Download Full Content – Printable Pickings
Before we get serious today, the Captain has a great post on a London Times columnist reacting to the BBC Queen snafu and the loony lady who married Bin Laden’s son. If you link to the article in the Times, UK you’ll learn BBC stands for Busy Blurting Confessions.
Power Line posts about a Herbert Meyer essay you won’t want to miss.
During the Reagan administration, Herbert Meyer was Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. Steve Hayward notes that in 1983, when the Cold War was still regarded almost unanimously as a fixture in global affairs, Meyer predicted that the Soviet Union was in its final stages. He argued that the U.S. therefore should begin planning for a post-Soviet world.
Earlier this week, Meyer turned his forecasting skills to the present situation. He noted that there are two competing views about the post-9/11 world: (1) that we’re at war with radical Islam and (2) that we’re simply experiencing high levels of violence as a result of our values and policies. Under the first view, we should strive for victory and avoid defeat on battlegrounds such as Iraq. Under the second view, we should merely try to reduce episodes of terrorism while adjusting our values and policies.
Real Clear Politics brings us that essay.
It’s possible that something horrific will happen in the immediate future to shift public support here in the US, and throughout the West, from the second perception to the first. When asked by a young reporter what he thought would have the greatest impact on his government’s fate, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan responded cheerfully: “Events, dear boy, events.” One more 9-11-type attack – biological, chemical, or nuclear – that takes out Houston, Berlin, Vancouver or Paris, and the leader of that country will be overwhelmed by the furious public’s demands to “turn the creeps who did this, and the countries that helped them, into molten glass and don’t let’s worry about collateral damage.” (This will sound even better in French or German.) Should the next big attack come here in the US, some among us will blame the President but most won’t. The public mood will be not merely ferocious, but ugly; you won’t want to walk down the street wearing an “I gave to the ACLU” pin in your lapel.
Absent such an event in the near future, it’s likely that over the next few years the war will settle into a phase that proponents of Perception Two will approve. Simply put, we will shift from offense to defense. The Department of Homeland Security will become our government’s lead agency, and the Pentagon’s role will be diminished. (Nothing will change at the State Department – but then, nothing ever does.) Most people in the US, and elsewhere in the West, will be relieved that “the war” is finally over.
Victor Davis Hanson in The City Journal answers the NY Times “surrender” editorial.
We promised General Petraeus a hearing in September; it would be the height of folly to preempt that agreement by giving in to our summer of panic and despair. Critics called for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a change in command in Iraq and at Centcom, new strategies, and more troops. But now that we have a new secretary, a new command in Iraq and at Centcom, new strategies, and more troops, suddenly we have a renewed demand for withdrawal before the agreed-upon September accounting—suggesting that the only constant in such harping was the assumption that Iraq was either hopeless or not worth the effort.
The truth is that Iraq has upped the ante in the war against terrorists. Our enemies’ worst nightmare is a constitutional government in the heart of the ancient caliphate, surrounded by consensual rule in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Turkey; ours is a new terror heaven, but with oil, a strategic location, and the zeal born of a humiliating defeat of the United States on a theater scale. The Islamists believe we can’t win; so does the New York Times. But it falls to the American people to decide the issue.
Debra Saunders reminds us what’s at stake in the emminent domain controversy.
No government should be able to take your land to give it to a corporation. As Susette Kelo noted Thursday, “Our federal tax dollars shouldn’t be used to take away our homes and businesses so that developers can build shopping malls and condominiums.”
Citizens have an interest in a system that allows governments to take property — at a just price — for public projects. But when states and cities, in search of a richer tax base, can take your land and give it to a private developer — they have license to trample on everyone’s rights. And no one, except the very rich, is safe.
ABC News reports Churchill dropped from Brit curriculum.
The Onion says Edwards has pledged to eliminate all bad things by 2011.