberal democracy. The war is not about defending Muslims; it is about Western civilization and America as its representative.

It is a mistake to see the debate on how to deal with terrorism along antiquated political lines. Partisan politics have played a role, but for the most part the battle to do what is necessary to win this war has freely crossed traditional party boundaries. One's beliefs about tax policy and social benefits have little to do with how to deal with the terrorist threat being generated in the Islamic world.

Every era dictates its own political divisions. In 19th century Great Britain, the political fight centered on the Corn Laws, reform bills and home rule for Ireland. Many of the old splits have vanished in Europe but this new divide is both wider and more vital. Jacques Chirac on the right is against intervention while Labour's Tony Blair is for it. The consequences of José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero caving in after the Madrid attack have yet to be felt, but I have no doubt that we will be facing more attacks in Europe based on the terrorists' reading of the weakness of European leaders.

In this fight the enemy does not play by our rules, or by any rules at all. WMD will be in terrorist hands eventually; conventional wisdom recognizes this reality. Concessions and negotiations at best only delay catastrophe. Europe and its people are in this war whether they acknowledge it or not. Those who would appease terrorists must realize that by pretending that this battle does not exist, they will soon have blood on their hands--both real and metaphorical.

More venom

As noted last October, South Carolina's senior U.S. Senator, Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, is getting loonier and more embarrassing to the state as he edges closer to retirement. Now he's trying to deny that vituperative comments he published recently are anti-Semitic.

In the face of charges of anti-Semitism, U.S. Sen. Fritz Hollings on Tuesday defended a newspaper column he wrote alleging President Bush went to war in Iraq to defend Israel and please American Jews.

Hollings declined a request for an interview Tuesday, but he released a letter defending his comments and calling “ridiculous” any criticism of them as anti-Semitic.

One S.C. Jewish leader was “horrified” by Hollings’ writings. The nation’s most prominent Jewish civil rights organization called on Hollings to renounce his charges.

“The whole foreign policy of the United States is based on Israel? What kind of ridiculous statement is that?” said Rabbi Philip Silverstein of Columbia’s Beth Shalom synagogue. “It makes him anti-Israel. It’s anti-Semitic ... it’s dangerous.”

Throughout his 38-year Senate career, Hollings, a Charleston Democrat, has apologized for remarks that have been decried as callous toward Jews, blacks, Japanese and other groups.

Judge for yourself, via the senator's own website:

Of course there were no weapons of mass destruction. Israel's intelligence, Mossad, knows what's going on in Iraq. They are the best. They have to know.

Israel's survival depends on knowing. Israel long since would have taken us to the weapons of mass destruction if there were any or if they had been removed. With Iraq no threat, why invade a sovereign country? The answer: President Bush's policy to secure Israel.

Led by [Paul] Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Charles Krauthammer, for years there has been a domino school of thought that the way to guarantee Israel's security is to spread democracy in the area.

Every president since 1947 has made a futile attempt to help Israel negotiate peace. But no leadership has surfaced amongst the Palestinians that can make a binding agreement. President Bush realized his chances at negotiation were no better. He came to office imbued with one thought -- re-election. Bush felt tax cuts would hold his crowd together and spreading democracy in the Mideast to secure Israel would take the Jewish vote from the Democrats.

Note how easily and recklessly the distinguished senator smears not only his nation's President, but Jews in both Israel and America as well. He even entered this statement in the Congressional Record. Hollings and his incontinent mouth cannot retire soon enough.

Sharpe fellows

First the brave Salvadorans, now the indomitable Brits. Isn't "bringing a knife to a gun fight" supposed to be a bad thing?

Outnumbered British soldiers killed 35 Iraqi attackers in the Army’s first bayonet charge since the Falklands War 22 years ago. The fearless Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders stormed rebel positions after being ambushed and pinned down.

Despite being outnumbered five to one, they suffered only three minor wounds in the hand-to-hand fighting near the city of Amara. The battle erupted after Land Rovers carrying 20 Argylls came under attack on a highway.

After radioing for back-up, they fixed bayonets and charged at 100 rebels using tactics learned in drills. When the fighting ended bodies lay all over the highway — and more were floating in a nearby river. Nine rebels were captured.

An Army spokesman said: “This was an intense engagement.”

The last bayonet charge was by the Scots Guards and the Paras against Argentinian positions.

Toughness

Wisdom of the day:

Pain is the sensation of weakness leaving the body.

On a t-shirt. Worn by a U.S. Marine... of course.

Ideological confusion and disdain for reflection

Mark Helprin is back, and he's still angry -- at both the Bush administration and their political opponents -- about the War. Tough ideas; essential to consider.

With nothing to offer but contradictions and paralysis, [the Democrats] and their presidential aspirant have staked their policy on a mystical and irrational prejudice against unilateralism. This is a new thing under the visiting moon, an absurdity propounded by the very same people who often urge the U.S. to unilateral action when it refrains, for example, from interventions in Africa to fight genocide or AIDS. In what way is America, moving in concert with Britain and Spain to invade Iraq, more unilateral or less multilateral than France moving in concert with Germany and Belgium to oppose it? And does a wrong act cease to be wrong if others join in, or a right cease to be right if others do not?

Just as many Republicans detest the idea of international governance but glow at the prospect of empire, many Democrats are reliably anti-imperialist yet dewy-eyed about world government. Thus, Sen. Kerry's only non-secret policy for the war is a bunch of mumblings about the U.N. and our "allies," presumably the ones who are not with us at the moment in Iraq. It is they and the U.N. who in the fairy dust of multilateralism will solve this most difficult problem. But in fact they neither can nor will do any such thing. Either Sen. Kerry knows that his strategy is just a cover for simple, complete, and ignominious withdrawal, or he does not know, which is worse.

In a war that has steadily grown beyond expectations, America has been poorly served by those who govern it. The Democrats are guilty of seemingly innate ideological confusion about self-defense, the Republicans of willful disdain for reflection, and, both, of lack of imagination, probity, and preparation -- and, perhaps above all, of subjecting the most serious business in the life of a nation to coarse partisanship. Having come up short, both parties are sorely in need of a severe reprimand and direct order from the American people to correct their failings and get on with the common defense.

Syria + North Korea?

Drudge refers to a news report that could indicate Syria is working to replace Iraq in the Axis of Evil.

Syrian technicians accompanying unknown equipment were killed in the train explosion in North Korea on April 22, according to a report in a Japanese newspaper.

A military specialist on Korean affairs revealed that the Syrian technicians were killed in the explosion in Ryongchon in the northwestern part of the country, according to the Sankei Shimbun. The specialist said the Syrians were accompanying "large equipment" and that the damage from the explosion was greatest in the portion of the train they occupied.

The source said North Korean military personnel with protective suits responded to the scene soon after the explosion and removed material only from the Syrians' section of the train.

The technicians were from the Syrian technical research center called Centre d'Etudes et de Recherche Scientific (CERS). Although CERS was established to promote science and technology development, it has been viewed as a major player in Syria's weapons of mass destruction development program.

The source said it was not known whether the cargo was the source of the explosion or whether it had exploded following a separate explosion on another section of the train.

As many as 10 Syrians and accompanying North Koreans were killed, according to the report. The bodies of the Syrians were taken home on May 1 by a Syrian aircraft, which had come to Pyongyang to deliver aid supplies.

The Syrians and North Koreans who transported the victimrs were also reportedly wearing protective suits similar to those worn by the North Korean military figures who arrived on the scene immediately after the accident, the source said.

BBC hurtles left

British journalist Melanie Phillips reports, in detail, that the BBC's news reporting has finally gone off the deep end.

Over the past few days, the BBC’s virulent bias over Iraq, America and Israel has gone into an utterly astounding overdrive. The scandal over the ill-treatment of Iraqi prisoners has clearly destroyed the last vestiges of any attempt at fairness as hysteria has descended on our public disservice broadcaster. Item after item has mounted attack after attack on America, hyping up the distorting defeatism over Iraq and continuing to promulgate the view that Israel, the victim of the most barbaric atrocities, is instead the root of the problem in the Middle East.

What all this shows is that the BBC has become far more than a redoubt of Guardian and Independent values; far more than a journalistic disgrace; far more than betrayal of the concept of public service broadcasting. It has become nothing short of a national menace, an enemy of this country’s interests and a fifth column in time of war. There is no doubt in my mind that a major reason why otherwise sane and sensible Britons have totally lost touch with reality, believe the US and Israel are the source of all evil while people who play football with the heads of Jews are the victims of injustice, and are on the way to pressurising the British government to pull out of Iraq, denounce America and thus hand victory to religious fascism, is because of the influence of the BBC, our secular church. And because of its immense global prestige and the fact that it is trusted to tell the truth, the BBC is now helping poison the discourse of the world.

If the BBC had behaved in this way during World War Two, we would have lost it. If it is allowed to carry on in this fashion, we may lose against the new fascism that threatens us.

The American press is still making a pretense of fairness, but is, for the most part, just as warped. The Boston Globe showed last week how to do it with a laughable lack of intelligence. Things will get much, much worse as the presidential campaign continues.

Rumsfeld speaks

C-SPAN has posted video (Real format) of the Baghdad town hall meeting with the troops hosted by Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Good Q&A with the audience. Also, DefenseLink now has the full transcript.

Rumsfeld's closing comment:

I want you to know that the American people have a very good center of gravity. They're sound., They're sensible. They understand what's taking place and they support you.

"A Tradition of Heroes"

Today is Armed Forces Day.

On August 31, 1949, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson announced the creation of an Armed Forces Day to replace separate Army, Navy and Air Force Days. The single-day celebration stemmed from the unification of the Armed Forces under one department -- the Department of Defense. Each of the military leagues and orders was asked to drop sponsorship of its specific service day in order to celebrate the newly announced Armed Forces Day. The Army, Navy and Air Force leagues adopted the newly formed day. The Marine Corps League declined to drop support for Marine Corps Day but supports Armed Forces Day, too.

In a speech announcing the formation of the day, President Truman "praised the work of the military services at home and across the seas" and said, "it is vital to the security of the nation and to the establishment of a desirable peace."

The first Armed Forces Day was celebrated by parades, open houses, receptions, and air shows. In Washington D.C., 10,000 troops of all branches of the military, cadets, and veterans marched pass the President and his party. In Berlin, 1,000 U.S. troops paraded for the German citizens at Templehof Airfield. In New York City, an estimated 33,000 participants initiated Armed Forces Day "under an air cover of 250 military planes of all types." In the harbors across the country were the famed mothballed "battlewagons" of World War II, the Missouri, the New Jersey, the North Carolina, and the Iowa, all open for public inspection. Precision flying teams dominated the skies as tracking radar were exhibited on the ground. All across the country, the American people joined together to honor the Armed Forces.

Said The New York Times on May 17, 1952 (before it began to work so often against American interests):

"This is the day on which we have the welcome opportunity to pay special tribute to the men and women of the Armed Forces ... to all the individuals who are in the service of their country all over the world. Armed Forces Day won't be a matter of parades and receptions for a good many of them. They will all be in line of duty and some of them may give their lives in that duty.

"It is our most earnest hope that those who are in positions of peril, that those who have made exceptional sacrifices, yes, and those who are afflicted with plain drudgery and boredom, may somehow know that we hold them in exceptional esteem. Perhaps if we are a little more conscious of our debt of honored affection they may be a little more aware of how much we think of them."

Not timed to coincide with Armed Forces Day, SecDef Donald Rumsfeld spoke to the troops in Baghdad this week. As so often, he was heartfelt and even eloquent.

You folks have helped to liberate 25 million human beings. You've also performed any number of acts of kindness, generosity and compassion to the Iraqi people that you've met, that you've worked with. I know you have security responsibilities to be sure, but I'm told that you folks have also trained new members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps; you've built playgrounds and a sports complex; you've improved local health clinics; and you're showing the Iraqi people and, indeed, the people of the world who will look, the character of the country that we're from and the character of the men and women in the armed services.

In recent days there's been a focus on a few who have betrayed our valued and -- values and sullied the reputation of our country. Like each of you I'm sure, and like most Americans, I was stunned. It was a body blow. And with six or seven investigations under way and a country that has values and a military justice system that has values, we know that those involved, whoever they are, will be brought to justice. And we've spent the day talking to people and seeing the steps that have been taken to see that those types of abuses to people for whom we have responsibility and custody will not happen again.

But it's important for each of you to know that that is not the values of America and it's not your values. And I know that and you know that and your families know that. And we're proud of you, each of you. We're proud of your service. We know each of you is here because you volunteered to serve your country. You said that that is important to you, and it's important to our country that we have the freedom that we all enjoy.

You know, the American men and women in uniform over the decades, they helped to defeat Germany and Japan in World War II and then helped to rebuild them; they've helped with the folks in Bosnia and Kosovo, and some of you have undoubtedly been involved in that; they're currently helping people in Liberia and in Haiti; and they understand America and our values. The people of the world understand that also.

We hear a lot of criticism in the press, but the fact of the matter is that people every year line up to come to the United States of America. They want to become American citizens, and the reason they do is because they know, as Abraham Lincoln said, that the United States is the last best hope of humankind.

I've stopped reading the newspapers. (Laughter, cheers, applause.)

It's a fact: I'm a survivor. (Cheers, applause.)

And instead, I've been reading a book about Ulysses S. Grant and the Civil War and the challenges that our country faced during that period. And of course, there are enormous differences between that conflict and this conflict. But I was constantly struck as I each evening -- and indeed, coming over on the plane I spent some time reading the book. In that conflict there were casualties that were just horrendous. There were battles, several battles, where a thousand, 2,000, 3,000, were lost in two or three days.

Back then the debate was vigorous; indeed, I would say vicious. Politicians were saying things about each other and about the conflict that were almost unprintable. Editorials were written that were critical of everything. I guess that's what editorial writers do. There were no e-mails or telephones to be used back in those days, but there were soldiers' diaries and letters, and letters from home. And it was interesting to read them.

There were questions -- honest questions -- by the politicians, by the editorial writers, by the families. Can we win? Is it worth it? Those are big questions. And you could see that the back and forth and the heartfelt concern and the questions and the unbelievable criticism of Abraham Lincoln, and indeed the criticism of generals on both sides -- but they were steadfast. And those veterans, when they looked back on that conflict and saw a nation that was together, a single nation, a union, they knew they had been part of something really big. And it had been worth it.

You folks are young. I'm not. (Laughter.) But you're going to look back on this conflict, on these debates, on these difficulties, and it's going to be a tough road ahead. We know that.

It's not going to be an easy path from a repressive dictatorship to a stable, prosperous, successful country that respects all of the various religious and ethnic groups, that's at peace with its neighbors, that understands what human rights are. That's not an easy path, it's a tough path. And there will be plenty of potholes in the road, and mistakes will get made, and people will have to be picked up and put back on that path towards a freer system. But one day you're going to look back and you're going to be proud of your service, and you're going to say it was worth it.

Thank you very much. (Cheers, applause.)

Damn right.

Offense and defense

Belmont Club ties together multiple threads of the Iraq campaign and draws a perspicacious conclusion:

The political storm over prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib and, to a lesser extent the decapitation of Nick Berg, has effaced the really important story in the Iraqi campaign: the US has just beaten back a major counteroffensive by Syria and Iran.

Lies and half-truths

During his quick trip to Baghdad, Donald Rumsfeld spoke out again about the PR war being fought over Iraq, including the difficulty in getting balanced news to citizens both here in the U.S. and in the Middle East.

Mr. Rumsfeld bristled at complaints that the Pentagon was engaging in a cover-up by not more rapidly bringing the provocative details of the abuse allegations to the attention of the President, Congress or the public.

Such a charge, Mr. Rumsfeld said, is "unfair, inaccurate and wrong. And if I find any evidence that it's true, I'll stop it."

He then took a shot at the Arab news media, which he said has filled newspapers and news broadcasts with anti-American propaganda about the mission in Iraq.

"We have been lied about, however, day after day, week after week, month after month for the last 12 months in the Arab press, in Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya," he said.

True to form and right on cue, Al Jazeera today implies that the video of Nicholas Berg's gruesome execution was faked. Somewhere it's all being blamed on the CIA and "Zionists."

Cry me a river

The utopians at The New York Times are shocked that we would use "coercive" techniques to interrogate Al Qaeda prisoners.

The Central Intelligence Agency has used coercive interrogation methods against a select group of high-level leaders and operatives of Al Qaeda that have produced growing concerns inside the agency about abuses, according to current and former counterterrorism officials.

One would hope that every method available, "coercive" or not, would be used to drain these murderous sociopaths of every scrap of useful information possible. No sympathy here, except for the difficult burden placed on the humanity of our interrogators.

Shedding skin

After brutal days in Iraq and elsewhere, Donald Sensing ponders what's coming next.

I wonder what is going through the minds of American Marines and soldiers in Iraq now. War is bitter, bloody business. The longer it goes on, the more inhibitions are shed. Acts once shunned as cruelty become almost passé. It was Stephen Ambrose, I think, who related that near the end of the second world war a platoon of GIs came upon about 30 German soldiers hiding in a ravine several feet deep. The Germans threw up their hands. The Americans gunned them all down.

An American medic related that in North Africa, the German and American medics would often assist each other in treating all the wounded after a firefight, without regard to nationality. By the time the war moved into France, he said, the medics would shoot at each other.

... if the combat is not soon ended, the terrorists (or so-called "militants" or "insurgents") will learn something else: they have made the war personal. When that happens, the American experience of war shows that our troops will shed the veneer of restraint like a snake's skin. And for every American head Zarqawi severs, he will soon find three of his own men's heads.

UFOs over Mexico

There's always time for spiffy news, no matter what else is going on in the world.

The Mexican Air Force has released footage of what a UFO expert said were 11 invisible unidentified flying objects picked up by an infrared camera as they whizzed around a surveillance plane.

The [Defense] ministry confirmed to Reuters it had provided the video, filmed by the Air Force on March 5 over the eastern coastal state of Campeche.

"We are not alone! This is so weird," one of the pilots can be heard yelling, after the plane's crew switched on an infrared camera to track the objects, first picked up by radar.

Video via Yahoo! News

Ignore the false flags of defeat

A sergeant serving on the front lines in Iraq writes back home to say some important things are going right.

The fighting we are engaged in against the uprising of Muqtada Al-Sadr is one that is extremely sensitive and risks catastrophe. Had we entered this previously, it would not have been possible for us to win. Over the months, we have been involved in preparations and much planning. Thus, today we are scoring amazing successes against this would-be tyrant.

I ask that the American people be brave. Don't fall for the spin by the weak and timid amongst you that are portraying this battle as a disaster. Such people are always looking for our failure to justify and rescue their constant pessimism. They are raising false flags of defeat in the press and media. It just isn't true....

It has been subtle and very well done by our leaders. You should be proud. It would have seemed impossible to have achieved our four main goals against Sadr even just a few months ago. Now today, despite the message of the pessimists who are misleading you into despair, we are have scored all the victories needed to bring this battle to a close. First goal was to isolate Sadr. Second was to exile him from his power-base in Baghdad. Third was to contain his uprising from spreading beyond his militias. And the last goal was to get both his hard-line supporters to abandon him, and to do encourage moderates to break from him. This has been done brilliantly, and now we are on the march in a way that just months ago seemed impossible to do. Sadr is losing everything....

I'm telling you this because you need to know that your soldiers are working their hardest. My unit is just one of many in this fight. What you need to do is be strong and persistent in your faith with us. Sadr's militia is in panic and desperate, so they are dangerous, but you need to keep this all in perspective. The pessimists would have you believe this is a disaster. Don't listen to them. I think some of them feel that their reputations require our failure because they have been so negative all along, so they are jumping at every opportunity to sensationalize what is happening here as a disaster. Eliminating Sadr's threat is part of the overall mission and we are further ensuring the liberation of the Iraqi people. This has to be done, and we are doing it.

Don't be seduced by those who would rather that we sit back and just enjoy the freedoms past generations of Americans have sacrificed to gain for us. This is our time to earn it. I remember President Bush saying after the September 11th attacks: "The commitment of our Fathers is now the calling of our time."

Read the whole thing.

Awful truth

Now contractor Nicholas Berg has been brutally executed by our enemy because he was an American and a Jew, and an opportunity for vast PR from a gullible and even compliant Western media. Mark Steyn sees an overwhelming parallel with the execution two years ago of journalist Daniel Pearl for the exact same reasons.

Back then, no media organization wanted to show Americans the death of Daniel Pearl, just as now they have no wish to show us the death of another victim of Islamofascism, or the brave final moments of an executed Italian hostage. The media are happy to show us Iraqi criminals on dog leashes night after night, because they shame Americans. To see the Berg or Pearl videos would anger Americans, and that doesn't suit the media's purposes. The Islamists have begun to figure this out.

Command Post has the photos and the video if you want to face the awful truth of this crime.

Australia's The Age runs an article with the headline, "Iraqis condemn beheading, blame US," which includes several anti-U.S. comments but also these quotes:

Muaid Louis Abdullah Ahhad, a Christian who owns a photo shop, denounced the execution and blamed followers of wanted al-Qaeda militant Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi for the beheading.

Zarqawi, who has a bounty of $US10 million ($A14.39 million) on his head, is accused by Washington of leading a network in Iraq that has carried out attacks against the US-led coalition and civilians aimed at fanning civil conflict.

The video of Berg's killing was entitled "Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi slaughtering an American", though it was not clear if he was involved.

"These people aren't Muslims. They are just using Islam as a cover and are harming the reputation of this religion," said a 50-year-old Shi'ite engineer for Iraqi Airways who also refused to give his name.

"I didn't know about it, but if he was an American, he was innocent. He came to Iraq on a mission to help Iraqis," said Ali Abu Nabi, a 29-year-old house painter.

A voice of experience

Amid too much public posturing over difficult times in Iraq, it's a relief to hear from someone with experience and perspective. Cholene Espinoza, former combat USAF captain and now radio correspondent, including embedded experience with the USMC in Iraq, has some thoughts on what happened at Abu Ghraib, what's going on in Iraq in general, and what needs to change. She's realistic.

Her concluding thoughts:

The only positive sides to this are that our nation is not burying this in secret investigations (thanks to Congress). Also, we should remember that yes, US soldiers did this, but it was also a US soldier who gave these pictures to his/her commander and to the press. This distinguishes us from the former Iraqi regime.

One last note, when I was sitting on the border of Iraq with the Marines waiting to invade, I turned to the 19 and 22 year old I was with and said, “The future of our country is in your hands.” They asked, “Why do you say that?” I replied, “Because your judgment and your conduct in this war and after the war will dictate in the end whether this war was just or not in the minds of the world.” There was a long silence after I said that. Today I feel like these men were sold short with too much mission, too few people and too little training.

Via Blackfive

The Beautiful Boys

On a light note: just why are Orlando Bloom, Viggo Mortensen, Johnny Depp, and Hugh Jackman so attractive to the ladies? Seems it has to do with a feature they have in common with fellow primates.

The work began when Dr Weston discovered that in our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, males have....

Scandal-itis

The unfolding scandal over Iraqi prisoner abuse continues its inexorable progress, obscuring all other issues among our tunnel-vision media.

Conservative George F. Will calls obliquely for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld based what he sees as evidence of intellectual & moral torpor. (Will is always most alarmed when confronted with inarticulateness... in others.)

Listen to the language. It is always a leading indicator of moral confusion....

One question is: Are the nation's efforts in the deepening global war — the world is more menacing than it was a year ago — helped or hindered by Rumsfeld's continuation as the appointed American most conspicuously identified with the conduct of the war? This is not a simple call. But being experienced, he will know how to make the call. Being honorable, he will so do.

He knows his Macbeth and will recognize the framing of the second question: Were he to resign, would discerning people say that nothing in his public life became him like the leaving of it?

"Listen to language" indeed, George. A better line of reasoning might be Dear Abby's old bottom line question: are we better off with him or without him? Another might be: does Rumsfeld as SecDef embolden or intimidate our enemies?

Old-fashioned liberal Morton Kondrake says to hold on.

Rumsfeld's leadership of the Iraq war effort has certainly been flawed, especially in his underestimation of post-war difficulties and costs. He has needlessly offended foreign countries. On the other hand, Iraq is largely his war - as well as Bush's and Vice President Cheney's - and, barring evidence of misconduct, he should be kept on to finish the job he started.

And so it goes....

Self-delusion

Historian Victor Davis Hanson ponders, in some depth, the sad history, causes and bloody results of appeasement.

As long ago as the fourth century B.C., Demosthenes warned how complacency and self-delusion among an affluent and free Athenian people allowed a Macedonian thug like Philip II to end some four centuries of Greek liberty--and in a mere 20 years of creeping aggrandizement down the Greek peninsula.

Thereafter, these historical lessons should have been clear to citizens of any liberal society: We must neither presume that comfort and security are our birthrights and are guaranteed without constant sacrifice and vigilance, nor expect that peoples outside the purview of bourgeois liberalism share our commitment to reason, tolerance and enlightened self-interest.

Most important, military deterrence and the willingness to use force against evil in its infancy usually end up, in the terrible arithmetic of war, saving more lives than they cost. All this can be a hard lesson to relearn each generation, especially now that we contend with the sirens of the mall, Oprah and latte. Our affluence and leisure are as antithetical to the use of force as rural life and relative poverty once were catalysts for muscular action....

When John Kerry talks of mysterious prominent Europeans he has met (but whose names he will not divulge) who, he says, pray for his election in hopes of ending Mr. Bush's Iraqi nightmare, perhaps he has in mind people like the Chamberlainesque European Commission president Romano Prodi, who said in the wake of the recent mass murder in Spain: "Clearly, the conflict with the terrorists is not resolved with force alone."

Perhaps he has in mind, also, the Spanish electorate, which believes it can find security from al Qaeda terrorism by refuting all its past support for America's role in the Middle East. But of course if the terrorists understand that, in lieu of resolve, they will find such appeasement a mere 72 hours after a terrorist attack, then all previously resolute Western democracies--Italy, Poland, Britain and the United States--should expect the terrorists to murder their citizens on the election eve in hopes of achieving just such a Spanish-style capitulation.

In contrast, George W. Bush, impervious to such self-deception, has, in a mere 2 1/2 years, reversed the perilous course of a quarter-century. Since Sept. 11, he has removed the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, begun to challenge the Middle East through support for consensual government, isolated Yasser Arafat, pressured the Europeans on everything from anti-Semitism to their largesse to Hamas, removed American troops from Saudi Arabia, shut down fascistic Islamic "charities," scattered al Qaeda, turned Pakistan from a de facto foe to a scrutinized neutral, rounded up terrorists in the United States, pressured Libya, Iran and Pakistan to come clean on clandestine nuclear cheating, so far avoided another Sept. 11--and promises that he is not nearly done yet.

If the Spanish example presages further terrorist attacks on European democracies at election time, at least Mr. Bush has made it clear that America--alone if need be--will neither appease nor ignore such killers but in fact finish the terrible war that they started.

As Jimmy Carter also proved in November 1979, one man really can make a difference.

Real war

Is there a radiological dirty bomb in our future? Sadly, almost certainly.

Intelligence agencies have reported no reliable, specific threats involving dirty bombs or nuclear weapons, but senior U.S. and European officials and outside experts said several factors have heightened fears in recent weeks.

They said concerns are focused on three al-Qaida operatives who led experiments involving dirty bombs and chemical weapons and on widely held suspicions that a special wing of the network is planning a spectacular attack.

They added that chatter justifying the use of nuclear weapons against the United States. has increased on radical Islamic Web sites as the occupation of Iraq stretches into its second year.

One focus of anxiety is the Olympic Games in Athens, Greece, in August. Recent security exercises there concentrated on mock attacks involving a dirty bomb, a chemical explosion and a hijacked jetliner.

Another potential target is the NATO summit scheduled for the end of June in Istanbul, Turkey, which will be attended by President Bush and other leaders. The threat was underlined by Turkey's disclosure Monday that it had arrested members of a group linked to al-Qaida who reportedly planned to bomb the summit.

The threat of attack is high enough that a senior European intelligence official, speaking on condition that his name not be used, said it is "not a matter of if there is a nuclear-related attack by al-Qaida, but when it occurs."

More than a food fight

The repressive tyrants of Communist China keep whittling away at Hong Kong's hopes and dreams, as well as the promises made to Britain before the transfer of power in 1997.

Clamping down further on Hong Kong's autonomy, Beijing warned the territory's legislature yesterday it has no right to criticize the central government's decision to rule out full democracy in the near future.

The state-run Xinhua news agency quoted a top official with China's liaison office in Hong Kong as saying local lawmakers would be acting unconstitutionally if they consider any motions that express "discontent with" or "condemn" China's ruling on democratic reform.

Another top Chinese official also branded the legislature's democracy advocates "bananas" — yellow-skinned Chinese on the outside, but with Western beliefs inside.

"These people, who badmouth China and Hong Kong, are sinners of the Chinese nation," Cheng Siwei, vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, was quoted as saying by the Chinese newspaper Ming Pao. "They are just like bananas, yellow outside but white inside."

Pro-democracy forces charge that Beijing unilaterally rewrote the territory's constitution, the Basic Law, when it ruled out direct elections of Hong Kong's next leader in 2007 and all lawmakers in 2008.

They accused the central government of rolling back freedom of speech, one of the Western-style civil liberties guaranteed to this former British colony.

Index

Here's an input metric for the War on Terror.

Alliant Techsystems Inc., the U.S. Army’s sole supplier of bullets, said it can’t keep up with demand that is rising to its highest level since the Vietnam war as the United States fights terrorism and conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Army is looking for a second ammunitions source, Alliant Chief Executive Daniel Murphy said on an earnings conference call. The service wants 2 billion rounds of bullets and Alliant will make 1.2 billion this year, up from 1 billion last year, he said.

Alliant is in talks to expand its Army-owned Lake City facility to produce another 300 million rounds and the Army is seeking a supplier of 500 million more. Demand could be this high for five years, Murphy said.

Not a photo-op

President Bush went to Ohio this week.

In a moment largely unnoticed by the throngs of people in Lebanon waiting for autographs from the president of the United States, George W. Bush stopped to hold a teenager's head close to his heart.

Lynn Faulkner, his daughter, Ashley, and their neighbor, Linda Prince, eagerly waited to shake the president's hand Tuesday at the Golden Lamb Inn. He worked the line at a steady campaign pace, smiling, nodding and signing autographs until Prince spoke: "This girl lost her mom in the World Trade Center on 9-11."

Bush stopped and turned back.

"He changed from being the leader of the free world to being a father, a husband and a man," Faulkner said. "He looked right at her and said, 'How are you doing?' He reached out with his hand and pulled her into his chest."

Faulkner snapped one frame with his camera.

"I could hear her say, 'I'm OK,' " he said. "That's more emotion than she has shown in 21/2 years. Then he said, 'I can see you have a father who loves you very much.' "

"And I said, 'I do, Mr. President, but I miss her mother every day.' It was a special moment."

Special for Lynn Faulkner because the Golden Lamb was the place he and his wife, Wendy Faulkner, celebrated their anniversary every year until she died in the south tower of the World Trade Center, where she had traveled for business.

The day was also special for Ashley, a 15-year-old Mason High School student, because the visit was reminiscent of a trip she took four years ago with her mother and Prince. They spent all afternoon in the rain waiting to see Bush on the campaign trail. Ashley remembers holding her mother's hand, eating Triscuits she packed and bringing along a book in case she got bored.

But this time was different. She understood what the president was saying, and she got close enough to see him face to face.

"The way he was holding me, with my head against his chest, it felt like he was trying to protect me," Ashley said. "I thought, 'Here is the most powerful guy in the world, and he wants to make sure I'm safe.' I definitely had a couple of tears in my eyes, which is pretty unusual for me."

Prudence

Empty-headed Newsweek correspondent Eleanor Clift wonders why John Kerry is "silent" about the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal.

If ever there was a moment for John Kerry to come out swinging, this is it. It is the biggest story of the war, and he is essentially silent. The independent voters who will decide this election want someone who is bold, decisive and a leader. They want someone like John McCain, who even though he wears a Republican team shirt has been candid and blunt in assessing the fallout from this and other Bush fiascos.

Here’s where Kerry’s vaunted caution comes into play. He held a press conference Wednesday in Los Angeles where he voiced boilerplate outrage and accused the administration of being “slow and inappropriate” in its response. He did call for Rumsfeld’s resignation, but he’s done that before. This is the language of a diplomat when the situation requires a warrior.

She blames it on his intellectual qualities.

Kerry’s decision-making style is that he calls a lot of people for advice rather than just go with his gut. Surely his instinct as a Vietnam vet must be to come out swinging with both fists. But he’s getting conflicting advice, and his tendency is to keep consulting and defer a decision.

Lawrence Kaplan in The New Republic gets closer to the truth. As with everything about John Kerry, it's all about Vietnam.

The most confused response comes, however, from John Kerry. On the one hand, the candidate faults "some American troops [who] under some circumstance have engaged in behavior that ... is absolutely unacceptable." On the other, he assures that "if I were president, we'd have a very different set of activities going on in Iraq today"--the none-too-subtle implication being that the abuses amount to an authentic expression of American policy.

Politically and morally, Kerry is treading a very thin line here. For political reasons, the candidate has yet to declare the obvious--that the soldiers in question have committed war crimes and that, whatever official policy may be, there simply can be no extenuation on this count.

To understand Kerry's reluctance to focus on the guards, we would do well to cast a glance backward, for this is hardly the first time the public has responded to a wartime revelation of this scope. Having been convicted in 1971 of premeditated murder during the My Lai massacre of 1968, Lieutenant William Calley became an overnight hero.

As it happens, one of the voices raised in Calley's defense belonged to John Kerry. The responsibility for My Lai, Kerry said in congressional testimony, rested not with Calley, but "with the men who designed free fire zones ... with the men who encourage body counts." Lest anyone miss the point, Kerry told an audience at the New York Stock Exchange, "Guilty as Lt. Calley might have been of the actual murder, the verdict does not single out the real criminal. Those of us who have served in Vietnam know that the real guilty party is the United States of America."

Kerry's insistence that none of this would have transpired "if I were president" blames the mission that filled Abu Ghraib with prisoners as much as it blames the soldiers who betrayed that mission. Again, this makes perfect political sense. But it hardly provides an adequate response to the moral questions raised at Abu Ghraib.

Kerry does have now an Internet petition calling for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation, but as of this moment, his home page features education and Cinco de Mayo more prominently than anything about Iraq.

Kerry opponents at CrushKerry.com believe that Senate Democrats "went pretty easy" on Rumsfeld yesterday, and they have sources who say they know why.

The photos of those alleged cases of abuse have enraged the Arab world. And Democrat bigs on the Armed Services Committee have called for Rumsfled’s head.

But according to our source inside the Kerry campaign, John Kerry badly wants the issue to go away. Kerry fears the longer the issue stays in the news, the greater the likelihood his controversial accusations of war crimes committed by US soldiers in Vietnam – including his own – will become an ancillary issue in the campaign for President. “The 9-11 Commission is already going to discredit Bush in their report. If we push things too far, there is bound to be a backlash,” our source told us. “Tonight’s cable news talk shows were proof. Virtually every one of them ran footage of John Kerry in 1971 trashing his fellow veterans and admitting atrocities.”

Our source told us that the Democrat Senate Caucus had originally planned to “rake Rumsfeld over the coals” at today’s hearing, but that Kerry wanted them to tone it down. Kerry had heated phone conversations with at least two key Democrats on the Armed Services Committee, demanding to know of one, “Why are you trying to f—k me on this?”

Tip via EconoPundit

Oddly, despite his intellectualism, Kerry's not-so-nuanced negotiating technique (“Why are you trying to f—k me on this?”) is probably remarkably similar to what President Bush had to say to our "allies" Jacques Chirac and Gerhardt Schroder just last year. Must be a Skull & Bones thing. Those crazy Yalies.

Not perfect, merely good

Scholar Victor Davis Hanson reminds us that we are facing implacable enemies who have good reasons to believe they can win an ugly asymmetrical war of equal parts PR and attrition.

We must give proper credit to our enemies for our present problems in Iraq and indeed in the so-called war against terror in general. The fundamentalists and holdover fascists are as adroit off the conventional battlefield as they were incompetent on it. If Middle Eastern fanatics cannot field tens of thousands to meet the United States in battle, they can at least offer up a few hundred spooky assassins, car bombers, and suicide killers seeking to achieve through repulsion what they otherwise could not through arms.

Thus while hundreds of thousands of Saddam's soldiers ran — as Egyptians, Syrians, and Jordanians did from the Israelis in five wars — hundreds most certainly did not once the rules of war changed to the protocols of peace. Recently we were within hours of smashing the resistance in Fallujah once we accepted war anew. But when the mujahedeen, Gollum-like, decided to slither out in the open, then in terror scampered to safety, then remerged on all fours defiant and barking when we stopped firing, our forbearance and fear of global-televised condemnation handed them a victory they did not earn. In short, we should have listened to Sam and strangled the creep on the spot.

Maybe all is not lost.

What then are we to do when choices since September 11 have always been between bad and worse?

We at least must have enough sense not to stand down and let Iraq become Lebanonized, Talibanized, or Iranicized, even though when all is said and done Americans will be blamed for bringing something better to the region. And yes, we need more democracy, not less, in Iraq and the surrounding Middle East in general.

We have to return to an audacious and entirely unpredictable combat mode; put on a happy, aw-shucks face while annihilating utterly the Baathist remnants and Sadr's killers; attribute this success to the new Iraqi government and its veneer of an army for its own 'miraculous' courage; ignore the incoming rounds of moral hypocrisy on Iraq from Europe (past French and German oil deals and arms sales), the Arab League (silence over Iraqi holocausts, cheating on sanctions), and the U.N. (Oil-for-Food debacle); explain to an exasperated American people why other people hate us for who we are rather than what we do; and apologize sincerely and forcefully once — not gratuitously and zillions of times — for the rare transgression.

Do all that and we can really complete this weird peace in Iraq.

The boot

Democrats fighting their proxy war against our own commander-in-chief, as well as some weak-kneed Republicans, are calling for Donald Rumsfeld to resign as SecDef over the burgeoning Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal. This all in the name of "accountability." Blackfive has a view on that.

If anything, it's obvious that the whole chain of command should be indicted - possibly past the Brigade Commander (BG Karpinski) and up into Central Command. However, calling for Secretary Rumsfeld to step down over this is ridiculous. It's an Army matter. The buck stops with General Schoomaker, and I don't think he should step down. If anything, General Schoomaker is the one Soldier who can fix all of these problems by sticking his Corcoran Jump Boot so far up the culprits' rear-ends that they'll be able to taste the Kiwi shoe polish.

Watch and learn

Video (Real only) of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth press conference is available via C-SPAN.

Straight arrows

Source document site The Smoking Gun has posted the full text of Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba's detailed report on Iraqi prisoner abuse.

The Baltimore Sun says that Taguba's own father was a survivor of the Bataan death march during World War II, and the general is described as a "straight arrow" by his admirers:

Taguba's blunt and forthright criticism of a department to which he has devoted his life comes as little surprise. Associates say he is deeply committed to the Army and to the idea of taking personal responsibility in matters of right and wrong.

An Army major writes to NRO's The Corner to say:

Anyone looking through [the report] and saying the situation wasn't investigated thoroughly is full of hot air. As surprised as I am to see it on the internet, I think it pretty much diffuses any claim the situation wasn't addressed. Must admit that after having done an Article 15-6 investigation or two myself, the general did a pretty good job putting things together."

SecDef Donald Rumsfeld seems like a straight arrow, too.

Unfortunately, he also says more bad news is coming.

"Apparently the worst is yet to come," Rumsfeld said. "There are lot more pictures and many investigations underway. . . . If these are released to the public, obviously it's going to make matters worse. I looked at them last night, and they're hard to believe. Be on notice. . . . It's not a pretty picture."

Posted by Alan at 05:29 PM

The unique importance of victory

In the latest of many insightful posts, The Belmont Club calls on the lessons of history to guide us in evaluating the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal.

The history which remembers the Second World War as 'the Good War' forgets how four years of fighting transformed Allies that refused to bomb German cities in 1940 into those that planned thousand plane raids on Hamburg and Dresden in 1945 to rain incendiaries on tens of thousands of Western Europeans as policy. There were no reprimands, only medals, for the B-29 crews that incinerated 100,000 civilians in Tokyo in the raid of March 9, 1945. And the sad balance of probability is that Abu Ghraib will be displaced from the front pages by the next terrorist outrage, the next Bali, the next Madrid, the next 9/11 until we find ourselves wondering why it upset us at all.

While it is important to punish everyone responsible for the outrages at Abu Ghraib, the only effective way to stop the corrupting influences of war is to achieve victory. Japanese tourists are welcome in Asia everywhere today because the Second World War ended in 1945. And if by contrast Palestinians hand out sweets whenever a Jewish orphanage and Old Folk's home is bombed it may be because the UN refugee camps there celebrated their 50th anniversary in 1998. If the outrages at Abu Ghraib hasten the end of war it will not have been in vain, but if they lead, as the Left most earnestly desires, to a Vietnam-like stalemate, it will be not the last but the first of many sad mileposts.

Compare and contrast with the mewlings of the cynical and irresponsible Left, hotly engaged in a proxy war on President Bush by demanding the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld.

Cruel but fair

Peggy Noonan is sobered by the prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq, and rightly so.

Because we are a free-press, free-expression nation in the media age, we tell the world our sins. Many will not receive the latest in a way that involves jumping up and down and exclaiming, "See the fruits of free inquiry, what a country!" Publication of the photos and reports we've seen so far inflames our enemies in a time of active war. This is a danger to us. At some point down the road some terrorist will testify that it was the picture of his masked and naked countrymen posing behind them that sealed his commitment to jihad. And yet there is no way around this. In fact this scandal is like a little metaphor for the Iraq experience itself: Whatever your opinion was, there's now no way round it but through it.

The best we can do is what we've done and had no choice but to do: Reveal these things for all the world to see. Redress, reform, repair, reprimand and remove.

As she does so often, Noonan also notices an overlooked aspect to the events.

The most distressing of the scandal photos is, to me, the one of an American woman, a GI, who is laughing, holding a cigarette and aiming her fingers as if comically shooting or aiming at a group of prisoners, presumably Iraqi. They are naked and hooded. She looks coarse, cruel, perhaps drunk. And as I looked at her I thought Oh, no. This is not equality but mutual degradation.

Can anyone imagine a WAC of 1945, or a WAVE of 1965, acting in this manner? I can't. Because WACs and WAVEs were not only members of the American armed forces, which responsibility brought its own demands in terms of dignity and bearing; they were women. They apparently did not think they had to prove they were men, or men at their worst. I've never seen evidence to suggest the old-time WACs and WAVEs had to delve down into some coarse and vulgar part of their nature to fit in, to show they were one of the guys, as tough as the guys, as ugly at their ugliest.

But the young woman soldier in the scandal photo--she looked, shall we say, confused about these issues. It was chilling. Perhaps we should be worrying about that, too.

Friends

Not all our heroes in Iraq are American. John Kerry may say dismissively that our allies are merely members of a "fraudulent coalition" but it sure looks like some of them can fight. Case in point: the Salvadorans when things got dicey around the "holy city" of Najaf.

One of his friends was dead, 12 others lay wounded and the four soldiers still left standing were surrounded and out of ammunition. So Salvadoran Cpl. Samuel Toloza said a prayer, whipped out his knife and charged the Iraqi gunmen.

In one of the only known instances of hand-to-hand combat in the Iraq conflict, Cpl. Toloza stabbed several attackers swarming around a comrade. The stunned assailants backed away momentarily, just as a relief column came to the unit's rescue.

"We never considered surrender. I was trained to fight until the end," said the 25-year-old corporal, one of 380 soldiers from El Salvador whose heroism is being cited just as other members of the multinational force in Iraq are facing criticism.

When Cpl. Toloza and 16 other soldiers arrived that morning at a low-walled compound of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, about a mile from their camp, they found that its 350 occupants had melted away. They also found themselves trapped by Sheik al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.

Lt. Col. Francisco Flores, the battalion's operations officer, said the surrounded soldiers held their fire for nearly a half-hour, fearful of inflicting civilian casualties, even as 10 of their number were wounded by rocket-propelled grenades and bullets from assault rifles and machine guns.

After several hours of combat, the besieged unit ran out of ammunition, having come with only 300 rounds for each of their M-16 rifles. Pvt. Natividad Mendez, Cpl. Toloza's friend for three years, lay dead, shot twice probably by a sniper. Two more were wounded as the close-quarters fighting intensified.

"I thought, 'This is the end.' But, at the same time, I asked the Lord to protect and save me," Cpl. Toloza recalled.

The wounded were placed on a truck while Cpl. Toloza and the three other soldiers moved on the ground, trying to make their way back to the base. They were soon confronted with Sheik al-Sadr's fighters, about 10 of whom tried to seize one of the soldiers.

"My immediate reaction was that I had to defend my friend, and the only thing I had in my hands was a knife," Cpl. Toloza said.

As reinforcements arrived to save Cpl. Toloza's unit, the two camps were under attack, with the Salvadorans and a small U.S. contingent of soldiers and civilian security personnel trying to protect the perimeter and retake an adjoining seven-story hospital captured by the insurgents.

The Spaniards didn't fight and only after a long delay agreed to send armored vehicles to help evacuate the wounded. Col. Flores said he cannot question the Spanish decisions that day, but added that the Spaniards "could have helped us sooner."

U.S. troops have replaced the Spaniards. Salvadoran officers, many of whom were trained at military schools in the United States, say they're pleased to be working with the Americans.

Tip via Blackfive

Love and honor

John McCain delivered a moving eulogy to fallen hero Pat Tillman at a public memorial service in California.

In our blessed and mostly peaceful society we're not as familiar with courage as we once were. We ascribe the virtue to all manner of endeavors that only really require skill, fortitude and a little daring, the qualities Pat Tillman showed on the football field. Pat's best service to his country was to remind us all what courage really looks like, and that the purpose of all good courage is love.

He loved his country, and the values that make us exceptional among nations, and good. And he worried after the terrible blow we were struck on September 11th, 2001, that he had "never done a damn thing" to serve her. Love and honor oblige us. We are obliged to value our blessings, and to pay our debts to those who sacrificed to secure them for us. They are blood debts we owe to the policemen and firemen who raced into the burning towers that others fled; to the men and women who left for dangerous, distant lands to take the war to our enemies and away from us, and to those who fought in all the wars of our history.

Pat Tillman understood his obligations, no better than his comrades in arms, perhaps, but better than many of his contemporaries. He must have known that such debts are not a burden, but that their recompense earns us our happiness. So he volunteered to take his place in the ranks, and defend his country in a time of peril.

Our country's security doesn't depend on the heroism of every citizen. Nor does our individual happiness depend upon proving ourselves heroic. But we have to be worthy of the sacrifices made on our behalf. We have to love our freedom, not just for the ease or material benefits it provides, not just for the autonomy it guarantees us, but for the goodness it makes possible. We have to love it so much we won't let it be constrained by fear or selfishness. We have to love it as much, even if not as heroically, as Pat Tillman loved it.

The hero?

Veteran John O'Neill was the skipper of the same "swift boat" in Vietnam later commanded by presidential wannabe John Kerry. He says Kerry is "unfit" to be commander-in-chief.

Like John Kerry, I served in Vietnam as a Swift Boat commander. Ironically, John Kerry and I served much of our time, a full 12 months in my case and a controversial four months in his, commanding the exact same six-man boat, PCF-94, which I took over after he requested early departure.

Despite our shared experience, I still believe what I believed 33 years ago--that John Kerry slandered America's military by inventing or repeating grossly exaggerated claims of atrocities and war crimes in order to advance his own political career as an antiwar activist. His misrepresentations played a significant role in creating the negative and false image of Vietnam vets that has persisted for over three decades.

Neither I, nor any man I served with, ever committed any atrocity or war crime in Vietnam. The opposite was the truth. Rather than use excessive force, we suffered casualty after casualty because we chose to refrain from firing rather than risk injuring civilians. More than once, I saw friends die in areas we entered with loudspeakers rather than guns. John Kerry's accusations then and now were an injustice that struck at the soul of anyone who served there.

Vietnam was a long time ago. Why does it matter today? Since the days of the Roman Empire, the concept of military loyalty up and down the chain of command has been indispensable. The commander's loyalty to the troops is the price a commander pays for the loyalty of the troops in return. How can a man be commander in chief who for over 30 years has accused his "Band of Brothers," as well as himself, of being war criminals? On a practical basis, John Kerry's breach of loyalty is a prescription of disaster for our armed forces.

Since 1971, I have refused many offers from John Kerry's political opponents to speak out against him. My reluctance to become involved once again in politics is outweighed now by my profound conviction that John Kerry is simply not fit to be America's commander in chief. Nobody has recruited me to come forward. My decision is the inevitable result of my own personal beliefs and life experience.

Today, America is engaged in a new war, against the militant Islamist terrorists who attacked us on our own soil. Reasonable people may differ about how best to proceed, but I'm sure of one thing--John Kerry is the wrong man to put in charge.

O'Neill has now organized a new group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to do battle with Kerry over his war record and his post-war peace activism, including Kerry's sweeping accusations about widespread "atrocities."

Today, a group of Swift Boat veterans from the unit in which Senator John Kerry served announced the formation of an organization, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The organization has been formed in order to bring the truth about Kerry to the American people. The organization intends to discuss Kerry’s war crimes charges, Kerry’s record and to request that Kerry authorize the Department of Defense to release the originals and the complete files relating to his military service and medical military records.

The group released a historic letter expressing the overwhelming opposition of those who served with Kerry or in his unit to his misrepresentation of his record and the unit’s record. The letter is signed by Swift Boat veterans at all levels and from the entire political spectrum; the entire chain of command during the period Kerry served in Vietnam; veterans who participated in the engagements resulting in his medals; and the majority of officers who served with him in Coastal Division 11, the unit in which he spent most of his four month tour of duty.

Public circulation of the letter began one week ago and collected hundreds of signatures. The signers already make up a majority of the Swift Vets whose addresses can be found.

O'Neill held a press conference today at the National Press Club to announce the group. (Footnote: the meeting was apparently organized by Spaeth Communications, a Dallas-based PR firm founded in 1987 by Merrie Spaeth, former director of media relations in the Reagan White House.)

Kerry's first Purple Heart wound was treated at a medical facility in Cam Ranh Bay by physician Louis Letson, now a retired general practitioner in Alabama. It seems that Letson's recollection of the incident is somewhat less dramatic than the telling Kerry prefers.

John Kerry was a (jg), the OinC or skipper of a Swift boat, newly arrived in Vietnam. On the night of December 2, he was on patrol north of Cam Ranh, up near Nha Trang area. The next day he came to sick bay, the medical facility, for treatment of a wound that had occurred that night.

The story he told was different from what his crewmen had to say about that night. According to Kerry, they had been engaged in a fire fight, receiving small arms fire from on shore. He said that his injury resulted from this enemy action.

Some of his crew confided that they did not receive any fire from shore, but that Kerry had fired a mortar round at close range to some rocks on shore. The crewman thought that the injury was caused by a fragment ricocheting from that mortar round when it struck the rocks.

That seemed to fit the injury which I treated.

What I saw was a small piece of metal sticking very superficially in the skin of Kerry's arm. The metal fragment measured about 1 cm. in length and was about 2 or 3 mm in diameter. It certainly did not look like a round from a rifle.

I simply removed the piece of metal by lifting it out of the skin with forceps. I doubt that it penetrated more than 3 or 4 mm. It did not require probing to find it, did not require any anesthesia to remove it, and did not require any sutures to close the wound.

The wound was covered with a bandaid.

Major media coverage has been tepid. Reliably wrong Joe Conason says at Salon that it's all a right-wing smear and that "facing the complicated truth about Vietnam remains difficult." Is "complicated" the same thing as "nuanced?"

Depraved

Here's more evidence of the stunning dishonesty of the Saudi leadership.

Crown Prince Abdullah was quoted Sunday as blaming "Zionism" for a shooting rampage the previous day that killed at least six people - two Americans, two Britons, an Australian and a Saudi - and wounding dozens.

Abdullah, speaking on Saudi television, said: "The kingdom will eliminate terrorism no matter how long it takes."

Later, the Saudi Press Agency quoted Abdullah as telling a gathering of princes in Jiddah that "Zionism is behind terrorist actions in the kingdom." Zionism had misled "some of our sons," he said without elaborating.

One of the attackers killed was reported to be on Saudi Arabia's list of most-wanted terrorists, many of whom are suspects in last year's suicide attacks on foreign housing compounds in the capital, Riyadh. Those two attacks were blamed on Al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden's terror network.

Inhumanity

With his usual eloquence, scholar Victor Davis Hanson condemns the apparent torture by a small group of American soldiers of Iraqi prisoners in Saddam's old Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

These seemingly inhuman acts are indeed serious stuff. They also raise a host of dilemmas for the U.S. -- from the pragmatic to the idealistic. We must insist on a higher standard of human behavior than embraced by either Saddam Hussein or his various fascist and Islamicist successors. As emissaries of human rights, how can we allow a few miscreants to treat detainees indecently -- without earning the wages of hypocrisy from both professed allies and enemies who enjoy our embarrassment? In defense, it won't do for us just to point to our enemies and shrug, "They do it all the time."

The guards' alleged crimes are not only repugnant but stupid as well. At a time when it is critical to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, a few renegade corrections officers have endangered the lives of thousands of their fellow soldiers in the field. Marines around Fallujah take enormous risks precisely because they do not employ the tactics of the fedayeen, who fire from minarets and use civilians as human shields.

He also notes that there are plenty of issues in the surrounding swirl of reaction, including utter cynicism in the Arab press.

There is an asymmetry about the coverage of the incident, an imbalance and double standard that have been predictable throughout this entire brutal war. The Arab world -- where the mass-murdering Osama bin Laden is often canonized -- is shocked by a pyramid of nude bodies and faux-electric prods, but has so far expressed less collective outrage in its media when the charred corpses of four Americans were poked and dismembered by cheering crowds in Fallujah. The taped murder of Daniel Pearl or a video of the hooded Italian who had his brains blown out -- this is the daily fare that emanates now from the television studios of the Middle East.

Indeed, if Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera could display the same umbrage over mass murder that they do over these recent accounts of shame and humiliation of the detained Iraqis, much of the gratuitous violence of the Middle East would surely diminish. The papers that now allege war crimes are the same state-controlled and censored media that print gleeful accounts of death and desecration of Westerners and promulgate an institutionalized anti-Semitism not seen since the Third Reich.

Via The Wall Street Journal (subscribers only)

Intolerable cruelty

This is what passes for "heroic" action in the twisted minds of the Palestinian "resistance." It takes real courage to gun down a mom and her kids, I guess.

Five members of an Israeli family - a pregnant mother and her four children - were killed Sunday afternoon in a Palestinian shooting attack on their vehicle while they were traveling on the road that leads to the Gaza Strip settlement bloc of Gush Katif.

The victims of the terror attack were identified as mother Tali Hatuel, 34, and her daughters Hila, 11, Hadar, 9, Roni, 7, and Merav, 2. Tali Hatuel, a resident of the Katif settlement, was a social worker for the Gaza Coast Regional Council. She was eight months pregnant, Israel Radio reported.

The Islamic Jihad and Popular Resistance Committees, an umbrella organization of militant groups linked to Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, claimed responsibility for the "heroic" attack in a call to The Associated Press.

Police said the Hatuels' white Citroen station wagon spun off the road after the initial shooting, then the attackers approached the vehicle and shot the occupants at close range.

Carnivores and such

Michael Ignatieff is a thoughtful guy. Like the rest of the known world, he has a book coming out, and now a lengthy essay in The New York Times Magazine. He's pondering the topic of "Lesser Evils" and wondering (a) is the West adult enough to win the War on Terror and (b) what might the conflict do to us. Worth reading.

Consider where we stand after two years of a war on terror. We are told that Al Qaeda's top leadership has been decimated by detention and assassination. True enough, but as recently as last month bin Laden was still sending the Europeans quaint invitations to surrender. Even if Al Qaeda no longer has command and control of its terrorist network, that may not hinder its cause. After 9/11, Islamic terrorism may have metastasized into a cancer of independent terrorist cells that, while claiming inspiration from Al Qaeda, no longer require its direction, finance or advice. These cells have given us Madrid. Before that, they gave us Istanbul, and before that, Bali. There is no shortage of safe places in which they can grow. Where terrorists need covert support, there are Muslim communities, in the diasporas of Europe and North America, that will turn a blind eye to their presence. If they need raw recruits, the Arab rage that makes for martyrs is still incandescent. Palestine is in a state of permanent insurrection. Iraq is in a state of barely subdued civil war. Some of the Bush administration's policies, like telling Ariel Sharon he can keep settlements on the West Bank, may only be fanning the flames.

So anyone who says ''Relax, more people are killed in road accidents than are killed in terrorist attacks'' is playing games. The conspiracy theorists who claim the government is manufacturing the threat in order to foist secret government upon us ought to wise up. Anyone who doesn't take seriously a second major attack on the United States just isn't being serious. In the Spanish elections in March, we may have had a portent of what's ahead: a terrorist gang trying to intimidate voters into altering the result of a democratic election. We can confidently expect that terrorists will attempt to tamper with our election in November. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said in a recent television interview that the Bush administration is concerned that terrorists will see the approaching presidential election as ''too good to pass up.''

Thinking the worst is not defeatist. It is the best way to avoid defeat. Nor is it defeatist to concede that terror can never be entirely vanquished. Terrorists will continue to threaten democratic politics wherever oppressed or marginalized groups believe their cause justifies violence. But we can certainly deny them victory. We can continue to live without fear inside free institutions. To do so, however, we need to change the way we think, to step outside the confines of our cozy conservative and liberal boxes...

Regulating a war on terror with ethical rules and democratic oversight is much harder than regulating traditional wars. In traditional wars, there are rules, codes of warriors' honor that are supposed to limit the barbarity of the conflict, to protect civilians from targeting, to keep the use of force proportional and to keep it confined to military objectives. The difference between us and terrorists is supposed to be that we play by these rules, even if they don't. No, I haven't forgotten Hiroshima and My Lai. The American way of war has often been brutal, but at least our warriors are supposed to fight with honor and can be punished if they don't. There is no warrior's honor among terrorists.

The real moral hazard in a war on terror emerges precisely here, in the fact that no moral contract, no expectation of reciprocity, binds us to our enemy. Indeed, the whole logic of terrorism is to exploit the rules, to turn them to their own advantage. If we hesitate to strike a mosque because the rules of war designate it as a protected place, then the smart thing for a terrorist to do is to store weapons and suicide belts there. If our forces start from the presumption that civilian women should be treated as noncombatants, then terrorists will train women to be suicide bombers. If all existing codes of warriors' honor forbid the desecration of bodies, then it is not just mindless brutality but actually a sound terrorist tactic to drag contractors from a car in Falluja, set them alight and display their severed and burned limbs from a bridge. Such provocations are intended to drag us down to their level.

This is the deepest reason why it is difficult to maintain self-control, let alone democratic control, in a war on terror. We are constantly being tempted to descend to the logic of terror itself. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, but unsaintly men and women, seeing their loved ones maimed and butchered, may begin to believe vengeance is theirs by right.

The siren song in any war on terror is ''let slip the dogs of war.'' Let them hunt. Let them kill. Already, we have dogs salivating at the prospect. A liberal society cannot be defended by herbivores. We need carnivores to save us, but we had better make sure the meat-eaters hunt only on our orders.

The Saudi front

Iraq isn't the only place where conflict is raging. Saudi Arabia is also a battlefield right now. The oil infrastructure will be a target, like it was today.

Gunmen opened fire Saturday at an oil refinery co-owned by Exxon Mobil and the Saudi company SABIC in northwestern Saudi Arabia, killing at least three Americans, two Britons, an Australian and a Saudi, company officials and diplomats said. Interior Ministry officials said three attackers also were killed.

The attack killed at least three American engineers working for oil services company ABB, according to company spokesman Bjorn Edlund, based in Zurich, Switzerland.

The European diplomats said two Britons, an Australian and a member of the Saudi national guard also were killed. A police captain was seriously wounded, they said on condition of anonymity.

There was another gunbattle earlier this week.

Saudi security forces raided a building in the Red Sea port of Jeddah Friday in a continuing crackdown on suspected insurgents. Five people died and three were injured in the confrontation which began Thursday night as police, tipped to their whereabouts, surrounded a building under construction in al-Safa, northeast of Jeddah, according to an Interior Ministry source.

Three of the militants were killed in an exchange of gunfire Thursday night and police began lobbing tear gas into the building Friday morning to root out the rest. Police said two more men died. Unconfirmed reports said one of the dead may have blown himself up.

In fact, Saudi authorities say massive counter-terrorism operations have been underway.

Saudi security forces have foiled "dozens" of planned major attacks in the kingdom while a group of suspected terrorists hiding out northwest of Riyadh are still being pursued, the Saudi Interior Minister said Thursday.

A car bomb attack earlier in April struck at the heart of the Saudi security forces.

Two car bombs blasted the Saudi national police headquarters Wednesday, killing at least nine people and wounding 125 others, police said. Facades were torn off buildings near the explosions, revealing rooms still ablaze. Cars were smashed by debris. Clouds of dust and black smoke rose from the building and settled over the neighborhood.

I guess we're in this together, like it or not.

One take only

Life imitates art, truth is stranger than fiction, whatever... In September NASA will use stunt helicopter pilots to catch the returning Genesis solar wind probe in mid-air. That is just cool.

The space agency has turned to a pair of helicopter pilots with years of experience filming Hollywood action pictures such as Clear and Present Danger and The Hulk to hook its ultra-fragile Genesis spacecraft from midair.

The centerpiece of a $300 million mission to help unravel the origins of the solar system, Genesis is nearing the end of a three-year, 20-million-mile journey to retrieve and return to Earth with the first invisible wisps of solar wind.

The capture requires the pilots to maneuver over the parachute of the descending spacecraft, threading an 18 1/2-foot-long boom with a hook beneath the fabric. Once secured, a long cable unwinds like a fishing reel, greatly lessening the shock of the catch.

The line is reeled in until the spacecraft is dangling less than 100 feet below the helicopter. Finally, the pilot hovers just high enough for a ground team to gently unhook their catch.

"A lot of the work we do with helicopters in movies has cameras on board and requires us to get very close. The director is always looking for lower and slower. You have to come in right overhead of, say, someone on a horse or a car and catch them right as they come over a hill or around a curve," pilot Dan Rudert said Thursday after a flawless demonstration of the capture at the 800,000-acre military facility outside Salt Lake City.

"A lot of those skills actually parallel acquiring the spacecraft and getting lined up to catch it."

Genesis is on course to reach Earth on Sept. 8. The plan calls for Rudert to back up senior chopper pilot Cliff Fleming. The two aviators have trained to criss-cross the skies like a pair of football receivers with out-stretched arms. If Fleming can't make the grab, Rudert is supposed to finish the play.

In five years of intermittent training, they have never missed.