Posse Incitatus

Bollinger goes Murphy Brown on Ahmadinejad

Watching the hubbaloo over Columbia's invitation to Ahmadinejad, I was unmoved.  I have a dim view of Lee Bollinger, the former Skunk Bear now running Columbia, and this invitation seemed to confirm the notion that academia knows no shame.

I figured they'd let Iran's wacky president speak and showcase their "openness" and "tolerance" - which always seems to be plentiful where anti-Americanism (and increasingly anti-Semitism) is concerned, and that would be that.

But then Bollinger decided to do a Murphy Brown on his guest.

For those that don't recall, Murphy Brown was a fictitous journalist famous for her sucker-punch interviews.  She'd ask some puffed up Washington type - almost always a conservative - on her show, ask him some soft ball questions, put him at ease, and then go for the jugular.

This was the payoff moment, the money shot of the righteous politically correct sitcom.  They made such a big deal of it, they'd often show tape of her launching into her guest later that same show.  It was like the highlight reel for liberal political junkies.

The victim was invariably reduced to blubbering incoherence by her brilliantly concieved and flawlessly executed ambush, which I always thought strange.  After all, didn't these guests know who this woman was?  Wasn't the whole premise of the show that she was the entire "60 Minutes" team rolled into one assertive feminist crusading journalist?

(The answer of course is that these people were conservatives, and thus too stupid to learn much of anything.  Other than greed, of course.  And racism.)

Bollinger basically did the same thing as Murphy Brown.  He invited the Iranian leader to campus, made a big deal about how he would be oh so courteously allowed to speak, and then essentially heckled him. 

Gosh, throwing shots at a guest with a friendly audience at your back in a venue you control - how novel!

What makes it funny is that some people are actually calling this boorish behavior praiseworthy.  (hat tip: Hated Instapundit) Since when?  This is as "brave" as U-M fans throwing beer bottles at the visiting band in Ann Arbor on game day - something Bollinger doubtless knows a thing or two about.

It's rudeness redefined as morality, and it's nothing new for the left.

This wasn't a "rope-a-dope," it was a "sucker punch."  One is an admirable use of tactics, the other is a cheap shot - hardly something to praise somebody for. 

Academia is about silencing dissent these days.  Bollinger deserves even more scorn for his behavior, not less.

When dinosaurs ruled the earth

What can one do but shrug and laugh ruefully at the news that the United Autoworkers are on strike against General Motors?  Michigan's economy is already circling the drain.  With the state poised to shut down because no one in the capital can figure out how to operate a calculator, a massive strike is just what is needed to push us over the brink.

Meanwhile, the UAW is making an excellent case for outsourcing.  Right-to-work advocates are no doubt pleased that the ne plus ultra of the labor movement is proving that they are as out of date as rotary-dial phones and phonograph needles.

If the anti-war left is in the throes of Vietnam nostalgia, the labor movement is also lost in the past and seeking to re-create its glory years of singing "Solidarity Forever" whilst holding sit-down strikes in Flint.  Of course, they can't really do that in Flint any more as all the plants are either closed or closing, but that's beside the point.

This is nothing more than an exercise in nostalgia and a great way to illustrate the proposition that people often act against their own self interest. 

If you need another example, try Dan Rather's lawsuit.

Six in a row

I wisely decided not to jinx my beloved Spartans and have been rewarded with a solid win - and the longest winning streak by an opponent in South Bend.

There are those of the Blue-Aid drinking persuasion (worshippers of the false-god Skunk Bear) who will point out that Notre Dame didn't put up much of a fight and that the Other School managed to shut them out.

To this we can only smile indulgently and point out that a win is a win.  While some may question the quality of Michigan State's opponents, we Spartan fans take at least some small satisfaction in knowing that while beating a MAC team doesn't bring a lot of glory, it beats the hell out of losing to a Division-IAA one.

On to Wisconsin!

The hidden costs - or - why freedom isn't free

It's been a busy week around the ranch.  My prediction about the Notre Dame - U of M game was off by such a large margin as to render comparison pointless.  I won't make a prediction on tomorrow's game in deference to that failure.

I also haven't had time to add to my thoughts on the Sept. 11 anniversary.  Happy, reader Childe Roland has helped me focus on the issue.

He writes:

"Our casualties in this war have been amazingly low"

3792 American. 169 United Kingdom. 129 "other". 4090 too many.

On what basis is this "too many" claim made?  As Gateway Pundit has demonstrated, the U.S. lost more soldiers annually under Clinton in "peacetime" than in combat operation in Iraq. 

Operation Iraqi Freedom also fares well when compared to the cost of previous American wars.

There is the old saying:  "Freedom is not free."  It has a cost, a cost in lives, blood and treasure.  One cannot make a judgement over the cost of something without some sort of basis of comparison.  To do so is to pretend that freedom is free, that any blood or treasure shed over it is wasted.

No, one must compare like with like.  Comparing this war with past wars, we have been amazingly fortunate in how few troops we have lost and how little money we have had to spend.

Before anyone starts foaming at the mouth and screaming "leftist! America hater!" and the like, all I'm saying is that human lives are not something to be plugged into a cost-benefit equation to see how well we're doing in Iraq.

First off, the only foaming at the Posse is by our liberal/leftish commenters.  More to the point, one must use analytical tools to determine whether a given policy is justified, otherwise one is left making key decisions of national policy on...what, exactly?  Emotion?  Shall we check bird entrails to see if the Gods want to us to go to war with Thebes instead?

A question that, by the way, can be answered by simple observation. Send more soldiers to their deaths and burn more dollars in prolonged surges?

Perhaps you missed it, but the Surge will be wrapping up soon.  It's been quite a success.  Not only have U.S. casualty rates fallen, Iraqis are also safer.  The real problem is that we didn't "surge" soon enough.

Withdraw as soon as possible and leave countless Iraqis to die and the terrorists of the world to celebrate their victory over the West? Both are horrible options (though staying probably looks better), and the middle-ground of maintaining a weak military presence is simply ineffective at achieving anything.

Both are not "horrible options," though.  The Surge is working.  Iraq is growing stronger.  American prestige is being restored.  A new dynamic is building in the Middle East - a desire for democracy and an end to Islamic extremism.

This is not free.  It cannot be free.  To insist that one can remove a tyrant at no cost is to live in a fantasy world - which much of the left seems to do.

"A rock and a hard place" comes to mind. Optimism and pessimism aside, we're hosed. For a while now, so called "liberal defeatists" have been decried, but exactly what kind of victory do we now hope to etch out of a land full of people that hate us (insurgency and terrorism), hate each other (civil war), and hate themselves (Shiite on Shiite murder)?

How does one reason with such despair?  I could point out that Iraq's army is daily growing stronger, more disciplined.  I could note that Anbar Awakening shows a new way forward, a grass-roots pride in Iraq and the heart-felt love of the Iraqi people who at long last appreciate what America is willing to do for them.

Don't take my word for it.  Read Michael Totten or Michael Yon.  Neither of these people are partisans, they don't pull any punches, either.  They are sometimes wrong in terms of policy suggestions, but the news they report is sourced and solid.

It paints a very different picture of what is going on there.  Far from a country where everyone hates us, our troops are treated like local celebrities, honored guests.  Our fallen leaders are considered "martyrs" for a free Iraq.  One cannot read these dispatches and not feel a sense of pride in America and amazement at how well things are finally going.

Look, one cannot be a superpower without paying some sort of price.  The price of leaving Saddam Hussein in power was diminished prestige, unending military commitments, and growing radicalism from the Saudis who objected to our troop presence there.  These were the hidden costs of containment.

There were others that were not so hidden.  Libya's dismantling of its WMD program and the revelation of Pakistan's rogue nuclear scientist could only happen after Iraq was invaded.  Qaddafi was terrified that he would be next and once he flipped, the rest of the netword was revealed.

The cost of leavin Saddam in power was that these WMD would have still been out there and could have been passed to terrorists.  It was a cost we could not know until after Saddam was deposed.

Lebanon's "Cedar Spring" hangs by a thread, but it would never have happened at all without the US strategic presence on Syria's other border.  Even now, the presence of 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq gives the dictators in Damascus and Tehran pause.

To put it another way, one cannot claim one course of action has been a failure, or decry its cost without articulating an alternative and - this is the really important part - giving a fair account of its costs as well.

If you do nothing, you are still making a decision - a decision which carries costs.  The costs of our inactivity in the 1990s were made clear on Sept. 11, 2001.  They were hidden until then.  Now, thanks to the ease and magnitude of our successes, we are once again becoming blinded to the costs that defeat and/or renewed inactivity will bring.

Would I rather that those four thousand soldiers were alive today?  Absolutely.  I would also rather the hundreds of thousands that perished in Vietnam, Korea, World Wars One and Two had lived to ripe old age and died in bed?  Yes.

But the cost of refusing to fight was greater.

This is the cold calculus upon which the world operates.   You don't have to like it, but you cannot deny it.  If you do, the enemies of freedom will win by default.

And that is a cost far higher than any of us are willing to contemplate.

Battle of the cripples

For the record, I pick Notre Dame over Michigan, 13-10.

I hate Elvish appeasement

Long-time readers of the Posse know that I’m a big fan of J.R.R. Tolkien.  I’ve recently finished Children of Hurin and when I saw that Mark Steyn had linked to an article that evoked comparisons between Middle Earth and our current world situation, well I had to go there.

Unfortunately, James Pinkerton’s article is a disaster – not only because it hugely misreads what Tolkien was trying to say, but because it is essentially incoherent.

If I could distill Pinkerton’s biggest mistake it would be this passage:

But Tolkien once confided, “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.” That is, Catholic in the sense that reality and history are complicated, that the world is rich in majesty and mystery, that human nature is but a poor vessel. In his world, the Shire is Christendom, and Christendom is the Shire.

No, it isn’t.  Pinkerton has this exactly backwards.  In fact, Tolkien was quite explicit in warning against what we might call “Shire-ism” – isolationism by another name.  Tolkien found the Hobbits praiseworthy because they just wanted to be left alone, it is true.  But they also had the wisdom and the inner greatness to step forward and save a larger world when the time came.

Had they simply stayed within their borders, they would certainly have been conquered and enslaved.

The whole point of the Lord of the Rings was that one couldn’t just save the Shire – you had to save everyone and everything – or nothing.

Tolkien didn’t castigate the West for trying to spread freedom and liberty as Pinkerton tries to do, but for failing to spread them enough.  That’s why he refers to it as a “Catholic” – that means “universal” - tale.

The character of Gandalf (Tolkien’s voice in much of his works) brings this point up repeatedly.

One of the consistent themes of the book is that the isolation of the Shire cannot be maintained.  Sooner or later the wide world will barge in.

Another theme is that inaction in the face of evil only increases danger.  In the Last Debate (Book V), Gandalf makes this explicit, saying:

[Sauron] has not built up his power until waiting until his enemies are secure, as we have done.

Gandalf is talking about how the West is always reacting, rather than acting – dare I say it, preemptively - against Sauron’s growing power.

In the years before Lord of the Rings takes place, we learn that the White Council – the body Pinkerton apparently seeks to emulate – patently refused to take action against Sauron until it was almost too late.  Of course that was partly because Saruman, the council’s leader, was planning to betray them.

When Tolkien said “Catholic,” he meant it.  Gandalf isn’t there just to save the Shire, or the West, but all of Middle Earth.  He made this explicit when speaking to Denethor in Book V:

"You think, as is your wont, my lord, of Gondor only," said Gandalf.  "Yet there are other men and other lives, and time still to be.  And for me, I pity even his slaves."

Far from urging the West to keep to its own affairs, Gandalf was urging universal action – the kind Pinkerton disparages when he describes the war in Iraq as ‘Uncle Sam forcing people to be free.’

At this point, one has to wonder if Pinkerton has even read the books.

Want an even bigger example?

Late in the essay, Pinkerton says this:

“To keep the peace, we must separate our civilizations. We must start with a political principle, that the West shall stay the West, while the East can do as it wishes on its side of the frontier, and only on its side.”

Gosh, this is exactly what Mordor asks for in a parley with Gandalf and Aragorn before the Black Gate at the climax of Lord of the Rings.  These are the terms that Sauron’s messenger offers:

"These are the terms," said the Messenger, and smiled as he eyed them one by one.  "The rabble of Gondor and its deluded allies shall withdraw at once beyond the Anduin, first taking oaths never again to assail Sauron the Great in arms, open or secret.  All lands east of the Anduin shall be Sauron's forever, solely.  West of the Anduin as far as the Misty Mountains shall be tributary to Mordor, and men there shall bear no weapons, but shall have leave to govern their own affairs." [...]

Looking at the Messenger's eyes they read his thought.  He was to be that lieutenant, and gather all that remained of the West under his sway; he would be their tyrant and they his slaves.

Gandalf rightly rejected this surrender, but - apart from the boundaries - it is little different from what Pinkerton hopes for.  Here’s his culiminating passage:

Having agreed that Israel must survive, within the protective ambit of Christendom, the council could engage Muslims—who are, themselves, in the process of restoring the Caliphate—in a grand summit. Only then, when West meets East, in diplomatic twain, might a chance exist for an enduring settlement.

So in Pinkerton’s vision of heroic valor, the “Knights of the West” will draw forth their ancestral blades, polish their armor, and then constitute a second United Nations to negotiate their gradual surrender.

I don’t know Pinkerton well, but this essay is stunningly weak.  He talks the good game about war, invokes everyone from Leonidas to Charles Martel, but in the end doesn’t really advocate doing anything other than having a Thomas Friedman-esque Arab-Israeli summit.

Like that’s not been tried before.

That’s why I say he is incoherent.  If you are going to issue the call to arms, at least go all the way.  If you believe there is an inevitable clash of civilizations and that sooner or later the Cross or the Crescent will fly in triumph over Mecca, Jerusalem and Rome, fine.  But don’t give us the St. Crispin’s Day speech (or worse still, Peter Jackson’s bastardized version of it) and then follow it up with the peace conference agenda.

I have to say I’m really surprised by this essay.  I’ve seen Tolkien used to argue many things, and Pinkerton isn’t the first to equate militant Islam with the power of Mordor.  However he is the first to suggest that the West should reach an accommodation with Sauron rather than strive for his defeat.

Look, I’m not sold on the need for a Holy War between East and West.  I think one is possible, but my last hope of averting it is based on events in Iraq. 

If there is a Frodo in all of this, it is George W. Bush who is doing what everyone else says cannot be done – creating an Arab democracy and spreading freedom in a part of the world that knows only extremism and hate.

The odds are long, the price is heavy and all the Wise say it will never work, but such is the challenge of our time.

Pinkerton may have missed this, but we aren’t “forcing” freedom on the Iraqis.  They are fighting along with our brave troops – they DO want their freedom and are dying for it every day.  The Iraqi Army’s losses are well in excess of ours and yet they keep getting stronger.

Look, these people have endured decades of dictatorship, war and starvation.  They are now pitted in a brutal war against a merciless enemy that will stop at nothing to destroy them.  It defies logic to argue that they’d have conquered Al Qaeda, defanged Iran and blockaded Syria, and put Saudi Arabia in its place, if they only wanted it badly enough – and they’d do it in FOUR YEARS.

Could the “realists” get less realistic?

I don’t know if we will ultimately succeed in Iraq.

What I do know is that you can’t make a change unless you try, and the message I took away from Lord of the Rings is that hope – even a fool’s hope – can succeed. 

If a hobbit and his servant can enter into the stronghold of Mordor and destroy the One Ring under Sauron’s very Eye, maybe we can help Iraq become a better place.

There are times when the little people shake the counsels of the Wise and Great.  It is entirely possible that common Iraqis and America’s best will unite and create what everyone said was impossible – and that the shock waves of that success will topple thrones from Tripoli to Riyadh. 

Maybe that is what is meant to be – and it is a far more encouraging thought.

Six years later

[Note - I wrote this to be put up on Sept. 11, however our internet provider (now ex-internet provider) has jacked things up that I haven't been able to post until now.]

So here we are, six years on.

For a while, Sept. 11, 2001 was The Day Everything Changed.  Then, as the shock and horror (and righteous anger) faded, it became The Day Nothing Changed.

Certainly quite a few conservative pundits have taken that latter argument and run with it.  For a while, we would have been inclined to agree with them.  However, it’s increasingly clear that a great many things have changed, though not in ways we expected.

Six years and one day ago, terrorism was not viewed as much of a threat.  Now it is an everyday thing.  Another day, another terror cell arrested – and more civil libertarians urging that the Mad Bombers of the Week had their rights infringed and that phone-tapping is utterly illegal and that they weren’t serious about killing people and if they were well we deserved it anyway because look at the JEWS and all the horrible things Israel does.

Sigh.

When I was young, I was a Democrat.  That was how I was raised and, in a liberal college town, that was how one fit in.

But I was never a true liberal.  Above all things, I loved my country.  When the Desert Shield and Desert Storm took place, I was a senior in high school.  The politically minded kids there immediately got it into their tender little heads that this was Vietnam Redux and now all that 60s nostalgia their parents and teachers had infused them with could be put into effect.

I didn’t fall into line with it.  At the time I was a firm believer in the United Nations and the UN had said in no uncertain terms that Saddam had to leave – and if he didn’t, the US and others would make him.

If that didn’t make the war necessary and moral, I didn’t know what would.

Back then, I was painfully naive about patriotism.  Even the kids running around with peace symbols and “Give peace a chance” T-shirts seemed to love this country.  Maybe they did.

But now, as the cliché runs, everything has changed.

I’ve written a great deal over the years since this blog began about why the left is the way it is, what motivates the anti-war movement and how we got where we are.  There is a division in society, and I’m not sure how to heal it.  Clearly the sharp impact of a terror attack was enough to hide those fissures, but only for a little while.  As soon as the immediate danger faded, people reverted to type:  The patriots still loved this country, the left still hated it – and now felt more encouraged than ever to let everyone know it.

The other day I was talking to a military recruiter about how things were going.  I mentioned in passing that I’d offer whatever help I could in my local area, since I live near my old high school and noted that back in the day, we had recruiters there and they did (or appeared to do) decent business.  That was years ago of course, and when I specified where I was from, he gave me a rueful smile.

“We don’t go there any more,” he said.  “They don’t like us.”

Basically, the parents and people who run this upper-middle class district decided that not only don’t they like the military, they don’t even want the option anywhere near their offspring.

I mention this because it illustrates the sense of privilege of the post-modern left.  Military service is beneath them.  Society isn’t classless any more; it is divided into castes and they one of those exempt from serving the state (except as bureaucrats, of course).

More than anything else, that notion of privilege and the resulting alienation is what helps explain the left’s attitude towards the military.  They don’t know “those people,” don’t associate with them, and don’t want their kids around them.

That’s probably why they believe that everything PVT Beauchamp said is 100 percent true – even the parts that The New Republic already admitted are false.

Six years ago my wife was pregnant with our second child and when I watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center I knew that she would grow up in a very different world than she was conceived in.

Like just about everybody, I wondered if this was the beginning of the Big One, the Abyss that seems to haunt my dreams.  Would we see gasoline rationing, weekly terrorist attacks, a breakdown of world commerce and would nuclear terrorism finally become more than theoretical?

Six years later, we’ve been spared, and it’s easy to go on and let the wounds heal, the memories fade and begin to think that the atrocities in New York and Washington D.C. were just aberrations – the bad guys got lucky and are now played out.

I’m not so sure.  Certainly if we bail on Iraq they won’t be played out – they’ll get their biggest boost ever.

The only constant in this world is change, something the liberal elites simply don’t understand.  The world has changed since 2001.  Saddam Hussein was overthrown and hanged by his own people.  His sons are dead.  So is Yasser Arafat and (arguably) Fidel Castro. 

George W. Bush went from the most popular president to one of the most reviled.

Looking back on this blog, I’ve been wrong about a lot of things, sometimes too optimistic, sometimes not optimistic enough.

But thinking back to six years ago today, I don’t think anyone can say we’re worse off that most people thought we would be.  Our casualties in this war have been amazingly low; the terrorists haven’t been able to stage follow-up attacks (except for that anthrax business, maybe) and – overheated press releases from faux civil rights groups to the contrary – our civil liberties are pretty much intact.

It still isn’t a perfect world, but it’s better than we had any reason to expect six years ago today as we stared in disbelief at the television.  For that, at least, I’m grateful.

 

Resolution on Beauchamp

That seems to be the theme of 2007.  I used to have some notion that most people are rational actors and that they tend (particularly in the aggregate) to make rational decisions.

However, there are so many examples of people acting against their own interest, that I'm finding it hard to maintain any faith in this proposition.

Over at Pajamas Media they have, at long last, an interview that pretty much blows the lid off of the whole Scott Thomas Beauchamp/TNR affair.

If Franklin Foer, the editor of TNR, still has a job after this gets some media play, TNR will have no credibility left.

Of particular interest to the Posse was the fact that PVT Beauchamp's rank is finally clarified (We raised the queston here).

He was a Private First Class in Germany, was reduced to Private E-2 in Kuwait and is now an E-1.  Talk about a negative career trajectory.

Certainly this adds another dimension to the discussion:  Beauchamp now clearly had an axe to grind against the Army.  I can't help but wonder if anyone at TNR thought to ask about that.  Probably not.

In any event, it looks like Foer was a total tool.  Beauchamp used his hunger for a "great story" to let him turn him into an instrument of payback.  Unhappy in the Army, he found a way to give it some hurt.  Unfortunately for Beauchamp, the Army still holds most of the cards. 

Hopefully ex-PFC Beauchamp has learned from this little episode.  Foer may have learned something as well, though whether he will retain his job is now even more problematic.

Attention U of M and Notre Dame fans

Cheer up.  By this time next week, one of your teams will have won a game.

Appalachian State

The Posse has particularly enjoyed the hair-pulling, teeth-gnashing and general despair over the University of Michigan's humiliating defeat by Division IAA Appalachian State.

We enjoy it not only because we are MSU fans, but because Sithkitten is from Appalachia, and so she is proud to see the locals make good.  Of course, going into the game she said that there would be some problems with U-M's fanbase - a good many appear to be hillbillies.  On a recent trip we spied a decrepit, barely habitable trailer perched by the roadside, halfway up a hill just on the Tennessee side of the Cumberland Gap.  In the cracked, dirty window a University of Michigan flag was proudly displayed.

If only we had a camera with us.