Pickerhead takes a holiday tomorrow. Happy Fourth!
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John Burns, of the NY Times, reports on recent revelations of Iranian efforts in Iraq.
BAGHDAD, — Agents of Iran helped plan a January raid in Shiite holy city of Karbala in Iraq in which five American soldiers were killed by Islamic militants, an American military spokesman said Monday. The charge was the most specific allegation of Iranian involvement in an attack that killed American troops, at a time of rising tensions with Iran over its role in Iraq and its nuclear program.
Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner, the military spokesman here, said an elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, a force under the control of Iran’s most powerful religious leaders, had used veterans of the Lebanese Islamic militia group Hezbollah as a “proxy†to train, arm and plan attacks by an array of Shiite militant cells in Iraq.
Joe Lieberman knows what to do.
“The fact is that the Iranian government has by its actions declared war on us,” said Lieberman, an independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats. As a result, he continued, “The United States government has a responsibility to use all instruments at its disposal to stop these terrorist attacks against our soldiers and allies in Iraq, including keeping open the possibility of using military force against the terrorist infrastructure inside Iran.”
Max Boot too.
… Ever since 1979, the radical mullahs who control Tehran have been waging covert war on the United States and our allies, and we have scarcely responded. Especially now, when we are mired deep in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, most Americans and especially most of our politicians would seemingly prefer not to focus on actions that might embroil us with war on another front.
Yet that kind of ignorance becomes harder to preserve in light of fresh evidence of Iranian aggression. …
WSJ comments on Zimbabwe’s Neocon.
Richard Cohen of WaPo must have a fever. He’s been making a lot of sense lately. He was in Pickings two weeks ago suggesting Libby’s jail sentence be commuted. Now he’s taking the Dems to task for being captured by the teachers unions. Unfortunately he doesn’t find his way to supporting vouchers, but maybe that’s next.
The eight Democratic presidential candidates assembled in Washington last week for another of their debates and talked, among other things, about public education. They all essentially agreed that it was underfunded– one system “for the wealthy, one for everybody else,” as John Edwards put it. Then they all got into cars and drove through a city where teachers are relatively well paid, per pupil spending is through the roof and — pay attention here — the schools are among the very worst in the nation. When it comes to education, Democrats are uneducable.
One candidate after another lambasted George Bush, the Republican Party and, of course, the evil justices of the Supreme Court. But not a one of them even whispered a mild word of outrage about a public school system that spends $13,000 per child — third highest among big-city school systems — and produces pupils who score among the lowest in just about any category you can name. The only area in which the Washington school system is No. 1 is in money spent on administration. Chests should not swell with pride.
The litany of more and more when it comes to money often has little to do with what, in the military, are called facts on the ground: kids and parents. It does have a lot to do with teachers unions, which are strong supporters of the Democratic Party. …
… In so far as the Democratic presidential candidates talked about public school education and in so far as they mentioned the Supreme Court decision, they largely mouthed Democratic orthodoxy. It must have sounded reassuring to big-city education unions and politicians with a gift for exacerbating racial paranoia. But to the kid in the classroom, to a parent bucking the bureaucracy, the rhetoric must have sounded as unreal as the hot air that comes from Baghdad’s Green Zone — a “surge” of money instead of men or, as we used to say, throwing good money after bad.
Gabriel Schoenfeld on the pardon.
Here is Hillary Clinton commenting on George W. Bush’s modest display of mercy to Scooter Libby, sparing him from prison: “this commutation sends the clear signal that in this administration, cronyism and ideology trump competence and justice.â€
“Cronyism and ideology� I agree with Hillary that cronyism is a terrible thing, but I think it is a stretch to say that that’s what the Scooter Libby affair was all about. If it was cronyism, Bush has not been very kind to his crony, keeping Libby’s fine, his probation, and his conviction intact.
In any case, in thinking about Hillary’s statement, it is useful to bear in mind some of the pardons granted by her husband Bill. …
David Boaz at Cato has some other commutation prospects.
Mark Steyn’s Song of the Week is American the Beautiful.
…
Oh beautiful for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!She put them down on paper that evening in her room at the Antlers Hotel. Today you’d be hard put to find a quatrain known to more Americans. Whether it’s Gary Larson’s Columbus approaching land in a “Far Side” cartoon and saying, “Look! Purple mountains! Spacious skies! …Is someone writing this down?” or Rush Limbaugh at noon welcoming listeners “across the fruited plain” to his daily radio show …
Dinesh D’Souza writes about what’s so good about America.
NY Times book review of The Bottom Billion, Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. The Reviewer is Niall Ferguson. He can make you think.
… Trade, too, is not a sufficient answer. The problem is that Asia has eaten Africa’s lunch when it comes to exploiting low wage costs. Once manufacturing activity started to relocate to Asia, African economies simply got left behind. Now, to stand any chance of survival, African manufacturers need some temporary protection from Asian competition. So long as rich countries retain tariffs to shelter their own manufacturers from cut-price Asian imports, they should exempt products from bottom billion countries.
This, however, is not the most heretical of Collier’s prescriptions. Reflecting on the tendency of postconflict countries to lapse back into civil war, he argues trenchantly for occasional foreign interventions in failed states. What postconflict countries need, he says, is 10 years of peace enforced by an external military force. If that means infringing national sovereignty, so be it.
At a time when the idea of humanitarian intervention is selling at a considerable discount, this is a vital insight. (One recent finding by Collier and his associates, not reproduced here, is that until recently, former French colonies in Africa were less likely than other comparably poor countries to experience civil war. That was because the French effectively gave informal security guarantees to postindependence governments.) Collier concedes that his argument is bound to elicit accusations of neocolonialism from the usual suspects (not least Mugabe). Yet the case he makes for more rather than less intervention in chronically misgoverned poor countries is a powerful one. It is easy to forget, amid the ruins of Operation Iraqi Freedom, that effective intervention ended Sierra Leone’s civil war, while nonintervention condemned Rwanda to genocide. …
Dilbert says planes are living things and you could be airplane poop.
Scrappleface says we are safe even though Scooter Libby is on the loose.