Petrified Truth

Shark attacks

Thinking twice about going into the water after repeated shark attacks in Florida? Here's an expert resource from the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida: the International Shark Attack File.

Nice

Think nothing gets done in Washington? Congress can unite... to vote itself another pay raise. Feel better now?

The House on Tuesday agreed to a $3,100 pay raise for Congress next year to $165,200 after defeating an effort to roll it back.

In a 263-152 vote, the House blocked a bid by Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, to force an up-or-down vote on the pay raise. Instead, lawmakers will automatically receive the raise officially a cost of living adjustment as provided for in a 1989 law that barred them from pocketing big speaking fees in exchange for an annual COLA.

Matheson was the only one of 434 House members to speak out against the 1.9 percent COLA, which will raise members' salaries in January.

A similar effort to block the raise could occur when the Senate considers its version of the bill. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., has tried in the past to block it but has had no more success than Matheson did.

In a House riven by partisanship, raising members' pay is one of the few things Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., agree on.

The annual debate on the members' COLA resembles kabuki theater: Both Democratic and Republican leaders guarantee sizable majorities of their members to block the effort, and they make sure there is not a clear-cut vote on the measure. None of the party campaign committees uses the pay-raise issue in campaigns.

Primevalism

Interesting: large areas of rural Europe are reverting to a "primeval" state and wolves are replacing vanishing human inhabitants.

Germans are getting used to a new kind of immigrant. In 1998, a pack of wolves crossed the shallow Neisse River on the Polish-German border. In the empty landscape of Eastern Saxony, speckled with abandoned strip mines and declining villages, the wolves found plenty of deer and rarely encountered humans. They multiplied so quickly that a second pack has since split off, colonizing a second-growth pine forest 30 kilometers further west. Soon, says local wildlife biologist Gesa Kluth, a third pack will likely form, possibly heading northward in the direction of Berlin.

Wolves returning to the heart of Europe? A hundred years ago, a burgeoning, land-hungry population killed off the last of Germany's wolves. Today, it's the local humans whose numbers are under threat. Wolf-country villages like Boxberg and Weisswasser are emptying out, thanks to the region's ultralow birthrate and continued rural flight. Nearby Hoyerswerda is Germany's fastest-shrinking town, losing 25,000 of its 70,000 residents in the last 15 years.

Such numbers are a harbinger of the future. Home to 22 of the world's 25 lowest-birthrate countries, Europe will lose 41 million people by 2030 even with continued immigration, according to the latest U.N. Population Division report. The biggest decline will hit rural Europe. As Italians, Spaniards, Germans and others produce barely half the children needed to maintain the status quo—and rural flight continues to suck people into Europe's suburbs and cities—the countryside will lose close to a third of its population, say both the United Nations and the EU. "It's a triple time bomb," says University of Lisbon demographer Nuno da Costa. "Too few children, too many old people and too many of the remaining young people still leaving the village."

Feeling

While we sit back and weigh the effectiveness of President Bush's words about Iraq, an alert reader at NRO's The Corner writes from the front line and speaks to a key concern about our commander-in-chief: is he not sensitive to the cost of this war?

The pain of having to give orders that result in the deaths of good men is second only to that of the family itself - except most families only face it once. Commanders face it again and again and again. Bush is a good commander, and he knows that pain exquisitely. Knowing that it must be done does not erase the anguished sense of responsibility. These fools worry about whether Bush feels my pain? I surely hope not. He has more than enough of his own and I wonder if they have the sense to feel his.

God bless him, but I surely wouldn't want his job.

Bush on Iraq

Ever useful C-SPAN already has (Real) video up of President Bush's primetime speech on Iraq.

The text of his remarks is here. Excerpt:

Some wonder whether Iraq is a central front in the war on terror. Among the terrorists, there is no debate.

Here are the words of Osama bin Laden: This third world war is raging in Iraq. The whole world is watching this war. He says it will end in victory and glory or misery and humiliation.

The terrorists know that the outcome will leave them emboldened or defeated. So they are waging a campaign of murder and destruction. And there is no limit to the innocent lives they are willing to take.

We see the nature of the enemy in terrorists who exploded car bombs along a busy shopping street in Baghdad, including one outside a mosque.

We see the nature of the enemy in terrorists who sent a suicide bomber to a teaching hospital in Mosul.

We see the nature of the enemy in terrorists who behead civilian hostages and broadcast their atrocities for the world to see.

These are savage acts of violence, but they have not brought the terrorists any closer to achieving their strategic objectives.

The terrorists, both foreign and Iraqi, failed to stop the transfer of sovereignty. They failed to break our coalition and force a mass withdrawal by our allies.

They failed to incite an Iraqi civil war. They failed to prevent free elections. They failed to stop the formation of a democratic Iraqi government that represents all of Iraq's diverse population. And they failed to stop Iraqis from signing up in large number with the police forces and the army to defend their new democracy.

The lesson of this experience is clear: The terrorists can kill the innocent, but they cannot stop the advance of freedom.

The only way our enemies can succeed is if we forget the lessons of September the 11th, if we abandon the Iraqi people to men like Zarqawi and if we yield the future of the Middle East to men like bin Laden.

For the sake of our nation's security, this will not happen on my watch.

Shelby Foote, RIP

Here's sad news: Shelby Foote has passed away.

Novelist and historian Shelby Foote, whose Southern storyteller's touch inspired millions to read his multivolume work on the Civil War, has died. He was 88.

Foote, a Mississippi native and longtime Memphis resident, wrote six novels but is best remembered for his three-volume, 3,000-page history of the Civil War and his appearance on the PBS series "The Civil War."

He worked on the book for 20 years, using a flowing, narrative style that enabled readers to enjoy it like a historical novel.

"I can't conceive of writing it any other way," Foote once said. "Narrative history is the kind that comes closest to telling the truth. You can never get to the truth, but that's your goal."

"He was a Southerner of great intellect who took up the issue of the Civil War as a writer with huge sanity and sympathy," said Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford, a friend and fellow Mississippi native.

Foote's soft drawl and gentlemanly manner on the Burns film made him an instant celebrity, a role with which he was unaccustomed and, apparently, somewhat uncomfortable.

In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Foote's "The Civil War: A Narrative" as No. 15 on its list of the century's 100 best English-language works of nonfiction.

Reading, he said, was as much a part of his work as writing.

After finishing his sixth novel, "September, September," in 1978, he took off three years to read.

He was a brilliant writer and a gifted raconteur -- there was no one better.

• The Mississippi Writers Page - Shelby Foote
• Booknotes - Shelby Foote (1994)

Nuclear threat continues

Need more to worry about? This risky situation just doesn't seem to be getting better. Why?

Four years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration and the U.S. Congress are showing signs of complacency about the threat of a terrorist nuclear attack that could cripple a major city and shatter the economy, nuclear security experts said on Monday.

At a public forum sponsored by the former Sept. 11 commission, the experts said the government must do more to secure bomb-making materials worldwide, prevent proliferation, and promote international cooperation on security.

Panel members including former Sen. Sam Nunn, a Democrat who once chaired the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, worried about the pace of efforts to secure nuclear stockpiles that are often poorly guarded in 40 countries, including former Soviet states.

"From my perspective, the terrorists are racing and we are somewhere between a walk and a crawl," said Nunn, who now leads a nonproliferation group called the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

He called on U.S. President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin to accelerate U.S.-assisted nuclear security efforts in Russia and to overcome bureaucratic entanglements that have retarded progress in the effort.

Nuclear Threat Initiative
Lugar Survey on Proliferation Threats and Responses (pdf)

King Kong - first look

Here's the first trailer for Peter Jackson's King Kong, scheduled for December 2005. Looks awesome. Turn up the volume.

• King Kong official site
• Kong is King.net fan site

Chinese technology acquisition

The second part of Bill Gertz's series on Chinese military development is focused on how they acquire technology: in large part, from the U.S.

China is stepping up its overt and covert efforts to gather intelligence and technology in the United States, and the activities have boosted Beijing's plans to rapidly produce advanced-weapons systems.

"I think you see it where something that would normally take 10 years to develop takes them two or three," said David Szady, chief of FBI counterintelligence operations.

He said the Chinese are prolific collectors of secrets and military-related information.

The Chinese intelligence services use a variety of methods to spy, including traditional intelligence operations targeting U.S. government agencies and defense contractors.

Additionally, the Chinese use hundreds of thousands of Chinese visitors, students and other nonprofessional spies to gather valuable data, most of it considered "open source," or unclassified information.

China's spies use as many as 3,200 front companies -- many run by groups linked to the Chinese military -- that are set up to covertly obtain information, equipment and technology, U.S. officials say.

Recent examples include front businesses in Milwaukee; Trenton, N.J.; and Palo Alto, Calif., Mr. Szady said. In other cases, China has dispatched students, short-term visitors, businesspeople and scientific delegations with the objective of stealing technology and other secrets.

But the problem of Chinese spying is daunting.

"It's pervasive," Mr. Szady said. "It's a massive presence, 150,000 students, 300,000 delegations in the New York area. That's not counting the rest of the United States, probably 700,000 visitors a year. They're very good at exchanges and business deals, and they're persistent."

Prince Bandar on his way out

NBC News is reporting that Saudi Prince Bandar, insider and longtime confidante of numerous U.S. presidents, may be quitting.

A senior western diplomat in Riyadh has confirmed to NBC News that Prince Bandar bin Sultan has tendered his resignation to Crown Prince Abdullah in recent days. “You can feel comfortable reporting that,” said the diplomat.

Bandar, the long time Saudi ambassador to the United States and a key figure in the Saudi decision to permit U.S. bases in the Kingdom during the Gulf War, resigned, said the diplomat because of recurring health problems, depression being the most significant.

There have been persistent reports of Bandar's battle with depression over the last several years. Bandar is also reported to have had problems with over use of antidepressants.

Bandar has played a key, personal role in developing and guiding Saudi Arabia's strange relationship with the U.S. This would be a significant behind-the-scenes change.

Summer fun

We daytripped yesterday to an afternoon concert at the International Festival-Institute at Festival Hill in scenic Round Top, deep in the heart of central Texas. The program by summer student artists was varied, exciting and fun. We may go back again next weekend for their Patriotic Concert on Sunday, July 3. The program looks fine: besides Copland, Ives, Gershwin and others, we can hear music by John Williams (The Cowboys) and Mel Brooks (The Producers).

After the music yesterday, we had a thoroughly enjoyable country French dinner at the Brazos Belle bistro in nearby Burton. Chef André Delacroix's kitchen was in good form.

On target

Gunner at Target CenterMass is celebrating his first year anniversary of blogging. Check out his site if you don't already know it.

China's military buildup

Bill Gertz starts a series of articles on the rapid and surprising build-up of China's offensive military capability.

China is building its military forces faster than U.S. intelligence and military analysts expected, prompting fears that Beijing will attack Taiwan in the next two years, according to Pentagon officials.

U.S. defense and intelligence officials say all the signs point in one troubling direction: Beijing then will be forced to go to war with the United States, which has vowed to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack.

China's military buildup includes an array of new high-technology weapons, such as warships, submarines, missiles and a maneuverable warhead designed to defeat U.S. missile defenses. Recent intelligence reports also show that China has stepped up military exercises involving amphibious assaults, viewed as another sign that it is preparing for an attack on Taiwan.

The war fears come despite the fact that China is hosting the Olympic Games in 2008 and, therefore, some officials say, would be reluctant to invoke the international condemnation that a military attack on Taiwan would cause.

For China, Taiwan is not the only issue behind the buildup of military forces. Beijing also is facing a major energy shortage that, according to one Pentagon study, could lead it to use military force to seize territory with oil and gas resources.

Let's face it: China is preparing itself across the board for hardnosed global competition and at least regional hegemony. If that eventually involves offensive military action, they intend to be ready. And willing.

Thug vs. thug

The winner has been declared in Iran's presidential "election:"

The ultraconservative Tehran mayor won Iran's presidential runoff, the Interior Ministry announced today — a stunning upset by a man reformers fear will take Iran back to the restrictions of the Islamic Revolution.

The mayor was rolling toward a landslide victory. Figures indicated Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could finish with more than 60 percent of the vote, said Mani Alizadeh, a campaign official for his more moderate opponent, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Ahmadinejad, a 47-year-old former Republican Guard commander, has presented himself as a champion of the poor in a country where unemployment is as high as 30 percent. But he has also vowed a return to the rigid principles of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

That stance has sent liberals and business leaders rushing into the arms of Rafsanjani, an insider of Iran's theocracy.

While many reformers have been suspicious of 70-year-old Rafsanjani in the past, they were more afraid Ahmadinejad will crush the greater social freedoms and openings to the West won over the past decade.

James Joyner surveys U.S. press coverage and notes that the contest is being reported largely with a straight face, which is a problem: it ain't so.

Strangely, none of the reportage on the Iranian presidential "election" questions the validity of the outcome. Indeed, the press has treated this as if it were a Western election decided on campaign issues.

A reader approaching any of these stories without background knowledge would come away with a decidedly distorted view of reality.

Iran watcher Michael Ledeen saw it much more clearly yesterday.

I don’t know who will win, and it may well be that nobody knows. Iran today reminds me very much of the death struggle between Hitler and the SA, the brown-shirted thugs who led the Nazi "revolution." At a certain point Hitler knew they were a potential threat to his rule, and they were violently purged. Supreme Leader Khamenei, the Islamic Republic’s Fuhrer, faces two possible outcomes: If Rafsanjani wins, he will have a certain amount of independence because of his vast wealth (accumulated in tandem with Khamenei) and his corrupt network of cronies and clients. If Ahmadinejad wins, he will have a certain amount of independence because of the support of the most fanatical killers in Iran, those from the Basij, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Quds Force, from which Ahmadinejad emerged. Khamenei may well judge that Ahmadinijad is the greater threat, and he may have ordered that Rafsanjani be declared the winner.

Please keep two basic facts in mind as this melodrama unfolds: Neither Rafsanjani nor Ahmadinejad has any intention of altering the basic structure of the Islamic Republic, nor of "liberalizing" Iranian society (the Reich was not notably more "moderate" after Hitler crushed the SA, was it?). Both are known murderers; one way of evaluating the outcome of today’s events is that the next Iranian president will be wanted for murder either in two countries (Ahmadinejad — Austria and Germany) or in just one (Rafsanjani — Germany). This is not a fight over the future of the country; it’s a power struggle within the tyrannical elite.

From our national standpoint, the outcome doesn’t matter, because Iran will continue to be the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism (did you notice, by the way, that MSNBC’s website laconically reported that the "management" of al Qaeda went to Iran after the liberation of Afghanistan?), and will continue to give its full support to the terror war in Iraq. Our leaders will still be forced, one fine day, to confront the mullahs or retreat from Iraq; there is no escape from this grim choice.

A dangerous cycle

Why is our political class leading the American public into losing its fortitude for winning the war in Iraq? Historian Victor Davis Hanson explains The Politics of American Wars.

[T]here was never much room for error in this war. We are not talking in this postmodern era in terms of a past Democratic president invading Latin America, interring citizens in high-plains camps, hanging terrorist suspects, nuking cities, or bombing pharmaceutical factories in Africa, but, at least from the weird present hysteria, something apparently far worse — like supposedly flushing a Koran at Guantanamo.

In a leisured and liberal society, it is very difficult in general for a conservative to wage war, because the natural suspicion arises — as a result of the conservative's tragic view of human nature and his belief in the occasional utility of force — that he enjoys the enterprise far more than a lip-biting progressive, who may in fact order more destruction.

Contrary to all recent popular wisdom, the war in Iraq is not a disaster, but nearing success. It has been costly and at times tragic, but a democracy is in place, accords are being hammered out with Sunni rejectionists, and the democratic reformist mindset is pulsating into Lebanon, Egypt, and the Gulf. This has only been possible because of the courage and efficacy of a much maligned military that, for the lapses of a small minority at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, has been compared to Stalin and Hitler.

If President Bush were a liberal Democrat; if he were bombing a white Christian, politically clumsy fascist in the heart of Europe; if al Qaeda and its Islamist adherents were properly seen as eighth-century tormenters of humanists, women, homosexuals, non-Arabs, and non-Wahhabi believers; and if Iraq had become completely somnolent with the toppling of Saddam's statue, then the American people would have remained behind the effort to dismantle Islamic fundamentalism and create the foundations to ensure its permanent demise.

Read the whole thing.

Bad moon rising

Kelo vs. City of New London: the liberal faction of the U.S. Supreme Court, with the help of swinger Justice Kennedy, endorses the absolute power of government to take property in the name of economic development. John at Blogs of War rounds up links and says:

Corrupt, cheaply bought, local officials now hold your family's future in their hands. This is the breeding ground of a revolution.

George F. Will notes the liberal thought process but also senses danger for conservatives.

The question answered yesterday was: Can government profit by seizing the property of people of modest means and giving it to wealthy people who can pay more taxes than can be extracted from the original owners? The court answered yes.

Liberalism triumphed yesterday. Government became radically unlimited in seizing the very kinds of private property that should guarantee individuals a sphere of autonomy against government.

Conservatives should be reminded to be careful what they wish for. Their often-reflexive rhetoric praises "judicial restraint" and deference to -- it sometimes seems -- almost unleashable powers of the elected branches of governments. However, in the debate about the proper role of the judiciary in American democracy, conservatives who dogmatically preach a populist creed of deference to majoritarianism will thereby abandon, or at least radically restrict, the judiciary's indispensable role in limiting government.

Rev. Donald Sensing has a prediction:

It’s not our homes that are most at risk despite this case. It’s America’s churches, synagogues and mosques.

If the purported intention of such property condemnation and seizure is increasing tax revenue, as Justice Stevens clearly believed it was, then there is no kind of building more vulnerable than a house of worship, for the simple reason that cities do not collect property taxes from houses of worship, nor any other kind of tax.

Furthermore, churches especially tend [to] occupy choice urban and suburban real estate because when towns were founded, one of the very earliest buildings to be erected was a church, almost always several churches of different denominations. In every city and town in America you will find churches sitting on what is now some of the most valuable land there.

Deterrence should be the first public response: any public official who chooses to exercise this newfound permission should be thrown out of office and made into an example by the voters.

Corsi to challenge Kerry

Nancy at American Daughter writes to say that she's posted an exclusive interview with Dr. Jerome Corsi, co-author of the 2004 election-year bestseller Unfit for Command. Interesting news: Corsi isn't finished with John Kerry.

I’m planning to actually establish residence in Massachusetts. I want to run against John Kerry in 2008 for the Senate. I’ve just formed an exploratory committee.

Read the whole thing, or listen to audio. Congrats to Nancy for a scoop.

Saudis in Iraq

It's important to know who the enemy is and is not. NBC News reports:

An NBC News analysis of hundreds of foreign fighters who died in Iraq over the last two years reveals that a majority came from the same country as most of the 9/11 hijackers — Saudi Arabia.

Among the suicide bombers was Ahmed al-Ghamdi, a one-time medical student and son of a Saudi diplomat. In December 2004, he climbed into a truck in Mosul and blew himself up.

On an Internet video, another Saudi says goodbye to his mother, then drives an ambulance full of explosives into a building.

They are among more than 400 militants from 21 countries whose deaths were celebrated on Islamic Web sites over the last two years.

"By far the nationality that comes up over and over again is Saudi Arabia," says Evan Kohlmann, an NBC News terrorism expert.

The NBC News analysis of Web site postings found that 55 percent of foreign insurgents came from Saudi Arabia, 13 percent from Syria, 9 percent from North Africa and 3 percent from Europe.

The U.S. military also says Saudi Arabia and Syria are the leading sources of insurgents.

Why do they go?

Saudis captured in Iraq say it's because of pictures on Arab television network Al-Jazeera.

"We saw the Americans massacring the Iraqis," says one Saudi prisoner in Iraq via translation.

Radical Saudi clerics urge them to go to Iraq to kill Americans.

"I read the communique of the 26 clerics," says another Saudi prisoner in Iraq.

ABC News has a related report.

As the number of suicide bombings in Iraq grows higher and higher, a top U.S. military intelligence official tells ABC News they are learning more about the true nature of the bombers.

According to Brig. Gen. John Custer, director of intelligence for U.S. Central Command, suicide bombers are "recruited on the Internet. They hear about the terrible atrocities perpetrated against the Iraqis in Iraq. They want to go and martyr themselves."

There have been more than 450 suicide bombings since August. The majority of the bombers are ages 18 to 25 and, with rare exception, male.

Officials say they know of only one suicide bomber who was Iraqi, with the others coming from countries that include Sudan, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia.

Custer says once interest is shown, an elaborate network run by Jordanian militant Abu Musab Zarqawi secretly sends the potential bomber into Iraq.

The would-be suicide bombers, says Custer, are then "hooked up with facilitators, whether in their country or neighboring countries, and flown to a capital — Damascus, [Syria,] is a place we've seen associated with this."

They then move across the border using false passports, Custer says, and are held in safe houses.

Once in Iraq, according to Custer, they are repeatedly exposed to videos showing civilian casualties of U.S. bombings or the photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. The indoctrination continues up until the moment the human bomber is given his suicide vest, bag, or vehicle.

Of course, it's being subsidized with petrodollars from your pockets and mine. Think about that the next time you fill up your gas guzzler.

Invertebrate behavior

Senate Dems held their line today, sending John Bolton's nomination to be U.N. ambassador to the showers, barring a much-less-than-ideal recess appointment. One Republican crossed over and actually voted with the Democrats.

Senate Democrats blocked John Bolton's confirmation as U.N. ambassador for the second time Monday and President Bush left open the possibility of bypassing lawmakers and appointing the tough-talking former State Department official on his own.

The vote was 54-38, six shy of the total needed to force a final vote on Bolton, and represented an erosion in support from last month's failed Republican effort. Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, who voted in May to advance the nomination, switched positions and urged Bush to consider another candidate, while only three Democrats crossed party lines.

One would hope that the flow of federal dollars directed to the great state of Ohio would slow to a trickle.

Bob Dole's message

As noted earlier, I received a copy of Bob Dole's wartime memoir, One Soldier's Story. I finished it on a recent flight to and from Washington, D.C.

His painful tale of loss and recovery is eloquent, even if the language is (like his public speaking) plainspoken. Quintessentially Midwestern, the message is simple but profound: Make a life. Make a difference. You don't have to walk alone.

One of life's great milestones is when a person can look back and be almost as thankful for the setbacks as for the victories. Gradually, it dawns on us that success and failure are not polar opposites. They are part of the same picture -- the picture of a full life, where you have your ups and downs. After all, none of us can ever lose unless we find the courage to try. Losing means that at least you were in the race. It means that when the whistle sounded, life did not find you watching from the sidelines.

There certainly have been times over the years when I have grappled with the "why" questions. Why did this happen to me? Why just a few days before the war ended? The questions are unanswerable this side of heaven. It's taken me sixty years to come to grips with the toughest questions of life, and in some small way, this book is my answer.

But instead of wallowing in despair trying to figure out a dilemma for which I believe there is a much larger answer than I will ever know, I've chosen to focus on a different set of "why" questions.

Why waste time wondering what might have been? Why go through life feeling sorry for myself? Instead of asking "why me," why not do something to help others?

Why indeed. Bob Dole's courage is an example for us all.

Mentors stand in for Dads at war

Father's Day involves some special people around Camp Pendleton, CA.

On this Father's Day, it should be noted that about 60 percent of military personnel — about 838,000 — are fathers, according to the Pentagon.

More than 123,000 of these fathers are deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. The lives of their children, says Nancy Campbell, who works in Army family services, "are turned upside down."

Untold numbers of men and women — relatives, neighbors, other servicemen and women — have marched to the aid of these children as temporary mentors. They play softball and board games, help with homework, and try to ease childhood's troubles with a sympathetic ear until the return of the deployed dads — or, sometimes, moms.

Some join programs like the one run by Big Brothers Big Sisters inside three public schools at Camp Pendleton, the city-sized base north of San Diego. Other mentors step forward informally to help brighten a dark time for a child.

"I got to have some time with somebody," said 11-year-old Gage Black at an end-of-school pool party at Camp Pendleton. "I'm not so lonely."

His father, who was away in Iraq, has now returned — but expects to ship out again soon.

Gage's mentor, Lt. Col. Sam Pelham, knows more than a little about comforting children: he is a father of three and, as a reservist, has worked in civilian life as an elementary school teacher. As mentor, Pelham would often ask the boy how his family was doing.

"If he was tight-lipped, I'd let him be tight-lipped," said Pelham. "It was his hour, and I didn't direct any of it. I was his running mate, basketball teammate, whatever he wanted."

Texas National Guard fathers in Iraq feel the separation too.

Maj. Greg Chaney, 38, of Abilene, said he'll be thinking of his daughters, 13-year-old Chelsea and 1-year-old Chera today. But the pangs of being away from home will not be a new experience.

"June is typically a month that the Texas National Guard is training, so we usually spend Father's Day away from home," he said.

This year, however, home seems especially far away for soldiers from the Guard's 56th Brigade Combat Team, as they struggle with heat, tedium and danger in dusty camps across Iraq.

The brigade's commander, Col. Red Brown, said an effort is being made to make soldiers "feel in touch with their families" on this special day.

Almost all troops will be given a chance to talk with their families, and the brigade's chaplain is preparing a special service.

"He plans to make sure fathers are recognized and that they can express their appreciation for their families," Brown said. "The families are absolutely the unsung heroes in this."

The 56th Brigade Combat Team is about halfway through a yearlong deployment in Iraq. The unit activated last July and spent six months training at Fort Hood before heading to Iraq.

"There are 3,000 Texas soldiers here, and each one has a different story," said Capt. Richard Jinks, a public affairs officer with the unit. "This is the national guard. These are guys who used to work with you or the guy who lives next door."

It turns out Father's Day in America was first conceived to thank a veteran.

Mrs. John B. Dodd, of Washington, first proposed the idea of a "father's day" in 1909. Mrs. Dodd wanted a special day to honor her father, William Smart. William Smart, a Civil War veteran, was widowed when his wife (Mrs. Dodd's mother) died in childbirth with their sixth child. Mr. Smart was left to raise the newborn and his other five children by himself on a rural farm in eastern Washington state. It was after Mrs. Dodd became an adult that she realized the strength and selflessness her father had shown in raising his children as a single parent.

The first Father's Day was observed on June 19, 1910 in Spokane Washington. At about the same time in various towns and cities across American other people were beginning to celebrate a "father's day." In 1924 President Calvin Coolidge supported the idea of a national Father's Day. Finally in 1966 President Lyndon Johnson signed a presidential proclamation declaring the 3rd Sunday of June as Father's Day.

So, here's to all the soldier dads and those who stand behind them. Thanks for all you do.

Strayhorn announces

The 2006 Texas governor's race should be, well, interesting. Whether it will be good interesting or train-wreck interesting remains to be seen.

With the Capitol as a backdrop and a scorching sun beating down, Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn turned the political heat up on Gov. Rick Perry today, formally announcing as a challenger to his re-election.

Strayhorn, saying she will run against Perry in next year's Republican primary, wasted no time in attacking her new opponent.

"You know that Texans cannot afford another four years of a governor who promises tax relief and delivers nothing," she said.

"Now is time to replace this do-nothing drugstore cowboy with one tough grandma," Strayhorn told a cheering crowd.

Strayhorn can talk the talk alright -- now we have to decide if she can walk the walk. Perry has been an empty suit as governor, so the opportunity is there if she can top his organization. It's hard to imagine the Democrats as a major factor, so the Republican primary is probably the real contest.

Enervation

Questions about America's commitment in the War on Terror, and what is influencing that commitment, seems to be the issue of the moment.

Austin Bay is in Iraq touring the front lines and has the same thing on his mind.

I find that this return visit to Iraq spurs thoughts of America– of American will to pursue victory. I don’t mean the will of US forces in the field. Wander around with a bunch of Marines for a half hour, spend fifteen minutes with Guardsmen from Idaho, and you will have no doubts about American military capabilities or the troops’ will to win. But our weakness is back home, on the couch, in front of the tv, on the cable squawk shows, on the editorial page of the New York Times, in the political gotcha games of Washington, DC.

It seems America wants to get on with its wonderful Electra-Glide life, that September 10 sense of freedom and security, without finishing the job. The military is fighting, the Iraqi people are fighting, but where is the US political class? The Bush Administration has yet to ask the American people –correction, has yet to demand of the American people– the sustained, shared sacrifice it takes to win this long, intricate war of bullets, ballots, and bricks.

This is the Bush Administration’s biggest strategic mistake– a failure to tap the reservoir of American willingness 9/11 produced.

PBS: Yes, but with strings

Wise Peggy Noonan makes the conservative case for federal funding of PBS, and how the network can continue to deserve it. She's exactly right. If you care about our culture, read the whole thing.

Conservative argue that in a 500-channel universe the programming of PBS could easily be duplicated or find a home at a free commercial network. The power of the marketplace will ensure that PBS's better offerings find a place to continue and flourish.

This I doubt. Actually I'm fairly certain it is not true. And I suspect most people on the Hill know it is not true.

We live in the age of Viacom and "Who Wants to Be a Celebrity," not the age of Omnibus and "Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts." A lot of Democrats think that left to the marketplace, PBS will die. A lot of Republicans think so too, but don't mind.

At its best, at its most thoughtful and intellectually honest and curious, PBS does the kind of work that no other network in America does or will do.

[S]ome great work [has come] from PBS's detachment from marketplace realities. And it has even been work--such as "The Civil War"--that helped our country by teaching our children the things they must know to go on to become adults who love their country. This, in the world we live in, is no small thing. It's huge.

Why, then, doesn't Congress continue to fund PBS at current levels but tell them they must stick to what they are good at, and stop being the TV funhouse of the Democratic Party? Nobody needs their investigative unit pieces on how Iran-contra was very, very wicked; nobody needs another Bill Moyers show; nobody needs a conservative counter to Bill Moyers's show. Our children are being raised in a culture of argument. They can get left-right-pop-pop-bang anywhere, everywhere.

PBS exists to do what the commercial networks should and won't. And just one of those things is bringing to Americans who have not and probably will not be exposed to it the great treasury of American art, from the work of Eugene O'Neill (again, ABC won't be producing "Long Day's Journey" anytime soon), outward to Western art (Shakespeare) and outward to world art.

And science. And history. But real history, meaning something that happened in the past as opposed to the recent present, with which PBS, alas, cannot be trusted.

Art and science and history. That's where PBS's programming should be. And Americans would not resent funding it.

It is true that if you tell PBS producers they are now doing a play series they will immediately decide to remount "Angels in America." How about a rule: It takes at least 50 years for a currently esteemed work to prove itself a work of art, a true classic. It proves this by enduring. Do plays that have proved themselves to be enduring contributions--i.e., art. Look to the permanent, not the prevalent.

PBS should be refunded, because it does not and will not exist elsewhere if it is not. But it should be funded with rules and conditions, and it should remember its reason for being: to do what the networks cannot do or will not do, and that somebody should do.

The Coming Saudi Oil Shock?

Have Saudi Arabia's oil reserves peaked through a combination of natural depletion and reservoir mismanagement? As noted earlier here and here, oil industry veteran and investment banker Matthew Simmons says "Yes" or at least "Maybe."

His controversial new book is finally out and the debate was featured in the Houston Chronicle.

Saudi Arabia says it has enough oil to keep the world happy for at least another 70 years.

But the closely guarded Saudi Aramco numbers that would back up that claim aren't available to outsiders. That worries Houston investment banker Matthew Simmons.

Simply put, Simmons doesn't think energy-intensive countries like the United States should take Saudi Arabia at its word. He contends that the country's official oil reserve count could be overstated and the kingdom's oil production could decline, throwing the world's supply-and-demand balance off-kilter and jacking up prices for years to come.

After parsing 235 technical papers from the Society of Petroleum Engineers written by state-owned Saudi Aramco's employees, Simmons says the kingdom's ability to produce ever-increasing amounts of oil looks bleak.

It's a theory he's been expounding on for more than a year. In an industry rife with double talk, Simmons' bold pronouncements that world oil production is peaking have earned him fans and foes alike.

His critics say Saudi Arabia has been a dependable oil source for the United States for decades, consistently stepping up as the world's swing producer to help calm energy markets and stabilize prices.

Even if state oil company Saudi Aramco has had a policy of withholding technical information, the math is there to back up the kingdom's claims, according to Sadad Al-Husseini, Aramco's recently retired head of exploration and production.

"We drilled, cored and logged numerous key wells in every active field and reservoir and surveyed the most significant oil fields with complete 3-D seismic coverage," wrote Al-Husseini, in a column for Oil & Gas Journal. "Over the years, these models have been updated annually and have confirmed our predictions of reservoir performance and our calculations of reserve and oil recoveries."

Simmons believes it could all add up to big trouble, although he's quick to call his book "a warning, not a certainty."

Listen and learn

Indispensable Victor Davis Hanson says we need to distinguish between myth and reality in the Middle East, and keep the pressure on.

This is all so strange.

Free-thinking Arabs refute all the premises of Western Leftists who claim that colonialism, racism, and exploitation have created terrorists, hold back Arab development, and are the backdrops to this war.

Indeed, it is far worse than that: Our own fundamentalist Left is in lockstep with Wahhabist reductionism — in its similar instinctive distrust of Western culture. Both blame the United States and excuse culpability on the part of Islamists. The more left-wing the Westerner, the more tolerant he is of right-wing Islamic extremism; the more liberal the Arab, the more likely he is to agree with conservative Westerners about the real source of Middle Eastern pathology.

The constant? A global distrust of Western-style liberalism and preference for deductive absolutism. So burn down a mosque in Zimbabwe, murder innocent Palestinians in Bethlehem in 2002, arrest Christians in Saudi Arabia, or slaughter Africans in Dafur, and both the Western Left and the Middle East's hard Right won't say a word. No such violence resonates with America's diverse critics as much as a false story of a flushed Koran — precisely because the gripe is not about the lives of real people, but the psychological hurts, angst, and warped ideology of those who in their various ways don't like the United States.

[T]he American public is tiring of the Middle East, its hypocrisy and whiny logic — and to such a degree that it sometimes unfortunately doesn't make distinctions for the Iraqi democratic government or other Arab reformers, but rather is slowly coming to believe the entire region is ungracious, hopeless, and not worth another American soldier or dollar.

This is a dangerous trend. Despite murderous Syrian terrorists, dictatorial Saudis, crazy Pakistanis, and triangulating European allies, and after so many tragic setbacks, we are close to creating lasting democratic states in Afghanistan and Iraq — states that are influencing the entire region and ending the old calculus of Middle Eastern terror. We are winning even as we are told we are losing. But the key is that the American people need to be told — honestly and daily — how and why those successes came about and must continue before it sours on the entire sorry bunch.

Numbed?

Daniel Henninger wonders if America is becoming numb to the global costs of terrorism, and losing its stomach for fighting a War on Terror.

Living in the U.S., one could make the cold-blooded calculation that 21,000 dead and 55,000 injured from all terrorist acts over 10 years is a drop in the bucket and that the war in Iraq has mainly increased the rate of death. This may be true. But if as many suicide bombs went off in Manhattan as have gone off in Israel, Manhattanites would have demanded martial law and the summary execution of suspects on street corners. Their greatest goal in life would not be, as it is now, the closing of interrogation rooms on Guantanamo but instead the erasure of terrorists hiding across the East River.

[O]ur own news coverage of [the] repeated slaughters of civilians in Iraq also lacks any normative or moral context unfavorable to the perpetrators. And little wonder that in such a world the only "side" many people in the U.S. feel comfortable with is heading for the exits.

Posted by Alan at 06:44 AM

Batman Begins

Saw Batman Begins last night: brilliant. Tough, fast, witty, exciting, very smart. Weakest link: Katie Holmes. As usual, Michael Caine is excellent. Christian Bale is almost perfect. We'll go back to catch more details.

Cave-in

Well, trembling librarians everywhere must be feeling good right now. Who knew they had such influence?

The House voted today to block the FBI and the Justice Department from using the Patriot Act to search library and book store records.

Despite a veto threat from President Bush, lawmakers voted 238-187 to block the part of the anti-terrorism law that allows the government to investigate the reading habits of terror suspects.

The vote reversed a narrow loss last year by lawmakers complaining about threats to privacy rights. They narrowed the proposal this year to permit the government to continue to seek out records of Internet use at libraries.

Supporters of rolling back the library and bookstore provision said that the law gives the FBI too much leeway to go on "fishing expeditions" on people's reading habits and that innocent people could get tagged as potential terrorists based on what they check out from a library.

That's 99.99% nonsense with only the tiniest likelihood of occuring. What's much more likely is this:

Supporters of the Patriot Act countered that the rules on reading records are a potentially useful tool in finding terrorists and argued that the House was voting to make libraries safe havens for them.

The river war

Naval War College professor Mackubin Thomas Owens explains the current U.S. military strategy in Iraq. Very interesting -- read the whole thing.

No force, conventional or guerrilla, can continue to fight if it is deprived of sanctuary and logistics support. Accordingly, the central goal of the U.S. strategy in Iraq is to destroy the insurgency by depriving it of its base in the Sunni Triangle and its "ratlines" — the infiltration routes that run from the Syrian border into the heart of Iraq.

One ratline follows the Euphrates River corridor — running from Syria to Husayba on the Syrian border and then through Qaim, Rawa, Haditha, Asad, Hit and Fallujah to Baghdad. The other follows the course of the Tigris — from the north through Mosul-Tel Afar to Tikrit and on to Baghdad. These two "river corridors" constitute the main spatial elements of a campaign to implement U.S. strategy.

The U.S. strategy in Iraq is limited by a number of factors: the U.S. forces available, Iraqi politics and the time it is taking to create a competent Iraqi military. But the ongoing river campaign indicates that America has chosen to go on the offensive, taking advantage of the success in Fallujah to deny the insurgents respite. The high operational tempo is intended to rapidly degrade the rebels' lines of communication at both ends of the two river corridors, while killing and capturing as many of the enemy as possible.

But while military operations have weakened the insurgency, military means alone cannot defeat an insurgency. That is why it is necessary to bring the Sunnis into the government. Recent evidence suggests that the steps so far have already begun to drive a wedge between the Sunni and the foreign jihadis who have come to fight for Zarqawi.

President Bush is taking hits in the opinion polls and media as the public frets about the war (and other issues). What the American people want and need is a sense that we're not just sitting back helplessly allowing casualties to pile up, but instead are on the offensive and making progress. Paying a price to win is one thing; paying that same price to stand still or lose is another thing entirely.

The administration and the Pentagon should be telling their own story much more effectively. But that's been a weakness of this presidency since Day One.

Kerry moment

The Senate Finance Committee gave preliminary approval yesterday to CAFTA. In the reassuring knowledge that some things are eternal, one couldn't help but enjoy this related news:

Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, assured his colleagues on the Senate Finance Committee yesterday that he was for free-trade agreements before he was against the Central American Free Trade Agreement.

"I have voted for every single trade agreement. I am not a protectionist," Mr. Kerry said as lawmakers debated CAFTA.

"Even in the campaign last year, when there were enormous pressures not to, I voted for Chile, Singapore and Australia," he said.

Congressional records, however, indicate he did not vote at all on the free-trade pacts. The three were approved without his support.

From Russia with Love

Here's yet another tentacle thrown off by the ever-widening Oil for Food scandal: possible Russian complicity, via The Wall Street Journal (subscribers only).

The alleged role of the Iraqi Embassy in Moscow in helping Baghdad exploit the United Nations' oil-for-food program has emerged as a new flash point in already rocky U.S.-Russian relations.

In the three years before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, say former employees of the Iraqi Embassy in Moscow and American investigators, cash deliveries were funneled through the embassy as part of an elaborate kickback scheme to Saddam Hussein's government, paid in return for lucrative oil contracts under the U.N.'s oil-for-food program.

The main question facing investigators is whether the scheme took place with the active cooperation of the Kremlin or was simply part of the murky and often corrupt business climate that has flourished in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. The intermingling of Russia's government and business spheres -- many companies are either formally state-owned or under the unofficial control of powerful political or military figures -- is making the issue more difficult to resolve.

Patriot Act creates strange allies

Last weekend we enjoyed watching on C-SPAN when Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) abruptly adjourned a House Judiciary Committee hearing on renewal of the Patriot Act. The issue that day was the fact that Democrats and their utopian friends from Amnesty International, et.al., wanted to hold forth endlessly on conditions at Guantanamo Bay, not talk to specifics of the Patriot Act itself.

The controversy continues as some on the Right join forces with their usual enemies on the Left to try and derail the Act's renewal. Paranoia runs deep.

Conservative groups have found common ground with the liberal American Civil Liberties Union in their opposition to the USA Patriot Act and pledge to wage a high-profile fight against it, claiming even its renewal is shrouded in secrecy.

Former Rep. Bob Barr, who led conservative efforts to impeach President Clinton, is leading a group called "Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances" that is focused exclusively on opposing the renewal of the Patriot Act.

The effort also has the enthusiastic support of three of the most influential conservatives in Washington, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, David Keene of the American Conservative Union and Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum.

But not all conservatives agree with some of the movement's biggest names. The Heritage Foundation has given its full-throated support to Mr. Bush's version of the law.

"Bob Barr is going to cast aspersions that only true conservatives think ill of the Patriot Act," said Paul Rosenzweig, a senior legal research fellow at Heritage. "I'll put it this way: Ronald Reagan would be for the Patriot Act. And I know that because his former attorney general, Ed Meese, is for the Patriot Act."

Mr. Rosenzweig said the Patriot Act "has all the checks and balances on police authority that has been around for years," and that its greatest feature is how it allows intelligence agents and the FBI to share the intelligence they gather.

"That is absolutely essential," Mr. Rosenzweig said. "Everyone realizes that except for Bob Barr."

News from Iraq

There's plenty of tough news from Iraq, but don't forget to take in some of the encouraging news as well. Arthur Chrenkoff rounds up three weeks worth of often-overlooked reports, including this admonishment:

"You can't fix in six months what it took 35 years to destroy." These words, spoken by Ibrahim al-Jaafari, Iraq's first democratically elected Prime Minister in half a century, should be inscribed in 3-foot-tall characters as a preface to all the reporting from Iraq. Sadly, the underlying reality all too often seems to escape many reporters caught in the excitement of "now."

Power Line posts a front-line note from "Major E.," who is also concerned about public perception.

Yes, we are winning. Yes, it is bloody. But our mission is moving forward and the enemy's mission must constantly adapt to the pressure we are putting on them, and their tactic of killing more civilians is making the public more supportive of us, and less so of them.

The insurgents have fought to break the will of the troops and have failed. They have fought to break the will of the Iraqi people and failed. They will continue to attack both fronts, but there remains another strategic front that they are now targeting more and more. The insurgents, in my opinion, are now seeking to break the will of the American people.

To do this, they are using more car bombs which make great sound-bite visuals on television, but while the weapon is sometimes tactically effective it is strategically irrelevant.... These tactics cannot stop our mission here from moving forward, unless the frequency and manner in which they are reported makes the American people think we are not winning or that it is not worth the sacrifice.

Please do not let that happen. This is worth the fight.

Operation Desecration another media crock

A Republican senator cracked under media pressure this week, possibly presaging a bigger cave-in by the Bush administration.

Sen. Mel Martinez said the Bush administration should consider closing the Guantanamo Bay prison for terrorism suspects — the first high-profile Republican to make the suggestion.

“It’s become an icon for bad stories and at some point you wonder the cost-benefit ratio,” Martinez said Friday.

Reality, please: inimitable Mark Steyn takes on those who cry "Gulag!" about the detention of terrorists and terrorist hangers-on at Guantanamo Bay.

When three times as many detainees "desecrate" the Koran as U.S. guards do, it seems clear that the whole Operation Desecration ballyhoo is yet another media crock and the Organization of the Islamic Conference and all the rest are complaining about nothing.

Nobody got killed in Gitmo, so instead America's being flayed as the planet's No. 1 torturer for being insufficiently respectful to the holy book of its prisoners, even though the Americans themselves supplied their prisoners with the holy book, even though Americans who fall into the hands of the other side get their heads hacked off, even though the prisoners' co-religionists themselves blow up more mosques and Qurans than the Pentagon ever does, even though the preferred holy book of most Americans is banned in the home country of many of the prisoners, where respect for other faiths is summed up in the headline, "Seven Christians Released In Saudi Arabia On Condition They Renounce Private Religious Practice."

That was in the British Catholic newspaper, the Universe, last week, by the way. Sadly, no U.S. newspaper found room for the story due to pressures of space caused by all the "Al-Qaida Press Secretary Denounces Insufficient Respect For Koran By Rumsfeld" front page splashes. But sure, go ahead, close Gitmo and wait for the rave reviews from the media -- right after the complaints that it's culturally insensitive to rebuild the World Trade Center when it's the burial site of 10 revered Muslim martyrs.

Guantanamo will be remembered not as a byword for torture but for self-torture, a Western fetish the jihad's spin doctors understand all too well.

Car bombs get more dangerous

The enemy in Iraq is proving to be very adaptable, especially with the critical help of a nearby sanctuary.

The car bombs killing troops and civilians in Iraq have grown more sophisticated as insurgents gain training and financing across the border in Syria, defense officials say.

The officials estimate that improvised explosive devices (IEDs), both roadside and car-borne, now account for 50 percent of all daily attacks, or "contacts," in Iraq.

When the IED attacks began in full force in late 2003, most bombs were made of artillery and mortar shells. But lately, the coalition is discovering more sophisticated bombs made of a mix of explosives, some of which include penetrating warheads to kill people inside buildings.

At the Pentagon, an Army-led task force is working to come up with ways to defeat the systems, but so far the insurgents are finding new technologies and tactics to stay one step ahead.

"There's not going to be a silver bullet," said one defense official assigned to the problem. "It's going to be a combination of technology, jammers and intelligence to find the bomb makers."

One problem, this source says, is that some of the financing to buy bomb parts and bomb-making training is going on in Syria, effectively giving the terrorists a sanctuary.

"We know they are training in Syria because they have no threat of being picked up," said the official, who asked not to be named.

The suicide car bombings are considered the work of foreign jihadists, most of whom enter Iraq through Syria. "We believe all of them are foreigners, not Iraqis," a second defense official said.

The jihadists are recruited by al Qaeda in Iraq, led by Jordanian-born terror chief Abu Musab Zarqawi. They train in Syria and Iraq, then are assigned missions.

A recent casualty from Texas was only a few hours away from coming home. That makes the tragedy even harder.

A day before he was scheduled to return from Iraq, Army Sgt. Roberto Arizola Jr. was killed when a device exploded near his vehicle in Baghdad.

Arizola, 31, of Laredo, was killed Wednesday by the roadside bomb. He had been a border patrol agent in Laredo before being sent to Iraq.

"We just can't believe it was his last day there," said his mother, Cecilia Arizola. "He was a good person."

Cecilia Arizola remembered her son as a loving father and husband who liked to play video games and sports with his 7-year-old son. His wife, Monica, and the rest of his family had postponed a birthday party for his son until he returned home.

NASA - Rocking the house

Is a NASA housecleaning on its way? Insiders tell the Washington Post it's coming soon. Are the leakers trying to forestall the changes or shape the decisions to preserve themselves and their internal allies?

New NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin has decided to replace about 20 senior space agency officials by mid-August in the first stage of a broad agency shake-up. The departures include the two leaders of the human spaceflight program, which is making final preparations to fly the space shuttle for the first time in more than two years.

Senior NASA officials and congressional and aerospace industry sources said yesterday that Griffin wants to clear away entrenched bureaucracy, and build a less political and more scientifically oriented team to implement President Bush's plan to return humans to the moon by 2020 and eventually send them to Mars.

The moon-Mars initiative has put severe pressure on NASA's budget, forcing Griffin into a difficult balancing act -- trying to build quickly a next generation spaceship without crippling programs ranging from Earth observation satellites and aeronautics research to maintaining the Hubble telescope.

At the same time, the sources said, Griffin wants to restore NASA's glamour, reasserting the engineering and science leadership that has been eroding since the Apollo era. To this end, the sources said, he is willing to oust as many as 50 senior managers in a housecleaning rivaling the purge after the 1986 Challenger explosion.

Real toughness is between the ears

Vice President Cheney spoke to an audience in Tampa at the conclusion of Southern Command's International Special Operations Forces Week. Here's part of what he said.

Above all, in your patience, and endurance, and devotion to your missions, special ops remind us of the importance of vigilance. We have a long war ahead of us, and our enemies are waiting for us to let our guard down. But we will not relent in this effort, because we have the clearest possible understanding of what is at stake. Looking across this room, I see the diversity of our planet, but an identity of interests. None of us wants to turn over the future of mankind to tiny groups of fanatics committing indiscriminate murder and plotting large-scale horror. And so we must direct every resource necessary to defending the peace and freedom of our world, and the safety of the people we serve. That's the commitment of the United States that we've made to ourselves and to other nations. And with good allies at our side, we will see this cause through to victory.

The writer Tom Clancy once said of special ops forces, "Real toughness is between the ears, not in the biceps. You've got to see them to believe them." That really captures the idea. It is difficult to put into words the intensity of your training, the hazards of your hardest assignments, and the speed of thought and action that are needed at the tip of the spear. You are the ones who can go into unfamiliar territory and become part of the environment -- preparing battle spaces, learning languages and cultures, building relationships, and picking up intelligence. Special ops are the ones who hunt down, engage, kill and capture enemies, yet also set up hospitals, call in humanitarian aid, and help villages to become self-sufficient -- leaving behind you men, women, and children who feel gratitude for your kindness and good will for our country.

Special ops, it's been said play every role from warrior to physician to diplomat to engineer. And at times you have to switch from one role to other in the blink of an eye.

In this time of testing for our world, many in the military have faced long deployments -- and because special ops go so far forward, you very often go without regular contact with home or family. It's also in the nature of your business that the best work goes unrecognized until years after the fact, if ever. And we may never know all the grief that has been spared because of you. I can only say, with complete certainty, that your efforts are paying off -- and today all of us live in a world made safer by your actions.

Bob Dylan: The Never-Ending Tour

Bob Dylan, living personification of "iconoclast," has essentially been on the road since 1988. What's he doing, and what drives him? It's not what you want, but what you need.

The place was the Soaring Eagle Casino and Resort, and it was an odd rock 'n' roll show. But it was the kind of show and the kind of site that Bob Dylan has increasingly made his own.

Mr. Dylan, 64, plays big cities, of course. (In April he played five nights in Manhattan.) But more and more, he is choosing stranger settings: state fairs, corporate events, urban street fairs and casinos (from Indian casinos like the Turning Stone in Verona, N.Y., and the Soaring Eagle to more traditional ones in Las Vegas and Reno). He is now in the middle of his second summer barnstorming tour of minor-league baseball fields, like the Osceola County Stadium in Kissimmee, Fla., with Willie Nelson in tow.

Mr. Dylan may be in the final phase of his long and iconoclastic life as a star, and for it he has chosen a very long and very iconoclastic tour: 1,700 shows and counting, beginning in 1988. Caught in an artistic crisis then, he decided to defibrillate his career and go back on the road. Accompanied by a small combo, he reintroduced himself to fans, sporting a lean energy and a commitment to exploring his nonpareil song catalog. He shows no signs of slowing down, though he has lately replaced the guitar he has played for more than 45 years with a keyboard, causing speculation that back problems might be responsible for the switch. (Through Mr. Dylan's publicist at Columbia Records, his management said playing keyboards was "just his musical preference" and declined to comment otherwise for this article.) Mr. Dylan has turned his act into one of the weirdest road shows in rock. He rarely speaks to the crowd, and when he does, his remarks are often gnomic throwaways. ("I had a big brass bed, but I sold it!") He plays some of his best-known songs, but often in contrarian, almost unrecognizable versions, as if to dampen their anthemic qualities. He highlights recent compositions more than most of his 60's coevals, but these, too, are delivered as highly stylized, singsongy chants. He strives to play as many kinds of places as possible, even playing successive nights in different theaters and clubs in large cities.

In other words, Mr. Dylan seems to have developed an unparalleled commitment to sharing his art, but only on his own very specific terms.

These shows have none of the strict choreography of the modern rock concert. Major touring acts will charge hundreds of dollars for a tightly scripted performance, with one or two opportunities for spontaneity. By contrast, Mr. Dylan's small ensemble plays confidently during each set's few anchors, but watches somewhat warily during the rest of the show, as Mr. Dylan decides which part of his huge repertory to sample next.

"He would do anything from old folk songs, Civil War-era songs, up to standards," said the guitarist G. E. Smith, who played with Mr. Dylan at the start of what has become known as the Never-Ending Tour. "I remember once, we were playing in Hollywood, and he played 'Moon River.' "

Check out tour schedules and set lists or listen to live performances and rare recordings at BobDylan.com.

Dana Elcar, RIP

Sadness: character actor Dana Elcar, best known as Pete Thornton on "MacGyver," has passed away.

Actor Dana Elcar, a familiar face on dozens of TV shows but best known as co-star of the action series “MacGyver,” a role he kept even after going blind, has died at age 77, his agent’s office said Friday.

Although hardly a household name, Elcar was instantly recognizable to U.S. audiences for his roles in dozens of shows spanning more than four decades, often playing good-guy authority figures.

In addition to frequent guest appearances, he was a regular on such series as “Baretta” opposite Robert Blake, “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” with Robert Conrad, and most notably, “MacGyver,” which starred Richard Dean Anderson as a rugged, clever crime fighter.

On “MacGyver,” which debuted in 1985 on ABC, Elcar played Anderson’s supervisor and friend, Peter Thornton, the director of field operations for the fictional Phoenix Foundation.

Elcar went blind from glaucoma a few seasons into the show, but his affliction was written into his character, and he remained on the show until the end of its run in 1992.

"Liberalism to cancer patients: Drop dead"

Wall Street Journal deputy editor Daniel Henninger decodes the Supreme Court decision against state laws on medical marijuana.

The Supreme Court's liberal bloc--Stevens, Ginsburg, Souter and Breyer--ensured Monday with the support of Justices Kennedy and Scalia that people sick from cancer treatment will have to think first about a house call from the federal drug police before using marijuana to relieve their symptoms.

Liberalism to cancer patients: Drop dead.

Meanwhile, dissents on behalf of medical marijuana were written by Sandra Day O'Connor, a cancer survivor, and Clarence Thomas, whose nomination was fought by recreational pot users.

Medical marijuana sounds simple. Cancer patients receiving chemotherapy often endure extreme nausea, and many say that smoking marijuana during chemo makes it bearable. Many of us know sober folks who have done this. So why is this a Supreme Court case? Because this is America, where nothing is so simple that it can't be turned into a federal case.

If the Court's four liberals had ruled in favor of state laws allowing medical marijuana, which federal law forbids, that precedent would have helped conservative efforts to reduce federal clout in other areas, such as environmental authority in the West. Thus Justice Stevens wrote that the Controlled Substances Act, a Nixon-era law, "is a valid exercise of federal power, even as applied to the troubling facts of this case." Liberals with cancer should take solace in knowing they will be vomiting to save the snail darter.

UPDATE: Physician-turned-pundit Charles Krauthammer has more thoughts on politics and constitutional law.

Justice Thomas: "Dope is cool."

Justice Scalia: "Let the cancer patients suffer."

If the headline writers characterized Supreme Court decisions the way many senators and most activists and lobbying groups do, that is how they would have characterized the Supreme Court decision this week on medical marijuana in California.

The real question is never what judges decide, but how they decide it. The Scalia-Thomas argument was not about concern for cancer patients, the utility of medical marijuana or the latitude individuals should have regarding what they ingest.

It was about what the commerce clause permits, and even more abstractly, who decides what the commerce clause permits. To simplify only slightly, Scalia says: Supreme Court precedent. Thomas says: the Founders, as best we can interpret their original intent.

With Thomas' originalism at one end of the spectrum and Scalia's originalism tempered by precedent — rolling originalism, as it were — in the middle, there is a third notion, championed most explicitly by Justice Stephen Breyer, that the Constitution is a living document and the role of the court is to interpret and reinterpret it continually in the light of new ideas and new norms.

This is what our debate about judges should be about.

The uncaring elite

Historian Victor Davis Hanson tries once more to explain why it is so wrong to allow unfettered illegal immigration from Mexico.

Illegal immigration is again in the headlines, but the debate isn't going anywhere. Instead, all the tired controversies are again being aired.

Some believe illegal immigration is a win-win bargain: An impoverished Mexico obtains crucial dollars, while job-hungry America receives industrious unskilled workers. Critics counter that millions of illegal workers undermine the sanctity of the law, and only abet a corrupt Mexican government that uses remittances to avoid needed reform.

Both sides agree that when newcomers arrive legally from Mexico in the thousands, rather than unchecked in the millions, these immigrants become among our best American citizens.

The politics are by now surreal. Those of the corporate right want cheap labor. So they join the self-interested multicultural left in politics, journalism and academia who don't mind seeing a growing presence of unassimilated and dependent constituents.

Yet rarely mentioned in the debate are the illiberal aspects of millions coming to the United States in violation of the law.

For too long the debate over illegal immigration has been demagogued on hot-button issues of economics, ethnicity and relations with Mexico. The subtext always has been that those who support open borders are somehow more caring or ethical than their purportedly insensitive opponents who wish a return to measured and legal immigration.

In fact, the opposite is true. More frequently it is an uncaring elite -- made up of both Democrats and Republicans -- that advocates not enforcing immigration laws. And it is past time for them to explain why it is moral or liberal, rather than merely convenient, to import millions outside the law to do the jobs we supposedly cannot.

Too abstract? Read the whole thing for six specific reasons.

Chess or poker?

This is high-stakes gamesmanship.

The United States has received "credible information" that Syrian operatives in Lebanon plan to try to assassinate senior Lebanese political leaders and that Syrian military intelligence forces are returning to Lebanon to create "an environment of intimidation," a senior administration official said Thursday.

The official said that the information had come from "a variety of Lebanese sources" and that "we assess it as credible." The information, he said, was gathered after the recent assassinations of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February, and of Samir Kassir, a well-known journalist, a week ago.

Both were outspoken critics of Syrian domination of Lebanese politics, and Mr. Kassir had blamed Syria for the assassination of Mr. Hariri.

"This is a moment when many politicians are facing overt Syrian intimidation in the middle of the election period," said the official, referring to parliamentary elections held last month and again this month. "When Lebanese sources tell us that they are hearing that the Kassir killing will be followed by others, we take it seriously."

It was clear that the official's statements, which were offered to reporters from at least two news organizations, were a deliberate signal of the Bush administration's continuing displeasure with the Syrian government's role in Lebanon.

He said that information about the threat had been disseminated to governments in the Middle East and Europe and that "we thought it would be useful to make this public as a deterrent to the Syrians."

Ground Zero has been stolen

Debra Burlingame is back in the public eye with a shocking expose of Leftist revisionism at the still emotionally smoldering site of the World Trade Center.

The World Trade Center Memorial Cultural Complex will be an imposing edifice wedged in the place where the Twin Towers once stood. It will serve as the primary "gateway" to the underground area where the names of the lost are chiseled into concrete. The organizers of its principal tenant, the International Freedom Center (IFC), have stated that they intend to take us on "a journey through the history of freedom" -- but do not be fooled into thinking that their idea of freedom is the same as that of those Marines. To the IFC's organizers, it is not only history's triumphs that illuminate, but also its failures. The public will have come to see 9/11 but will be given a high-tech, multimedia tutorial about man's inhumanity to man, from Native American genocide to the lynchings and cross-burnings of the Jim Crow South, from the Third Reich's Final Solution to the Soviet gulags and beyond. This is a history all should know and learn, but dispensing it over the ashes of Ground Zero is like creating a Museum of Tolerance over the sunken graves of the USS Arizona.

The so-called lessons of September 11 should not be force-fed by ideologues hoping to use the memorial site as nothing more than a powerful visual aid to promote their agenda. Instead of exhibits and symposiums about Internationalism and Global Policy we should hear the story of the courageous young firefighter whose body, cut in half, was found with his legs entwined around the body of a woman. Recovery personnel concluded that because of their positions, the young firefighter was carrying her.

The people who visit Ground Zero in five years will come because they want to pay their respects at the place where heroes died. They will come because they want to remember what they saw that day, because they want a personal connection, to touch the place that touched them, the place that rallied the nation and changed their lives forever. I would wager that, if given a choice, they would rather walk through that dusty hanger at JFK Airport where 1,000 World Trade Center artifacts are stored than be herded through the International Freedom Center's multi-million dollar insult.

Ground Zero has been stolen, right from under our noses. How do we get it back?

Debra is the courageous sister of Charles "Chic" Burlingame, captain of American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11 and she names names.

Michelle Malkin
Power Line
Little Green Footballs

The EU makes no sense

Following France's dramatic "No" vote on the E.U. "constitution," Claire Berlinski tries to talk some sense into Eurocrats and Europe-watchers. It'll probably fail, but it's a strong effort.

According to those dismayed by the outcome of the referendum, last weekend's no vote represented a mix of incoherent sentiments, chiefly a frustration with unemployment, a rejection of market reforms and a widespread loathing of the government of President Jacques Chirac. These issues are all real. But unemployment in France is a long-term structural problem. It would be a problem whether or not the French voted for the constitution. As for Chirac? Everyone has always disliked him.

The one thing the vote surely expressed is the unwillingness of the French to cede any more of their national identity to the fantasy of a unified Europe. It is a fantasy, of course, of very old standing. Pope Innocent III's failed attempt to unify fractious medieval Europe was an expression of much the same fantasy. No effort to unify Europe has ever succeeded. Most have ended in blood.

Nobody in the French elite has been prepared to say what the French electorate has said clearly -- that, even if the E.U. makes sense economically, it makes no sense historically. It reflects neither the will of a single nation-state, nor the will of an empire, based on the ability of a central political entity to dominate its periphery, nor does it reflect some form of established European identity with deep historic roots. Even the Austro-Hungarian Empire had in Austrian power -- diminished as it was after 1866 -- a stable and powerful center.

All of European history -- all of world history -- argues against a federation with no force to back it up and no way to impose its will on member states. The French voters recognized this even as the French elite failed to. The E. U. is in effect an empty empire. The only national identities up for grabs are the old national identities of the chief nation-states of Europe. And no matter how hard the E.U. bureaucrats try to turn the French identity into a European one, the people just aren't buying it.

Signing up

Here's news about a prominent Houstonian who's decided to give something back.

Belatedly continuing a tradition led by Michael DeBakey, Denton Cooley and "Red" Duke, prominent Houston cardiologist Dr. Ward Casscells joined the U.S. Army Reserves on Monday.

In a ceremony at the University of Texas School of Public Health at Houston, Casscells was commissioned a lieutenant colonel in the Medical Corps. Mayor Bill White administered the oath of office.

Casscells, who'll be assigned to the surgeon general at the Pentagon, has not received his orders yet but said he thinks he'll start this summer. For the next eight years, he is subject to 90-day call-ups every two years, in addition to serving a weekend a month.

It isn't yet clear whether Casscells will spend any time in Iraq. The Army has expressed interest in tapping his expertise in disaster preparedness and prevention, and Casscells said he definitely expects to travel to South Asia because of his interest in the pandemic flu.

Casscells said he could only aspire to follow in the footsteps of other Houston doctors who served in the military. Noting they "put it on the line" during their youth, he called them "my heroes."

They included heart surgeon DeBakey, who served in World War II and conceived the mobile army surgical hospital, or MASH unit; heart surgeon Cooley, who was chief of surgical services at the military hospital in Linz, Austria, immediately after the war; Duke, who served with one of the first NATO troops in Europe before becoming a trauma surgeon; and Texas Heart Institute surgeon Bud Frazier, who was an Army flight surgeon in Vietnam.

Casscells sought to join up eight months ago, but it took that long for the Army to grant him waivers based on his age and medical condition (he has prostate cancer).

Evolution

The U.S. military continues to evolve its strategies in the War on Terror.

The Pentagon is discussing war-strategy changes for defeating Islamic terrorists that would place more emphasis on killing, capturing or discouraging midlevel operators who enable top al Qaeda leadership to function.

Interviews the past week with Bush administration officials show that policy-makers are thinking the only way to ultimately win the war is to take down the lower-level operators who form the networks that support Osama bin Laden and scores of other al Qaeda lieutenants around the world.

Another change being discussed in an ongoing interagency review by the Pentagon, State Department, CIA and White House National Security Council is a strategy that emphasizes this is a war that targets Islamic extremism, not Islam itself.

"We have to convince Muslims that al Qaeda is their mutual enemy," said the administration official.

There is a belief by some officials that the phrase "war on terror" is not specific enough, said a second official.

And a third topic is finding new ways to discourage Muslim clerics from preaching hate and encouraging violence.

Adaptability is an important attribute if we're going to win this conflict.

Hillary pulls down the mask

In case you had been somehow lulled into a false sense of complacency, believing the beguiling MSM talk that Hillary Clinton has evolved into some kind of Senatorial moderate, take a gander at what she said to the faithful today.

Senator Hillary Clinton castigated President Bush and Washington Republicans today as mad with power and bent on marginalizing Democrats during a speech to 1,000 supporters at her first major re-election fund-raiser, which netted about $250,000.

Mrs. Clinton, who is running for a second term in 2006 and is widely described as a possible Democratic nominee for the presidency in 2008, said that her party is hamstrung because Republicans dissemble and smear without shame and the news media has lost its investigatory zeal for exposing misdeeds.

"There has never been an administration, I don't believe in our history, more intent upon consolidating and abusing power to further their own agenda," Mrs. Clinton told the audience at a "Women for Hillary" gathering in Midtown Manhattan this morning.

"I know it's frustrating for many of you; it's frustrating for me: Why can't the Democrats do more to stop them?" she continued to growing applause and cheers. "I can tell you this: It's very hard to stop people who have no shame about what they're doing. It is very hard to tell people that they are making decisions that will undermine our checks and balances and constitutional system of government who don't care. It is very hard to stop people who have never been acquainted with the truth."

Mrs. Clinton described Republican leaders as messianic in their beliefs, willing to manipulate facts and even "destroy" the Senate to gain political advantage over the Democratic minority. She also labeled the House of Representatives as "a dictatorship of the Republican leadership," where individual members are all but required to vote in lock-step with the majority's agenda.

Referring to Congress' Republican leadership, she said, "Some honestly believe they are motivated by the truth, they are motivated by a higher calling, they are motivated by, I guess, a direct line to the heavens."

That's 100% pure, barking moonbat-speak, indistinguishable from the everyday rhetoric of motor-mouthed Howard Dean or all the other predictable Leftists.

Maybe she can be beaten (outside of New York) after all. I'm feeling much better.

D-Day, 61 years later

The American cemetary at Normandy, France holds the remains of 9,387 U.S. soldiers killed. 1, 557 soldiers were declared Missing in Action in the vicinity of the cemetery.

"On the day World War II began, Dwight Eisenhower wrote his brother, 'Hitler should beware of the fury of an aroused democracy.' Ike was right. Galvanized by the atrocities and conquests of the totalitarian nations, America sent her best and brightest to the beaches of Normandy, Sicily, Iwo Jima, and many other battlefields oceans away from her shores.

The American sailors, soldiers and airmen came not to conquer, but to liberate, not to loot or destroy, but to bring life and freedom. Eisenhower told his troops, 'We will accept nothing less than full Victory!' After horrendous sacrifices, that is what they produced."

- Stephen Ambrose, historian and patriot

via The National D-Day Museum

Remembering Reagan

President Ronald Reagan passed away one year ago today in the afternoon. Rest in peace, great man.

"Whatever else history says about me when I'm gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears; to your confidence, rather than your doubts. My dream is that you will travel the road ahead with liberty's lamp guiding your steps and opportunity's arm steadying your way."

- Ronald Reagan

Go dog go

Wow: "The best Chicago dog story ever."

The cops had to fire so many shots to stop the lunging pit bull, the gunpowder set off an overhead smoke detector.

Still, the dog didn't die.

But she wasn't the toughest dog on the block. That title belongs to Maya, a 74-pound black Lab who took on India, the 120-pound pit bull who was mauling a sixth-grader on the Northwest Side.

Now 5-year-old Maya is being hailed as a hero -- a selfless pooch who rushed out of her home to save a stranger and has a scarred body to prove it.

Tip via NRO's The Corner

What is The Quran?

The Rev. Donald Sensing calls again for a more nuanced understanding of the importance of The Quran to Muslims, especially in the context of recent news about supposed "desecrations" at Guantanamo Bay.

The Quran is holy to Muslims in a different way that the Bible is holy to Christians. Until the rise of American fundamentalism about a century ago, the Christian assertion that the Bible was “the word of God” was understood more analogically than literally. That the texts of the Bible were inspired by God - James said the Scriptures were “God breathed” - wasn’t doubted, but the notion that the Bible was dictated verbatim by God is really only about 100 years old and is a small-minority belief among Christians today.

But the literal, verbatim dictation of the Quran by Allah to Mohammed, through the angel Gabriel, is a very basic tenet of faith of Muslims everywhere. The words of the Quran are affirmed not merely to have been inspired by Allah but they are the actual, very words of Allah. Therefore the Quran is for Muslims not just a book but the physical representation of the deity himself. So abusing the Quran is a hideous offense to Muslims more than the same abuse of a Bible would be to Christians.

Understanding this fact is not merely a matter of wimpy “sensitivity.” The administration has staked its entire national strategy for combating terrorism on the basis that while Islamists are hostile to the United States, Islam itself is not. In liberated, free and democratic Iraq Islam will become the official state religion under the upcoming constitution.

As usual, details are important and glib shorthands, either by journalists or polemicists, are unhelpful, so his guidance is much appreciated. Such understandings don't in any way excuse the violent conduct of radical Islamists in the name of their faith.

Europe adrift

Following the rejection by France and Holland of the proposed EU "constitution," David Brooks ponders what's happening in Europe.

The core fact is that the European model is foundering under the fact that billions of people are willing to work harder than the Europeans are. Europeans clearly love their way of life, but don't know how to sustain it.

Over the last few decades, American liberals have lauded the German model or the Swedish model or the European model. But these models are not flexible enough for the modern world. They encourage people to cling fiercely to entitlements their nation cannot afford. And far from breeding a confident, progressive outlook, they breed a reactionary fear of the future that comes in left- and right-wing varieties — a defensiveness, a tendency to lash out ferociously at anybody who proposes fundamental reform or at any group, like immigrants, that alters the fabric of life.

This is the chief problem with the welfare state, which has nothing to do with the success or efficiency of any individual program. The liberal project of the postwar era has bred a stultifying conservatism, a fear of dynamic flexibility, a greater concern for guarding what exists than for creating what doesn't.

Thomas Friedman made similar observations recently, including an explicit contrast, not between Europe and the U.S., but between Europe and the rising powers of Asia.

It was extremely revealing traveling from Europe to India as French voters (and now Dutch ones) were rejecting the EU constitution — in one giant snub to President Jacques Chirac, European integration, immigration, Turkish membership in the EU and all the forces of globalization eating away at Europe's welfare states. It is interesting because French voters are trying to preserve a 35-hour workweek in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day. Good luck.

Voters in "old Europe" — France, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy — seem to be saying to their leaders: Stop the world, we want to get off; while voters in India have been telling their leaders: Stop the world and build us a stepstool, we want to get on. I feel sorry for Western European blue-collar workers. A world of benefits they have known for 50 years is coming apart, and their governments don't seem to have a strategy for coping.

Driving history

Useful to know for summer vacation time: the Natchez Trace Parkway is now 100% complete.

The meandering Natchez Trace winds through lush forests and expansive fields of yellow wildflowers, offering a serene escape from the beaten path.

But it also offers a bridge to the past — where bandits waited in the shadows and American Indians struggled to survive the advance of settlers, traders and soldiers.

This spring, a paved, two-lane road that roughly follows the original, centuries-old trail was finally completed. Work on the Natchez Trace Parkway began in 1938. The last two segments — about 21 miles near Jackson and Natchez — were finished in May, allowing visitors to drive, hike, bike and ride horses along all 444 miles of this historic route

The parkway — which begins south of Nashville, Tenn., clips part of northwest Alabama and slices southwest to Natchez and the Mississippi River — is a National Scenic Byway and part of the National Parks system.

The Old Natchez Trace was a series of paths trampled into the wilderness by American Indians, explorers, settlers and traders. The paths were linked over the years and the Trace became one of the most important commerce paths in the South.

Today, the Trace flows through forests where the smell of honeysuckle and jasmine fill the air and warm, spring sun drips through miles of forest.

We drove most of the length of the Parkway several years ago. It is indeed quite scenic and an utterly different driving experience than regular roads, interstate or not. With a 50 mph speed limit, a winding path, and plenty of interesting places to stop, it does take a long time, so plan ahead.

Liberation

Good news: the Opportunity Rover has broken free of the Martian sand in which it's been trapped for the last month.

NASA's Opportunity rover has broken free from the Martian sand dune where it had been stuck for more than a month, the mission's top scientist announced Saturday.

In late April, during a southward trek toward a crater of interest called Erebus, Opportunity's wheels became mired in the crest of a foot-high (30-centimeter-high) sand dune — and mission managers took weeks to plot out a strategy for getting out of the dune. The rover team commanded the machine to reposition its wheels, then go through a series of spins that pushed the rover forward an inch at a time.

Opportunity broke free after making about 3 feet (93 centimeters) of that inch-by-inch progress.

The turn of the tide

Today is also the anniversary of the crucial Battle of Midway in 1942, a turning point in the World War II struggle against Imperial Japan. Yale professor David Galernter calls on us to remember.

Samuel Eliot Morison was one of the 20th century's most eminent American historians. His writing is vivid, but in "The Two-Ocean War" he appeals directly to his readers just once. Speaking of airmen who died at the Battle of Midway, he writes, "Think of them, reader, every Fourth of June. They and their comrades who survived changed the whole course of the Pacific War."

As June 1942 began, Japan was on a rampage. America had yet to recover from Pearl Harbor, hit in late '41. The Japanese had just launched a campaign to grab Midway Island from the U.S. as a base for more air strikes against Hawaii and to open the central Pacific to attack.

The two fleets faced off north of Midway, too far apart to reach each other with gunfire. The battle was fought by aircraft. There were three American carriers (virtually all that remained of the U.S. Pacific fleet) versus four large Japanese carriers.

The battle went badly for the U.S. fleet until the very last moments.

"For about one hundred seconds" at the heart of the battle, Morison writes, "the Japanese were certain they had won the Battle of Midway, and the war."

Then, one more group of U.S. warplanes suddenly appeared — dive bombers led by Lt. Cmdr. Clarence W. McClusky. In countering the previous attacks, Japanese fighter planes had been drawn downward — leaving American bombers unmolested at 14,000 feet, free to dive on the Japanese ships. Two carriers were sunk. Soon afterward a third was destroyed, later a fourth. The U.S. went on to win the battle — and the war.

Why must we remember? Because Midway was the turning point in our war with Japan — which is central, in turn, to our understanding of the 20th century and the human race.

Tip via The Braden Files.

Related: NPR's Talk of the Nation recently featured an interview with military historian John Lundstrom on what he believes is the underappreciated role of Rear Admiral Frank J. Fletcher both at Midway and elsewhere in the Pacific War. It's interesting that we are still sorting who did what, and why, after all these years.

Oddly, Lundstrom doesn't mention that Fletcher won the Medal of Honor for heroism at Vera Cruz in 1914.

Recognizing history

The people of Hong Kong haven't forgotten, despite efforts by their masters in Beijing to ignore the past.

Thousands of protesters in Hong Kong raised candles in the air and sang solemn songs Saturday to mark the 16th anniversary of China's bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations on Tiananmen Square, while security was tightened in Beijing to block any memorials there.

China's Communist Party has eased many of the social controls that spurred the 1989 student-led protests, which ended when soldiers and tanks attacked, killing hundreds of people. But Chinese leaders still crush any activity that they fear might challenge its monopoly on power.

Tiananmen Square was open to the public, but extra carloads of police watched tourists on the vast plaza and there was no public mention of the anniversary or any sign of attempts at commemorations.

In Hong Kong, people holding candles filled an area the size of five soccer fields at Victoria Park the only large-scale protest on Chinese soil. Police estimated that 22,000 people attended the annual vigil, but organizers said the crowd numbered 30,000 to 40,000.

Simon in Hong Kong says nothing has changed.

Often we cling to this event as a sign of hope. A hope that democracy and freedom will one day prevail over the Communist party. The reality is while many of us like to think of June 4th as a turning point, the past 16 years have proved us wrong.

[I]n situations like June 4th, 1989, the CCP is likely to err on the side of crackdown and confrontation. There's no upside in compromise and they hold the guns.

That's the problem. Firstly it seems almost inconcievable for another 1989 protest to happen as things stand. Secondly if it should happen the question to ask is how would the CCP leadership respond today? The answer is clear - in the same way. The CCP are good at learning the lessons of history.

The CCP has a clear desire to remain in power at all costs. Democracy and freedom is not an inevitability for China. That's the legacy of Tiananmen Square.

More:

As always, Donald Rumsfeld is looking ahead:

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has expressed concern over China's military buildup, saying it could threaten the security balance in Asia. Mr. Rumsfeld spoke at a meeting of Asian and Western defense ministers in Singapore.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a gathering of defense ministers from 21 nations that China now has the third-largest military budget in the world and the largest in Asia. And he said China appears to be expanding its missile forces, allowing them to target many parts of the world.

"Since no nation threatens China, one must wonder why this growing investment, why these continuing large and expensive arms purchases, why this continuing robust deployment?" he said.

Why indeed?

Stalling

This would seem to be disturbing news, with a local Houston angle.

The head of Houston's Immigration and Customs Enforcement office has accused the FBI of stalling a federal investigation into a terrorist fund-raising organization, officials said Friday.

Joe Webber, special agent in charge of ICE's office in Houston, told Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, that the FBI had delayed for four months his efforts to obtain a wiretap authorization in an investigation involving an individual in Houston suspected of terrorist ties and a person designated a terrorist by U.S. intelligence agencies.

On Friday, Grassley wrote U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, seeking a joint investigation.

Webber is a veteran agent who was in charge of the U.S. Customs office in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, and narrowly escaped when the terrorist attacks damaged his building next to the World Trade Center.

Officials said that ICE agents had collected evidence that a Houston-area man had ties to al-Qaida and might be raising money for terrorists.

They said the agency could document calls to a person designated a terrorist but could not listen in on those calls until a phone tap was approved.

Keeping faith

American Daughter says she has been threatened but she's going to soldier on anyway. Hang in there.

I speak out about what I think are the wrongs of the world, and I will continue to speak out. I wish for all the citizens of the globe the precious freedoms that are my heritage.

Recently I was threatened because of my coverage of the situation in Iran. Clearly those who attempt to influence by fear have no concept of my soul, shaped by generations in the legacy of freedom and armored by faith in God. Those threats sharpen my pen, redouble my efforts.

Cat and mouse

American forces are continuing their gutsy fight against the Taliban in remote corners of Afghanistan. That's a conflict that will take a long time to wind down, mostly due to fighters infiltrating from Pakistan.

For weeks, sightings of Taliban fighters were being reported all over the rugged mountains here. But when Staff Sgt. Patrick Brannan and his team of scouts drove into a nearby village to investigate a complaint of a beating, they had no idea that they were stumbling into the biggest battle of their lives.

On May 3, joined by 10 local policemen and an interpreter, the scouts turned up at a kind of Taliban convention - of some 60 to 80 fighters - and were greeted by rockets and gunfire. The sergeant called for reinforcements and was told to keep the Taliban engaged until they arrived. "I've only got six men," he remembers saying.

For the next two and a half hours, he and his small squad, who had a year of experience in Iraq, cut off a Taliban escape. Nearly 40 Taliban and one Afghan policeman were killed. "It's not supposed to be like that here," said Capt. Mike Adamski, a battalion intelligence officer. "It's the hardest fight I saw, even after Iraq."

During the last six months, American and Afghan officials have predicted the collapse of the Taliban, the hard-line Islamists thrown out of power by American forces in 2001, citing their failure to disrupt the presidential election last October and a lack of activity last winter.

But the intensity of the fighting here in Zabul Province, and in parts of adjoining Kandahar and Uruzgan Provinces - roughly 100 square miles of mountain valleys in all - reveals the Taliban to be still a vibrant fighting force supplied with money, men and weapons.

The May 3 battle was part of an almost forgotten war in the most remote corners of Afghanistan, a strange and dangerous campaign that is part cat-and-mouse game against Taliban forces and part public relations blitz to win over wary villagers still largely sympathetic to the Taliban.

"Viable" might be a better word than "vibrant" to describe the Taliban at this point.

Shoving the mountain

Here's a brilliant take on what real intelligence reform would look like, what worked in the past, and what's actually happening now, by Herbert E. Meyer, Reagan administration veteran. Unfortunately for us all, he sounds right on the money.

If your objective were to place a beacon atop a mountain, would you:

A: Get a beacon and place it atop the mountain, or

B: Get a beacon, suspend it in mid-air near the mountain using poles, wires and helicopters, then shove the mountain under the beacon?

If you chose Option A, you should consider a career in the private sector, where common sense often is rewarded. If you chose Option B – your future lies in Washington. For this is precisely the approach the Bush administration and Congress have taken to fix our country’s broken intelligence service and get it back into action. And no, I am not exaggerating.

In the aftermath of 9-11, we had a chance to build a new intelligence service that looked like the OSS. Instead, we are building one that looks like General Motors. No doubt it will enjoy some successes, because the top-level officials are honorable and decent people who will be working very hard to protect our country. And they will be supported by some lower-level intelligence analysts and operations officers who really are world-class, and whose recent actions against al Qaeda have been very impressive. But it’s clear from the structure of the new service, and from the personnel choices made thus far, that our new intelligence service is based on the model that fails, rather than the one that succeeds.

Judging from all the telephone calls and emails flying around right now among intelligence veterans, the mood is one of disappointment and genuine concern. A common thread in all these conversations is that – alas -- it will take another horrific attack before the political will is there to create the kind of light, fast, razor-sharp intelligence service we used to have and now need. Perhaps. Or perhaps Washington has become so muscle-bound and partisan that even should Dallas, Chicago or another of our great cities become a pile of radioactive rubble its only response will be yet another Presidential commission which probably will conclude once again that “structure” was the problem -- and will recommend that we create a Director of Inter-Galactic Intelligence, to sit atop the Director of National Intelligence, who sits atop the Director of Central Intelligence.

Tip via Laurie Mylroie.

More than we knew

Another milestone: actor Leon Askin, aka "General Burkhalter," has passed away in Austria.

Leon Askin, the actor who played Gen. Albert Burkhalter in the 1960s television comedy "Hogan's Heroes," has died, Austrian officials said Friday.

The actor was 97. Neither city officials nor the Vienna hospital where he died disclosed the cause or date of his death.

Askin was best known for his role as the Nazi general who constantly threatened to send the prisoner of war camp's inept commander, Col. Wilhelm Klink, to the Russian front because of his stupidity.

Born Leo Aschkenasy in Vienna on Sept. 18, 1907, Askin worked as a cabaret artist in the 1930s before fleeing first to France and then to the United States to escape persecution by the Nazis.

He had roles in dozens of films, including Billy Wilder's "One, two, three" and the Austrian director Fritz Lang's "Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse." In the course of his career, he appeared opposite Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Peter Ustinov.

Advance warning

There are new warnings about terror threats against Westerners in Indonesia.

Australians in Indonesia have been warned to expect a bombing attack aimed at the lobbies of hotels popular with westerners.

"Terrorists are in the very advanced stages of planning attacks," the Federal Government said last night in an unsually detailed warning.

It came on the same day that a bag of white powder was sent to the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, at Parliament House, echoing Wednesday's letter scare at the Indonesian embassy in Canberra.

Updating its travel advice, the Government re-issued its warning against all unnecessary travel to Indonesia. The Australian embassy first issued the warning of a bombing after the US embassy in Jakarta advised its citizens that terrorists were going to attack at noon on an unspecified date.

"The US embassy informs American citizens in Indonesia that the embassy has learned … there were plans by extremists to conduct bomb attacks targeting the lobbies of hotels frequented by westerners in Jakarta," the US warning said. The embassy said there was no additional information on the timing of the attacks or the method.

Watching Iran

Former diplomat Dennis Ross says negotiations towards de-nuclearizing Iran are failing and the Bush administration needs to modify its strategy.

[A]t this point the dynamic of the negotiations seems more likely to change European, not Iranian, behavior. If anything, the Iranians seem to believe they can continue to move incrementally toward developing fissile material openly and clandestinely and without incurring any real costs--and recent history would suggest they're right.

[T]he Bush administration can also change its approach so that the Iranians actually believe they will pay a price if they go nuclear. To do this, the administration must now be prepared to join the Europeans in the talks. This means crossing the threshold of dealing directly, if multilaterally, with the Iranians but only on the basis of an agreement with the Europeans. At present, the Europeans agree that sanctions would be adopted if the negotiations fail. But there is no understanding on what the sanctions would be or even how to decide if the negotiations have failed. In return for the administration's directly joining the talks, the Europeans must come to an agreement on the meaning of each of these points.

If the Iranians see that there is such an understanding, they would know that they would not escape a real cost, and they would no longer be able to play the Europeans off against us. Even that may not prove to be enough, but at least such an approach could change the current dynamics--dynamics that have the Iranians inexorably moving toward having a nuclear capability while the world takes comfort in talks that cannot succeed.

That may be worth a try. But we can't forget Iran's actual conduct on both nuclear development and a long history of supporting terrorism. For example, here's today's reminder of reality, including details of named terrorists.

U.S. intelligence and foreign allies have growing evidence that wanted terrorists have been residing in Iran despite repeated American warnings to Tehran not to harbor them.

The evidence, which stretches over several years, includes communications by a fugitive mastermind of the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing and the capture of a Saudi militant who appeared in a video in which Osama bin Laden confirmed he ordered the Sept. 11 attacks, according to U.S. and foreign officials.

Bad law

Eminent military historian John Keegan explains why applying civilian legal precepts against the military during wartime is inherently destructive.

No one wants law-breakers to go unpunished. The reality is, however, that once military police and military lawyers start investigations, the normal understandings and assurances of mutual confidences on which normal army life subsists go out of the window.

Military lawyers, in the nature of their job, cast their net as wide as possible. Comrade is questioned against comrade. Suspicion is aroused. The law of self-protection sets in. Men who would never in everyday life impugn a brother in arms are driven to hint at wrongdoing. Worse, those in positions of command who would normally object to any accusations being levelled against their subordinates become affected by the desire to distance themselves from criminal proceedings.

Those who were in the front line, an intrinsically lonely place, suddenly find themselves lonelier still, without any protectors among those they are taught to regard as their natural protectors.

The legal code, in short, is highly destructive of the emotions, comradeship, mutual concern and responsibility of seniors for juniors on which the military system operates. Traditionally, the British Army always recognised that the intrusion of civilian law into its way of life was undesirable. In consequence it maintained its own legal system in which, under court martial, soldiers were judged by other soldiers.

There was a lot that was wrong with the court martial system, which produced much rough justice. There was, however, also a lot that was right. Under court martial, it is unlikely that officers or soldiers, pleading that their actions should be understood within the military realities of fear, confusion and concern for each other's safety, would be condemned for lack of understanding of such circumstances. Good civil law is likely to make for bad military law. Only a lawyer would argue otherwise.

Do-gooders and anti-military activists will disagree vehemently. Ironically, their efforts have the net effect of dragging out the conclusion of the war they so oppose.

Denzel is alright

Actor Denzel Washington has made good on all those Internet rumors by making a large donation to the laudable Fisher House charity. Bully for him.

Months after visiting a military hospital and promising to help families of wounded U.S. soldiers, actor Denzel Washington has come through in a big way.

Washington gave one of the biggest donations ever made to Fisher House Foundation Inc., which operates guest facilities for families with loved ones recuperating in military hospitals, an official at the nonprofit said Wednesday.

The actor's involvement with Fisher House resulted from a stop six months ago at Brooke Army Medical Center, where many troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan have been treated for injuries.

During the December visit, after learning Fisher House provides inexpensive lodging and other support for recuperating soldiers' families, Washington vowed to help the organization.

The pledge was captured — and convoluted — by the Internet rumor mill and within weeks a widely circulated e-mail, which was exchanged throughout the service ranks, erroneously stated Washington pulled out his checkbook at Brooke and made a huge donation on the spot.

The e-mail had a life of its own, said Fisher House officials, who were barraged with inquiries about the donation and how it would be spent.

Do your part:

Fisher House Foundation

Watergate revisited

Bob Woodward tells his version of how and why FBI official Mark Felt became "Deep Throat" and helped topple the Nixon White House over Watergate.

It was only later after Nixon resigned that I began to wonder why Felt had talked when doing so carried substantial risks for him and the FBI. Had he been exposed early on, Felt would have been no hero. Technically, it was illegal to talk about grand jury information or FBI files -- or it could have been made to look illegal.

Felt believed he was protecting the bureau by finding a way, clandestine as it was, to push some of the information from the FBI interviews and files out to the public, to help build public and political pressure to make Nixon and his people answerable. He had nothing but contempt for the Nixon White House and their efforts to manipulate the bureau for political reasons. The young eager-beaver patrol of White House underlings, best exemplified by John W. Dean III, was odious to him.

His reverence for Hoover and strict bureau procedure made Gray's appointment as director all the more shocking. Felt obviously concluded he was Hoover's logical successor.

And the former World War II spy hunter liked the game. I suspect in his mind I was his agent. He beat it into my head: secrecy at all cost, no loose talk, no talk about him at all, no indication to anyone that such a secret source existed.

Well, at least it was on the money to realize John Dean was (and is) "odious."

All too well

As you no doubt have heard, the former no. 2 official of the FBI has confessed to being "Deep Throat" and helping bring down a president. James Taranto has a useful insight into what it all means thirty years later.

President Nixon's fall, after all, was a triumph for liberal Democrats and muckraking journalists--a triumph neither group has managed to equal since. To say the least, a protégé of J. Edgar Hoover makes an unlikely hero in this tale.

Yet consider what has happened in the years since Watergate. The Democratic Party suffered a series of electoral defeats and today is arguably in its weakest position since before the New Deal. During the same period, the press has seen a steady erosion in its public esteem.

This is in part because both the Democrats and the press learned the "lessons of Watergate" too well. The press is constantly seeking the next scandal, and the Democrats and the liberal left have taken to portraying policy disagreements as criminal coverups--the impulse behind both the Iran-contra scandal and the Valerie Plame kerfuffle.

Was it all worth it? I wonder.

Nazi nuke?

History still holds many mysteries. Did they or didn't they?

Historians working in Germany and the US claim to have found a 60-year-old diagram showing a Nazi nuclear bomb. It is the only known drawing of a "nuke" made by Nazi experts and appears in a report held by a private archive.

The researchers who brought it to light say the drawing is a rough schematic and does not imply the Nazis built, or were close to building, an atomic bomb.

But a detail in the report hints some Nazi scientists may have been closer to that goal than was previously believed.

Related:

• Physics World - New Light on Hitler's Bomb

Puzzlement

Here's some reprehensible news from Kandahar, Afghanistan:

A bomb from a suicide attacker tore through a mosque during Wednesday's funeral for a Muslim cleric opposed to the Taliban, killing at least 20 people, and the local governor said an al-Qaida-linked militant was responsible. At least 42 people were wounded.

The world is now waiting for the Arab/Muslim street to erupt in protests and even riots over this obvious desecration of a sacred site.