Newt Gingrich is right.
The Hamas victory in Gaza is a warning that World War IV (as Norman Podhoretz has called it) is going to be long and hard. It is also a warning that the West is currently losing that war. [...] The source of failure is not to be found in the American people but in the inarticulate and unimaginative leaders all across government who now preside instead of lead.The tragedy of the current debate in Washington is that while the inarticulateness and the failing performance of the Bush administration have led the American people to desire a new direction, the politics of the left insists that the new direction be less than President Bush. Yet the lessons of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, New Jersey, the JFK plot, the Algerian bombings, the Iranian nuclear program, the conflict in Lebanon and now the defeat in Gaza all point to the need for a war policy that is substantially bigger and more robust than Mr. Bush.
Exhibit A: GOP surrender monkeys:
Republican support for the Iraq war is slipping by the day. After four years of combat and more than 3,560 U.S. deaths, two Republican senators previously reluctant to challenge President Bush on the war announced they could no longer support the deployment of 157,000 troops and asked the president to begin bringing them home."We must not abandon our mission, but we must begin a transition where the Iraqi government and its neighbors play a larger role in stabilizing Iraq," Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, wrote in a letter to Bush. Voinovich, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, released his letter Tuesday — one day after Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the panel's top Republican, said in a floor speech that Bush's strategy was not working.
Andy McCarthy understands.
I don't mean to be harsh regarding Senator Lugar. He is hardly a singular voice here. Unlike the foreign policy establishment, however, I have spent many years dealing with real live jihadists. Fact: They really do think they can and will win. They don't need a lot of hope to carry on — people willing to kill themselves in order to kill you are already pretty motivated. But they derive great hope from what they (rightly) see as our surrenders and our ambivalence — compared to their own great certainty and confidence.I am not a fan of how the war has been directed, and I believe expending our time and effort on the democracy project rather than on defeating our enemies in Iraq and elsewhere will go down as one of history's great blunders. But with all that said, I note with the heartache of one who has seen it all too many times before: We will rue the day we leave Iraq without routing radical Islam. What we have not killed, we have made stronger.
An alert reader sends this story from BBC News.
Iranian naval forces in the Gulf tried to capture an Australian Navy boarding team but were vigorously repelled, the BBC has learned. The incident took place before Iran successfully seized 15 British sailors and Marines in March....When Iranian Revolutionary Guards captured the British sailors and Royal Marines in March, it was not exactly their first attempt.
It turns out that Iranian forces made an earlier concerted attempt to seize a boarding party from the Royal Australian Navy.
The Australians, though, to quote one military source, "were having none of it".
The BBC has been told the Australians re-boarded the vessel they had just searched, aimed their machine guns at the approaching Iranians and warned them to back off, using what was said to be "highly colourful language".
The Iranians withdrew, and the Australians were reportedly lifted off the ship by one of their own helicopters.
So, in other words, the Aussies both had posted a lookout to actually notice the approaching Iranians AND then had the imagination and fortitude to do something about it. Unlike, say, the Brits.
Or, as noted by the alert reader, "At least the Australians knew what to do." Indeed.
Which is worse? The pathetic female Episcopal priest who has converted to Islam, or her deluded Bishop and other church colleagues who are OK with that?
Here's one more iteration of government policies having impacts that the political smart set can't seem to anticipate. But guess who will be vilified?
With Congress and the White House pushing to increases the use of ethanol, the oil industry is scaling back its plans to expand refineries — which could keep gasoline prices high, possibly for years to come....Only last year, the Energy Department was told that refiners, reaping big profits and anticipating growing demand, were looking at boosting their refining capacity by 1.6 million barrels a day, a roughly 10 percent increase.
But oil companies already have scaled those expansion plans back by nearly 40 percent. More cancelations are expected if Congress passes legislation now before the Sensate calling for 15 billion gallons of ethanol use by 2015 and more than double that by 2022, say industry and government officials.
"These (expansion) decisions are being revisited in boardrooms across the refining sector," says Charlie Drevna, executive vice president of the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association.
Politics or bureaucratic ass-covering? Hard to say, but something's stupidly wrong here.
The new director of the National Hurricane Center, an outspoken critic of his superiors since he took over in January, charged Friday night that they are trying to muzzle him and could be setting him up for termination.Bill Proenza said the acting director of the National Weather Service, Mary Glackin, visited his office in West Miami-Dade Friday and handed him a three-page letter of reprimand.
''I don't think they can pull the rug out from under me right now,'' Proenza said, ``but there is no question they are trying to muzzle me.''
In recent interviews with The Miami Herald and other media, Proenza has strongly criticized leaders of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for spending millions of dollars on a public-relations campaign while hurricane forecasters deal with budget shortfalls.
One of his main concerns has been the imminent demise of a key weather satellite called QuikScat, launched in 1999 and long past its designed lifetime.
No replacement currently is in development and the loss of QuikScat could diminish the accuracy of some hurricane forecasts by up to 16 percent, Proenza and other experts have said.
Mickey Kaus says there are at least ten ways in which immigration is "Bush's domestic Iraq". That's an insightful analysis, and a scary future to contemplate .
Mainstream editorialists like to praise President Bush's immigration initiative as an expression of his pragmatic, bipartisan, "compassionate conservative" side, in presumed contrast to the inflexible, ideological approach that produced the invasion of Iraq. But far from being a sensible centrist departure from the sort of grandiose, rigid thinking that led Bush into Iraq, "comprehensive immigration reform" is of a piece with that thinking. And it's likely to lead to a parallel outcome....
In both cases the consequences of losing the grand Bush bet are severe. Bush himself is busy these days describing the debacle that his big Iraq bet has now made possible: a government "overrun by extremists on all sides … an epic battle between Shia extremists backed by Iran, and Sunni extremists aided by Al Qaeda." Possibly "the entire region could be drawn into the conflict."
The equivalent disaster scenario on immigration would go something like this: "Comprehensive reform" passes. The 12 million illegals are legalized as planned. But the untested enforcement provisions prove no more effective than they've been in the past — or else they are crippled by ACLU-style lawsuits and lobbying (as in the past). Legal guest workers enter the country to work, but so do millions of new illegal workers, drawn by the near-certain prospect that they too, some day, will be considered too numerous to deport. Soon we have another 12 million illegals, or more. Wages for unskilled low-income American and immigrant workers are depressed. As a result, in parts of L.A., visible contrasts of wealth and poverty reach near-Latin American levels.
And, yes, the majority of the new illegals are from one country, Mexico — a nation with a not-implausible claim on large chunks of the Southwestern U.S. For the first time, a neighboring country will have a continuing hold on the loyalties — and language — of a majority of residents in some states, with the potential for Quebec-like problems, and worse, down the road.
Read the whole thing.
President Bush is fond of saying, "We will fight the terrorists overseas so we do not have to face them here at home." Unfortunately, if we get a "domestic Iraq" the fight will be right here in our own streets and schools.