WIN THE WAR, NOT THE “WAR OF IDEAS”

All of a sudden everybody’s asking, “Who are we fighting anyway?” It’s an interesting question, but it’s not nearly as important as many of the debaters believe.

The 9/11 Commission tells us we’re fighting Islamists, or Islamist terrorists, and David Brooks has cooed over this, because he likes the notion that we’re fighting an ideology. The White House has devoted lots of man-hours to this matter, trying to figure out how we win “the battle of ideas,” and the Internet is full of people who argue, variously, that we’re fighting “radical Islam,” “Saddam’s die-hards,” “foreign fighters,” or even “Islam itself.” (more…)

THE FALLUJAH FLY-TRAP

It’s now conceded even by the appeasement-addicts at the State Department that their stopping the Marine assault on Fallujah (after the butchery of four Americans) was a disaster. Fallujah has become the sanctuary for all varieties of terrorists in Iraq.

Yet, as Jack Kelly writes below, there is a silver lining emerging in Fallujah that reminds me of a famous conversation between Alberto Fujimori of Peru and Andres Pastrana of Colombia, back when they were presidents of their respective countries. Pastrana was so spineless he had just given the FARC narco-terrorists a sanctuary the size of Switzerland in exchange for (more…)

THE DISCOVERY OF IRAN

The organizers of the Council on Foreign Relations special task force to promote the appeasement of Iran must be cursing their uncommonly bad luck. They scheduled a meeting in Washington today to call for increasing normalization of relations between the United States and Iran. With a fine eye for dark comedy, the Council persuaded two relics of the catastrophic Carter years to appear: Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert Gates.

The principal advocate of the policy, however, is undoubtedly the president of the Council, Richard Haas, who has long seen rapprochement with the mullahs as an “historic opportunity” for the United States. (more…)

THE GREAT INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE REPORT

Wow, more than 520 pages! As Dan Darling and I worked through it (and don’t miss his more detailed analysis at www.windsofchange.net), we were constantly entertained by big blocks of “redacted” pages. Why don’t they just put in ellipses instead of all those blacked-out paragraphs? Maybe the Government Printing Office gets paid by the page, and Congress wants the GPO to have more money?

The other great mystery is how the authors expect us to read the report. It’s terribly written, and talks breathlessly about “trade craft” when “logic” or “common sense” would do better. It takes multiple sentences to (more…)

WHEN IT’S TIME TO REFORMAT YOUR HARD DISK

Sooner or later we all need to. Perhaps your hard disk fails. All hard disks fail sooner or later. Or you’ve installed too many programs and uninstalled too many trial programs. Your computer has slowed to a crawl because your registry is fractured, full of errors.

Maybe your system’s been hit by numerous virii or other intruders that are impossible to get rid of. Perhaps you want to partition your hard disk or add or change operating systems.

Are you prepared? How long will it take you to get back up?

I’m directing this to myself as well. My system (more…)