Right Wing Nut House

You’ve probably seen that headline a half dozen other places. Everyone and their mother feels a compulsion to tell us what the addition of 30,000 US troops and a modest change in strategy (along with, perhaps, a more competent commanding general?) means for the immediate and long term future of Iraq.

Have you noticed that no one seems to be able to agree on anything? Are US troop fatalities down, up, or relatively unchanged? Take your pick. How about Iraqi civilian casualties? Ditto. “I hear you can walk through the streets of Ramadi without body armor.” Yeah, but don’t lose your military escort. The Brits bug out of Basra thus securing one third of the country for the militias and their patrones in Iran. “Yeah, but Basra isn’t part of the surge, ya know?” Perhaps. Praytell, how do we intend to recapture that rather large slice of Iraq from al-Sadr and the Badr Organization not to mention keep Iran’s grubby mitts out of Iraqi politics??

I don’t know if American casualties are down. I surely hope they are. I don’t know if civilian casualties have dropped significantly. Looking at the big picture, it hardly matters. Iraqis are still being found in the streets of Baghdad with holes drilled through their heads or worse, no heads at all. And Iraqi families are still hearing knocks on the door in the middle of the night telling them they have 15 minutes to pack up and leave as the de facto partition of the country into Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish enclaves continues apace - surge or no surge.

No one is denying al-Qaeda is on the run although they seem quite able to set off mass casualty car and truck bombs whenever they want to garner headlines and goose the left in this country into another round of “I told you the surge wasn’t working” Bush bashing. It is one thing to be duped into falling into the enemy’s propaganda trap. But it is quite another to use al-Qaeda’s PR strategy and knowingly incorporate it into your domestic political critiques of your opponent. That is just one of the amazingly ignorant and dangerously naive components of the left’s strategy to counter any and all good news coming out of Iraq.

And then we have the hilariously ironic spectacle of the left using body counts to justify withdrawal. It was an article of faith for the left during the Viet Nam War that body counts didn’t mean anything, that they were used by the military to justify continuing the war. My how times have changed, no? Today, it is an article of faith on the left that we should leave Iraq because of the body counts.

Of course, this kind of deliciously corrupt irony is totally lost on the left. In order to appreciate irony, one must be capable of introspection. And as we all know, the left don’t do introspection. Such things as self examination may lead to an emotional and intellectual crisis as the riot of conceits that make up modern American liberalism with all of its contradictions and hypocrisy could very well cause a short circuit somewhere between their brains and their mouths - if there hasn’t been such a breakdown already.

Fred Kagan believes that not only is the surge working but that Bush’s visit to Anbar yesterday was a “Gettysburg” moment - a hinge of history, so to speak, a turning point. While I will grant that the article makes some cogent and encouraging points about the Sunni “awakening,” as is Kagan’s wont, he glosses over some of the more troubling aspects of the strategy of arming Sunnis who just a few months ago were trying to kill us in order to fight al-Qaeda.

For instance, Kagan’s thesis is that this “bottom up” reconciliation will work because it is in the self interest of all parties involved that it happen. Ditto the reason Sunnis won’t suddenly turn on their new found American friends and blast them with the weapons with which we have recently armed them.

But that “self interest” argument can be a trap as well. Who’s to say that in the near future, the Sunnis wouldn’t believe it in their own interest to start killing Americans again? There could be an “incident” that sets them off or perhaps the realization that we are facilitating a permanent division of Iraq into 3 slices - something that may become a reality with or without our blessing. Or the Democrats could win the argument in Congress and yank the troops just as they are starting to do some good, something that might be seen as a betrayal by the Sheiks who have laid their lives on the line by almost certainly going against the wishes of many younger men in their tribes and making common cause with the Americans against al-Qaeda.

There are a half dozen reasons why the Sunnis would find it in their “self interest” to begin taking pot shots at Americans again. Kagan dismisses this with a wave of his magic wand and the bland assurance that this is a permanent change in Sunni behavior. I certainly hope he’s right. But I wouldn’t be surprised if, once again, Kagan is proven to be wrong.

So that part of the surge’s success may be ephemeral. And I think that the idea of a “bottom up” reconciliation is also a mirage. It doesn’t hurt, mind you. But only a strong central government can save Iraq from its own stupidities and hate. Kagan points eagerly to the 2009 parliamentary elections and believes that it will be at that point that the unreasonable Sunni and Shia politicians in Baghdad will go down to ignominious defeat to be replaced by level headed democrats. Don’t count on it.

The Shia religious parties have the power and will fight to keep it. There may be more Sunni representation after the next election but probably not enough to form a coalition with secularists and take control of the legislature. The Kurds have already cast their lot with the Shias, seeing in them the quickest way to independence - perhaps cynically believing that the Shias will so alienate the Sunnis that the partition of Iraq will become a foregone conclusion. At any rate, it is unlikely that the Kurds would ally themselves with their former oppressors.

None of this has anything much to do with answering the question of whether the surge is “working” or not. Petreaus has cleverly kept the goals of the surge limited. The Congress and White House have added all the bells and whistles having to do with political benchmarks and the like. This probably means that Petreaus can go before Congress and show that the surge is working but that the political questions involving reconciliation have a long way to go.

Petreaus deserves every day of funding that Congress can give him to continue what he is doing in the Sunni provinces. As for the rest - Baghdad and the south - there really isn’t much to be done. The entrenched nature of the sectarian conflict in Baghdad is probably beyond our military to deal with - even with the additional troops. This would seem to indicate that the Iraqis themselves will have to sort out the situation. And given the sectarian nature of the Iraqi government, I would not be very encouraged if I were a Sunni living in Baghdad.

The political argument over whether the surge is “working” or not has degenerated into a food fight of facts and figures, each side using whatever charts and graphs showing progress or lack thereof as if by inundating us with numbers and arrows and decimal points, some magic truth will emerge and one side or the other will “win” the argument. This is so much bullsh*t. My 5 year old nephew can make facts and figures say pretty much whatever he wants them to say. The ultimate question, as always, is do we stay or do we go?

Given the alternatives, it seems that the Iraq tar baby has us firmly in its grasp. And there isn’t a big enough briar patch in all the Middle East to save us.

Much of this blog post originally appeared in The American Thinker

Everyone knows that politics is a rough game and not for those with weak stomachs or too many skeletons in their closet.

But there used to be lines that just weren’t crossed regardless of the provocation. Letting it be known that a candidate’s wife was a drunk or a floozy was one such barrier although what earthly difference it would make to voters was never quite made clear. Regardless, the press was usually pretty good about refereeing the political playing field, coming down hard on any campaign that crossed the boundaries of taste and what passes for “fair play” in such a cutthroat world.

Where’s the line now?

Soon, a new name will pop up on Mike Rogers’s hit list.

Larry Craig wasn’t “the first on my list,” the gay blogger says. And the Idaho senator, who announced his resignation Saturday, “won’t be the last.”

Rogers, sitting on a club chair in his Northwest Washington apartment, is basking in the attention. For three years now, he’s been a feared one-man machine, “outing,” he says, nearly three dozen senior political and congressional staffers, White House aides and, most damagingly, Congress members on his blog. On Capitol Hill, a typical phone call from Rogers — “Are you gay?” he’d ask — is “a call from Satan himself,” says a former high-ranking congressional staffer whose name is on the list.

Rogers reasons that there’s justice behind his tactics — “odious,” “outrageous” and “over-the-line” as they might seem to his detractors.

In the twisted, gutter mind of Rogers, if you oppose “gay rights” (whatever that is) and you are a closet homosexual, “all bets are off.”

To say that this is perhaps the most nauseating example of how the left can justify using double standards to advance their political agenda is to state the obvious. But where Roger’s transgressions against decency and humanity really sink to levels unseen before in American politics is his towering conceit about what constitutes “hypocrisy” and how that self defined character flaw in someone else should lead to either ruining their political careers or their lives.

Someone like Larry Craig who is “outed” by his own behavior is something different entirely. The people who Rogers has deemed unworthy of being allowed to maintain their privacy regarding their sexual preference have not broken any law nor have they transgressed against any rules in Congress that would make their homosexuality an issue in any way, shape or form. Instead, Rogers applies an extraordinary narrow, close minded, indeed ignorant yardstick to determine whether someone “deserves” to be “outed.

In short, if you oppose his own definition of “gay rights” and refuse to “out” yourself, Rogers will do it for you.

Patterico mixes exactly the right amount of outrage with unmitigated contempt:

Mike Rogers is an extortionist. He is a blackmailer. He is a thug. And today, he is lionized on the pages of the Washington Post.

It should be utterly uncontroversial that Rogers is nothing more than a political shakedown artist. He makes this quite clear in the Post article, eschewing the usual indirectness of the professional blackmailer for the shockingly direct threat:

Of course, to Rogers, any vote against gay rights is cast “to gain political points” — because he can’t conceive of such a vote being cast on principle.

And so, Rogers’s message to politicians is simple and straightforward: if he doesn’t like the way you vote, he will expose embarrassing information about you. If you toe the line, however, he will protect you.

That is the classic position of the extortionist.

Indeed, Patterico (who is a prosecutor when not blogging) convicts Rogers from statements out of his own mouth several times over. How any decent Democrat can stomach this worthless specimen of humanity is one reason I will never switch parties. I may be very angry with the Republican party at the moment, despise parts of its agenda, and have nothing but contempt for a broad swath of its leaders. But the GOP has nothing comparable to the Rogers operation.

Oh, they have their oppo researchers and underhanded tactics. But that’s politics boys and girls, get used to it or get out. What Rogers does has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with personal aggrandizement and the accumulation of power. And the fact that the Democratic left latches on to this lickspittle of a man and gives him encouragement puts them beyond the pale in my book.

There are many gay Republicans who oppose much of what Rogers considers “gay rights” including gay marriage. Conservative gays have wide ranging opinions on what constitutes gay rights. For Rogers to set himself up as an arbiter of opinion among conservatives - gay or not - about what people should believe is an astonishing demonstration of arrogance.

Quite simply, it’s none of his business. This is especially true of Congressional staffers who are not responsible to the voters but rather to the Member of Congress they work for. To “out” a staffer just because Rogers hears rumors about him is beyond belief. What possible difference can it make to Rogers except by outing the aide, he can put another notch on his gun. One more victim of his one man pogrom against gay Republicans who won’t slavishly think as he does.

This man is a blight on American politics and should be banished from public life forever. Instead, like his partner in “exposing Republican hypocrisy” porn magnate Larry Flynt, they receive the plaudits and adoration of the left for their efforts.

Times have changed…

There is something mildly depressing about the day after Labor Day. Summer is officially over even though the calendar tells us we’ve still got a few weeks left - a trick that science and nature have combined to play upon our Midwestern sense of time’s passing. Here in the heartland, the clock likes to take the long way around the dial, or seems to anyway. It is an illusion born of a belief that the pace of life should mirror the miracle of nature’s timetable for the growth of living things; slow, stately, and with due regard for the sacred trust vouchsafed those who tend, till, or simply love the land.

The lines of demarcation between summer and fall are sharp and noticeable. Evenings are already generally cooler than they were just a few short weeks ago. Dawn brings a slight nip to the air, a reminder and portent of what is soon to come. The leaves shake nervously on the trees with every breath of wind, mindful that soon it will be time to clothe themselves in Autumn’s spectacular raiment.

Speaking of clothes, Sue has already gathered much of her fall wardrobe and is preparing her annual couture auditions, evaluating and making her selections as if she were casting a blockbuster motion picture. Which outfits still fit? Which ones are still in style? Which ones go in the box marked “Salvation Army?” Not a clothes horse but born with the fashion sense of a classy American lady, my Zsu Zsu’s good taste (and mastery of the clothing budget) allows her to appear in public always looking like a million dollars.

This year, new lightweight jackets for the both of us. A couple of pullovers for me. A sweater or two for Sue. Throw in a suit for her and a sports jacket for me and we’re done. I pity those men who fail to plan adequately for the annual fall excursion to the mall and end up helpless appendages as their wives or girlfriends race from store to store unable or unwilling to decide exactly what they want. What Sue and I accomplish in 2 hours takes most couples half the day or more.

I experienced a great sense of self satisfaction being able to sit in front of the TV on Saturday afternoon watching the start of the college football season knowing that many of the hundreds of men I saw at the mall with their wives that morning were still there, the feeling of panic rising in their throats as they watched the time, knowing they had already missed most of the first quarter of the game and praying they’d be granted a stay of execution (or prevented from committing hari-kiri) so that they could be home by halftime.

Another tradition that reminds me that summer is over is the annual wrestling match with our window air conditioning units. We have two monsters - old Gargantuas that spit out 17,000 btu’s each. Last year, we put off taking them out in favor of storm windows until November and paid for it with a heating bill in December that brought out the smelling salts. Not this year, not with the cost of energy what it is. Hence, rather than waiting until the last gasp of Summer has run its course, we have arbitrarily set next weekend for the removal of the behemoths.

It isn’t the weight of these Paul Bunyans of the air conditioning world that makes them such a pain in the ass to move. It is their bulk. Their span rivals that of the wings on a 727. One can barely grasp each end at the same time. Of course, you need someone inside and another outside the window in order to first detach and then lift the Colossus, placing the entire burden on the poor unfortunate who happens to be outside while the inside person runs like hell through the house and out the door, hoping to reach the hapless victim before the elephantine machine falls on his foot and breaks a toe.

Then it’s off to the garage where the two of us must lift these mountains of ancient technology over our heads and on to a shelf where they will be wrapped in blankets like some gigantic steel infants and forgotten about until the following summer.

I suppose we could get new, lightweight, energy saving units but then, what fun would I have writing about that?

Yes, the days are noticeably shorter now, the birds not greeting me in the morning with their cheerful lyrics when I arise. I hear them today when I’m already well into my second cup of coffee. The dawn now struggles to appear before the early news and will soon lose that battle as well. Soon - too soon - the endless and inexorable will overtake our memories of anticipation and restless impatience for the days’ quickening beat as summer gives way to fall. Not a happy time. Nor does it quite impart the sighing sadness that we feel when the leaves begin to change, then fall, and then receive their first covering of frost, causing them to appear as whitened sculptures dotting the landscape, ever so delicate and oh so lovely.

Summer may not be gone but it is certainly being handed its hat and ushered toward the door. It is this time between the light and warmth and the darkness and cold that the ancients chose to observe their most sacred ceremonies. Perhaps they too felt the cold hand of winter closing around them and fought to remain in the light as long as possible. Perhaps they just wanted an excuse for a good party. Whatever the reason, we too observe and mark this time as the changing of the seasons once again connects us to the cycle of life and reminds us of our own mortality in the face of the immutable forces of nature.

Change, neither good nor bad, simply is. Get used to it. Spring is a long, long winter’s way off.

John Edwards is a very serious man.

He is very serious about his hair.

He is very serious about doing his part on global warming - adding to it by generating a carbon footprint the size of Rhode Island.

He is very serious about helping the poor - believing that by getting rich using junk science and New Age mumbo jumbo when suing doctors and then plowing his winnings into hedge funds, he can impoverish others thus adding to the poor’s numbers.

He is very serious about running for President. Just exactly who or what he wants to be President of might be a little hazy:

Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards said on Sunday that his universal health care proposal would require that Americans go to the doctor for preventive care.

“It requires that everybody be covered. It requires that everybody get preventive care,” he told a crowd sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Cedar County Courthouse. “If you are going to be in the system, you can’t choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK.”

He noted, for example, that women would be required to have regular mammograms in an effort to find and treat “the first trace of problem.” Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, announced earlier this year that her breast cancer had returned and spread.

Edwards said his mandatory health care plan would cover preventive, chronic and long-term health care. The plan would include mental health care as well as dental and vision coverage for all Americans.

“The whole idea is a continuum of care, basically from birth to death,” he said.

One can immediately see the problem with this birth to death, “Health Care at the Point of a Bayonet” program the former Senator and Breck Girl has come up with. It’s not the cost of the program itself that would bust the treasury. It’s creating the National Health Care Police Force to make sure his diktats about going to doctors and having your head examined on a regular basis are enforced. Perhaps this is how Silky Pony intends to fight terrorism? Send the Doctor Police overseas and force al-Qaeda recruits to see their local shrink. I’ll bet half of the jihadis are committed on the spot.

I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop in Edwards’ “Gun to Your Head” preventive health care proposal; what will be the penalties for not going to the doctor when Nanny Sam says you must? Perhaps Edwards can come up with something unique and politically viable at the same time. Instead of using animals to test new drugs and new surgical techniques, why not punish American citizens who fail to follow orders about going to the doctor by making them the guinea pigs? Better that scofflaw doctor avoiders suffer the side effects of bad drugs than poor helpless rats. This would please his PETA supporters to no end while being a big help to Big-Pharm who no doubt will embrace any program that puts so many potential customers within spitting distance of a doctor, most of whom received their medical degrees with free drug samples attached.

Althouse has this pegged correctly:

And I predict Edwards will, within a day, chide us for misunderstanding what he meant by “require” and that “require” doesn’t mean you’ll be forced, only that the big bad medical establishment will be required to provide.

Just like “misunderstanding” Jane Hamsher putting Joe Lieberman in black face. We rubes are just too unsophisticated to get all this “nuance” don’t you know?

And where there is utter depraved stupidity, there is the Mexican President:

President Felipe Calderon blasted U.S. immigration policies on Sunday and promised to fight harder to protect the rights of Mexicans in the U.S., saying “Mexico does not end at its borders.”

The criticism earned Calderon a standing ovation during his first state-of-the nation address.

“We strongly protest the unilateral measures taken by the U.S. Congress and government that have only persecuted and exacerbated the mistreatment of Mexican undocumented workers,” he said. “The insensitivity toward those who support the U.S. economy and society has only served as an impetus to reinforce the battle … for their rights.”

He also reached out to the millions of Mexicans living in the United States, many illegally, saying: “Where there is a Mexican, there is Mexico.”

Interesting, isn’t it? Calderon can’t even make that boast good in his own country! Millions of Mexican citizens live in areas not controlled by the Mexican government but by vicious, murdering drug gangs. His control over his own capitol is also in question since the speech where he uttered those inflammatory words was not delivered at the Mexican Capitol building, the San Lazaro, where tradition dictates it be given, but rather at the National Palace (Palacio Nacional). This is due to the opposition’s blocking him from making the speech at the capitol, claiming Calderon rigged the election that brought him to power.

Of course, he’s counting on the fact that his fighting words will create a backlash from illegal immigrant opponents which will gain sympathy and support for the lawbreakers from legal Mexicans and naturalized citizens here in America. This will only serve to put more pressure on the Democrats and President Bush to pass an amnesty bill sooner rather than later.

No doubt, many will overreact to Calderon’s carefully calculated insult to American sovereignty and thus play into his hands. But actually, this is truly pathetic from the Mexican President. He is reduced to political tricks in order to get the American government to acquiesce to immigration reform.

Recent data on remittances from immigrants in the US to Mexico shows a significant drop thanks to measures designed to make it harder for illegals to send money home. This may have Calderon worried because those remittances dump around $18 billion into the Mexican economy in much needed dollars. And those transfer payments are the second largest source of foreign income following oil exports. Is it any wonder that Calderon sees putting pressure on the US government to pass Bush’s immigration reform as vital to Mexican national interests?

Let the popinjay spout, I say. He can brag as much as he wishes about Mexico claiming sovereignty over anywhere in the US that an illegal immigrant is breaking the law. But in the end, his rhetoric is as empty as his head if he thinks that anyone actually believes such nonsense.

It took 106 days and nearly 160 fatalities for the Lebanese Army to clear out the nest of terrorists who had infested the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp but they finally finished the job yesterday, killing Fatah al-Islam’s leader Shakir al-Abssi in the process:

The Lebanese Army has finished off the Fatah al-Islam legend, killed its leader Shaker al-Abssi and 31 other terrorists and rounded up 20 in the 106th day of the confrontation at the northern refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared.
Security agencies have launched a nationwide manhunt for 10 terrorists who escaped the battle Sunday by infiltrating through the al-Bared River stream.

Judicial sources told Naharnet a Palestinian cleric, who had mediated with Fatah al-Islam terrorists, identified al-Abssi’s body.

However, the judiciary issued a warrant to bring in al-Abssi’s wife and daughter to the public hospital in Tripoli to identify the body and, to conduct DNA tests that would provide the definite answer to questions related to identity of the alleged Abssi corpse, the sources explained.

Later reports from the hospital confirm that al-Abssi’s wife has in fact identified the body of her husband in the morgue.

Abssi created Fatah al-Islam last November following a break with the ultra radical Palestinian faction based in Syria Fatah al-Intifada. Sentenced to death in absentia for his role in the assassination of US Jordanian diplomat Laurence Foley, Abssi had previously fought with Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq and claims to have been inspired by al-Qaeda’s radical ideology, pledging his loyalty to Osama Bin Laden.

All that is known is that Abssi moved into Nahr al-Bared in November and in a matter of months, he had assembled 300 fighters (many of them Salifists from other Arab countries) and was training them at a makeshift camp. Many Lebanese believe that Abssi is a present from Syrian gangster President Bashar Assad. While Assad’s relations with the parent terror group Fatah al-Intifada are not the best, it is not beyond imagining that the Syrian president would have facilitated the creation and growth of Fatah al-Islam as a means to destabilize the Lebanese government.

Last spring, several members of Fatah al-Islam were implicated in a bank robbery and were traced to a building in Tripoli that housed a Fatah al-Islam office (the Lebanese government has also accused members of the group of carrying out a terrorist attack on commuter buses in February). The resulting gunfight turned into a siege with the terrorists finally blowing themselves up after a 3 day standoff. Other members of the group took refuge in the nearby Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, attacking the Lebanese army and vowing a fight to the death. The Lebanese army responded by firing artillery and heavy machine guns into the camp that housed 30,000 refugees at that time and the fight was on.

The Palestinian authorities in Lebanon at first tried to negotiate an end to the crisis but eventually, gave permission for the Lebanese army to enter the camp and take out the terrorists. And for the last 100 days, that is what the Lebanese Army has tried to do.

At first, the army tried frontal assaults on the terrorist positions which were repulsed with great loss of life. The Lebanese army had not fought a major engagement since the end of the civil war and its lack of training and experience showed. Gradually, and with what appeared to be rather indiscriminate use of heavy weapons, the Lebanese army began to shrink the pocket of terrorists until all that was left of their fortress like positions was a small group of destroyed buildings.

Some of the militants tried to sneak out through a tunnel, while another group tried to escape through a different path. Outside fighters arrived to help them, said security officials.

Army quickly deployed reinforcements to the camp, just outside the port city of Tripoli, blocked surrounding roads and set fires to nearby fields to deny fleeing militants a hiding place. Helicopters provided aerial reconnaissance for the military inside the camp, and checkpoints were erected as far as Beirut and southern Lebanon.

Villagers of nearby settlements, armed with guns and sticks, also came out to help the army and protect their houses, the state TV reported.

By the end of the day, the camp was in Lebanese army control and authorities declared victory over Fatah Islam. Officials said the army killed 39 militants and captured 20. It was not immediately known how many militants managed to escape.

The final civilian death toll is almost certainly higher than the official number of 20. Early days of the fighting saw the Lebanese army bombarding the camp with tank and artillery rounds while spraying heavy machine gun fire down the narrow streets. An early cease fire allowed most of the residents in the camp to escape. But there are still thousands of refugees in Nahr al-Bared who have been without water or food for months.

The Lebanese people are celebrating this victory by the army with Prime Minister Siniora going on television to praise their performance and pledging to rebuild the camp - under Lebanese control:

“It is a great success that the Lebanese army has achieved over the terrorists, those who sought chaos, destruction and tragedies for Lebanon,” he said in a televised speech to the country.

He pledged that the Lebanese government would rebuild Nahr al-Bared, but said that the camp would be placed under the authority of the state and “only the Lebanese state.”

“As we said at the beginning of the battle, the Lebanese state is committed to rebuilding the camp and today we are restating this pledge,” Saniora said, adding that he had called for a meeting of donor countries on September 10 to help in rebuilding efforts.

“As the state stood by you when you were forced to flee Nahr al-Bared, we stand by you again in rebuilding the camp so that you can return there with your heads held high,” Saniora said, addressing the estimated 30,000 Palestinian refugees who were forced to flee at the start of the standoff between the army and Fatah al-Islam militants on May 20.

The significance of this declaration of Lebanese control of Nahr al-Bared should not be lost on the Palestinian authorities. There are 12 Palestinian camps in Lebanon with internal security in them controlled by the PLO. The Lebanese army by tradition maintained security around the camps and was actually forbidden by a 1969 accord to enter. That agreement was voided by the Lebanese parliament in 1987 but had been maintained ever since because the potential for unrest in the camps if the Lebanese army violated the pact was great. Then, UN Resolution 1559 called upon Lebanon to establish sovereignty over all its land and disband the militias including Hizbullah and the Palestinian groups patrolling the refugee camps. So far, the Lebanese government has failed to implement 1559 but this declaration by Siniora would seem to be the first time that the Lebanese government has sought to establish its sovereignty where it had not been previously.

The practical benefits of the army’s victory should not be overlooked. While their initial efforts were less than successful and indeed, quite amateurish, the soldiers seemed to gain in confidence and ability as the siege wore on. Woefully underequipped, the army nevertheless ended up making the entire country proud by facing down and defeating a well armed, entrenched enemy.

Indeed, all of Lebanon is celebrating today - even the Hizbullah led opposition which had the good sense to support the efforts of the government to eradicate the terrorists despite the 9 month cabinet crisis that continues to threaten the stability of the country. There is little doubt that the army is the only major institution in Lebanon that is seen to be above politics (even though that may be less true than most Lebanese realize). Their well earned victory today gives a much needed boost to the besieged Siniora government while uniting the Lebanese, if briefly, in celebration.

What tomorrow will bring is a different story.

UPDATE: “VICTORY BABE”

I couldn’t resist. It’s been a while since we’ve seen a smile on the face of a beautiful Lebanese woman - without a doubt the best looking demonstrators in the world:

If, as Cicero wrote, “Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things,” then it is safe to say that the farther away our world moves from 9/11, the more our memories of that day should enrich us and keep us from taking actions that will make another equally devastating terrorist attack more likely.

Alas, the old Roman republican never knew a country like America. If he had, he would almost certainly have found an exception to his logic. For us, the past has always been an annoyance that gets in the way of our determined and dedicated march to the future. There is no malice in it, this flight, this mad dash from our history. In some ways, it is necessary for us to forget or ignore what has transpired in order to be free of the consequences the past sometimes imposes on those who would use our collective memory to keep the future at bay, standing in the way of progress in the name of hidebound “tradition” or “custom.”

So it has come for 9/11, a date but 6 years in the past and already seeing the effects of what James Earl Jones in the film Field of Dreams referred to as the erasure of history:

And they’ll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they’ll watch the game and it’ll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they’ll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again.

Jones’ character was talking about baseball as a cultural touchstone by which each succeeding generation maintains contact with the past. But even here, that paean to baseball neglects the very real history of the game. Jones himself grew up during a time when members of his race were barred from playing the game. To say that baseball “reminds of us of all that once was good” ignores the fact that even a cursory glance at the historical record would flip those words and posit that baseball, in fact, also reminds us of all that once was bad about America.

It is this kind of schizophrenia - a duality of mind regarding our past - that so angers and fascinates many of us who love American history. We can glory in the words of the Declaration of Independence while realizing the hypocrisy of demanding freedom as we kept three million human beings in bondage ourselves. Similarly, we can marvel at the elegance and simplicity of the Constitution while acknowledging that its words still ring hollow for so many and have for so long.

Although aware of the dichotomies, the Founders gave these little discrepancies scant thought, believing it would be up to future generations to right the wrongs that they had neither the political or moral will to fix themselves. Right or wrong, much of American history is carelessly strewn about our national attic like a bunch of old steamer trunks and hope chests, examined (if at all) not for what the curios inside can teach us about ourselves but rather how their contents can be used in the present to propel us into the future.

And now this battle between the past and future has come for 9/11 as the open wounds of that day scab over and the emotional impact of the event becomes hard for even the vividness of searing memories to arouse in our breasts the same feelings of anger, outrage, and the terrible, aching sadness felt by virtually all Americans. For many of us, what remains is a determination not to forget and a realization that “The Long War” is upon us. For others, remembering 9/11 is an unwelcome intrusion or worse, a political construct to try and revivify feelings of patriotism and the war spirit. To these citizens who cling to the latter - most of whom could fairly be said are on the left - identification of 9/11 with their rabid opposition to the Administration of George Bush and the Iraq War builds an unreasonable resentment about remembering the attacks at all.

This excellent article in the New York Times by N.R. Kleinfield about the battle over how to best remember the history of 9/11 reveals both the pathos and the agony memories of that day engender as well as the desire by many to try and simply wish those memories away:

Each year, murmuring about Sept. 11 fatigue arises, a weariness of reliving a day that everyone wishes had never happened. It began before the first anniversary of the terrorist attack. By now, though, many people feel that the collective commemorations, publicly staged, are excessive and vacant, even annoying.

“I may sound callous, but doesn’t grieving have a shelf life?” said Charlene Correia, 57, a nursing supervisor from Acushnet, Mass. “We’re very sorry and mournful that people died, but there are living people. Let’s wind it down.”

Some people prefer to see things condensed to perhaps a moment of silence that morning and an end to the rituals like the long recitation of the names of the dead at ground zero.

But many others bristle at such talk, especially those who lost relatives on that day.

“The idea of scaling back just seems so offensive to me when you think of the monumental nature of that tragedy,” said Anita LaFond Korsonsky, whose sister Jeanette LaFond-Menichino died in the World Trade Center. “If you’re tired of it, don’t attend it; turn off your TV or leave town. To say six years is enough, it’s not. I don’t know what is enough.”

It isn’t just family members who wish to commemorate 9/11 as solemnly and fully as possible. However, the “moral authority” of those who lost loved ones that tragic day should be respected. They are stand ins for the rest of us who still see 9/11 as a day that changed America in ways that a mere 6 years after the event we are still trying to understand.

Superficially, there is the debate over increased domestic security. Even the wars currently being fought by our military in Iraq and Afghanistan are only surface manifestations of something fundamental that is altering our political and cultural landscape as I write this. In this respect, it doesn’t matter if Hillary Clinton or other Democrats want to take us back to a 9/10 world where the threat of terrorists and those who support and enable them occupies a much smaller space in our national politics.

Whether or not they realize it, the 9/10 Democrats can try all they wish to make 9/11 disappear into the mists of memory by downplaying its significance so that rather than a rallying cry it becomes a day marked by an inexpressible sadness with overtones of guilt that the attacks were actually our fault. They will not succeed because our enemies will not let them.

Sooner or later, our perfect record of preventing another terrorist attack on American soil will bump up against the reality that we can succeed a thousand times in thwarting the designs of those who contemplate mass murder but our enemies need to win only once. And then those memories that we have carefully stored in our national attic will come back in a rush and we will wonder if we shouldn’t have dusted them off every once and a while in order to glean whatever lessons in preparedness we might have missed the first time around.

To be sure, it is human nature to try and push unpleasant memories to the back of our minds lest the pain they cause become a part of our everyday lives. And we shouldn’t blame those who wish that 9/11 be relegated so soon to the status that other days of national tragedy have fallen:

Few Americans give much thought anymore on Dec. 7 that Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941 (the date to live in infamy). Similar subdued attention is paid to other scarring tragedies: the Kennedy assassination (Nov. 22, 1963), Kent State (May 4, 1970), the Oklahoma City bombing (April 19, 1995).

Generations, of course, turn over. Few are alive anymore who can recall June 15, 1904, when 1,021 people died in the burning of the steamer General Slocum, the deadliest New York City disaster until Sept. 11, 2001. Also, the weight of new wrenching events crowds the national memory. Already since Sept. 11, there have been Katrina and Virginia Tech. And people have their own more circumscribed agonies.

A strong argument could be made that none of those other days of tragedy had the raw, emotional impact of 9/11. Perhaps the Kennedy Assassination echoes the surprise of what happened on 9/11. And Pearl Harbor certainly aroused similar feelings of anger and determination.

But 9/11 stands alone as a date that tears at our souls and requires us to re-examine uncomfortable truths. We are at war. Remembering or not remembering 9/11 won’t change that fact nor will denying the reality of that statement make it less true. The reason is simple. It takes two sides to make war. And our enemies will find ways to remind us that our denial is silly, stupid, and self defeating as often and as painfully as we let them.

It may be a different kind of war but war it is and pushing the proximate cause of the conflict into the recesses of our memory because remembering is too painful, or too much a bother, or gives political advantage to one side or another is simply putting off the day of reckoning when those in denial will be forced once again to look 9/11 full in the face and realize the overwhelming truth that America is in danger. And if we are vouchsafed the time to allow the emotional scars of 9/11 to heal, we should also use that time to prepare for the next onslaught while doing everything in our power to prevent it.

Once again, America is steamrolling our history into a flattened state of forgetfulness. This time, it is happening in record time and partly being done so that any political advantage in remembering 9/11 can be neutralized by an opposition that plays upon the emotional weariness of the voters in fighting a war few understand and many wish would just go away. Part of this problem can be laid at the feet of the current Administration who has, at times (not as often as they have been accused), employed the imagery and played upon the emotions that 9/11 brought to the surface; feelings of patriotism and unity that seem somewhat quaint when we look back on them today. Not because they were not genuine but because the opposition has determined that these emotions are inappropriate and not germane to the political realities of today.

Instead, the dominant emotion we should be feeling about 9/11 is outrage. Not at Osama Bin Laden but at George Bush for using 9/11 as an “excuse” to get us embroiled in the morass that is Iraq and to skirt the limits of Constitutional authority in order to protect the homeland from further attacks. This is what the Democrats will run their campaigns on in 2008. It remains to be seen whether they will be successful or not.

Meanwhile, the 6th anniversary of 9/11 approaches and once again we will try and conjure up what it felt like to be alive and an American that day. Whether the exercise in remembrance is useful or not is immaterial to those who lost loved ones on that horrible day. For them, the war to remember 9/11 is irrelevant to their bereavement. They are beyond comforting and need only our understanding. I would hope that both sides in this battle for the degree of poignancy with which we recall September 11, 2001 keeps them in their thoughts and prayers as the history of that day fades into myth and legend, becoming a touchstone for all we hold dear as Americans.

More tidbits of information are being gathered by an aroused press corps about former fugitive Democratic financier Norman Hsu that would seem to suggest some rather strange and significant connections in his past.

This Los Angeles Times piece provides the shockers of the day:

The most obvious red flag: A check of a commonly used database produces a 1990 San Francisco Chronicle news story detailing how Norman Hsu had been kidnapped by gang members in the San Mateo County suburb of Foster City. A second widely used database discloses that Norman Yuan Yuen Hsu of Foster City had a bankruptcy in 1990.

Having established that he lived in San Mateo County, a check of the San Mateo County Superior Court’s website reveals that Norman Yuan Yuen Hsu had a criminal case.

“Kidnapped by gang members…?” And he lived to tell the tale? What kind of gang? The Wall Street Journal fills in the details:

In 1990, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a group of Chinatown gang leaders had been arrested for kidnapping Mr. Hsu. The article said the alleged kidnappers were stopped after speeding through a red light, and Mr. Hsu took the opportunity to tell police he was being kidnapped. The article said he owned a restaurant and clothing businesses throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

Some of the Chinatown Triads have ties to legitimate Chinese businesses like the state owned China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO) which has a history with the People’s Liberation Army. COSCO has subsidiaries all over northern California and has been allegedly involved in smuggling arms to gangs here in the US.

I bring up COSCO because as an importer, Hsu would have been familiar with such a large shipping concern and may have even done business with them.

No doubt Hsu was extremely lucky if he really was being kidnapped. We can only speculate on the reason for his kidnapping but it could have had something to do with a refusal to pay “protection” or even a failure to hire a gang member to work at one of his businesses.

Or, Hsu himself could have been a member of a rival triad.

And the fact that Hsu claimed bankruptcy in 1990 and then emerges 2 years later as Managing Director of Newton Enterprises Ltd in Hong Kong is also rather amazing. As is the news that he evidently never made restitution to the investors he swindled:

In a separate matter, Mr. Hsu turned himself in at State Superior Court in California, where he faced three years in jail before vanishing in the early 1990s. Mr. Hsu had raised more than $1 million from investors to import latex gloves from Asia and resell them for a profit, according to Ronald Smetana, the deputy California attorney general who handled the case.

James Brosnahan, an attorney for Mr. Hsu, released a statement saying his client “has pledged to deal forthrightly with this 15-year-old legal issue” and “is having preliminary productive discussions with the Attorney General’s office.” He added that Mr. Hsu “is hopeful that the matter will be resolved shortly to everyone’s satisfaction.”

Mr. Brosnahan said the $2 million bail “can also be used for restitution to any persons who might still be unpaid.”

According to the article, there are at least a few investors swindled by Mr. Hsu who didn’t receive restitution. Along with his 1990 bankruptcy, one of the legitimate questions being asked by the Justice Department in their probe into Mr. Hsu’s activities must be where did he get the money? One would think that his assets were frozen as a result of the verdict in his criminal trial. Judging by the property he has owned in New York City since his return from Hong Kong, his fortune must be considerable. And while there is no doubt the “Managing Director” of an import company might receive a considerable salary, it is unlikely that it would have been enough to allow for the multi-million dollar property deals he cut upon his return to New York City.

For once, the smell of a good story has overridden the reluctance of the press to cover a Democratic party scandal. We’ll see how far they go when more information about Mr. Hsu is discovered.

UPDATE

Just noticed something strange in that Wall Street Journal account of Hsu’s kidnapping. The report from the San Francisco Chronicle apparently mentions “gang leaders” in the car that supposedly kidnapped Mr. Hsu.

Why would the leaders of gangs be cooperating in a kidnapping of some nobody? More bizarre yet, why would gang leaders be doing their own dirty work? One would think that the leaders of gangs would avoid taking on such tasks for the very reason they made the paper; the chance of getting caught.

This raises the possibility that Hsu was not being kidnapped at all but was being escorted to a gathering of some kind involving all of the Chinatown gangs. Could Hsu himself be one of those “gang leaders?”

Just asking…