Month: September 2006

No speeches or sermons or recollections from me today. Just a stream of posts designed to show what al Qaeda and the Islamo-fascists have not yet destroyed: our freedom as Westerners. Today’s blog is dedicated to showing Osama, Zawahiri, Nasrallah, Ahmadinejad and all the Islamist murderers and tyrants what they hate: evidence of resistance and of freedom – from the West, from moderate Muslims, from Jews, from women, from gays, and from all who seek freedom against theocratic tyranny. If you have a link, an item, a photo or a YouTube guaranteed to offend Islamist theocrats, please send them to me, and I’ll post. Check in throughout the day for images and words that will gall Islamists everywhere, quotes that reveal tenacity and lack of fear, videos that expose the failure of the medieval bigots who struck five years ago, tributes to people who have stood up to these bullies and who have shown that we have not submitted yet; and never will.

For starters – and a moment particularly poignant for me as an Anglo-American – here’s the Buckingham Palace band, playing the American national anthem after 9/11. If it re-summons some of the trans-Atlantic solidarity after the atrocity, then it’s a good way to start the day.

"Angie and I will consider tying the knot when everyone else in the country who wants to be married is legally able," – Brad Pitt. Thanks, Brad. I wish more opposite-sex couples would take the same stand – or go to Massachusetts to get married, the one state where equality is already here.

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent.  Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding," – Justice Brandeis, 1928.

"Men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." Who does that remind you of?

I’ve aired this viewpoint before – and it is, at least, something practical that might be done, while we are stymied from effective action or a competent executive for the next two years. From a reader:

There is another alternative: redeploy in Kurdistan, as Galbraith suggests. The US troops are wanted there, you can access the large oil fields of Kirkuk, and you’re still close enough with the troops to act as a genuine deterrent to both a meddling Iran or the Sunni cesspool in Baghdad.  It will be like enforcement of the no-fly zone, except with more muscle because they’ll still be troops on the ground, who will not be preoccupied with minding their backs in the midst of a civil war; things are relatively calm in Kurdistan. The peshmerga can still retain the job of internally policing Kurdistan, whilst the US can keep an eye on what’s going on in the rest of the region. It would be easy enough to deploy troops quickly in the event that Iran blockaded the Straits of Hormuz, or the Islamists seized the Saudi oil fields, or Israel was attacked by Iran and/or Syria (and their Hezbollah minions). This strikes me as the most elegant solution to a very messy problem right now.

Better than "whack-a-mole" because Rumsfeld won’t allow us to win.

The latest revelation that Donald Rumsfeld actually threatened to fire any subordinate who tried to come up with a post-invasion occupation plan makes me feel a little less crazy. Among the few posts airing theories about the bizarre decision-making by the Bush administration before I went on vacation, there was this one:

Some in the administration and among Bush-supporters, like me, believed in democratization as well as WMD-removal as twin pillars of the war. But the war-plan proves that this was not what Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush really had in mind. The most plausible interpretation is that they expected the discovered WMDs to provide complete justification for the war – and then wanted to get out as fast as possible, with a friendly exile like Chalabi installed. They wanted merely to send an intimidating signal.

For this and other attempts to make sense of Bush incoherence, I was described as demented, paranoid, etc. Of course, anyone who has read "Fiasco," or "Cobra II" will be less surprised. Fire. Rumsfeld. Now.

You can either fight a war on drugs or fight an effective war on terror. You can’t do both in Afghanistan. Johann Hari shows how the drug war brought the Taliban back from the near-dead. Money quote:

Over the past five years, with British and American military support, a sinister corporation called DynCorps has been going to the fields of the poorest farmers in Afghanistan and systematically destroying them. This is because they are growing opium poppies, used to make heroin that is freely bought on the streets of the West. Emmanuel Reinert, the Executive Director of the Senlis Council, explains, "The Taliban revival is directly, intimately related to the crop eradication programme. It could not have happened if the US was not aggressively destroying crops. It is the single biggest reason Afghans turned against the foreigners."

My take on the president’s bid to keep his military tribunals, enshrine torture in law, and use the issue – and the 9/11 families – as his electoral ace card. My Sunday Times column is here.

Elanora, Australia, 7 am.

More doubt is shed on the veracity of the president’s account last week. The best I’ve read is in Ron Suskind’s "The One Percent Doctrine."

Mean Girls: a Cartoon fantasy about a future campaign between Condi Rice and Hillary Rodham-Clinton.