At ease y’all.  Those who worry about the preparedness of the massive welfare-warfare machine that is the American military should relax. The US military has already wrestled with a weighty, waste-management matter: incontinence and urinary tract infections among its women. The (malodorous) matter made news headlines across the US in March of 2010. Our ascetic enemies, it appears, are at a disadvantage, when it comes to Esprit de corp…~ilana

In 2002, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, then Osama bin Laden’s spokesman, gave an interview to an Algerian newspaper in which he mocked the American campaign to dismantle al-Qaida, calling it a “Hollywood script.” Back then, OBL and his aides had quite a bit to snicker about. The massive welfare-warfare machine that is the American military was preoccupied with a weighty, waste-management matter: incontinence and urinary tract infections among its women. The (malodorous) matter made news headlines across the US.

Our ascetic enemies are not encumbered by feminine plumbing problems. Al-Qaida maintains Esprit de corps among its men by confining the role the ladies perform in their outfit: Wahabbi women may combust for the cause; but they do not get to disable the ranks with feminine and feminist special pleading ─ OB/GYN and urinary tract requirements, sexual harassment lawsuits, out-of–wedlock pregnancies, and welfarism.

As if to confirm al-Qaida’s expressed contempt for the Empire’s army and soft recruits; the military proceeded, back then, to launch a Hollywood-like production proper. The Pentagon, no less, endorsed a VH1 series entitled “Military Diaries,” a bit of “militarytainment” that made Abu Ghaith’s reference to a “Hollywood script” impossible to dispute.

“Military Diaries” was touted as a “powerful firsthand look at our heroes, their stories and the music that gets them through.” The viewer was treated to the thrusting pelvis and swaying breasts of a recruit by the name of Charlie, followed by Laurie, Danielle, Paul, and Jimmie, among others. These poster-girlie GIs wanted America to know that their “real duty was to provide humanitarian aid to the Afghans.” They shared with us their dreams of being “self-help authors.” And they imparted the joys of manning posts like “Diversity Awareness Officers” or “Drug and Alcohol Counselors.”

The production sure put a “human face” on our co-ed men and women of the armed forces. But it was a face that exuded mush, not mettle. And it was seen and savored by an enemy, to whom the “Promised Land” is a military victory, not a spot on Oprah Winfrey’s concave couch (due to that lady’s mighty keister).

Cut to 2010. A politically powerful faction of the military-media-industrial-congressional complex is cobbling together another production to motivate OBL and his men. It features a pathetic pop tartlet called Lady Gaga, whose iconic status, in the absence of any artistic merit, tells you all you need to know about her fans. Gaga, a celebration of all things kitsch, has recently been eviscerated by pop-culture commentator Camille Paglia, a scrappy Democrat who is adored by conservatives.

Paglia described this pretentious, middle-class American “singer,” born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, as “calculated and artificial,” a “manufactured personality”; “pallid flesh in the fetish-bondage garb of urban prostitution.” That’s all well and good (and welcome), until you discover that Paglia is terribly cross only because the God-awful Gaga ─ a facilely recycled idiot ─ is not as fine as Madonna, and may in fact be borrowing the antics of that slightly less icky, more antique character.

Indeed, in the realm of art and culture, Paglia routinely substitutes symbolism for substantive assessment. And what Paglia knows about music is dangerous. Camille has conceptualized of Madonna—who is unable to sing or compose a warble worth hearing—as “an authentic, creative artist.” For our purposes what you need to know is that the grotesque Gaga is leading the charge to repeal the rather reasonable policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” DADT does not ban gays from serving in the military; it simply prohibits gay, lesbian, and bisexual service members from “Serving openly.”

As I see it, in order to return the American military to an earlier formation ─ that of a disciplined band of men united in common purpose ─ one would need to purge it of women. Since that is impossible, leveling the promiscuous playground that is the military lies in reintroducing the proverbial closet as a symbol of discretion, not oppression. Indiscriminate discretion ought to be the rule for homos, heteros, and the sexually indeterminate. All should rut in private, and off base.

A legal advocacy group ─ The Service Members Legal Defense Network ─ disagrees. SLDN is backing Gaga in seeking to add the gay parade to the list of services enjoyed by America’s military women (those with the Y chromosome included). An entourage of gay men and women, on active military duty, flanks the gaudy exhibitionist on her outing extravaganzas. They are not the least bit embarrassed to be associated with the Gaga melodrama.

The specter of Gaga draped in meat ─ insubordinate service members, who doggedly follow her to rallies, and have cameoed at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards in Los Angeles ─ tells the enemy a lot about trends infecting America’s army. Gaga advocates a new reeducation program that “targets straight soldiers who are ‘uncomfortable’ with gay soldiers in their midst.”

“Our new law is called ‘If you don’t like it, go home!'” she squealed, raising her porcelain-doll-like arm at a rally in Maine on Monday. “It is unjust for goodhearted gay soldiers to be booted from military service while straight soldiers who harbor hatred toward gays are allowed to fight for their country,” Gaga cooed.

Somewhere, someplace, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith must be having a good giggle.

©2010 By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
September 24

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Holding out hope for that elusive humble foreign policy is proving futile. Barack Obama had promised originally to exit Iraq within 16 months of taking office. Now he is wobbling about that war, and has indicated he might “refine” his policy. Or, rather, renege on his campaign commitments.

Obama’s liberal acolytes—and some libertarians still hankering after that humble foreign policy—will soon discover that the troops he withdraws from Iraq will not be heading home; 9000 soldiers will be packed off to Afghanistan to join the 36,000 American fighting in that theater.

You see, Obama wants to maintain a meaty presence in Afghanistan. He may even be conjuring up new monsters and new missions. This is because Obama needs a “good” war. Electability in fin de siècle America hinges on projecting strength around the world—an American leader has to aspire to protect borders and people not his own. In other words, Obama needs a war he can call his own.

In Afghanistan, Obama has found such a war.

By promising to broaden the scope of operations in Afghanistan, Obama has found a “good” war to make him look the part. By staking out Afghanistan as his preferred theater of war—and pledging an uptick in operations against the Taliban—Obama achieves two things: He can cleave to the Iraq policy that excited his base. While winding down one war, he can ratchet up another, thereby demonstrating his commander-in-chief credentials.

The polls tell Obama that Americans want out of Iraq. And more Americans want to leave immediately than want to stay to “stabilize” the situation. Americans have learned this much from Iraq: Democracy has not sprung Athena-like from her father’s head. Surge, smurge; this form of government will not take hold in Iraq, not in our lifetime. And no matter how long we linger. Although they are hardly enthusiastic about the prospects of an interminable conflict there, voters are more ambivalent about Afghanistan.

If a presidential hopeful needed to buttress his commander in chief bona fides, as Obama apparently does, Afghanistan would be the place to do it. The initial mission in Afghanistan was, after all, a just one. Going after al-Qaida in Afghanistan at the time was the right thing to do and was a legitimate act of retaliation and defense accommodated within Just War teachings. Al-Qaida was responsible for the murder of 3,000 Americans. The Taliban succored al-Qaida and its leader bin Laden. The President had told the hosting Taliban to surrender bin Laden and his gang. The Taliban refused. America invaded. So far so good.

But that initial mission mutated miraculously, and now we are doing in Afghanistan what we’re doing in Iraq: nation building. Nations building is Democrat for spreading democracy. Spreading democracy is Republican for nation building. These interchangeable concepts stand for an open-ended military presence with all the pitfalls that attach to Iraq.

Americans are currently training the Afghan army. As in Iraq, it’ll take years if not decades before the training wheels can be removed. The men of the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions have made magnificent progress in pushing the Taliban back. But the gains are short-lived. The Taliban invariably regroup. Their stake in that country is simply greater than ours. Always will be. Then there are the costs and the casualties. When Special Forces target the Taliban, they frequently infringe on tribal territory instead. Civilians die. Tribal elders are enraged, and rightly so.

Nation building in that country also entails policing a corruption-riddled police force. Afghani officers of the law are “uniformed thieves.” They run the opium trade by which the impoverished Afghani farmers survive. Somewhere on the food chain sit the drug traffickers. We mediate between them and other crime bosses, or war lords, as they are known. When we supply impoverished farmers with basic supplies, the Taliban first fleece these long-suffering folks and then punish them for collaborating with the Americans. By swooping down to save the locals from the Taliban we cripple them with kindness and deepen their dependency.

Another of the contradictions of occupation: The Pashtun population we patronize happens to disdain the central government we hope to strengthen. So it goes: We help local groups we believe to be patriotic, at the same time, end up establishing an authoritarian protectorate. Pakistan anyone?

So, as Obama sets forth strategically to ingratiate the conflict in Afghanistan on his constituents—all in order to flaunt his fitness for the office—remember: This war too must end.

©2008 By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
July 18

*Screen pic courtesy here.

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This war was first and foremost an injustice—a massive moral failure. For how else does one describe the willful, unprovoked, ruinous attack on a Third World country, whose military prowess was a fifth of what it was when hobbled during the gulf war, and which had no navy or air force, and was no threat to American national security? ~ilana

McCain demonstrated his inability to tell Shiite from Shinola ~ilana

Michael Ware, the best war-time correspondent broadcasting from Baghdad, tried to remind his CNN colleagues covering the Petraeus-Crocker extravaganza that “the war is not a campaign event.” During this valiant but vain effort, Ware said: “I have come almost directly from the war…some people are living this thing.”

Ware, who is seldom caught off-guard by events in Iraq, and who’d been briefly held captive by al Qaida, is still a world away from the reality of American politics. The made-for-television event, down to the crush of reporters and canned performances from the presidential candidates, dismayed the tough reporter in that it was “more about the campaigns than about the war itself.”

Against this background, both amusing and macabre, Gen. David H. Petraeus put on a bravura performance. Petraeus, acting as a military man-cum-unelected policy maker, defended a pie-in-the-sky policy over and above an unviable military mission. It was something to behold how Petraeus managed to pull back from the unconstitutional abyss each time he was about to enunciate the policy he was manifestly promoting, if not crafting.

Petraeus’ Princeton smarts, however, did little to pierce his bafflegab about equations, this or the other co-efficient, “battlefield geometry,” and “non-linear” political progress.” All in all, we were informed that security in Iraq was “significantly better,” but still “fragile and reversible.” The surge had worked, but not well enough to allow a significant drawdown of troops. The troops would stay, at least until the changing of the guard in November.

Bush’s boy in Baghdad has given the president the backing for a policy the American people have repudiated. It is well-known that Bush regularly bypasses Petraeus’ superiors, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen. They both understand “the broad view of our national security needs … and the risks posed by stretching the force too thin,” countered Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee. To preclude that “broad view,” Bush has habitually sidestepped the chain of command. Chain of command, separation of powers, limited and enumerated powers—winking at those fundamentals is all in a day’s work for W.

But boy, did Clinton corner Ryan Crocker! Hillary exposed the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and his bosses for the extraconstitutional sham they’re running. It transpires that the government of Iraq intends to ask the Iraqi parliament to vote on whether to provide the legal authority for U.S. troops to continue to conduct operations in Iraq. Why in bloody blue blazes, Clinton demanded to know, was this administration not asking the United States Congress to vote on that too?

Had Obama so deftly exposed the way in which the administration is shunting aside the American people and their (lame) representatives, you’d never have heard the end of it. In response, Crocker predictably consigned to the executive branch decisions to be rightfully made by “We the People.” The Decider decides under the Bush administration’s constitutional scheme. The “advise-and-consent procedure” would not be required in this matter, ma’am, quipped Crocker in Orwellian: “We intend to negotiate this as an executive agreement.”

Indeed, Petraeus had already informed the president he’d like to “wait until the summer” before deciding whether to reduce troops or not. Bush has fixed the policy around Petraeus. Both have already shaken hands over the “agreement.”

Most Americans are unaware that there’s anything wrong with the way our executive dictatorship does business on our behalf. What they know about the powers of the people, the separation of powers, and the imperative of checks and balances is positively dangerous—almost as dangerous as McCain’s knowledge of al-Qaida.

When cementing his open-ended commitment to usher in Utopia in Iraq—”a peaceful, stable, prosperous, democratic state that poses no threat to its neighbors and contributes to the defeat of terrorists”—McCain also demonstrated his inability to tell Shiite from Shinola:

McCain: There are numerous threats to security in Iraq and the future of Iraq. Do you still view Al Qaeda in Iraq as a major threat?

Petraeus: It is still a major threat, though it is certainly not as major a threat as it was say 15 months ago.

McCain: Certainly not an obscure sect of the Shiites overall?

Al-Qaida international and Al-Qaida Iraq are Sunni. Call them Wahhabis, Salafis, Takfiris, if you like, but not Shiites!

From then on it was all downhill. Clinton complained that “the longer we stay in Iraq, the more we divert resources not only from Afghanistan, but other international challenges, as well.” The lady would prefer to deficit spend elsewhere in the world; pursue a more Democratic “mission” or “war.”

Obama hedged his words, offering meekly that the US invasion was a “massive strategic blunder.” Is that all it was?

This war was first and foremost an injustice—a massive moral failure. For how else does one describe the willful, unprovoked, ruinous attack on a Third World country, whose military prowess was a fifth of what it was when hobbled during the gulf war, and which had no navy or air force, and was no threat to American national security?

©2008 By Ilana Mercer
WorldNetDaily.com
April 11

The post The Decider’s Dictatorship appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Senator Hillary Clinton and neoconservative blogger Andrew Sullivan share more than a belief that “Jesus, Mohamed, and Socrates are part of the same search for truth.” They’re both Christians who won’t confess to their sins.

Both were enthusiastic supporters of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, turned scathing and sanctimonious critics of the war. Neither has quite come clean. Both ought to prostrate themselves before those they’ve bamboozled, those they’ve helped indirectly kill, and whichever deity they worship. (The Jesus-Mohamed-and-Socrates profanity, incidentally, was imparted by Sullivan, during a remarkably rude interview he gave Hugh Hewitt. The gay activist-cum-philosopher king was insolent; Hewitt took it .)

I won’t bore you with the hackneyed war hoaxes Sullivan once spewed, only to say that there was not an occurrence he didn’t trace back to Iraq: anthrax, September 11, and too few gays in the military—you name it; Iraq was behind it. Without minimizing the role of politicians like Clinton, who signed the marching orders, neoconservative pundits like Sullivan provided the intellectual edifice for the war, also inspiring impressionable young men and women to sacrifice their lives and limbs to the insatiable Iraq Moloch.

For her part, Clinton the turncoat has refused to atone for her role in the prosecution of an unjust war. During the Democratic presidential candidates’ debate in New Hampshire, she was asked whether she regretted “voting to authorize the president’s use of force against Saddam Hussein in Iraq without actually reading the national intelligence estimate, the classified document laying out the best U.S. intelligence at that time.” Her reply: “I feel like I was totally briefed. [Expect the “I-feel-like” locution to proliferate if a woman is ensconced in the White House.] I knew all the arguments. I knew all of what the Defense Department, the CIA, the State Department were all saying. And I sought dissenting opinions, as well as talking to people in previous administrations and outside experts.”

Clinton is claiming to have possessed perfect knowledge from which she managed somehow to derive less than perfect conclusions, and for which she blames Bush! In authorizing Bush to go to war, the knavish Clinton insists that she believed (or rather “felt like”) the president would first let Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei and his team of weapons inspectors search for WMD, a task they were performing at the time of the invasion, and only then invade Iraq. But Bush played a trick on her. He switched his strategy. Instead of searching for WMD first and then invading, Bush invaded and then searched for WMD. Poor Polly; she didn’t suspect the president had demanded powers that were not constitutionally his—the power to commit the country to war belongs to Congress—because he wanted to … go to war.

Here’s what’s really happening. Those who were 100 percent wrong on the Iraq war want to, somehow, retain their credibility and pretend that those of us who got it 100 percent right did so by coincidence. Not if I can help it. Like the remarkable Rep. Ron Paul, opponents of the invasion were right because we cleaved to the kind of intellectual and moral principles that were immutably true before Sept. 11, after it, and forever after.

Objective reality was a start: Iraq was an economically desperate, secular dictatorship, utterly antagonistic to Islamic fundamentalism. At the time of the invasion, it had acquiesced to inspectors, was being criss-crossed by teams of them, hadn’t any ties to al-Qaida or a hand in Sept. 11; was a Third-World nation, whose military prowess was a fifth of what it was when hobbled during the Gulf War. It had no navy or air force, and was no threat to American national security.

If objective reality proved problematic for the skittish Sullivan, as a Catholic, he might have deferred to the traditions of natural law and just war. If the natural prohibition against aggressive, unprovoked wars also struck Sullivan as unintuitive, he ought to have contemplated what the Founding Fathers provided. A limited, constitutional republican government, by definition, can never pursue the kind of 21st-century Manifest Destiny Bush was chasing. If it does, it is destined to become limitless, unconstitutional, and dictatorial.

To be fair, Sullivan did bury in a Time Magazine column an expression of “a real sense of shame and sorrow that so many have died because of errors made by their superiors, and by writers like me.” This alone makes him infinitely nobler than Clinton, for what that’s worth. Both ought to credit their betters—pundits and a presidential candidate—for not becoming mired in moral and intellectual confusion.

The Roman author Syrus said that “to confess a fault freely is the next thing to being innocent of it.” Sullivan, Clinton—and the many other former war proponents now posing as veteran opponents of the invasion—have skipped what ought to have been a public confession.

© 2007 By Ilana Mercer
WorldNetDaily.com

    June 8

The post Confess, Clinton; Say You’re Sorry, Sullivan appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Better a people that turns on government in troubled times than a people that turns to government in such times ~ilana

Better a people that turns on government in troubled times than a people that turns to government in such times. So it was heartening to observe how the Spanish, in the elections that followed the savage Islamist attack on four commuter trains in Madrid, chose to sack their sitting statists.

Perhaps Sept. 11 is responsible for the love-it-or-leave-it attachment Americans have to their government. But, cajoled by their minders in the media, Americans have refused even to hold this government accountable for the still-concealed scandal surrounding the 9-11 attacks or the lies that constituted the casus belli for the war on Iraq. Instead of demanding obedience from their officials, Americans demand from them “leadership” – a euphemism, if ever there was one, for bigger, more “energetic” government.

We in the United States rallied around the government after 9-11, mistakenly equating patriotism with empire building. The Spanish, however, after suffering their own terrorist outrage, fired their foreign adventurers. They did not confuse their own interests with the will of their government, especially considering the ousted Popular Party had rammed through a most unpopular policy – 90 percent of Spaniards did not support joining the coalition of the bribed and the bullied in Iraq.

To make matters worse, following the Madrid bombings, the soon-to-be-booted Popular Party leader Jose Maria Aznar and his officials began a campaign of lies to conceal the identity of the killers. Aznar blamed the radical Basque separatist group, ETA, for the atrocity. When the truth surfaced, a brief cover-up of the cover-up was attempted. Government officials denied that they had issued briefs to local and foreign journalists and diplomats blaming ETA for the bombings and ruling out Islamic extremists categorically.

Nevertheless, the Spanish people correctly suspected that al-Qaida affiliates were behind the coordinated attacks. Overcome by sorrow and later incensed by anger, 11 million of them streamed into the streets to give vent to their sadness and rage. They then promptly replaced the incumbents.

There can be little doubt that the Spanish people intend to deal swiftly and severely with the cruel and craven murderers who slaughtered 201 people and wounded 1,500 more. Contrary to the chattering classes, by ousting the Popular Party in favor of the Socialists, Spaniards did not “cave in” to terrorism. This would be the case only if one were to conflate the fight against terrorism with the war in Iraq. The Spaniards didn’t.

Despite the condescension with which the American media monolith treats them, the Spanish electorate was not timid – it was bold. It had the gall to say no to tyranny – government tyranny. “Prosecute the war on terror on our terms or else you are fired” was the message.

The Spanish object to the war in Iraq because they thought it inimical to their own interests, not because they wanted to appease al-Qaida. Divesting from Iraq remains the prudent thing for all the parties involved. What sense is there in sacrificing blood and treasure in Iraq for the sole purpose of irritating al-Qaida? (Not much else is going to be achieved there – not in our lifetime.) There are other more effective ways to annoy al-Qaida (killing its members in covert operations, for starters).

The American punditocracy is crediting the Spanish voter’s “cowardice” with giving al-Qaida a significant geopolitical triumph. This affront aside, the claim is a crude simplification at best. Its premise is that the Spanish backed down. In reality, they’ve merely parted strategic company with the United States – they don’t agree that the only effective fight against terror is tailor-made in America.

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the Spanish prime minister elect, it would seem, can chew gum and walk at the same time. He has already declared that his “most immediate priority will be to fight terrorism.” And protecting Spain, he has decided, has nothing do with occupying Iraq.

It was not al-Qaida but the Spanish voter that unseated the Popular Party. Britain’s Tony Blair, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, Australia’s John Howard and Japan’s Junichiro Koizumi – all of whom disregarded the will of their peoples on Iraq – may suffer the same fate as Aznar.

Finally, right-wingers should understand that the election of a socialist government is only distressing if one pretends there is a meaningful difference between modern-day conservative and socialist governments. George Bush’s dedication to big “beneficent” government makes him every bit the socialist John Kerry is. Most Western democracies are fittingly termed Third Way governments because they embody a principles-bereft pragmatism situated between the old Left and the new neoconservative Right.

The Democrats and the Republicans don’t disagree significantly on foreign policy. Both are equally keen on empire building in the guise of nation building. The only difference is that the former are multilateralists and the latter unilateralists. They are both socialists in sheep’s clothing.

The fortunate Spanish voters had an alternative. And they seized the day.

©By ILANA MERCER

   WorldNetDaily.com

   March 19, 2004

The post THE SPANISH PRISONERS FREED appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Without let, the United States continued to bully its way to war, in the process, bribing one opponent—Turkey—with American taxpayers’ funds and thus attempting to suppress and subvert a democratic vote passed in a democratic congress; threatening another—Russia—with the loss of oil “rights” in a conquered Iraq; and generally dictating the terms of debate, including to frame as a moral failure any opposition in the Security Council to an invasion of a prostrate Iraq.

Amidst this chilling swagger, one thing became clear: The Russians got it. The Germans got it. The French got it. The Canadians got it, and many British and European people got it. Even Hollywood, in its invincible ignorance, was able to grasp why the war Washington and Whitehall were about to wage was unjust.

What does this say about most of the nation’s pundits, who never stopped licking their chops for war? What does it say about those who supported conquering and occupying a sovereign member of the international community? They’ve lost their moral and intellectual moorings. They’re even dumber, and certainly far more politically corrupted and co-opted, than the likes of the bug-eyed bovine Susan Sarandon.

Iraq had not attacked in 12 years and was not poised to attack the U.S. or its neighbors.

To attack Iraq was to launch a purely offensive, non-defensive war. This flouts the Christian duty to do no harm to one’s neighbors. It flouts the Jewish teachings, which instruct Jews to robustly and actively seek justice. It flouts “Just War Theory,” developed by great Christian minds like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine. It flouts the libertarian axiom, which prohibits aggression against non-aggressors.

And it flouts what the Founding Fathers provided.

A limited, constitutional republican government, by definition, doesn’t, cannot, and must never pursue what Mr. Bush is after, and what paleoconservative Gladden J. Pappin called “a sort of twenty-first-century Manifest Destiny.” The fact that it does, can, and is intent on spreading global democracy by death and destruction indicates how limitless, unconstitutional, and dictatorial American government truly is.

I’m no pacifist. While I don’t condone the lingering American presence in Afghanistan, and while I doubt the abilities of the U.S. military to contain al-Qaida there, I supported going after bin Laden’s group in that country. That was a legitimate act of retaliation and defense, accommodated within St. Augustine’s teachings, whereby a just war is one “that avenges wrongs, when a nation or state has to be punished, for refusing to make amends for the wrongs inflicted by its subjects.”

Al-Qaida was responsible for the murder of 3,000 Americans. The Taliban openly succored the organization and its masterminding leadership. Mr. Bush had asked the hosting Taliban to surrender bin Laden and his gang. The Taliban refused, insisting on defending their murderous guests.

The impending attack on Iraq also flunked the criterion for a preemptive war, facilitated in St. Augustine’s idea of the “just cause,” whereby it’s permissible to attack someone who would otherwise shortly and imminently attack you.

The Israeli Six-Day War is a good example of a legitimate preemptive war. (Although, to be accurate, Jordan initiated the first strike.) Before Israel proceeded to deal them a debilitating blow, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon had divided their labor in stepping up raids into Israel’s territory, shelling her farms and villages, amassing troops on her borders, signing a pact, kicking UN monitors out of the Sinai, and blockading Israel’s main shipping route to Asia.

Notwithstanding Colin Powell’s multimedia presentation of circumstantial and speculative bunkum, there was no evidence that Iraq was positioned to pounce as Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt were; nor that Iraq recently posed a “real and imminent” danger to the U.S. or her neighbors. The Bush administration continued, however, to mount a blitz of Goebbels-worthy misinformation in order to discredit the thorough job the inspectors were doing.

In the 2,000 kilometers he crisscrossed in three weeks of searching for nuclear development activities, in the 75 facilities examined, in 218 nuclear inspections at 141 sites, including 21 newly discovered sites, Hans Blix’s colleague, Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei, met with an “overall deterioration” and disrepair in Iraqi infrastructure. There was no trace of North Korean or Iranian-style firing up of production. In his account, ElBaradei did make polite mention of an investigation into reports (spread by the U.S.) regarding Iraq’s uranium transactions: They were “not authentic,” he wrote. The American power-worshipping chattering classes (and networks) had concealed that the reports were forgeries!

Blix’s own cautious report details no evidence of “mobile production units” for weapons of mass destruction. The units Collin Powell warned of turned out to be mobile food-testing laboratories. Iraq’s improving, although still less than optimal, cooperation was certainly not a legitimate cause for war.

As a counterweight to “Just War Theory,” which places excess faith in the motives of public authorities, Americans have the Founding Fathers.

In his pre-war National Press Conference, however, Bush showed he hadn’t a clue what was and what was not constitutional. After claiming his job was to protect America, and that this was the essence of his crusade, Bush immediately contradicted himself: “There’s a lot more at stake than just American security… freedom is at stake,” he said, going on to indicate his plan to “deal with” totalitarianism wherever it presents itself.

James Madison predicted this craven and wicked propensity: “The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it,” he wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1798.

Duly, The Founders vested war powers not with the executive but with Congress! The framers entrusted the declaration of war to the legislature so as to avoid what we’ve seen play out. What The Founders could not have foretold, given their own scruples, is the cowardly abnegation by this legislature. This Congress, like many before it, simply surrendered authority to the president, sans debate, thus forsaking the people.

©By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
March 12, 2003

*Image credit

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Most people don’t know who Haim Sapir is. Had he been an American, Sapir would have been declared a hero. Had he been an American, Sapir would be clamoring for his halo on the talk-show circuit. He’d have a gooey-lipped Fox News ditz, bubbling with questions like, “What went through your mind when you killed the non-terrorist Hesham Mohamed Hadayet at the El Al ticket counter, in LAX, on the Fourth of July?”

We came to know about the slightly built Israeli, who tackled and shot the Egyptian, not from the laconic Israelis, but from an American eyewitness, who suctioned himself to a television camera at the first opportunity.

Americans have a tough time distinguishing real from phony heroes. Sapir was just doing his job. He was trained to take out the enemy in 30 seconds, and he probably thinks he didn’t quite measure up. But for Americans, who live in a world festooned with symbolism and sentimentality, such matter-of-fact realities may be difficult to grasp.

When you’re given to emotional flights of fancy, your leaders are better able to obscure the reality on the ground. For one, they can hide the fact that the military is no longer doing anything that will advance the good of its countrymen or punish the enemy. Leaders can, moreover, give The War its own momentum, as this administration has done, by hyping it as a symbolic war.

For example, facts and common sense indicated Iraq should not have been attacked. If anything, threatening to attack a nation that had not aggressed against us was bound to make a dormant but dangerous Saddam Hussein act recklessly. To disguise these hard specifics, the administration whipped up a frenzy, framing its unprovoked aggression as a metaphoric battle of good against evil, and launching the U.S. on a figurative, wild-goose chase.

There is, however, a real war—its battlefront is in our midst. With the July-Fourth murders of Victoria Hen and Yaakov Aminov, we got a lesson on how semantics can conceal the slow war of attrition here at home—where the citizens are the unwitting warriors, the leaders their mortal enemies. The other lesson gleaned was that no administration will ever allow Americans to defend themselves by singling out and ejecting the fifth columnists living among them.

At this juncture we find Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, who lived in the U.S. quite comfortably. On July Fourth, 2002, politicians moved like lightning to depict Hadayet as a perpetrator of a random attack. The fact that Hadayet was a semiautomatic, sword-wielding Islamist, whose family departed mysteriously for Egypt a week prior to the Los Angeles International Airport attack, was, apparently, sheer coincidence. Or so claimed Ari Fleischer, the FBI, state politicians, and almost all the pointy-heads on television.

If this performance is anything to go by, the tack is to convince Americans that their enemies at home are simply lone lunatics. Isolated incidents, after all, don’t adequately support demands for culturally compatible immigration policies, for profiling, or for large-scale deportations—all of which need to happen if lives are to be safeguarded. In the absence of a cause for drastic change, Americans will be forced to accept their lot and…die silently.

And so it was that a speedy amen was given to the “isolated incident” theory. Americans had to be convinced, and fast, that the war effort needed to grow just enough to support Bush’s worldwide faith-based offensive but not quite sufficiently to allow Americans to protect life at home. That is, to convince them Iraq had to be attacked, but also impress upon them that they must continue to open their borders to enemies like the Hadayets of the world.

No surprise then that the Debkafile‘s Counter-Terror Sources had information about Hadayet that is at odds with the random-event humbug. It appears that Hadayet was an al-Qaida plant, member of a sleeper-cell, a fact backed by no less than the gray eminence of the Arab press, the London-based Al Hayat! As a member of the Egyptian Jihad Islami, al-Qaida’s primary operational arm, the Egyptian gunman likely met twice in California with one of the Jihad Islami chiefs, Dr. Ayman Zuwahri, also Osama bin Laden’s deputy.

The man fits the profile of the kind of terrorist who has plagued airlines and terminals for the past twenty years. But with a trick of the tongue, he was declared a mismatch, nothing but an artifact.

© By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
July 10, 2002

The post THE REAL WAR IS AT HOME appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Violation of property rights by government hardly raises objections. If it did, the appropriate reaction to the banning by John Magaw of firearms in the cockpit would be: “Whose property is it anyway?” American airlines are, ostensibly, privately owned. Why, then, is the transportation secretary’s minion not allowing rightful owners to defend their property?

The dangers for commercial aviation of such a prohibition, arguably, have a lot to do with turning ownership—in this case airline ownership—into conditional tenure.

If things were as they ought to be, we wouldn’t chafe about whether pilots should carry guns or not. Any tension would revolve around passengers choosing the airline that optimizes their peace of mind. Passenger X’s reasons for taking airline A to his destination might be because the carrier’s pilots are armed. Mrs. Y’s overriding priority is to ensure her young daughters are not subjected to the mandatory pat downs—she chooses airline B, because its security personnel profile passengers.

In a word, true market competition would arise, and the consumer would be in a position to shape the delivery of security through his buying or his abstention from buying. This would be possible if airlines were not merely nominally private, as they are now, but were instead in a position to freely fine-tune their responses to consumer demand without interference from Congress and the regulators. It stands to reason that the stronger the proprietor’s rights in his property, the better he is able to respond to the consumer.

Since regulation replaces consumer preferences with bureaucratic decision-making, it invariably instates the wrong standards or simply settles on lower standards than those of the consumer. While business will pay a steep price in the free market for misreading the consumer, a government-granted reprieve is always on hand in a regulated industry, especially one that is considered an essential part of the national infrastructure, as civil aviation is. On the heels of September 11, government handed the airline industry a multi-billion-dollar bailout, as well as immunity from lawsuits. Thus were the airlines released from responsibility for the security of their passengers.

Government-run airports were—and still are—responsible for further vitiating passenger safety. As explained by economist Robert Murphy in an article entitled “The Source of Air-Travel Insecurity”:

The federal government had established minimum-security guidelines and then forced the airlines to chip in their share to pay for them. Whatever their airline, passengers were funneled through a common security checkpoint, staffed by a third-party company. In such an environment, it would have been silly for an individual airline to spend millions of dollars to exceed the government’s minimum standards by providing expert security personnel. Because of the setup of [government-run] airports, every other airline would have benefited too from this arrangement, so it is doubtful that such expenditure would have been rewarded by increased consumer patronage. Further, because the public naively believes the government when it “guarantees” air safety, even if an individual airline could have realistically offered better security measures than its competitors, consumers would still have felt that rival carriers were safe.

Only when an airline can undertake “curb-to-curb” handling of its passengers will it stand both to reap the benefits that arise from providing superior service, as well as incur full liability for forsaking passenger safety. This is possible only in a privatized airport, where freedom of association and freedom of contract aren’t overridden or blurred by government, and where responsibility isn’t collectivized.

Alas, the recent federalizing of airport security has removed even the limited involvement the airlines had in the protection of their passengers, leaving no doubts about the political commitment of this administration to full socialization of airline security. With civil servants-cum-political appointees now overseeing the industry, airlines have to get in line and wait to be assigned a federal marshal, if they want to defend their passengers and property.

Granting the airlines the right to arm employees—and the freedom to privately contract with on-board security providers—will obviate somewhat the inevitable security pitfalls of a nationalized airport.

Closer to home—and equally ominous—is the manner in which the Fair Housing Act erodes property rights, and, with them, the right to safeguard our homes.

According to the Act, a property owner cannot “discriminate against any person … in the sale or rental of a dwelling … because of race, color, religion … or national origin.”

An essential attribute of ownership is the right to exclude, a right that could come in very handy considering that apartment building owners have been warned by the FBI (for what it’s worth) about the possibility that al-Qaida operatives may rent suites and plant explosives in them.

© By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
June 5, 2002

The post WHOSE PROPERTY IS IT ANYWAY? appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

The film “Spy Games” reached a crescendo as retiring CIA officer Robert Redford transfers $282,000 of his life’s savings to an account in the Cayman Islands. The money is supposed to help pay for the rescue of Redford’s bureau protégé Brad Pitt, who has been “burned” by his employers at the CIA for going solo. Pitt turns rogue, when he has a revelation. He discovers that working for the CIA is a dirty business. For years, Pitt manages to swim in some very polluted waters until he becomes romantically entangled. The object of his affections is a bitter British bit, who herself is no stranger to blood sports. In one of her varied incarnations as a human rights activist, this gentle soul blows up a building. In the process, she kills the son of a Chinese diplomat. Unbeknownst to Pitt’s love interest, the CIA offers her up to the Chinese in exchange for a captive American operative. No great loss, says I, but not according to Pitt, who attempts to rescue the girl from this infernal pit. In the process, Pitt is captured, tortured, and is about to be put to death, when Redford pulls a clever stunt.

As the Cayman Islands transaction is playing out on the screen, my mind becomes tangentially-but necessarily-preoccupied. I confess, I can easily become bored during a film, and am wont to tug at the sleeve of my better quarter and, not unlike a two-year-old, ask questions: “I’m not sure,” I tell the wincing man, “that Redford would be able to complete such a transaction now, not with the new anti-terrorism laws.” “Can’t you leave me in peace,” comes the poor man’s tortured reply, a line he has commandeered from Basil Fawlty of “Fawlty Towers.”

Back home, I attempt to search for the relevant information among the sea of “Legislation Related to the Attack of September 11.” The contagion includes nine “Bills and Joint Resolutions Signed Into Law,” nine “Other Resolutions Approved,” fifteen items of “Legislation With Floor Action,” and dozens of “Legislation Without Floor Action.” Sure enough, the protagonist-not to mention the screenplay writer-in Spy Games would have found his style cramped somewhat by the new USA Patriot Act. Banker’s secrecy agreements notwithstanding, Redford’s broker would probably be wise to “file a report of a suspicious financial transaction.” An amendment to this act indeed mandates that a registered broker submit a suspicious activity report.

The bills that have already been signed into law have been exposed many times over for their assaults on liberties, assaults that are not commensurate with safety. The banking subterfuge is no different, and neither is it new. As Veronique de Rugy of the Cato Institute notes, “Financial transactions and bank accounts in the United States have been monitored for some time now.” Unfortunately, this monitoring-a spying game that the American Bankers Association pegs at roughly $10 billion a year-didn’t detect the nine SunTrust accounts used in Florida by the terrorists involved in the attack of the World Trade Center.

The USA Patriot Act is indeed supposed to provide “Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.” In theory, the Act could certainly make an alien with terrorist affinities “ineligible for admission or deportable,” that is if such ties were readily traceable. The Act cannot void of vipers the many U.S-based Jihad nesting grounds, set up for the purpose of funneling ideological trainees into the terrorism trade, just as “French laws monitoring bank accounts and illegal activities don’t stop Algerian terrorists living in France from regularly murdering people by placing bombs in subways.”

If the existing votes-for-visas immigration policy were not bad enough, Bill S1424 proposes to grant officials “permanent authority” to confer an “S” visa on an alien if he can supply critical information with respect to criminal or terrorist organizations. The thought of bureaucrats freely using visas as bait to recruit operatives for the intelligence community is chilling. Still less confidence-inspiring is the notion of releasing into American neighborhoods individuals who are in a position to rat out an al-Qaida member.

Then there are the Resolutions condemning any “discrimination” against Muslim Americans. Aware as we are that freedom of association has long been prohibited, and forced integration mandated-does this Resolution also condemn sensible security-related profiling? If so, it is positively perilous to our safety.

Many-if not most-bills have deceiving titles. The appellation of the “Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act” masks a bailout bill for the airline industry. Other bills like the one proposed by, wouldn’t you have guessed, “the Hildebeast,” are worse than useless. Sen. Clinton spearheaded an increase in funding to “mental health providers serving public safety workers affected by the terrorist attacks of September 11.” The de rigueur therapy used to “treat” such workers would be crisis intervention and debriefing. This psychotherapeutic modality is useless as far as efficacy goes, and may even be harmful to its recipients.

A cursory perusal of the legislation related to the attack serves as an intemperate-and much needed-reminder that the “work” of the legislator is plain fatuous. What on earth are these people doing by issuing “a joint resolution expressing the sense of the Senate and House of Representatives regarding the terrorist attacks launched against the United States”? Or how about a joint resolution encouraging every United States citizen to display the flag of the United States? Or one “condemning any price gouging with respect to motor fuels during the hours and days after the terrorist acts of September 11”? To paraphrase journalist Barbara Amiel’s memorable words, government is keeping out of our bedrooms, but what is it doing in every other room?

I don’t mean to sound callous, but being blown up by terrorists is no reason to give victims awards for valor. The deaths are a result of horrible happenstance; they are not conscious acts of bravery. Yet there is a spasm afoot to confer the highest of honors on “civilian employees of the Department of Defense who are killed or wounded by a terrorist attack.”

Fido has not yet been given the Purple Heart for his olfactory contributions to the September 11 rescue efforts. But one giddy Rep. by the name of Benjamin Gilman wants Congress to recognize the Furry Brigade “for their service in the rescue and recovery efforts in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.” (What can I say? “Blessed Be the Cheese Makers for They Shall Inherit the Earth.” See “The Life of Brian.”)

Advance such consistently puerile notions in a private sector job, and you stand to be fired, or at the very least examined for the presence of a brain infarct. Here’s an idea for our parochial parasites: Stop groping greedily and obscenely for the “Stimulus Package” in order to revive the economy. Instead, resign. In pirate parlance, “walk the plank”! Get a job! Do your patriotic bit for the nation.

©2001 By Ilana Mercer

Special to LewRockwell.com

November 28

The post Entertainment Interruptus appeared first on ILANA MERCER.