March 17, 2004
All Work and No Blogging
...make this a sleepy site. Unfortunately, with deadlines looming, this is likely to remain true until Monday at best. I've been hoping that Maureen would take up some of the slack, but she's been busy, too.
On returning, we'll choose a winner (or winners) of the silly caption contest. (Sorry, Jay.)
If you're looking for something to read, please do visit the Blogs around the World post (someday to be a free-standing page). I've removed many of the dead links, fixed many of the broken ones (though some that I thought I'd deleted/fixed remain), and added more than a handful of new sites worth visiting.
Back soon, I hope.
March 12, 2004
March 11, 2004
Along with the United Kingdom, Spain is the obvious strategic partner for the United States on the Atlantic littoral.Our three countries have synergistic ties across the ocean - not only with each other, but with Latin America and Africa, the two continents with the most undervalued potential. In this new century, our interests converge.
As a result, the threats against us also converge. Terrorists hate successful democracies, public freedoms and thriving economies. Foreign and domestic, the forces of terror hate all that 21st century Spain stands for.
The losses suffered by the Spanish people on March 11, 2004, were as devastating to our allies and friends as the losses of 9/11 were to us.
Spain stood by us. Now we must have the vision to stand by Spain.
And we have a new ally:
To express condolences to the Spanish people is too empty and not enough. We pledge to them that we, the Iraqi people shall be in the forefront and will be the first line fighters to exterminate these monsters.Alaa
March 09, 2004
March 05, 2004
Friday VDH
On NRO today, Victor Davis Hanson has another eloquent column on the less-heralded developments in the war and the potential consequences of a Kerry victory, Do We Want to Go Back?. Excerpts:
Despite hysteria that the Bush administration is in the clutches of some vast neoconservative (read Jewish/Likud) conspiracy, it has advanced the most ambitious, humane, and needed initiatives for the Middle East in the last half century. Precisely because we no longer give autocracies a pass for pumping oil and keeping out Communists and are no longer complacent as usual, but unpredictably angry about terrorism our policy now is neither cynical realism nor starry-eyed multilateral fantasy.Instead, without naivetι we strive for constitutional government and modernization. We are trying to help to integrate the Middle East into the rest of the world's democratic economy and to end our own appeasement of fundamentalism, dictatorship, gender-apartheid, anti-Semitism, press censorship, and pathetic victimhood that all played their parts in leading to September 11.
and
More likely, if President Bush loses, the war against terror will return, as promised, to the status of a police matter subpoenas and court trials the more appropriate response to the mass murder of 3,000 at the "crime scene" of the crater in New York. Europe will be assured that our troops will stay while we apologize for the usual litany of purported unilateral sins. North Korea will get more blackmail cash, while pampered South Korean leftists resume their "sunshine" mirage. Iraq will be turned over to the U.N. as we abruptly leave, and could dissolve into something like the Balkans between 1991 and 1998. Iran and Syria will let out a big sigh of relief as American diplomats once more sit out on the tarmac in vain hopes of an "audience" with despots. The Saudis will smile that smile. Arafat will be assured that he is now once again a legitimate interlocutor. And strangest of all, the American Left will feel that the United States has just barely begun to return to its "moral" bearings even as its laxity and relativism encourage some pretty immoral things to come.If White House politicos figured that many who were angered about out-of-control federal spending and immigration proposals would grumble, but not abandon Mr. Bush given the global stakes involved after September 11, and the specter of a new alternative foreign policy far to the left of that of a Warren Christopher and Madeline Albright then they were absolutely right.
I hope he's correct about those threatening to abandon President Bush. In any event, please read the whole thing.
Noonan on Kerry
On OpinionJournal, Peggy Noonan has an insightful and funny column comparing and contrasting John F. Kerry with his political model, the other JFK. Excerpt:
The good news about Mr. Kerry, and I mean this seriously, is he does not appear to be insane. We now know Howard Dean was frightened he might become president, and this perhaps led to what might be called irrepressibility and irritability. We know Wesley Clark was . . . well, he seemed a little mad too. The untold story of the Democratic race is that one of our two great parties had a remarkably shallow bench. They had no one. But Mr. Kerry is not crazy. You can imagine him as president. You can imagine him struggling, like Mr. Clinton, to know what precisely he wanted the presidency for once he had it, but at least you can imagine him having it.If he were president he would surround himself with the same foreign-policy people Clinton did--Richard Holbrook et al. It wouldn't be insane--Incompetent maybe, confusing certainly, and uncertain certainly too. They would struggle. The great unmentioned fact of Democrats in power and foreign policy right now is that they try hard to do nothing, because if they were to do something it would be what Republicans do. And they don't want to do that.
They'd be a little lost, maybe a little like JFK.
I recommend the piece.
March 01, 2004
I'm Rerun?
You are Rerun!
Which Peanuts Character are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
(via Damian Penny.)
