Month: April 2005

Quotes of the Day (There’s a lot going on.)

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Quote 1:

For it is a fact – Greenpeace and their co-religionists are not primarily concerned about human health (see also: DDT and malaria). Nor is their main concern the welfare of the starving, nor even the broader environment itself. It is, all-importantly, opposition to global capitalism – especially as reflected in the policies of the US and the current administration – whenever possible, whatever the issue and whatever the situation.

–Scott Burgess

Quote 2:

There is another side of this. If the media owners have skated by for years based on their oligopolistic control of the distribution function, then so have the practitioners of journalism. Swaddled by the lack of competition, a J-school degree and an attitude have become a substitute for knowing the beat. How long have we suffered with technology reporters whose knowledge is as deep as a showing of Pirates of Silicon Valley? Or business reporters who substitute leftist politics for Econ 101? Reportage will now be held to account by both audience and those reported upon, and it’s high time. Welcome to competition, lads.

–Tim Oren

Quote 3:

If Syria can be flipped, the axis is broken. Iran will not be able to communicate directly with the local terrorists. They will be further weakened by the loss of their Syrian sponsor and protector. Prospects for true Lebanese independence and Arab-Israeli peace will improve dramatically.

As Iraq, in fits and starts, begins finding its way to self-rule, the center of gravity of the Bush Doctrine and the American democratization project shifts to Lebanon/Syria. The rapid evacuation and collapse of the Syrian position in Lebanon is crucial not just because of what it will do for Lebanon but because of the weakening effect it will have on the Assad dictatorship.

We need, therefore, to be relentless in insisting on a full (and as humiliating as possible) evacuation of Syria from Lebanon, followed by a campaign of economic, political and military pressure on the Assad regime. We must push now and push hard.

–Charles Krauthammer

John Paul II: Philosopher, Poet, Dramatist, Priest, Pope (1920-2005)

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God rest his soul.

In my view, he was one of the greatest men of the last century.

John Paul II was lover of freedom. Readers of ths blog may be interested in this quote from him: “Where self-interest is suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control that dries up the wellspring of initiative and creativity.” He had lived under communism. He knew the score.

He devoted his life to the service of God, as he saw it, through all hardships, and in the face of all opposition.

He was a deep thinker and a prolific writer. It will take decades for the Church, and the world, to digest and fully understand what he wrote and his vision for the Church going forward.

We will not see anything like him again.

May God have mercy on his successor, and grant him courage. He’ll need it.

Oremus pro beatissimo Papa nostro Joanni Paulo.

General Ted Serong, Iraq and “… intelligence spontaneously offered by the population “

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Instapundit links to this piece from StrategyPage about how attempts to launch terrorist attacks during the recent Shia religious festivals were thwarted. The key passage:

…an increasing number of Sunni Arab religious leaders have changed their minds about armed resistance to democracy, and coalition forces. This has made it easier for Sunni Arabs to pass on information to the police.

This reminded me of something I read recently. Please permit a seeming digression. I’ll bring it around. I was looking for something comprehensive on the Australian military participation in OIF. This led me to the Australian Defense Force Journal. This led me to a review of a book about General Ted Serong, a man I had never previously heard of. He was, in a way, the Australian John Paul Vann. This led me to this article, “`Get Me Ten Years’: Australia’s Ted Serong in Vietnam, 1962-1975.” (This is a brilliant article which you should read, but which I will not elaborate on here.) Serong was one of the last people off the roof of the US embassy. He had been in Vietnam for 13 years. He was a counter-insurgency and jungle warfare expert. His ideas were not heeded, unfortunately. As you will recall, the communists won that one.

One passage jumped out at me. In 1962 Serong gave a presentation to the Americans, saying that all their calculations of why they were winning were wrong:

You could get impressive figures by counting missions flown, casualties taken and inflicted, stores delivered and ammunition expended, he said, but the only real indicator of progress in a war of counterinsurgency was the volume of intelligence spontaneously offered by the population, since this was the indicator of whether or not the people believed you really could offer them security.

I thought: There is Rumsfeld’s missing “metric”. It has been supplied by General Serong, God rest his soul. And it is favorable.

Sounds like we may actually be winning in Iraq.

Will Jacques Chirac have to face capital punishment when he leaves office?

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Jacques Chirac and his friends have been suspected of corruption for many years, and his chums look indeed set to go to jail:

A major corruption trial has begun in France involving allies of President Jacques Chirac from his time as Paris mayor in the 1980s and 1990s.
Among the 47 accused are former Sports Minister Guy Drut, who is currently on Paris’ Olympic bid committee.
The trial centres on a system alleged to have been initiated by President Chirac’s Rally for the Republic (RPR).
Companies are accused of paying major political parties to win contracts to renovate schools around Paris.
Prosecutors argue that the RPR and its ally, the Republican Party, received donations worth 1.2% of awarded contracts, while the Socialists got 0.8%.
The arrangement allegedly lasted from 1989 to 1997.
Mr Chirac was the mayor of Paris for 18 years, until he was elected president in 1995.

The French political attitude is quite tolerant of corruption, but it seems that Chirac has gone way too far even by these lax standards. It is an open secret that he would have gone to jail if he hadn’t been elected as French President. He was very glad about his reprieve, but it looks now as if it might backfire badly. Patience with him has run out after all these years of evading justice, and now Émile Zola Jr, one of the most influential French writers, has penned a fiery essay, in which he is demanding impeachment and capital punishment for the Jacques Chirac, and even calls for a thoroughly renewed French republic:

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