Stromata Blog

Quote of the Day

One of NRO’s military correspondents, W. Thomas Smith Jr., USMC, recollects his childhood:

For the record, I had a G.I. Joe when I was a boy. He was a red-blooded all-American fighting man, who was always going out on top secret missions: Usually fighting the Germans, sometimes the Soviets, occasionally the Viet Cong.

My younger sister, Annette, had a couple of Barbies and a Ken.

Anyway, my G.I. Joe used to go over to Annette’s Barbie playhouse and beat up Ken. Then he put Barbie in the front passenger seat of his Jeep (It had a .50 caliber machine gun mounted in the back just like the Rat Patrol). With Ken out of the way, Joe and Barbie would drive around for a while, then park in front of the TV set. That was their drive-in movie.

Ah, the innocent joys of youth!

The Ayatollah and the Philosophe

Well worth a few minutes of your reading time is David Frum’s review of a book with the unpromising title Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism.

Michel Foucault (1926–1984, died of AIDS) was (and is) a leading light of post-modern, i. e., post-rational, thought discourse. He loathed Western civilization, bourgeois morality and, above all, the United States of America (except for the bath houses in San Francisco, that is). He was thus ready to fall in love.

French philosophers have a long and ugly history of apologetic for tyranny, from Voltaire’s enthusiasm for Frederick the Great up through the craze for Maoism that swept Paris in the 1960s.

But of all the absurd infatuations ever to sweep literary Paris, none has ever matched the absolute incongruity of Michel Foucault’s enthusiasm for the Iranian Islamic revolution of 1979. Foucault, a man utterly devoid of religious feeling, a homosexual who reveled in the brutalities of San Francisco’s sado-masochistic bar scene, decided in 1978 that the Khomeini revolution offered mankind’s best hope for personal liberation. . . .

Foucault perceptively perceived that communism was fading as a challenger to the western liberal order he despised. Perceptively (indeed presciently), he decided that radical Islam offered the only effective challenge to western liberalism. He welcomed this challenge and published more than a dozen essays celebrating the Iranian revolution. . . .

Even after the Khomeinites began putting homosexuals to death, Foucault insisted that the sentenced men had been punished not for their sexual orientation, but for support of the shah, with homosexuality as a convenient excuse. (He may in fact have been right about this latter point – but it’s an odd defense to come from a man like Foucault: “Homosexuality was not the reason for murder. It was the pretext for murder. See – nothing to worry about!”)

The authors of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution find roots in Foucault’s theories for his Islamofascist nympholepsy. Whether they are right about that, I can’t say. (If I knew the Foucault oeuvre well enough to pass judgement, I would have been guilty of a plentiful waste of time in my earlier years.) What’s striking is how little Foucault is unique. Though not all share his puppy dog-like devotion to the Ayatollah, a vast number of intellectuals find excuses for preferring the terrorist perpetrators of medieval superstition over the contemporary West. The common denominator among them, Foucault and the Islamofascists is not homosexuality or post-structuralism or attitudes toward women; it is pure hatred of Judaism and Christianity, of American culture and of the Western tradition of individual liberty. Next to the diabolical George W. Bush, Ruhollah Khomeini – or Osama bin Laden – looks like a post-modernist saint.

No Offense!

The Malaysian government has imposed a month-long ban on Makkal Osai, a Tamil language newspaper, for publishing an irreverent cartoon of Jesus. I can’t find the image on-line, but it reportedly shows Him smoking a cigarette and holding a beer can. Oh, the horror! Our Lord turned that sort of thing into a joke:

John [the Baptist] came, neither eating nor drinking, and they say, “He is possessed.” The Son of Man came, eating and drinking, and they say, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” [Matthew 11:18–19]

I’m happy to see that at least one Malaysian Christian blogger has protested: “Do Not Use My Faith As An Excuse For Oppression!”

There are two threads here. One is the secular authorities’ use of this alleged offense to Christianity as a cloak for silencing political opponents. As the linked entry observes,

For starters, it is common knowledge that the space for discourse on civil society and community issues within the Tamil speaking community in Malaysia is very limited and generally dominated by the government owned media (like RTM) or MIC owned mouthpieces. [“MIC” is the Malaysian Indian Congress, one of the political parties in the governing National Front coalition.] This same sorry situation is replicated in a lot of civic organisations that the community participates in.

Makkal Osai has generally been much more independent in its editorial policy and has recently been doing a series of in-depth reports on an issue that MIC very much wants people to forget .. the alleged mismanagement of Maika Holdings [link added].

The second thread is retroactive “justification” of the violent reaction of Moslem extremists to the famous Danish cartoons of Mohammed. The government found a dhimmi bishop to push that line:

“When two newspapers published a caricature of Prophet Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban early last year, the government took immediate action banning the two newspapers. It was a right decision. Now we have this and they too should be served the same punishment as a lesson to others,” Bishop Julious Paul [of the Evangelical Lutheran Church] said.

He said although the newspaper carried an apology today, it was not enough as the publication of the picture “looked deliberate and unacceptable.”

Terming the publication of the picture as mischievous, he also wanted the newspaper to publish an apology not only in Makkal Osai but also in all major newspapers in the country as it had hurt the feelings of Christians in the country.

“Hurt feelings” are no excuse for censorship, and Islamofascist intolerance should be condemned, not imitated.

Petty Totalitarianism and Its Consequences

Thirty-five years ago, Roland Huntford, the London Observer’s Stockholm correspondent as well as a noted biographer of polar explorers, wrote a book about Sweden that he titled The New Totalitarians. In the preface, he wrote,

The ultimate crime in Brave New World is to deviate from a norm. That norm is innocent of ethics and morality, and decided on grounds of expediency alone. The situation is already a doctrine of Swedish law. Gone is the idea of right or wrong, or the moral content of an action. Crime is now defined as social deviation. The test of whether an offense is punishable, however, is solely whether it has awkward effects on the collective. Analogously, in the non-criminal spheres the worst solecism is to be different. Sweden, like Soviet Russia, belongs to that group of countries in which ‘individuality’ has a derogatory ring. [p. 12]

This species of totalitarianism is not like the Grand Totalitarianism of Hitler, Stalin or Mao. It does not aim at perfecting society under the worldwide domination of the Master Race or the Vanguard of the Proletariat. All that it does is snuff out all attitudes and behavior that offend the sensibilities of those who have the ear of the authorities. Mr. Huntford was wrong on one point: Being “different” is not an offense per se. All sorts of “deviants”, in the ordinary sense of that term, live their lives freely in Stockholm. What goes beyond the pale is this:

The Environmental Court in Växjö has banned a woman from smoking in her own garden, Sydsvenkan reports. The 49-year-old single mother is enraged by the decision but says that she will obey the ruling to avoid having to pay a fine.

She had been sued by her next door neighbor, a lawyer who professed an aversion to tobacco smoke, which he emphasized by wearing a breathing mask while walking from his house to his car. He demanded damages of “15,000 kronor ($2,000) to compensate for his suffering, along with an additional 2,000 kronor for each time she lit a fresh cigarette”.

The case eventually ended up at the Environmental Court (Miljödomstolen), which last week sent a delegation to the woman’s home. . . .

The delegates proceeded to take meticulous notes, resulting in a scale diagram of the two gardens. According to the court’s inspection protocol, the assessment took a total of 40 minutes. . . .

After reviewing the relevant documentation the court ruled on Monday that most of the woman’s garden was now off limits for smoking.

Why should smoking, of all the world’s minor irritants, be selected for this degree of condemnation? Why didn’t the Miljödomstolen’s judges laugh out of court a man who claims to need a breathing mask to endure cigarette smoke 20 feet away?

I doubt that there’s any strong reason. It is just an impulse that has taken over minds that are unwilling to subject impulses to rational scrutiny; indeed, that doubt reason exists.

If modern society had taken up disliking cats rather than tobacco, Swedish ailurophobes would be going to Environmental Courts to force neighbors to keep their cats indoors. If homosexuality falls off its pedestal, it will be declared a danger to public health, and hotels will be barred from accepting same-sex couples whose effluvia might offend later guests.

The vice of Petty Totalitarianism isn’t that it is unbearably oppressive but that it represents a negation of reasoned discourse. How does one argue with hypersensitivity and irrational loathing? In the end, politics is reduced to a clash of brute force, because there is no other way to resolve conflicts born of pure feeling. And thus the choices are reduced to anarchy on the one hand or the “peace” of tyranny on the other.

The Rest of the Vietnam Analogy

Max Boot’s “Another Vietnam?”, in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, looks at several lessons that we should have learned from the Vietnam War beyond the obvious ones to which President Bush referred in his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars the day before yesterday. Unfortunately, the Left’s utterly ahistorical narrative has become conventional. Mr. Boot revisits what really happened in Vietnam and points to similar dangers that we face in Iraq:

• The danger of prematurely dumping allied leaders. . . . In the early 1960s, American officials were frustrated with Ngo Dinh Diem, and in 1963 the Kennedy administration sanctioned a coup against him, in the hope of installing more effective leadership in Saigon. The result was the opposite: a succession of weak leaders who spent most of their time plotting to stay in power. In retrospect it’s obvious that, for all his faults, we should have stuck with Diem. . . .
• The danger of winning militarily and losing politically. . . .By 1972 most of the south was judged secure and the South Vietnamese armed forces were able to throw back the Easter Offensive with help from lots of American aircraft but few American soldiers. If the U.S. had continued to support Saigon with a small troop presence and substantial supplies, there is every reason to believe that South Vietnam could have survived. It was no less viable than South Korea, another artificial state kept in existence by force of arms over many decades. But after the signing of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, we all but cut off South Vietnam, even while its enemies across the borders continued to be resupplied by their patrons in Moscow and Beijing. . . .
• The danger of allowing enemy sanctuaries across the border. This a parallel that Mr. Bush might not be so eager to cite, because in many ways he is repeating the mistakes of Lyndon Johnson, who allowed communist forces to use safe rear areas in Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam to stage attacks into South Vietnam. No matter how much success American and South Vietnamese forces had, there were always fresh troops and supplies being smuggled over the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

And, finally, if Congress insists that we treat Baghdad as dishonorably as we did Saigon:

• The danger of not making plans for refugees. One of the great stains on American honor in Indochina was the horrible fate suffered by so many Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians who put their trust in us. When the end came we left far too many of them in the lurch, consigning them to prison, death or desperate attempts to escape.

As the saying goes, Read the whole thing.

More Sausage News

I shouldn’t have made light of giant sausages in Chicago. The things are evidently more dangerous than I thought:

Boy, 12, is charged with assault by sausage

A boy of 12 has been brought before a court and charged with assault – with a sausage.

He was accused of throwing the cocktail sausage at an elderly neighbour. It allegedly hit him on the shoulder. . . .

The boy, who cannot be named, pleaded not guilty. It is understood the case has already cost about £2,000. . . .

The alleged incident is said to have taken place on Aug 11 in Wythenshawe, Manchester, when the victim was walking home after visiting a pub. He claims that the boy threw the sausage after a disagreement.

The boy’s mother said he had been “worried sick that he would be sent to prison”.

Luckily for the lad, that seems unlikely. The judge, clearly no law-and-order zealot, is quoted as saying, “I was brought up in the era of Just William. You may not remember it, but this incident sounds similar.”

William is described thus by what I take to be a trustworthy entry in Wikipedia:

William Brown is an eleven-year-old boy, eternally scruffy and frowning. William and his friends, Douglas, Henry and Ginger, call themselves the Outlaws, and meet at the old barn in Farmer Jenks’ field. The Outlaws are sworn enemies of the Hubert Laneites with whom they frequently clash.

William’s family, his elder red-haired sister Ethel and brother Robert, caring mother and stern father, and never-ending supply of elderly aunts cannot understand William. Only his mother has any sympathy for him. . . .

A William story often starts when William or the Outlaws set out to do something — put on a play, collect scrap metal for the war effort, look after Violet for example. William always manages to get into trouble with his parents, although he can never see why. Often his well meaning efforts result in broken windows and hysterics among Mrs. Brown’s friends.

Or sometimes a criminally thrown sausage.

The Democrats’ Tin Lady

Instapundit is strangely encouraged by Hillary Clinton’s speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, highlighting the single sentence, “We have to be preparing to fight the new war”. Symmetrically, the Left is routinely angry.

Context matters. That statement came in remarks during which Senator Clinton, who opposed the surge, criticized President Bush for not starting it earlier, declared that it “is working” in at least one key province, and demanded that it be called off. The one who should have been “preparing to fight the next war”, according to the Senator, was George W. Bush. Her own way to “fight” will be to tell the world, immediately upon her election to the Presidency, that “Diplomacy is back!”

Diplomacy with whom, and to what end?

She says she would pull together key allies and people from countries bordering Iraq to mediate among sectarian groups in Iraq, and dissuade Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Syria from getting involved in civil war in Iraq, either directly or indirectly.

The magic of jaw-jaw, like mommy’s kiss, will make it all better.

Many opponents of the mufsidun console themselves with the thought that, because Hillary Clinton has a record of single-minded nastiness toward the “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy”, she would be a Thatcher-like Iron Lady in the war against Islamofascist terrorism. At the moment, though, her metal is more like tin.

Mohammed’s “Jesus”

Judging by the brief notice in the Guardian, the BBC’s forthcoming documentary on “The Muslim Jesus” will offer a superficial treatment of an interesting topic: the Koran’s attempt to explain Christianity and Judaism in Moslem terms. Carl H. Becker, one of the pioneers of Islamic studies, summarized the Koranic view thus:

In order to understand Muhammed’s attitude towards Christianity, we will examine in greater detail his view of this religion, the portions of it which he accepted or which he rejected as unauthentic. In the first place he must have regarded the Trinity as repugnant to reason: he considered the Christian Trinity as consisting of God the Father, Mary the Mother of God, and Jesus the Son of God. In the Qoran, God says, “Hast thou, Jesus, said to men, Regard me and my mother as Gods by the side of God?” Jesus replies, “I will say nothing but the truth. I have but preached, Pray to God, who is my Lord and your Lord” (5.116, f). Hence it has been inferred that Muhammed’s knowledge of Christianity was derived from some particular Christian sect, such as the Tritheists or the Arab female sect of the Collyridians who worshipped the Virgin Mary with exaggerated reverence and assigned divine honours to her. It is also possible that we have here a development of some Gnostic conception which regarded the Holy Ghost as of feminine gender, as Semites would do;[A] instances of this change are to be found in the well-known Hymn of the Soul in the Acts of Thomas, in the Gospel to the Egyptians and elsewhere. I am inclined, however, to think it more probable that Muhammed had heard of Mariolatry and of the “mother of God,” a title which then was a highly popular catchword, and that the apotheosis of Jesus was known to him and also the doctrine of the Trinity by name. Further than this his knowledge did not extend; although he knows the Holy Ghost and identifies him with Jesus, none the less his primitive reasoning, under the influence of many old beliefs, explained the mysterious triad of the Trinity as husband, wife, and son. This fact is enough to prove that his theory of Christianity was formed by combining isolated scraps of information and that he cannot have had any direct instruction from a Christian knowing the outlines of his faith.

[Footnote A: The word for “Spirit” is of the feminine gender in the Semitic languages.]

Muhammed must also have denied the divinity of Christ: this is an obvious result of the course of mental development which we have described and of his characteristically Semitic theory of the nature of God. To him, God is one, never begetting and never begotten. Denying the divinity of Jesus, Muhammed naturally denies the redemption through the Cross and also the fact of the Crucifixion. Yet, strangely enough he accepted the miraculous birth; nor did he hesitate to provide this purely human Jesus with all miraculous attributes; these were a proof of his divine commission, and marvellous details of this nature aroused the interest of his hearers.

Mary the sister of Ahron – an obvious confusion with the Old Testament Miriam – had been devoted to the service of God by her mother’s vow, and lives in the temple under the guardianship of Zacharias, to whom a later heir is born in answer to his prayers, namely John, the forerunner of the Holy Ghost. The birth is announced to Mary and she brings forth Jesus under a palm-tree, near which is a running spring and by the dates of which she is fed. On her return home she is received with reproaches by her family but merely points in reply to the new-born babe, who suddenly speaks from his cradle, asserting that he is the prophet of God. Afterwards Jesus performs all kinds of miracles, forms birds out of clay and makes them fly, heals the blind and lepers, raises the dead, etc., and even brings down from heaven a table ready spread. The Jews will not believe him, but the youth follow him. He is not killed, but translated to God. Christians are not agreed upon the manner of his death and the Jews have invented the story of the Crucifixion.

Muhammed’s knowledge of Christianity thus consists of certain isolated details, partly apocryphal, partly canonical, together with a hazy idea of the fundamental dogmas. Thus the influence of Christianity upon him was entirely indirect. The Muhammedan movement at its outset was influenced not by the real Christianity of the time but by a Christianity which Muhammed criticised in certain details and forced into harmony with his preconceived ideas. His imagination was profoundly impressed by the existence of Christianity as a revealed religion with a founder of its own. Certain features of Christianity and of Judaism, prayer, purification, solemn festivals, scriptures, prophets and so forth were regarded by him as essential to any religious community, because they happened to belong both to Judaism and to Christianity. He therefore adopted or wished to adopt these institutions. [Christianity and Islam (1909)]

The “Jesus” to whom the Moslems pay their respects is a wholly imaginary construct, having little in common with the Gospel Jesus except his name. It is as if Christians honored a “St. Mohammed” who legendarily preached Christ to the Arabs but whose words were distorted into a parody of the Church under the name of “Islam”.

Once Mohammed’s followers came into contact with actual Christianity, they learned that our Bible contained nothing like the teachings attributed to us by the Koran. Their reaction was not to doubt the accuracy of the Koran’s picture but to claim that Christians had tampered with the text of the New Testament. The divergences between the Old Testament and the Koran were similarly declared to be Jewish falsifications. Conspiracy theorizing thus entered Islam’s thought processes at a very early stage.

Addendum: Jonah Goldberg posts a number of interesting messages from his readers about the Koranic “Jesus”. I do want to quibble with the fellow who thinks that the Koran’s knowledge of Christianity derives from Nestorianism. The Nestorians (who still have a few outposts, including the heavily persecuted Assyrian Church in Iraq) are unlikely to have been a source for the Koran. One of their distinctive features is refusal to call Mary “Mother of God”. As Professor Becker observes, that title was an evident source of the Koran’s misconception that Christians include Mary in the Trinity.

The Progressives’ Static World

Anti-Iraq types are much pleased by the video of a snippet of an April 1994 interview with Dick Cheney, in which the former Defense Secretary explains the Bush père Administration’s decision not to depose Saddam Hussein in 1991, using words that could have been uttered by any leftist a moment ago, e. g., “How many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? And our judgment was, not very many.”

So, doesn’t that prove, from the Neocon-in-Chief’s own lips, that deposing Saddam twelve years later was a dreadful mistake? Sure, if one supposes that the world remained changeless between 1991 and 2003. At the time of the First Gulf War, Islamofascism was the concern of a handful of scholars and policy analysts. Though Moslem terrorist groups already existed, very few saw them as likely to act outside the Middle East. We would have done well to pay more attention to the nascent threat, but, if we had, we could have crushed it with measures far less strenuous than a substantial military campaign.

Moreover, in 1991 Saddam Hussein was just another Arab dictator. It was reasonable to assume that, having roundly lost a war, he would fade away. Or he might, like Anwar Sadat under parallel circumstances, shift his policy 180 degrees. No one foresaw that he would remain in power, renege on his cease fire agreements, regularly try to shoot down U.S. and British aircraft, subsidize suicide bombers, form friendly ties with al-Qa’eda, celebrate the 9/11 attacks, provide facilities for terrorist training camps, refuse to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspections, and spread bribes massively among Western politicians and opinion makers.

In brief, the answer to “how many dead Americans is Saddam Hussein worth?” rose dramatically over time. A perfectly prescient President Bush would have known that he had the opportunity in February 1991 to strangle a monster in its cradle. To an ordinary mortal, it didn’t look like there would be much point to the exercise.

What the Cheney interview actually demonstrates is that one of the key architects of the Second Gulf War had no illusions about the difficulties that could follow Saddam’s overthrow. To mitigate them, President Bush fils took a number of steps that weren’t taken by his father: He secured a series of U.N. Security Council resolutions explicitly condemning the Ba’athist regime and implying that continued defiance would lead to military action. (In 1991 the U.S. had no mandate beyond expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait.) He assembled a coalition of over 30 countries to take part in the invasion. (In 1991, no other nation was willing to proceed from the Kuwaiti border to Baghdad.) He determined that Saddam should be replaced by a democratically elected government. (In 1991, no one thought seriously of that possibility.) He strengthened ties with the Kurds to ensure that their province would not instantly split off from the rest of Iraq. (In 1991, fears of Kurdish secession and the breakup of the country were a leading motive for caution, as Mr. Cheney says in the interview.)

The upshot wasn’t instant peace and contentment in Iraq, but it’s notable that the purely domestic sources of violence proved much less serious than Messrs. Bush, Cheney et al. envisioned a decade and a half ago. The spur for violence has been the terrorism carried out by al-Qa’eda in Iraq, the overt purpose of which is to set the Iraqis against each other. What made matters temporarily precarious and prompted the American “surge” was the bombing of the al-Askareyya Mosque in February 2006. Without such al-Qa’eda atrocities, Iraq would be relatively stable, as is shown by the visible improvements on the ground since the “surge” began.

So Mr. Cheney had tenable reasons for inaction in 1991 and powerful ones for action in 2003. Conceiving the world as a dynamic place, where changed circumstances call for changed policies, is, I realize, hard for the essentially reactionary Progressive mindset. We’re fortunate that the Dick Cheneys of the world aren’t hopelessly mired in the past.

Tortious Roses?

From the Daily Telegraph comes the story – at once sad and instructive – of a car salesman who ordered flowers on-line for his inamorata. Unluckily for him, the florist sent the receipt to his home, where the first person to see it was his wife.

Bereft of bouquet, she called the company and requested more information, which not only included the damning card message but the girlfriend’s name and address.

She faxed the receipt to her husband at work with her own note: “Be a man! If you got caught red handed then don’t lie.”

Divorce proceedings followed swiftly.

And after that followed, as sure as this is 21st Century America, the ex-husband’s lawsuit against the flower company. He wants a million dollars as compensation for his mental anguish, alleging that he was specifically told that nothing would be sent to his home.

Maybe that’s true and the seller was negligent. If so, this anecdote is an excellent argument for the venerable, oft-derided doctrine of contributory negligence.

Taking Ames

The Ames straw poll used to be a very early event in the race of the Republican Presidential nomination, preceding official declarations of candidacy, Presidential debates and the first Best of the Web bye-kus. Now it falls practically in mid-campaign.

Its earlier incarnations were at least worth talking about, because there wasn’t yet much indication of how strong the candidates would turn out to be. Not that these particular tea leaves proved particularly informative: In 1979, George H. W. Bush crushed Ronald Reagan; in 1987, Pat Robertson led handily, and Vice President Bush finished third; in 1995, Phil Gramm tied Bob Dole. Only the 1999 test was a harbinger, when George W. Bush romped past Steve Forbes. (The poll has been run only in years when no incumbent Republican President was running for reelection, so it’s far from a regular affair.)

Based on that track record, “As Ames goes, so goes the party” would be a dubious maxim. I doubt, too, that it tells us much about the energy level of rank-and-file Republicans. I’ve seen a number of worried comments about the decline in the number of votes cast compared to the 1999 outing: to 14,302 from 23,685. Now, I can think of plenty of reasons for Republicans to be gloomy about 2008, but the straw poll turnout isn’t one of them. With three of the four top-tier contenders not competing, what was one to expect? If the next election looked terrific for the GOP, all the commentators would be emphasizing that 30 percent more ballots were cast than in 1995.

If the poll means little, it has at least furnished comic relief, in the form of Ron Paul zealots who demonstrated the depth of their libertarian convictions by trying to get the federal courts to tell the Iowa Republican Party how to run it. Now they are fashioning conspiracy theories about how Mitt Romney and Diebold rigged the results. The convergence of the fringes continues.

BTW, the Illinois Republican Party is holding its own Presidential straw poll this coming Thursday at the Illinois State Fair in Springfield. Since no candidate (so far as I know) is trying to pack the electorate, this vote may be more meaningful than Ames – not a high standard, I realize.

Historical note: The Wikipedia entry linked above doesn’t include the 1979 poll results. Here is what the Associated Press (October 15, 1979) had to say at the time:

Party regulars personally favor former CIA Director George Bush for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination, according to a straw poll released Monday by the Iowa Daily Press Association. . . .

Participants who paid $50 per ticket to see nine of their party’s presidential candidates Saturday night [October 13, 1979] in Ames returned 1,454 of the 1,639 ballots distributed, an 88.7 percent response. . . .

Bush received 35.74 percent of the ballots cast in the straw poll. Former Texas Gov. John Connally came in second with 15.35 percent, Kansas Sen. Bob Dole tallied 14.79 percent, former California Gov. Ronald Reagan had 11.28 percent and Tennessee Sen. Howard Baker received 8.20 percent of the vote for fifth place.

Other votes were scattered among Illinois Rep. Philip Crane, 5.47 percent; Illinois Rep. John Anderson with 2.94 percent; California businessman Ben Fernandez, 2.24 percent; South Dakota Sen. Larry Pressler .77 percent; former Defense Secretary Alexander Haig .14 percent; and former Minnesota Gov. Harold Stassen .07 percent.

The results listed 1.68 percent “undecided” votes and 1.33 percent of the votes for “others.”

Update (8/17/07): In case you were waiting with bated breath, the Chicago Tribune reports that Mitt Romney cruised to victory in the Illinois straw poll, with 40.4 percent of the vote. That would have been more impressive if more than 922 votes had been cast and if his state organization hadn’t made a concerted effort to get supporters to the fairgrounds for the event. The tally in full:

Mitt Romney: 373 (40.4%)
Fred Thompson: 184 (20.0%)
Ron Paul: 174 (18.9%)
Rudy Giuliani: 107 (11.6%)
John McCain: 38 (4.1%)
Mike Huckabee: 28 (3.0%)
Sam Brownback: 10 (1.1%)
Duncan Hunter: 6 (0.7%)
Tom Tancredo: 2 (0.3%)

Perhaps more significant was a poll of Republican county chairmen, to which almost half responded:

Among the 48 votes cast by the GOP county chairmen, former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, an as-yet unannounced candidate, got 22 ballots while former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani finished second with 13. Romney finished third with nine votes. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee got two votes and Arizona Sen. John McCain and California Rep. Duncan Hunter each received one vote.

None of these results – concededly weak on meaningfulness – suggests that the burst of updraft that Governor Huckabee was supposed to have gotten from finishing second in Iowa carried him as far as Illinois.

Thrift for Democrats, Part II

Last month, Democrats in the House pushed through a budget cut for the Office of Labor-Management Standards, which enforces financial disclosure rules for labor unions. It was the only unit in the Department of Labor that didn’t see its budget increased. Today, while catching up on professional reading, I came across an interesting OLMS announcement, issued not long before the Dems decided that its funding should be squeezed:

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS) has announced a plan to reduce delinquent reporting among labor unions that are required to file annual financial disclosure forms (Form LM-2, LM-3, or LM-4) with OLMS.

Every labor organization representing private sector employees is required to file a report with OLMS within 90 days after the end of its fiscal year, or further enforcement action will be pursued. Each year, however, 30 to 40 percent of unions fail to submit their reports on time, and in some instances reports remain outstanding for over one year.

OLMS’ effort to reduce this delinquency will initially focus on approximately 1,275 unions whose reports are over one year past due, including 118 of the largest unions, which are required to file the electronic Form LM-2. These unions should have filed financial disclosure forms for their fiscal years ending in 2005, with the reports due no later than March 31, 2006.

OLMS will send letters to the unions that have not filed their 2005 annual report and, after 30 days, the names of those unions that have not filed will be posted on the OLMS Web site at http://www.olms.dol.gov. Further enforcement action then will be pursued, including referral to local U.S. attorneys for civil or criminal enforcement.

Among their other legal privileges, unions are tax-exempt, that is, from the standard issue liberal point of view, their activities are underwritten by U.S. taxpayers. (That’s what the Left thinks about pension plans, charities, etc.) Other exempt organizations get little government sympathy when they are late with their required reports. A pension plan sponsor can, for instance, be fined up to $1,100 a day for tardiness. I’m sure that few Democratic congressmen would be pleased if the DoL announced that it doesn’t care much if Form 5500’s are a year or two late. Yet almost all of them are, it appears, mightily displeased at vigorous efforts to improve compliance among a different group of exempt entities.

We can add rank-and-file union members, who may be interested in timely information about how their dues money is being spent, to the groups that don’t have much clout in the 110th Congress.

Giant Sausage Ticketed in Chicago

There are few days on which the ghost of Colonel McCormick can feel proud of the pale shadow of his Chicago Tribune. Today is one of them. [Thanx to Helen Montgomery]

A massive hot dog clogged Chicago’s main artery Thursday morning.

In a rare occurrence of an encased-meat vehicle committing a traffic violation, Chicago police ticketed the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile for illegal parking on the Magnificent Mile.

The incident began at 10:57 a.m. in the 400 block of North Michigan Avenue. At least two members of the Wienermobile entourage left the vehicle in the six-lane street with its emergency blinkers on. The vehicle is registered to Kraft Foods under the Wisconsin license plate “WEENR.”

A police officer approached the Chevrolet with the 27-foot fiberglass sausage and removable bun roof. The officer radioed for a tow truck.

Matt Smith of the city’s Streets and Sanitation Department said the city would have been ready to handle the job.

“We have access to tow trucks that could have handled a Polish sausage, not just a hot dog,” Smith said.

The officer wrote the ticket and affixed it to the wiener’s footlong side mirror. Ed Walsh, a spokesman for the city Department of Revenue, said parking in a “Parking/Standing Prohibited Anytime” zone is a $50 violation.

About 15 minutes later, as curious passersby snapped pictures with their camera phones, the driver and passenger of the vehicle returned before tow trucks could arrive. “The situation was resolved without the use of ketchup, which in Chicago is a big thing,” Smith said. . . .

Sydney Lindner, a spokeswoman for Kraft Foods, said the Wienermobile is on a nationwide tour promoting a contest to sing the Oscar Mayer jingle in an upcoming commercial.

She said “regardless of the reason” the driver had for parking there, the company neither condones nor relishes such actions.

“It’s against company policy to park in undesignated area even if you’re driving a company vehicle that’s shaped like a giant hot dog,” Lindner said. “We appreciate the police doing their job and we regret any inconvenience this may have caused.”

The hot dog was last seen driving north on Michigan Avenue.

The Colonel would, of course, have found a way to blame Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Economic Derangement, Too

Bush Derangement Syndrome debilitates more areas of the brain than just the foreign policy bump. Today’s OpinionJournal Political Diary ($3.95/month, less than one percent of the cost of a haircut!) offers two instances.

First, the Democratic Presidential candidates got together in Chicago for a debate last night. Almost nobody noticed. Lucky Dems. If there had been an audience, they would have lost the votes of everybody who isn’t yearning for a reprise of Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression:

Hillary Clinton for her part wasted little time bashing the North American Free Trade Agreement for allegedly hurting workers. She promised to pursue laws that would give “real trade assistance” to workers displaced by international competition. Then Barack Obama proceeded to see and raise Mrs. Clinton, saying he would immediately phone up the presidents of Mexico and Canada to amend NAFTA with greater labor protections. [Update: I took it for granted that “president of Canada” was OpinionJournal’s imprecise paraphrase. Nope. David Frum, a former Canadian, is either appalled or amused.]

Remember who negotiated NAFTA? Maybe Mrs. and Mr. Clinton need a counseling session on spousal communication. And Canadian workers need “greater labor protections”?

Dennis Kucinich topped them all when he promised in his first week in the White House to pull America out of both NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. The crowd ate that up. Even the Chicago Bears couldn’t have gotten louder cheers at Soldier Field.

Rep. Kucinich isn’t a serious candidate, but who can doubt that he is close to his party’s heart on this issue?

OpinionJournal doesn’t quote John Edwards or Bill Richardson on free trade, but James Pethokoukis does:

Edwards: “Well, look, people don’t want a cheaper T-shirt if they’re losing a job in the process.”

Richardson: “What we need to do is say that from now on, America will adhere to all international labor standards in any trade agreemen – no child labor, no slave labor, freedom of association, collective bargaining – that is critically importan – making sure that no wage disparity exists.

American workers being, in general, the best paid in the world, Mr. Richardson is essentially calling for U.S. economic isolation. That absurdity passed unnoticed.

The last unabashed protectionist to run for the Presidency on a major party ticket was Warren G. Harding. It looks like he’ll have a successor in 2008.

Second, at a time of ubiquitous laments about high gasoline prices, my very own Congresscritter, Rahm Emanuel, makes a gesture – futile, one may hope – in favor of raising them higher still:

Congress is finally home on August recess but not before voting to keep gasoline prices high. The House overwhelmingly approved a resolution by Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois to censure the state of Indiana for granting a permit to British Petroleum to invest $3 billion in an oil refinery expansion in Whiting, Indiana. Rep. Emanuel’s resolution was pushed by Midwesterners who complained that the facility would pollute Lake Michigan.

One might think Congress would be cheering for the BP/Whiting project, the largest new investment in domestic refining capacity in decades. Existing refineries have been running at 90% to 95% capacity, prompting spikes in gas prices whenever these overworked facilities suffer maintenance outages or a recent rash of fires. As for the pollution argument, it’s a red herring. Indiana has tougher clean-water statutes than even the federal Environmental Protection Agency. The state’s own data show that the BP facility would contribute fewer pollutants to the lake than many communities that are already permitted to dump their wastewater into it.

Naturally, Mr. Emanuel, who runs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, is always first in line to blame high gas prices on President Bush’s “failed energy policy.” The story gets even richer with hypocrisy because oil companies are under blistering assault from Congress and environmental groups for not producing enough gasoline. Says Charles Drevna, head of a refinery trade group: “Every time I testify, the first question I’m asked is: “Why isn’t industry building more refineries?’” At a Senate hearing earlier this year, New York’s Chuck Schumer accosted “big oil” for buying back shares of stock rather than investing in more domestic operations. “It seems that big oil is pumping cash, rather than petrol,” he charged.

So keep in mind Mr. Emanuel’s resolution next time you’re pumping $3.50 gas. Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, one of just 28 House members who voted against the anti-refinery resolution, notes that the alternative to producing more gasoline domestically is to import more from abroad. Paradoxically, he says, the House just voted overwhelmingly in favor of “higher gas prices, out-sourcing of jobs and energy insecurity.”

A trifecta that we’ll see more of as a Democratic Congress pursues its idée fixe that we can get more energy by punishing energy producers.

Your TSA Dollars (Formerly) at Work

The ban on taking cigarette lighters onto airplanes never had a personal impact on me. I even came up with a brilliant business concept: Buy lighters for a quarter from embarking passengers (better than throwing the thing away, right?), then sell them for a dollar to arriving smokers desperate for a light. Now I see that the Transportation Safety Administration, doubtless eager to stop my prospective profiteering, has lifted the ban. Ah, well, another lost opportunity to become a billionaire. As I was browsing wistfully through news stories, I came across this startling statistic:

In 2006, airport authorities collected nearly 12 million lighters at a reported cost of US$4 million to dispose of them.

Twelve million lighters . . . 75 cents profit each . . . (deep sigh). . . .

Horcruxes and Hallows and Snape, Oh My!

In the Middle Ages, chess fanatics, thinking the regular game too short and decisive, expanded it by enlarging the board, inventing new pieces and adding ploys by which an endangered King could put off defeat. The end product of this evolution, shatranj al-Kabīr (“Great Chess”), was played on an 11x10 board, plus six “citadel” squares adjoining the field, with 17 pieces and 11 pawns to each side. The enemy King had to be checkmated three times to be killed, and one of the pawns had the ability, upon reaching the last rank for the third time, to turn into a replacement King.

The game is said to have been Tamerlane’s favorite. As a pastime between pillaging and rapine, it doubtless had its attractions, but do you wonder why it isn’t played any more?

Reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows reminded me irresistibly of shatranj al-Kabīr. Harry, Hermione and Ron must destroy one by one the hiding places (“horcruxes”) among which the Dark Lord Voldemort has divided his soul. Their quest is prolonged by the need to find the weapons that will destroy the horcruxes and by the riddle of the “deathly hallows”. The author implies a promise that these adventures will have a decisive impact on the inevitable confrontation between Harry and Voldemort. But all that they do is postpone it. The key to the outcome is – the protective charm that Lily Potter’s sacrificial love placed on Harry just before the beginning of book one!

As a teller of incidents, J. K. Rowling is often splendid. Readers of Deathly Hallows will remember Bill and Fleur’s wedding, the infiltration of the Ministry of Magic, Xenophilius Lovegood’s bizarre house, the near-fatal visit to Godric’s Hollow, the escape from Gringott’s, the return to Hogwarts, Severus Snape’s autobiography and Harry’s last talk with Dumbledore long after they have lost track of who is the true master of the Elder Wand and why.

To my mind, the Harry Potter series resembles one of those English country houses that has been enlarged and refurbished and redecorated according to the whims of successive generations, until the ensemble can’t be looked on without inducing aesthetic vertigo. If one approaches fantasy novels with the expectation of a thoroughly worked-out setting, a linear plot that leaves no end untightened and an efficient storytelling technique, J. K. Rowling will never be one of your favorite novelists. Nor will you much like Le Morte d’Arthur. The standards of the “well-made” narrative aren’t what every reader is looking for. In fact, they are a fairly recent development in literary history and could fade away within a generation or two.

Television series are constructed in much the same way as Harry Potter, particularly where the individual episodes are fitted into an overall “arc”. In a show like Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica (about which I claim no expertise, but think I know enough for these generalities), the addition of casual complexities to the story line is commonplace, with no premium on close-fitted construction. One way to understand the popularity of the Potter books, despite gaping plotholes, spur-of-the-moment alterations to the laws of the universe and occasional personality transplants, is to think of them as a TV program that had to be brought to a close after seven seasons. From that perspective, it compares quite favorably to Babylon 5.

Had I edited Miss Rowling, I would have browbeaten her into writing something completely different: The books would have stayed under 300 pages each; “laws of magic” would have been devised in advance and rigorously followed; no event would have been superfluous to the ultimate resolution; all foreshadowings would have led to substance; and every inconsistency would have been ruthlessly purged. To anyone imbued with the tastes of my generation, the result would have been a far more satisfying set of volumes. But would they have sold more copies than anything since the Bible? Of that I am not so sure. Shatranj al-Kabīr may be the next generation’s game.

John F. Kerry, Historian and Moralist

Responding to a Wall Street Journal columnist’s criticism of his nonchalant claim that the communist takeover of South Vietnam didn’t have untoward consequences – “We heard that argument over and over again about the bloodbath that would engulf the entire Southeast Asia, and it didn’t happen” – Senator John Kerry says [link probably for subscribers only, so I quote him in full],

James Taranto misinterpreted my words and misreads history (“‘It Didn’t Happen,’” Opinion, July 26). I know the tragedy that followed a tragic war. John McCain and I led the effort to locate American POWs and ultimately normalize relations with Vietnam. I traveled to Cambodia to help create a genocide tribunal to bring to justice the butchers of the killing fields.

But what did not happen was the region-wide war or immediate chaos predicted by many who believed we had to maintain our massive military presence in Vietnam. A brutal dictatorship consolidated power in Vietnam, the region’s refugee crisis worsened and two years after we left Vietnam, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge launched a genocide.

Mr. Taranto mistakenly views the violence after 1973 as a direct result of our withdrawal. In fact, the violence arose from the conditions that led us to withdraw: a Vietnamese civil war we couldn’t stop supported by a Cambodian insurgency we couldn’t bomb into submission. It’s horrifying that so many South Vietnamese suffered. But, even accepting Mr. Taranto’s estimate of 165,000 Vietnamese deaths – double that of most academic sources – this is a significant decrease from the preceding eight years when 450,000 civilians and 1.1 million soldiers were killed.

We should not repeat the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq, but let’s have an honest debate rather than a hysterical one. The agony of exiting a quagmire is that there are few certainties and no good options. That choice was created not by the advocates for changing course, but by the architects of a disastrous war.

The number of distortions and falsifications in these four paragraphs is remarkable. What the supporters of South Vietnam predicted was precisely that “a brutal dictatorship” would “consolidate power in Vietnam”. They further predicted, quite accurately, that it would kill tens of thousands of Vietnamese, imprison hundreds of thousands and drive millions into exile, and that the same catastrophes would overwhelm Laos and Cambodia. No one foresaw “region-wide war or immediate chaos”, because, unfortunately, once the U.S. cut off all aid to the free nations of Southeast Asia, in December 1974, no one there had the wherewithal to resist the communists.

South Vietnam succumbed not to civil war but to a conventional invasion from the North. Indigenous guerilla activity had largely come to an end after the failure of the Tet Offensive in 1968. The supposedly southern-bred Viet Cong increasingly consisted of Northern infiltrators, as Hanoi itself openly declared after the war. In 1972, after American troop levels had been reduced drastically, the North launched its first invasion. The South Vietnamese Army, bolstered by American air and naval support, defeated it so soundly that the communists in January 1973 accepted a peace agreement that, if its terms had been adhered to, would have permanently ended Northern aggression against the rest of Southeast Asia. For the next two years, South Vietnam was reasonably peaceful, while neither the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia nor the Pathet Lao in Laos made any appreciable progress in their wars against admittedly inept anti-communist governments.

But the American Left did not want a noncommunist Southeast Asia to endure as a monument to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. It pooh-poohed Hanoi’s violations of the Paris Accords, and the post-Watergate Congress cut off military assistance, to the point of forbidding ammunition sales to the South Vietnamese armed forces. When the North invaded again, in 1975, the South lacked the means, not the will, to defend itself. The U.S. Seventh Fleet, which could have pulverized the invaders, was strictly forbidden to intervene.

South Vietnam’s collapse in April 1975 led swiftly and inevitably to the Khmer Rouge takeover in Phnom Penh, notwithstanding Senator Kerry’s artless attempt to put as much distance as possible between that disastrous event and America’s abandonment of its allies.

Senator Kerry’s moral calculus is as disturbing as his historical revisionism. I suppose that, if South Vietnam had surrendered to Hanoi in 1963, the aggregate death toll there would have been lower. Similarly, if Europe had declined to oppose Hitler, millions of lives, a great many of them American, would have been saved. And we could avoid a lot of future deaths by hailing Osama bin-Laden as the Caliph of Islam and submitting to his beneficent rule. Resistance to tyranny costs lives and fortune. By Senator Kerry’s implicit calculations, it isn’t worth it: The murders carried out by communist Vietnam or Ba’athist Iraq are weighed equally with the sacrifices of soldiers in combat against them.

In his final paragraph, Senator Kerry writes of “the agony of exiting a quagmire”. In Vietnam, we didn’t “exit a quagmire”; we abandoned an ally, at a point where very little was needed from us. In Iraq, we are at an earlier stage, best compared, perhaps, to South Vietnam circa 1963. Of course we can “exit”, saving a few American lives and a little American money, at the price of inspiring all of our enemies with confidence that we won’t fight anywhere else either. The people of Iraq can’t exit so easily, but Senator Kerry seems to care as little for them as for the South Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians. A few years from now, he will be smilingly at work to normalize relations with post-democratic Baghdad, or will sponsor the establishment of a “genocide tribunal” for the Middle East. That was, after all, a great comfort to the dead in Cambodia.

Further reading: I haven’t footnoted this post, because two remarkable histories contain all the needed references and background: Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965 by Mark Moyar and A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam by Lewis Sorley. Eventually, when history supersedes contemporary politics, America’s treatment of Vietnam will be recognized as an unmitigated national disgrace.

Update (8/8/07): Best of the Web published readers’ responses to Senator Kerry on August 6th and 8th. The second set adds an important point: Senator Kerry compares the number of post-war murders by the Vietnamese communists to “1.1 million soldiers” killed during “the preceding eight years”. He does not note that three-quarters of those casualties were enemy troops.

[C]onsider what Kerry is claiming: that it [would have been] worth sacrificing the lives and freedom of the South Vietnamese – our ally – in order to prevent casualties on the enemy side. Imagine what the world would look like if we’d taken that approach during World War II – or, for that matter, what it will look like if we take it with Muslim terrorists.

Iraq for the Iraqis!

At least three conflicts are going on in Iraq. Separating them in our minds would promote clarity of thought.

The first is the effort of al-Qa’eda and its allies to drive the Coalition forces out of the country. This is a “war of choice” on the enemy’s part, which both Osama bin-Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri have declared to be the front line in their struggle to establish a world-dominating Islamic caliphate. Mufsidun have poured in to fight beside “al-Qa’eda of the Land of the Two Rivers”. Al-Qa’eda will win this conflict if America pulls out, and the West will win if the mufsidun give up.

The second is a civil war between two loose factions that want to replace Iraq’s democratic government with a dictatorship – either a revival of the Ba’athist regime or one emulating (and controlled by) the Iranian mullarchy. Both al-Qa’eda and Iran see advantages for themselves in fostering this conflict by aggravating enmity between the Sunni and Shi’ite communities. All the belligerents in this war oppose the elected Iraqi government and can do nothing unless it collapses. Therefore, they have dual objectives: to defeat the government and to defeat the other faction; in what order matters very little.

Finally, the elected leaders of the government disagree sharply on a variety of matters. Some are, in fact, spokesmen for one or the other of the pro-dictatorship factions. The rest aim to employ democratic means get the best possible arrangements for themselves and their constituents. This conflict is political rather than military, though the presence of anti-democrats in Parliament may blur the boundaries between it and the dictatorial camp’s aspirations for a coup d’etat.

The most obvious fact about the first conflict is the absurd disproportion between the enemy’s means and its ends. Far inferior in numbers, leadership, equipment and technology, the mufsidun have zero hope of defeating the Coalition on the battlefield. They barely have the capability for minor harassment. Recognizing this fact, they have fixed their strategy around America’s conspicuous weakness: the unwillingness of much of our political class to engage in long wars, even if casualties are low and costs affordable. In normal times, that would have been an unlikely road to success. It didn’t work for the Serbs in Bosnia, for instance. It is our enemy’s good fortune that many prominent figures on the American Left are consumed by irrational hatred of the incumbent Administration and regard its defeats as their own victories. Bush Derangement Syndrome may succeed for the mufsidun where force of arms fails.

The second conflict is, like much contemporary ethnic and sectarian strife, largely the artificial product of ambitious demagogues. In and of itself, the Sunni-Shi’a split began with an issue – must the caliph of Islam be a member of Mohammed’s family? – that lost its burning practical relevance in the 7th Century. Since then, the “sects” (probably too grand a name for them) have been little more than geographical markers. Each has customs and folkways of its own, but their religious significance is trivial. They would be no more divisive than the divergences between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Judaism, were it not for their appropriation as handy instruments for assembling mobs.

In this case, al-Qa’eda and the mufsidun perceive that vigorous bloodletting between Sunni and Shi’ite reinforces the arguments of the pro-retreat faction in America, so they have helped matters along with abundant atrocities against civilians. The “sectarian” fighting started in earnest when al-Qa’eda bombed the bombing of the al-Askareyya Shrine in February 2006, sparking Shi’ite outrage that extremist leaders channeled into counter-atrocities against ordinary Sunnis. Iran has gladly lent a hand by supplying arms to both its puppet Moqtada al-Sadr and Ba’athists who yearn for a new Saddam Hussein.

For a long time, the American strategy was to do what the Left says we ought to do: Pay little attention to internecine struggles in Iraq, and concentrate on our direct enemies. So we pursued al-Qa’eda and generally ignored the “Mahdi Army”. The “Surge” changes that policy, with the goal of winning the first conflict decisively in a fairly short time and damping the other two. The change wasn’t dictated by facts on the ground but by facts in Washington. From the hazy perspective of the Potomac, every time a terrorist murdered a group of schoolchildren, he strengthened the “proof” that America had “lost” and that it was only a matter of time before helicopters would be airlifting the last remnants of our army from the rooftops of Baghdad. So winning the war on the home front entailed adding the pro-dictatorial militias to our enemies’ list.

Inevitably, given the magical thinking that is so commonplace in Washington, the Surge included resolution of the third conflict, the hurly-burly of Iraq’s political factions, among its goals. American policy wonks devised a set of legislative proposals that, according their calculations, would give each interest group its fair and reasonable share of the spoils of government, from which national reconciliation would blossom.

The Iraqi Parliament hasn’t rushed to enact these foreign-written prescriptions into law. Maybe that is because Iraqis are incapable of governing themselves and are doomed to an ineluctable slide into chaos. Or maybe it is because the responsible members of Parliament doubt that either the al-Qa’eda invaders or the local anti-democrats will be appeased by laws concerning the allocation of oil revenues and the eligibility of former Ba’athists for government jobs.

None of the proposals that Washington has elevated to the level of “benchmarks” has much to do with fundamental principles. Their goal isn’t to make Iraqi society more open, to extend the realm of liberty or to protect oppressed minorities (Christians, for example). No, they represent an attempt to micromanage relationships about which we don’t know a great deal. Mesopotamia est omnis divisa in partes tres sounds truer here than in Baghdad or Mosul or Ramadi or Kirkuk.

Leftist sensitivity to other cultures stops at the Euphrates, it seems. The Baghdad government is declared to be an irredeemable failure unless it conforms to American dictates, though the same critics objected to America’s “imposition” of democracy. Worse still, Iraqi nonconformity has been enlisted as an excuse for giving up on the military conflicts and dismissing as irrelevant all the evidence that those wars are turning in favor of the Iraqi freedom.

The Left has an excellent chance of winning the battle that it wants to win, where the objective is to abandon Iraq to its fate. If so, the price of victory will be the transformation of its own ideology into one that is insouciant toward mass murder, scornful of the ability of foreigners to govern themselves and hostile toward democracy. The latest version of the Left looks more and more like the racist, blimpish Right of yore. I confess to an absence of surprise. The affinity between the leftist notion of liberty and practical totalitarianism was clear to Edmund Burke two centuries ago. Each passing decade has confirmed it, and the debate over Iraq is a kind of culmination.

A Thought About the Bridge Disaster

A great many bridges, all of them still standing, had worse inspection reports than the one that collapsed Thursday in Minneapolis-St. Paul. In 2005, it received a mediocre 50% rating from the Department of Transportation; “a 50 percent score or less indicates replacement may be in order”. More than 30 bridges have lower ratings and are busier than I-35W’s was. While one would like absolute safety, it’s obvious that the overall quality of bridge construction is very high. Catastrophic failures are rare and often can’t be blamed on structural deficiencies, as when the Sunshine Skyway in Tampa broke up, killing 35 people, after it was rammed by a freighter.

We’ll see a lot of panicky “rebuild every bridge right away” responses to the I-35W tragedy, but every dollar put into bridge repair is a dollar not spent on something else, and that something else may be important for public safety, too.

Democrats are already – surprise, surprise – declaring that President Bush is personally responsible for I-35W, because of his alleged stinginess. That “stinginess” included signing a six-year transportation funding bill that increased Minnesota’s federal allotment by 46 percent. The state has, however, had non-bridge priorities:

Over the past few years, we Minnesotans have spent something like a billion dollars of transportation money on a light rail system. “System,” actually, is too grand a term; it is a single line that runs from the Mall of America to downtown Minneapolis. Conservatives generally opposed light rail, viewing it as an inefficient boondoggle, and wanted to spend the money on road construction instead. But the liberals prevailed, and the billion dollars were spent. If we hadn’t spent that money on light rail, those dollars would have been available for other transportation projects. Like bridge repair.

The country is awash in money-losing mass transit programs in areas where the population density can’t conceivably justify them. That would be a good source to tap for funds if we must embark on a massive bridge-building spree.

A Step Closer to the 21st Century

With the annual moonbat convention meeting in Chicago, I’m thankful to be able to escape 300 miles westward to the NASFiC (the North American Science Fiction Convention, held only in years when the World Science Fiction Convention – this year in Yokohama, Japan – is off the continent). And what more fitting news to read during the con than this?

California-based [Moller International] has just begun production on the initial six airframes of its M200G Volantor.

Described by its creators as “the ultimate off-road vehicle", the saucer-shaped vehicle can take off and land vertically and travel at a maximum speed of 100mph.

Powered by eight of the company’s rotary engines, the vehicle can carry two passengers and glide about three metres above the ground.

Company founder Dr Paul Moller said the vehicle could travel over any surface, and was as easy to operate as a hovercraft. . . .

He said the vehicle's electronics kept the craft stabilized at no more than 10 feet altitude, which placed the craft close enough to the ground to obtain extra lift. . . .

The prototype has completed over two hundred flights with and without a pilot on board.

Air-bags surround occupants in the cockpit, while the vehicle’s on-board computer system ensures that it does not enter regulated airspace.

Moller International has not arranged for training or licensing requirements to operate the vehicle, but is prepared to offer demonstration sessions at its California base once the vehicle is ready for market.

Another story furnishes more information about how the device works:

• The M200G’s performance is similar to that of a light helicopter, but its computerised control system restricts it to within 10 feet of the ground.
• The vehicle uses multiple thrust-generating fans. Each fan is enclosed in a housing and provides thrust under the control of an independent flight control computer.
• The system ensures that each fan is available to provide stability and control during flight.
• In the event that a controller, fan or engine fails, the others will maintain the vehicle’s attitude until the vehicle can land safely.
• The vehicle can reach a maximum speed of 100 miles per hour, and is fuelled by a mixture of ethanol and water.

If there are enough orders, the price may be as low as $125,000. But wait – it runs on ethanol. I’ll bet there’s a big subsidy for purchasers in the next farm bill.

A Moment of Silence

. . . for those killed or injured in the Minneapolis-St. Paul bridge collapse, and for their families and friends. I know a great many people in the Twin Cities, some from science fiction fandom (of which the area is a long-time epicenter), others from working closely for many years with my firm’s employee benefits practice there.

If tragedies stemmed only from malice, the world would be a happier place.