There are times when I go a little overboard in my condemnation of the left. My excuse is that they are such ridiculously easy targets for ridicule and spite that I just can’t help myself. The venom and vinegar that pour forth from this site directed at liberals is simply a matter of taking an easy out and letting common sense and logic take their course and effortlessly reveal the stupidites and inanities of the left in all their glory. I hardly break a sweat most of the time.

But every once and a while, I come across something so outrageous, so ridiculous, so unsettling in its denial of reality that the words simply won’t come. Try as I might, I can’t conjure up the outrage, the humor, or the snark to describe what some nitwit on the left has written. Usually, it’s Lambchop who elicits this kind of response. For sheer hyperbole, hysteria, exaggeration, and hate, there are few who can match Mr. Ellison.

But we have a new entry in the Idiot Sweepstakes. This post by Phoenix Woman at Firedoglake is an updated version of an article she evidently wrote a while ago:

Ever wonder how the last six-odd years might have gone, had all the votes been counted in 2000?

I’d like to think that they might have gone something like this…

I know, I know. Liberals aren’t satisfied until all of their votes are counted at least twice. And the military overseas? “Out of site, out of luck” is an adage liberals all but spit in the face of our soldiers serving outside of the United States. So much for counting all the votes.

But I challenge you to follow that link above and read the post without your jaw hitting the floor and an unnerving feeling overtake you that suicide might actually be a viable option as opposed to having to finish this…this…

No words.

December 1, 2000: After a night on the town and too much lobster in champagne sauce, Sandra Day O’Connor has a horrifically vivid dream of how the ascension of George W. Bush to the Oval Office would mean the destruction of the American economy, the senseless deaths of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, the loss of American prestige both at home and abroad, and — worst of all — the utter dissolution of her beloved Republican Party as, upon being deserted by even the corporate media, it suffers a series of definitive electoral ass-kickings in 2006, 2008, and 2010 before giving up the ghost. She goes on to provide the swing vote that allows the Florida count to continue, thus guaranteeing that Al Gore’s election is confirmed. Media pundits attack O’Connor so viciously that she decides to retire three weeks later…

February through April, 2001: The members of the Republican Congress, with the US corporate media backing them up, start a barrage of conservative legislation — tax cuts for the rich, gutting environmental laws, et cetera — that they plan to browbeat Gore into signing. President Gore vetoes each bill and the vetoes are sustained. He is called “obstructionist” by Tucker Carlson, Robert Novak, and the spokespersons of the Heritage Foundation, the Club for Growth, and the American Nazi Party…

May 5, 2001: National Security chief Sandy Berger, at the urging of his staffers John O’Neill and Richard Clarke, presents President Gore with a PDB (Presidential Daily Briefing) warning of imminent plans by bin Laden to attack New York, America’s financial center, with hijacked commercial jets used as flying bombs. The suspicion is that Al-Qaeda will try to succeed where they had failed eight years earlier and attack the World Trade Center. Gore consults with former Senators Gary Hart (D-CO) and Warren Rudman (R-NH), who chaired a terrorism commission formed by President Clinton in the late 1990s; they concur with the PDB’s findings.

After some heroic countermoves, we come to 9/11:

August – early September, 2001: Dozens of students at flight schools are arrested in a major FBI operation. Thirteen of these students turn out to be directly involved in what will come to be called “the September Plot”.

September 11, 2001: At the Houston, LAX and Minneapolis International airports, seven Saudi and Algerian men were forbidden from boarding their flights after airport security personnel found box cutters, wire and other banned items on their persons. These men turn out to be the remnants of the band of Al-Qaeda’s September Plotters; all the others had been caught in the FBI’s sweep of the flight schools.

Armed with this evidence, Gore demands and gets Congressional authorization to send US troops to Afghanistan. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough ridicules the idea that “idiots with box cutters” could take over an airliner. Rush Limbaugh claims that “Gore is sending our young men and women off on a wild goose chase.” Bill O’Reilly, William Kristol, and Ann Coulter demand that Gore invade Iraq, even though none of the would-be hijackers is Iraqi or has any connection to Iraq or to Saddam Hussein.

September 12, 2001: UN Secretary General Kofi Annan agrees to a call by Madeline Albright, US Ambassdor to the UN, for an international force to enter Afghanistan to root out Al-Qaeda. France and Britain, whose intelligence services have worked closely with US intelligence agencies, strongly back the Gore Administration’s position as copious evidence of planned Al-Qaeda attacks in Europe has come to light. To buttress further the case for invasion, well-documented human rights abuses committed by Afghanistan’s Taliban government, which is allied with Al-Qaeda, are brought forth as evidence.

PNAC’s Donald Rumsfeld, while taking care not to seem to oppose the planned intervention in Afghanistan, goes onto Rush Limbaugh’s radio program to complain that even though Afghanistan’s terrain is ruggedly mountainous and therefore has proved to be historically less vulnerable to aerial attacks than other, flatter nations, recent developments in high-tech weaponry mean that the US need not send quite so many troops Kabul’s way — and besides, the real problem is in Iraq!

September 16, 2001: 150,000 UN-led troops, 100,000 of whom are US forces, leave for Afghanistan. Saddam Hussein, who as a secularist Muslim leader despises Osama bin Laden and is in any event eager to get back in the world’s good graces, assists in setting up staging areas in Iraq for the UN. In Teheran, Iran’s moderate leadership, which needs the help of the world community in beating back the conservative mullahs, agrees to let UN troops and planes pass through Iran unhindered.

It’s the “Al-Qaeda War.” And our buddy Saddam is so accomodating, no? Especially after Clinton bombed the sh*t out of him for 8 years.

One last jaw dropper:

December 15, 2004: In exchange for his aid in rooting out Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and his sons Uday and Qusay are encouraged by Gore and by former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter to work out a plan for Iraq’s transition to a secular democracy after Hussein’s death, with Hussein and his sons in pivotal roles on the democracy commission. American conservatives immediately decry this as “appeasement”, whereas Iraq-based observers congratulate Gore, Clinton and Carter for working on a plan to stave off the horrifically bloody civil war that would likely follow Saddam’s death or removal from power.

As I said. No. Words.

PELOSI: Britain? “Great” Britain? I seem to remember reading something about them when I was a little girl. Weren’t we allies or some such in a war or something? I always wanted to be a princess when I grew up.

The fact that House Democrats excused themselves from history by deliberately adjourning for a little spring break without expressing any sentiment whatsoever of support for the 15 British sailors languishing in capitivity shouldn’t surprise us. This is the gang that likes to write little love notes to the terrorists, insurgents, and unreconstructed Baathists in Iraq telling them the date certain the US military won’t be around to kill them anymore. Why should they bother sending a message to Iran expressing any kind of displeasure whatsoever with the dirty necked galoots who are holding the military personnel of our most important ally hostage?

Members of the House left Washington on Friday for their two-week spring break without weighing in on the international crisis tormenting the nation’s closest ally: the capture of 15 British sailors and marines by Iran.

The omission by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is being noted by some Republicans, who say they should have gotten the chance to join the Senate in denouncing Tehran’s bold actions.

“I am very disappointed that the speaker chose not to act,” said Rep. Charles Dent, R-Pa.

“I believe it’s important for us as Americans to show our solidarity with the Britons,” he added in a phone interview Friday. “The British are our closest allies, and I think we have to stand next to them in a moment like this.”

The Senate on Thursday, before adjourning for its one-week break, passed a resolution condemning the act “in the strongest possible terms” and calling for the sailors “immediate, safe and unconditional release.”

Maybe the Democrats are still mad at the Brits for burning Washington during the War of 1812. Seems an awful long time to hold a grudge. President Madison, of course, was a Democrat. Perhaps that matters to the hyper-partisans who masquerade as lawmakers.

Seriously, it’s not really a mystery why Speaker Pelosi refused to consider condemning Iran for their outrageous violation of international law. She didn’t want any unpleasantries to interfere with her photo op in Damascus with President Bashar Assad of Syria. It might have been awkward talking with Iran’s number one ally in the region if she had just come from a House session taking them to task for acting beastly to the Brits:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will visit Syria, a country President Bush has shunned as a sponsor of terrorism, despite being asked by the administration not to go.
“In our view, it is not the right time to have these sort of high- profile visitors to Syria,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters Friday.

Pelosi arrived in Israel on Friday in what is her second fact-finding trip to the Middle East since taking over leadership in the House in January.

Her repeat trip, an indication she plans to play a role in foreign policy, is also a direct affront to the administration, which says such diplomatic overtures by lawmakers can do more harm than good.

Yes, let’s “affront” the Administration by running into the arms of Syria and talking to the man who, while she is sitting in his parlor drinking tea, is attempting to destroy democracy and gobble up his tiny next door neighbor Lebanon. Better to make Bush look bad than do the decent, honorable thing and shun the beast who orders the assassination of Lebanese democrats whose only sin is standing up to their Syrian tormenters while Assad foments civil strife to create an excuse for his tanks to roll back into Beirut.

It’s pretty clear Pelosi eschewed a resolution of support for the Brits because it may have upset her little Damascus tea party with Assad. And despite the fact she will not change the relationship between the US and Syria one iota by her grandstanding, she does send a disappointing message to our ally; politics trumps loyalty. Better to thumb your nose at the President than stand shoulder to shoulder with a nation that has been at the side of the United States in every major conflict over the last century.

UPDATE

Ed Morrissey:

The Democratic leadership has once again demonstrated why no one took them seriously on foreign policy and national security for the last twenty years. It’s difficult to achieve this conjunction of idiocy in a single week, but Pelosi & Co have proven themselves just the idiots for the task.

Allah nails it – and Pelosi:

Mind you, Assad and his terror apparatus are also the prime suspects in the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, whose pro-western political heirs are currently deadlocked with Hezbollah in Lebanon. If she’s not loyal enough to her own country to refrain from handing one of its biggest enemies a propaganda windfall, you’d think she’d at least be decent enough not to legitimize a suspected killer under UN investigation by doing meet and greets with him.

Repulsive. As usual.

As it stands now, the performance of Rudy Guiliani on 9/11 is one of unquestioned courage and leadership. Images of Rudy striding down the streets of Manhattan as the world literally collapsed around him and appearing before the cameras as a calm, honest spokesman for not only the government of New York city but for the US government as well will be with us forever. Even the left grudgingly gave him high marks for his remarkable performance that day.

But as in all human endeavors – and indeed all human existence – there were mistakes, missteps, bad decisions, and pettiness. And the fact that government was involved means that there were bureaucratic turf battles, political considerations, and bad planning that, when they are examined (and you can count on them being thoroughly looked at during the campaign) will take some of the luster off of Rudy’s performance that day.

Certainly some of this is part of the process of vetting presidential candidates. The press feels an obligation to expose the worst in our next president – especially if he happens to be a Republican. But you can bet that the Democratic candidates will come in for their share of bad press although one gets the sense that the press doesn’t take quite the gleeful pleasure in exposing Democrats as they do in savaging Republicans.

In short, Rudy is about to have his 9/11 credentials wrung through the ringer. And for ammunition, the press need look no further than this book by reporters Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins.

Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 claims to be meticulously researched and sourced. Not having read the book I can’t say. But this long excerpt from the book in Village Voice will give you an excellent idea where Rudy’s critics will take aim:

Giuliani has never acknowledged a single failing in his own performance. Yet he did nothing before September 11 to alleviate the effects of a terror attack. He embodied his city’s lack of preparation on West Street that morning. And he did not do anything later that matched the moments of grace and resolve he gave us the day we needed him most. What we have left is this: At a moment when the public needed a hero, Rudy Giuliani stepped forward. When he assured New York that things would come out all right, he was blessedly believable. It was a fine thing. But it was not nearly as much as we, at the time, imagined.

You really must read the whole thing to get a sense of the kinds of issues that the authors believe Rudy failed to address that day and the aftermath. But a short version is that Guiliani’s mistakes both prior to 9/11 and on that tragic day were magnified by the sin of hubris – overweening pride that prevented several key decisions from being made that would have saved lives. How the authors arrive at these conclusions is a mystery. And I’m sure you’ll end up reading some of their criticisms and wondering if anyone could have done any better considering the circumstances – something authors are clearly not interested in exploring. But what makes this critique of Guiliani’s performance so problematic for the Mayor is that Rudy, like John Kerry, is running using his past experience in the fires of tragedy as proof of his fitness for office – and not much else.

When you think about it, what else has Rudy got to offer in the way of experience? He’s never been to Congress. He never even served in the state legislature of New York. His experience outside of New York is confined to a stint as Associate Attorney General in Reagan’s Justice department – hardly a position that would inspire confidence in his abilities that would be translatable to the presidency.

Rudy was Mayor of New York city. And beyond that, he was Mayor of New York city on 9/11 for which he is properly considered a hero. But if the press starts to chip away at Rudy’s 9/11 personae, what we might find underneath will not be pretty nor attractive to the mostly conservative voters in Republican primaries.

What might the press find by reading the Barrett-Collins hit piece? This article by AP writer Larry McShane makes it clear that the top two issues that will play against Rudy’s 9/11 narrative are the communication’s snafu at Ground Zero that day which has been flogged by some widows and firefighters for years as well as Guiliani’s decision to shut down the meticulous search for bodies in November of 2001 when so many were still missing:

Giuliani, the leader in polls of Republican voters for his party’s nomination, has been faulted on two major issues:

• His administration’s failure to provide the World Trade Center’s first responders with adequate radios, a long-standing complaint from relatives of the firefighters killed when the twin towers collapsed. The Sept. 11 Commission noted the firefighters at the World Trade Center were using the same ineffective radios employed by the first responders to the 1993 terrorist attack on the trade center.

Regenhard, at a 2004 commission hearing in Manhattan, screamed at Giuliani, “My son was murdered because of your incompetence!” The hearing was a perfect example of the 9/11 duality: Commission members universally praised Giuliani at the same event.

• A November 2001 decision to step up removal of the massive rubble pile at ground zero. The firefighters were angered when the then-mayor reduced their numbers among the group searching for remains of their lost “brothers,” focusing instead on what they derided as a “scoop and dump” approach. Giuliani agreed to increase the number of firefighters at ground zero just days after ordering the cutback.

More than 5 1/2 years later, body parts are still turning up in the trade center site.

AJ Strata does a good job debunking these criticisms:

That (bad communications) was not caused by Rudy, but by the different police and fire bureaucracies which refused to integrate their purchasing. If a government entity at any level gives up the power to purchase it gives up authority. And so the firefighters and port authorities and city police and state police all refuse to coordinate their equipment. Many times their money comes from different sources, for instance state, city, county, various federal agencies. The Port authority would get Federal dollars from ICE or the Coast Guard and the cops from DoJ. This is not Rudy’s fault and even a bush-league reporter would know this is the case…

The decision (to step up removal of debris) was WEEKS into the clean up, not days or hours. And the problem here is the mound of debris was a festering health hazard. There was no time to pick delicately through the pile of rubble, within which the fires did not finally go out for MONTHS afterwards.

As for the first issue, Barrett and Collins point out that Rudy had ridden roughshod over many of those same bureaucracies during his terms in office and that the fact he didn’t butt a few heads together in order to get the firefighters and police modern communications was a failure of will on his part. Beyond that, the authors point out that Guiliani put the emergency management bunker at the World Trade Center – even after the towers had been attacked in 1993. Was this smart? The towers were centrally located and seemed a natural place to put the emergency bunker. But the authors are looking at Rudy’s decision from a post 9/11 world. The 9/10 world inhabited by Rudy and the rest of us would have seen the attack in 1993 as an aberration and not a harbinger of things to come. In that context, Rudy’s decision was probably the right one.

But don’t expect too many people to be giving Guiliani the benefit of the doubt once the stories start pouring out criticizing his performance on 9/11. There is also the real question of whether he should have been walking the streets in the first place. Why didn’t he head for the temporary emergency bunker where he could monitor communications? As he was walking around lower Manhattan, he was deaf and blind to what was going on at Ground Zero.

There’s also the question of why the police and fire chief met only once during the crisis and very briefly at that. Couldn’t many lives have been saved if the two were side by side, listening to their own people communicating since their equipment wouldn’t allow them to talk to each other? Could Rudy have ordered the two to stay close by?

Barrett and Collins raise a half dozen other issues – some of them germane, some silly – each of which will force Rudy on the defensive. Notoriously thin skinned, one wonders if the scrutiny becomes too intense if Rudy will be able to weather the public storms without lashing back. This, he must resist in that it will make people start to doubt Rudy’s own narrative of events.

For the moment, Guiliani basks in the glow of being the Republican front runner. But the appetite of the press for a horse race means that they will almost certainly begin to hammer away at Rudy’s version of what happened on 9/11. And how Rudy emerges from this scrutiny will determine whether or not he can go the distance and capture the nomination.

A bad day in Iraq yesterday as violence has exploded in the formerly quiescent Tall Afar:

A day after twin truck bombings laid waste to predominantly Shiite neighborhoods in the northern Iraqi city of Tall Afar, marauding Shiite gunmen and police executed dozens of Sunnis in retaliatory attacks that many Iraqis feared might precipitate a resurgence of open sectarian warfare.

The killings took place in a city once cited by President Bush as a sign of the U.S. military’s success in pacifying the insurgency. Bush said in a speech almost exactly a year ago that the “example of Tall Afar gives me confidence in our strategy.”

But parts of the city reverted to chaos and carnage Wednesday as gunmen went door to door assassinating as many as 60 people in revenge for the previous day’s truck bombings, Iraqi military and government officials said. The attack was startling for several reasons, including the alleged participation of police officers in the killings and the implication that the six-week-old Baghdad security plan might be allowing violence to metastasize outside the capital.

The attacks were “startling” only to those who haven’t been paying attention to what’s been going on in Iraq for the past year. The participation of police officers in the massacre (18 of whom were later arrested by the Iraqi army) and the idea that violence will flare up where there are fewer American and Iraqi troops isn’t surprising, or “startling,” or even depressing. There have been other bad days in Iraq since the surge began. There will be many more in the coming months.

Just as there have been good days in Iraq since the surge began with clear signs of progress made in some areas previously resistant to good news of any kind. And there will be other good days ahead as more and more American troops arrive as part of the surge. So far, we have deployed around 7,500 of the 20,000 combat troops that will eventually be part of the program. And deployment is not expected to be completed until the end of May or early June.

Most importantly, there have been some small, hopeful signs from the Iraqi government that Prime Minister Maliki has made a commitment to political change. At this point, I would give Maliki a grade of C- for his efforts at reconciliation, reigning in the militias, sharing oil revenue (still stuck in legislative limbo in the Iraqi parliament), and bringing the Sunnis into full participation in the political life of the country. There have been ongoing talks regarding a wholesale change in the cabinet to bring more secular, Kurdish, and Sunni political parties into the government. So far, those talks have not met with much success thanks to resistance from Maliki’s own Dawa party. But the fact that the talks are even taking place was unthinkable just a few months ago.

The good, the bad, the ugly – this will be Iraq for the foreseeable future; stops and starts on the road to creating a viable, peaceful state that will probably be “partly free” (a State Department designation). Any rational, reasonably well informed person looking at the facts on the ground the last 60 days or so would probably come to pretty much the same conclusion.

Of course, mentioning the words “rational and reasonable” in the same sentence with “liberal” would give most of us a headache:

So here we are in the midst of an escalation oops, surge, in their futile involvement in the Fertile Delta, sending ever more of what they have been determined to be our fully expendable American youth to die amid the filthy corrupt realities of the modern, oil saturated Arab world. All the while our boy Junior adds daily to his litany of pious pronouncements on peace and freedom for a part of the world where there is little respect for peace and no respect for liberty because 13 centuries of Islamic fatalism and authoritarian rule have not allowed, and may never allow either.

As the bullets and shrapnel fly and the bodies are stacked in great rotting piles and the Mothers of Iraq and the Mothers of America weep in endless screams of pain and anguish our congress plays political games in a disgusting, half ass tug of war with President Puke that makes me want to offer Monica Lewinsky a chance to perform just one more public service so that we might at long last give the Republicans and the Democrats something to get stirred up about enough to impeach this criminal son of a bitch.

I actually giggled at the hyperbole, the sanctimonious twaddle, the cloying condescension toward our little brown brothers in the Middle East. This piece isn’t over the top. It’s over the moon, the sun, the stars, and the Andromeda galaxy.

Those of us who are skeptical of the surge but willing to give it time to work do not recognize Iraq or America (or any other country on planet earth for that matter) in the writer’s hysterical rantings. (Although I must say that this fella has missed his calling. That kind of overwrought fiction would best be seen in romance novels.)

And what would a liberal screed like this be without a nod to the stupid soldiers who continue to stride into the maw of death and destruction to fight George Bush’s war:

I talked briefly with a young man today who is leaving for Army boot camp in a few days. We were introduced by his friend’s father who is a close friend of mine from my favorite watering hole, the local pool hall. The young man is 19, fresh of face and rosy cheeked, not an ounce of guile in his spirit and ripe for the slaughter. As we spoke I couldn’t shake the feeling that I might never see the kid alive again. I wanted to cry as I shook his hand and told him to pay attention and cover his ass.

I don’t quote know what to say about someone so heroic, so sensitive, so…so…GOOD. It makes me want to cry. Group hug, everyone.

I’m sure the young man going off to war appreciates the kind words although I’m not sure he would like to be thought of as “ripe for the slaughter.” And as we’ve talked about the use of that word before as it can be applied to our casualties in Iraq, the sensitive souls on the left have a roving definition of the term “slaughter.” For them, it should only be used in a context that sheds the absolute worst light on our efforts in Iraq. Any other context – say 3,000 Americans being “slaughtered” on 9/11 – never quite makes the grade as far as the “slaughter” rule is concerned.

Of course, singling out this post is unfair. Most of the top lefty blogs wrote about the Sunni rampage in Tall Afar, pointing to it as conclusive “proof” that the surge isn’t working, that Iraq will never be a relatively peaceful place, and that we are DOOMED! DOOMED DOOMED!

Sort of reminds me of the way the left “debates” global warming. If we have one day when the temp tops 100 degrees, 10,000 greens are in the street weeping about Gaia’s fever and pointing excitedly at the thermometer like a two year old pointing at an ice cream truck, telling us that here at last, was IRONCLAD PROOF that global warming is a threat to man’s existence on the planet. (I can play the hyperbole game as well!) A more accurate example is listening to that noted scientific expert and global warming gadfly Al Gore who has stated that because the last few summers have seen temperature records broken, that this closes the case on global warming being a fact.

Leaving aside the idiotic notion that 3 or 10 or even 100 years of steadily rising temperatures proves anything- not since many climate scientists use models based on data going back hundreds of thousands of years – the idea that Al Gore has any special insight or knowledge about the future of the climate on planet earth is silly. But that doesn’t stop Al and his friends on the left from solemnly declaring every time there’s an uptick in the temperature that it’s time to shut down western industrialized civilization and get used to walking.

So it goes in Iraq from the left’s point of view. To lovingly dote on each setback, every attack that we fail to stop, or any indication of trouble whatsoever as proof of anything is sheer lunacy. And it bespeaks a shallowness of thought we have become all too familiar with from people who openly wish for a defeat of American arms on the field of battle.

UPDATE

Uh-oh. Two bad days in a row in Iraq. Looks like an irreversible trend to me:

Five suicide bombers struck Shiite marketplaces in northeast Baghdad and a town north of the capital at nightfall Thursday, killing at least 122 people and wounding more than 150 in one of Iraq’s deadliest days in years.

The savage attacks came as a new American ambassador began his first day on the job, and Senate Democrats ignored a veto threat and approved a bill to require President Bush to start withdrawing troops.

At least 178 people were killed or found dead Thursday, which marked the end of the seventh week of the latest U.S.-Iraqi military drive to curtail violence in Baghdad and surrounding regions.

Please excuse the snark but I am heartily sick of brainless twits on the left who have yet to offer one solid idea on how to improve the situation in Iraq (Americans exiting would not improve the situation one iota) while denigrating our efforts. As far as I’m concerned, they’re not in the game. They forfeited years ago. And the only reason you can’t ignore them is because they are so obnoxious.

If you can spare a few dollars, why not follow the link here and donate to the fund set up to send two RedState bloggers to Iraq.

Jeff Emanuel and Victoria Coates – known on this site and many others as Academic Elephant – received permission from the Department of Defense to embed with the troops in Iraq. I don’t have to tell you how important it is for bloggers and other new media types to get a first hand view of what’s happening in Iraq as we move into this critical phase of the war. Writers like Michael Yon, Michael Totten, Austin Bay and others have given much needed context to stories coming out of Iraq, fleshing out details as well as reporting the thoughts of our soldiers and Iraqi civilians.

They are about 2/3 of their way to the financial goal of $10,000 as of early 3/30. If you’re a blogger, why not put a blurb up on your site asking people to contribute? And if you’re a visitor, I urge you to donate as much as you can and to spread the word on other sites about their need.

Let’s put them over the top today!

It’s been nearly 35 years since the United States negotiated an end to the Viet Nam War. There have been several excellent chronicles of those negotiations most notably, Henry Kissinger’s massive The White House Years gives an obviously self-serving but nevertheless fascinating account of the personalities and twists and turns that led to peace.

For my money, Larry Berman’s No Peace, No Honor is a much livelier read, very critical of Kissinger, and surprisingly harsh on the North Vietnamese.

Both Kissinger and Berman make one thing clear: Following the signing of that agreement, the Soviets, the Chinese, and the North broke both the spirit and letter of the treaty almost immediately. The Soviets and Chinese sent massive amounts of aid to North Viet Nam in direct violation of the accords. And immediately after releasing our prisoners, the North began a buildup in the South, transferring units and supplies to positions in South Vietnamese territory, contravening the stipulation in the agreement that they not reinforce their forces on territory they occupied in the South.

It didn’t matter anyway. South Viet Nam was doomed the day that the US agreed to allow the North’s troops to maintain their positions in the country, something Berman points out and adds that Kissinger knew full well the fate of the South was sealed once the US left.

And now, 30 years later, the United States has once again made an agreement with the Vietnamese Communists. This time, we have sacrificed a nascent democratic reform movement in exchange for some short term political capital at home.

In exchange for our helping Viet Nam achieve membership in the World Trade Organization, the Communists promised to open their society ever so slightly by not cracking down on dissidents and releasing some of those already detained.

Will we ever learn?

It is being characterized by international rights groups as Vietnam’s biggest crackdown on political dissent in more than 20 years. And the intensifying harassment and growing number of detentions are fast sapping the life out of the country’s nascent but bold democratic-reform movement that the US tacitly supports.

Last month, Vietnamese police arrested Catholic priest and democracy activist Nguyen Van Ly on charges that he attempted to undermine the government through the establishment of an independent political organization. Ly is a founding member of Bloc 8406, a budding pro-democracy movement launched publicly last April that has called for more democracy and rights. He and two other Bloc 8406 members have been permitted only state-appointed legal counsel and face trial on Friday.

On March 6, police arrested and jailed human-rights lawyers Nguyen Van Dai and Le Thi Cong Nhan on criminal charges that they had propagandized against the state. The authorities early last month detained Dang Thang Tien, spokesman for the Vietnam Progression Party, one of a handful of small opposition parties that have been established over the past year. On February 3, engineer and democracy activist Bach Ngoc Duong was arrested, beaten and even strangled during interrogations, according to dissident groups. They all face jail sentences of up to 20 years if convicted on anti-state charges.

As this analysis from the Asia Times makes clear, Viet Nam is spitting in our face as they round up advocates for democracy who have bravely stood up to Hanoi’s oppression:

The hard-knuckled crackdown coincides with Vietnam’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), of which it became an official member on January 11. It’s now brutally apparent that the new, younger generation of communist leaders who took power last year from their war-hardened revolutionary predecessors have no intention of coupling their impressive economic-reform drive with complementing political reforms.

Moreover, the mounting crackdown represents a deliberate diplomatic slight to the United States, which was instrumental in brokering Hanoi’s highly coveted WTO membership. Washington’s support for Hanoi’s WTO bid was predicated on the Communist Party substantially improving its human-rights record, which includes the detention in abysmal prison conditions of hundreds of political and religious activists.

During last year’s negotiations, the Vietnamese government agreed to release a handful of high-profile political prisoners identified by Washington, but simultaneously detained dozens of other democracy activists, journalists, cyber-dissidents and Christian activists. Nonetheless, US President George W Bush’s commercially oriented administration agreed to remove Vietnam from its watch list of Countries of Particular Concern (CPC), above the protests of religious-freedom organizations and exiled Vietnamese democracy groups, and successfully lobbied Congress to grant Vietnam Permanent Normal Trade Relations status last December.

Prior to Bush’s trip last November, the Republicans stalled the Viet Nam trade bill in Congress, somewhat of an embarrassment for the President who hoped to hold the trade agreement up at the Asian Economic Summit he was attending as a sign of progress in the region.

The Administration argued unsuccessfully that “normal” trade status was the best way of getting Viet Nam to abide by international trade rules, including bans on copyright piracy – a particular concern given the cheap knockoffs produced in Viet Nam of American movies, CD’s, and other intellectual property. This is a huge business for Viet Nam, as they sell the knockoffs all over Asia raking in billions and costing the American entertainment and software industries hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties. The trade bill eventually passed in December.

But Vietnamese perfidy with regards to their human rights crackdown has hardly raised an eyebrow in Washington. Despite protests and entreaties by Vietnamese exile groups, the issue of Viet Nam’s backsliding hasn’t gotten much support in Congress:

Republican Congressman Chris Smith, who in the past has met with Ly, Dai and scores of other Vietnamese dissidents, recently introduced a resolution in Congress that condemns the attacks and calls for the unconditional release of jailed dissidents and warns that ongoing harassment, detentions and arrests will harm the broadening ties with the US. The resolution also aims to put Vietnam back on the US State Department’s rights-related CPC list.

In a press conference, Smith referred to the jailed dissidents as the future “Vaclav Havels of Vietnam”, a reference to the Czech dissident playwright who became a democratic symbol across former communist-controlled Eastern Europe. Yet so far Smith’s remains a lonely voice in the diplomatic wilderness. President Bush has remained conspicuously mum on the crackdown, presumably because it represents such a clear-cut failure of his administration’s engagement policy toward Vietnam, which from the start prioritized commercial and security concerns over democracy promotion.

So much for those grand words uttered in his second inaugural address about there being “no justice without freedom.” I guess Bush should have added “unless there are markets to be opened for American businesses.”

Viet Nam’s Communists have proved once again that they cannot be trusted to keep an agreement. It remains to be seen whether anyone in Washington will hear the cries of the oppressed and stop handling these brutes with kid gloves.

Holy Christ! For the last 45 minutes or so The House has been under a massive spam attack.

At least 40 spams a minute (at least those that were registering) overwhelmed my spam filter. This caused the site to freeze up like a side of beef in a Kansas City meat locker. And since my little hosting company can’t handle that kind of traffic anyway, chances are you probably were unable to break through and access the site.

These spam attacks are getting worse. Many of you were kind enough to offer suggestions the last time this happened and I actually blacklisted about 80 IP’s. But the bots are clever little devils. They just keep changing up on me, laughing at my weak and pathetic attempts to keep them from filling up my spam queue.

May the fleas of a thousand camels infect the crotches of spammer’s first born. And may they not have the satisfaction to itch.

The votes are in from this week’s Watchers Council and the winner in the Council category is “The Contranomics of Global Jihad” by Big Lizards. Finishing second was “Muslim Cashiers Refuse to Touch Pork” by The Colossus of Rhodey.

Coming out on top in the non Council category was “Four Years In” by American Digest.

Replacing Sundries Shack in the Sacred Circle is Cheat Seeking Missiles. Welcome Laer!

If you’d like to participate in the Watchers Council vote, go here and follow instructions.

Is it culturally bigoted to compare the Iranian mullahs to Persian rug merchants? (Note: According to this site, referring to an Arab as a rug merchant is considered racist. Since everyone knows that Persians are not Arabs – just ask any Arab who remembers every Persian invasion over the last 1000 years – I think I’m on safe ground with the language Nazis of the left.)

If the shoe fits…

Actually, the entire British hostage episode is turning into something of a rug merchant joke, reminiscent of haggling in a bazaar over the price of a piece of carpet only to have the merchant raise the price after you agree to his final offer. “Ah! But this is a special carpet with magical properties,” says the merchant. “Surely you wouldn’t mind paying a bit more for a carpet that flies, no?”

And that’s just about where the Brits are with the Iranians at this point in the drama, as the mullahs, after saying they would let the female hostage go today, appear to have reneged on that promise and have now upped the price by saying that Tony Blair’s government must grovel before Darius and the mighty Persians:

Iran may delay the release of the female British sailor if Britain takes the issue to the U.N. Security Council or freezes relations, the country’s top negotiator Ali Larijani said Thursday.

Speaking on Iranian state radio, Larijani said: “British leaders have miscalculated this issue.”

If Britain follows through with its policies on the 15 British sailors and marines detained by Iran last week, Larijani said “this case may face a legal path” – a clear reference to Iran’s prosecuting the sailors in court.

How have the Brits “miscalculated?” They actually believed the Iranians when they said they would release the woman. That was mistake number one. Their second mistake was not seeing this coming a mile away; the beginning of the attempt to humiliate Great Britain:

Iran’s foreign minister said Wednesday that Britain must admit that its 15 sailors and marines entered Iranian waters in order to resolve a standoff over their capture by the Mideast nation.

Manouchehr Mottaki’s statement in an interview with The Associated Press came on a day of escalating tensions, highlighted by an Iranian video of the detained Britons that showed the only woman captive saying her group had “trespassed” in Iranian waters. Britain angrily denounced the video as unacceptable and froze most dealings with the Mideast nation.

The Iranian official also backed off a prediction that the female sailor, Faye Turney, could be freed Wednesday or Thursday, but said Tehran agreed to allow British officials to meet with the detainees.

Mottaki said that if the alleged entry into Iranian waters was a mistake “this can be solved. But they have to show that it was a mistake. That will help us to end this issue.”

Please note the escalation of Iranian demands the longer this thing goes on. They apparently are seeking a replay of the American hostage drama from 27 years ago when the students would come out every couple of months with an ever changing, ever shifting set of demands that would have to be met before we got our people back. Then, just as the Carter Administration would buckle, the students would up the ante. How many times did President Carter or one of his aides announce the imminent end to the hostage drama only to have negotiations blow up in their faces when the Iranians shifted gears and add another “condition” to the release of our diplomats?

The question should be asked why the Brits should acknowledge something that isn’t true:

In London, British military officials released new information about the seizure, saying satellite positioning readings showed the vessels were 1.7 nautical miles inside Iraqi waters.

Vice Adm. Charles Style gave the satellite coordinates as 29 degrees 50.36 minutes north latitude and 48 degrees 43.08 minutes east longitude. He said that position had been confirmed by an Indian-flagged merchant ship boarded by the sailors and marines.

He also told reporters the Iranians had provided a geographical position Sunday that he said was in Iraqi waters. By Tuesday, he said, Iranian officials had given a revised position 2 miles to the east, inside Iranian waters.

“It is hard to understand a legitimate reason for this change of coordinates,” Style said.

Wonderful British understatement! The Iranians provide a position that clearly shows the men were in Iraqi waters but when they realize they goofed, they pretend the first set of numbers were never released and simply make sh*t up.

To be completely accurate, the boundaries for the Shatt-al-Arab waterway where the Brits were kidnapped has been in dispute for centuries. The problem for the Iranians is that the Brits were clearly in Iraqi territorial waters under a mandate from the UN (UN SEC RES 1723) and at the invitation of the Iraqi government. The waterway is a bone of contention between Iraq and Iran and was one of numerous issues that led to the Iran-Iraq War in 1980. But the British sailors were in internationally recognized waters belonging to Iraq. Of this, there is no doubt.

But such minor details like what actually happened don’t trouble the Iranians. They have much bigger fish to fry. They have a western nation to humiliate and make an example of and nothing is going to stand in the way of that goal.

So far, the Blair government has been firm but not bellicose. Fat lot of good that did them when the Iranians, sensing weakness, now threaten to put the sailors on trial unless the Brits grovel before them and tell the world what everyone knows to be false; that they were in Iranian waters when they were illegally taken.

I fully expect the UN to issue what passes for ringing denunciations. In UNese, this means calling on “both parties” to exercise restraint while politely suggesting to the Iranian thugs holding the sailors that they be good sports and not be too beastly to the Brit hostages. And if they could see their way clear to letting them go, they would have the eternal gratitude of the UN - something the Iranians might find a little ironic since the Security Council has just slapped a few more sanctions on their heads for trying to build a nuclear bomb.

There are some whispers coming out of western capitals that this latest hostage grab is actually a symptom of a power struggle within the Iranian government. Ahmadinejad may have felt his power ebbing away and decided on carrying out an operation guaranteed to whip the population into a frenzy of patriotic feeling. Meanwhile, the less radical faction (I just can’t bring myself to call some of these galoots “moderates”) led by former presidents Ayatollah Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami who favor engaging the west in some kind of dialogue are trapped. If they criticize Ahmadinejad, they risk losing support of the people. If they support him, Ahmadinejad has bought himself some breathing room.

No matter whether this has anything to do with internal Iranian politics, the Brits are up against it. If this thing starts to drag on, Blair may find himself “Carterized” – shown to be impotent in the face of naked aggression. This would only embolden Iran and could lead to other hostage situations involving not only the Brits, but the United States as well.

And what about our response? Two carrier battle groups are launching F-18’s 24 hours a day, roaring off the decks and making a huge show of force. Would George Bush launch a strike against Iranian nuke and oil facilities? Not while the Brits are hostages. And this raises the question of the timing of this grab. I mentioned here that some analysts around the world think that the US is preparing to strike Iran sometime in April of this year. The Iranians can read the papers too which may mean they are hedging their bets. Sure would be awkward if the Iranians placed those Brits in various strategic sites around the country as human shields.

That last was rank speculation but the question is valid; would we attack even without the permission of the Brits? I don’t think George Bush would risk getting Blair mad at him so that option is off the table. For the moment, we wait. And the British sailors also wait to hear if their country sacrifices honor and truth just to get them back or whether Blair stands firm and, with the rest of the world behind him, gets the Iranians to back down and release the hostages.

UPDATE

Allah has an update that Blair will ask the UN to urge the Iranians to release the hostages immediately.

What’s very strange is that there is a “debate” scheduled for today in the Security Council.

It may seem a little forward of me to ask, them being high falutin diplomats and all, but who, praytell, is going to take the position in this “debate” that Iran is within their rights to hold 15 foreign nationals who even the Iranian government admitted on Sunday (later changing the lat/long to reflect the lie that they were picked up in Iranian waters) were in Iraqi territorial waters engaged in activity mandated by the UN and approved by the Iraqi government?

Further, if the debater is going to make the case that the Brits were engaged in “espionage,” they are going to have to explain why the sailors were boarding an Indian-flagged dhou looking for contraband in broad daylight when they were kidnapped and not sneaking around at night watching Iranian military posts and the like.

Sounds like a job for the late Johnny Cochrane or maybe the Monty Python guys could do something with it.

The British hostage “crisis” is proving to be a real eye opener both for London’s allies and any potential adversary. In fact, in some ways the British response to this outrageous and provocative act of war by Iran has been truly frightening – a sense that for a variety of reasons, the British people and their government are sleepwalking through history, living a dream that reality cannot intrude upon.

Reading the British papers, an American is struck by the fact that there is very little outrage among most of the population – at least as it is reported. Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips has noticed the same thing:

Yet in its response to these events, Britain seems to be in some kind of dreamworld. There is no sense of urgency or crisis, no outpouring of anger. There seems to be virtually no grasp of what is at stake.

Some commentators have languidly observed that in another age this would have been regarded as an act of war. What on earth are they talking about? It is an act of war. There can hardly be a more blatant act of aggression than the kidnapping of another country’s military personnel.

What clearly does belong to another age is this country’s ability to understand the proper way to respond to an act of war. When his Marines were seized by the Iranians, the commander of HMS Cornwall, Commodore Nick Lambert, did nothing to stop them and later said it was probably all a misunderstanding. If Nelson had been such a diplomat in such circumstances, Trafalgar would surely have been lost.

The reaction brings to mind the London bombings on 7/7/05. I wrote something similar at that time:

From much of the reaction I’ve seen, with the exception of most politicians (who will probably wait until after the funerals to begin their Bush-Blair bashing) the reaction of the average Brit has underwhelmed me and left me with a sense that the Great Britain of today is a far cry from the Great Britain of my father’s day.

Would the British population of today stood up to Hitler? Would they have stuck with Churchill? Or would they have accepted Hitler’s “peace” offer that the Nazi dictator gave prior to the start of the Battle of Britain which guaranteed British sovereignty?

The Brits back then didn’t even bother to respond. In fact, the BBC gave an eloquent response rejecting Hitler’s offer without even consulting the government. Now that was a spirit of resistance.

It’s clear to me that something has gone out of Great Britain in the last decade or so. I am not accusing them of cowardice. Rather it appears to be a disease infecting most of the western world; a curious, debilitating loss of faith in the beliefs and values that animated the west for nearly 4 centuries. Some of those beliefs were pernicious to be sure; a feeling of superiority over the benighted savages in Africa and Asia, a nauseating self righteousness that allowed all sorts of despicable practices like slavery and colonialism to become commonplace, and a moral blindness regarding the effect of many of our policies on the developing world.

But dwelling on the sins of the west ignores the truly remarkable achievements that have accrued to all of humanity as a result of western dominance of the planet. People are living longer and healthier lives despite widespread poverty. Many diseases that scourged the world for centuries – smallpox, malaria, polio, to name a few – have been wiped out or dramatically decreased. Literacy is commonplace. Agriculture has been revolutionized. Communications, travel, education – all have been transformed in third world societies as a direct result of contact with western nations.

But the deadening effect of the guilt ridden western left that so dominates the media and culture in Europe and America have so cowed the leadership, the opinion makers, and ordinary citizens that even when attacked, people sit and wonder if they are at fault for “provoking” such an act.

Ms. Phillips sees an even more immediate and specific cause of Britain’s lack of outrage:

Twenty-five years ago, we re-took the Falklands after the Argentines invaded. Faced with an act of war against our dependency, Mrs Thatcher had no hesitation. Aggression had to be fought and our people defended. It was the right thing to do.

Can anyone imagine Mrs T wringing her hands in this way over Iran’s seizure of our Marines?

True, we are now living in very different times. Personally, I supported the Iraq war, and still do. But the undoubted mistakes and disasters made by the coalition since the fall of Saddam have caused this country to throw up its hands over the whole issue of aggression by the Arab and Muslim world.

As a result, many in Britain are failing to see the big picture. Iraq is merely one theatre in a global war which threatens us and in which Iran is a major player.

And Arthur Herman is even more blunt:

Britain has been an exception. In places like Bosnia and the Persian Gulf, and in operations like Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom, its help has been solid and genuine, as well as important in a symbolic sense. America always looks better when a couple of frigates flying the Royal Navy’s White Ensignare side by side with those flying the Stars and Stripes. U.S. sailors also know that in a real fight, the men of the Royal Navy, which our navy men still call the “Senior Service,” will never let them down.

That contribution has never been vital to America – yet it was a badge of honor for Britain. It had echoes of past glory as an empire, of course, but also of Britain’s historic role as protector of a civilized and stable world order, and specifically the role of the Royal Navy. The British navy had wiped out the slave trade; it had single-handedly defied tyrants from Louis XIV and Napoleon to Hitler; and it served as midwife to the ideas of free trade and the balance of power.

Now those days are gone for good. Yet, if today’s Britons thought that by shedding that historic responsibility they could buy themselves some peace of mind, the current hostage crisis has just proved them wrong

What will it take for Britain and the rest of the western world to wake up? A better question might be is there anything that will accomplish that goal? Have Britain and Europe fallen into a permanent stupor, a languid state of denial and equivocation that will spell the end of the great alliance between America and Europe, allowing the enemies of democracy to simply grow themselves into a majority?

A change of course is desperately needed. Who will lead it and will the people follow are two questions that, at present, cannot be answered with any confidence much less certainty.