Pursuing Holiness

The Bush Paradox - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

… During that period in 2006 and 2007, Bush stiffed the brass and sided with a band of dissidents: military officers like David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno, senators like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and outside strategists like Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and Jack Keane, a retired general.

Bush is also a secretive man who listens too much to Dick Cheney. Well, the uncomfortable fact is that Cheney played an essential role in promoting the surge. Many of the people who are dubbed bad guys actually got this one right.

The additional fact is that Bush, who made such bad calls early in the war, made a courageous and astute decision in 2006. More than a year on, the surge has produced large, if tenuous, gains. Violence is down sharply. Daily life has improved. Iraqi security forces have been given time to become a more effective fighting force. The Iraqi government is showing signs of strength and even glimmers of impartiality. Iraq has moved from being a failed state to, as Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations has put it, merely a fragile one.

h/t Gateway Pundit

And Flopping Aces has MSNBC singing the same song… sorta.

Captured members of Al Queda groups from this same camp claim that they were assisted, trained, supplied, and funded by Saddam’s IIS as well as taking orders from Saddam’s IIS.

Captured documents confirm their claims.

Captured regime members confirm their claims.

Now even highly anti-war/pro-Democrat MSNBC confirms the claim itself. Al Queda leaders confirm the claims (Zawahiri and Zarqawi specifically).

Shocking.

written by Laura

Hot Air » New Jihad Watch…bound and gagged:

Lawfare is just another front in the war, and our failure to treat it as such will lead to our eventual loss.

Dan Simmons has a very instructive story that diagnoses the problem clearly:

“You were a philosophy major or minor at that podunk little college you went to long ago,” said the Time Traveler. “Do you remember what Category Error is?”

It rang a bell. But I was too irritated at hearing my alma mater being called a “podunk little college” to be able to concentrate fully.

“I’ll tell you what it is,” said the Time Traveler. “In philosophy and formal logic, and it has its equivalents in science and business management, Category Error is the term for having stated or defined a problem so poorly that it becomes impossible to solve that problem, through dialectic or any other means.”

I waited. Finally I said firmly, “You can’t go to war with a religion. Or, I mean . . . sure, you could . . . the Crusades and all that . . . but it would be wrong.”

The Time Traveler sipped his Scotch and looked at me. He said, “Let me give you an analogy . . .”

God, I hated and distrusted analogies. I said nothing.

“Let’s imagine,” said the Time Traveler, “that on December eighth, Nineteen forty-one, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke before a joint session of Congress and asked them to declare war on aviation.”

“That’s absurd,” I said.

“Is it?” asked the Time Traveler. “The American battleships, cruisers, harbor installations, Army barracks, and airfields at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere in Hawaii were all struck by Japanese aircraft. Imagine if the next day Roosevelt had declared war on aviation . . . threatening to wipe it out wherever we found it. Committing all the resources of the United States of America to defeating aviation, so help us God.”

“That’s just stupid,” I said. If I’d ever been afraid of this Time Traveler, I wasn’t now. He was obviously a mental defective.“The planes, the Japanese planes,” I said, “were just a method of attack . . . a means . . . it wasn’t aviation that attacked us at Pearl Harbor, but the Empire of Japan. We declared war on Japan and a few days later its ally, Germany, lived up to its treaty with the Japanese and declared war on us. If we’d declared war on aviation, on goddamned airplanes rather than the empire and ideology that launched them, we’d never have . . .”

I stopped. What had he called it? Category Error. Making the problem unsolvable through your inability – or fear – of defining it correctly.

written by Laura

This is the sort of thing we can look forward to thanks to SCOTUS - the release of a convicted terrorist, “Osama Bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe”, thanks to a legal technicality:

Just in case you think the spat McCain and Obama are having today over criminal protections for jihadis is academic, behold.

… With the prospect of extradition removed, the Ministry of Justice has been forced to release him by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission.

He’ll have to wear an ankle bracelet - not unlike the one even Martha Stewart had no problem figuring out how to get out of - and he’s forbidden from using cell phones, computers, and the internet.  (Yeah, like that’ll stick.)  He’s on the dole to the tune of 1,000 pounds a month, so now whatever plots he hatches are taxpayer subsidized.

But hey, we can all feel good about the fact that his human rights were protected.  And the icing on this cake is that it wasn’t even decided on by the Brits directly; the court decided the way it did because of an EU convention to which they are bound.

written by Laura

So SCOTUS thinks the military ought to kill unlawful combatants (people captured on the battlefield who are not in uniform and who are not signatories to the Geneva Convention.) Well, they didn’t say that, exactly, but how many people do you really think are going to make it into custody now, when custody means, “treat them like the US citizens they are not,” and when the next logical step is “prepare to defend yourself in a criminal case with an ACLU lawyer explaining to a jury why you should not have arrested or did not Mirandize this suspect.”

Not too many.

Does anybody really think that this isn’t going to result in more deaths? The deaths of suspected terrorists, and the deaths of innocent civilians who are not going to benefit from the information received from those detainees. The unspoken policy now is going to be to kill them when you can, because it’s going to be a real pain to deal with them later. And given the liberals propensity to haul our soldiers into court on criminal charges, killing the detainee so he can’t testify against you - and remember, the al Qaeda playbook specifically instructs them to lie and make up charges against you - seems like the best way to go. Continue reading »

written by Laura

Choke on it, Congressman!

Added: and yet another example of Obama’s poor judgment:

Barack Obama, asked about Murtha’s charge by Alan Colmes in June of 2006, stated, “I would never second guess John Murtha… I think he’s somebody who knows of which he speaks.”

And Michelle Malkin re-posts this excellent video and comments,

See if you can find the story on the NYTimes or any other MSM outlet that splashed the original accusations all over their front pages. You’ll need a magnifying glass.

written by Laura

Gabriel Malor follows up on the honor killing in Basra:

The story doesn’t end there. At the time, the girl’s mother, Leila, divorced from her monster husband, was fleeing from reprisals for denouncing the murder. She had been hiding in safehouses established by women’s rights movements in Basra where they had plotted an escape for her to Jordan. She didn’t make it. Leila was gunned down on the way to meet her contact.

… Mother and daughter were killed because of a stupid honor culture. Keep it in mind the next time some snob tells you that we must learn to respect other cultures.

I’m reminded of General Sir Charles Napier:

A story for which Napier is famous involves a delegation of Hindu locals approaching him and complaining about prohibition of Sati, often referred to at the time as suttee, by British authorities. This was the custom of burning widows alive on the funeral pyres of their husbands. The exact wording of his response varies somewhat in different reports, but the following version captures its essence: “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

written by Laura