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Some of our favorites have Tony Snow thoughts. From The Corner; Mark Steyn, Kathryn Jean Lopez, Yuval Levin, Byron York, and Shannen Coffin. From Contentions John Podhoretz.
Since the world is reaching a point of no return regarding the nukes in Iran, the story of the raid 27 years ago that destroyed Saddam’s nuclear program is germane. Jerusalem Post has the story.
It was late afternoon, Sunday, June 7, 1981, and Zeev Raz was leading his squadron of F-16s across Iraq toward the Osirak nuclear reactor. Anxiously, he scanned the terrain ahead for the last checkpoint of their hair-raising mission, a little island in the middle of the Bahr al-Mihl Lake, about 100 kilometers west of the target, from which the pilots would calculate their final assault on Saddam Hussein’s impending bomb factory.
At 5.34 p.m., bang on schedule, Raz spotted the lake. Or at least he thought he did. Except that it looked rather larger than it had in the satellite photos they’d pored over. And that little island – the crucial last reference point – was nowhere to be seen.
Flashing through Iraqi air space at 10 kilometers a minute, Raz was second-guessing himself. Had he miscalculated? Had he strayed from the meticulously planned route? Was he leading his colleagues to disaster? What had gone wrong?
Too late, Raz realized what had happened. The previous winter’s heavy rains had swollen the lake and submerged the island. The satellite image was out of date. He had been in the right place, and should have trusted himself. Quickly, he reset his computer, inputting his new position, obtaining the adjusted parameters for the bombing run.
But minutes later, when Raz closed in on his target, it became appallingly clear that the miscalculation at the sunken island had profoundly distracted him. This expert airman, leading the pride of the Israel Air Force across vast swathes of hostile terrain on a mission deemed by prime minister Begin to be critical to Israel’s very existence – a mission that the chief of the General Staff, Raful Eitan, had told them that day “must be successful, or we as a people are doomed” – found to his horror that he had, almost amateurishly, overflown the target. He had begun his bombing dive too late.
Israel’s legendary destruction of Osirak – a near-impossible operation, pushing the F-16s further than they had been built to fly, evading enemy radar for hundreds of miles, to precision bomb a heavily protected nuclear target – has entered the pantheon of acts of extraordinary Zionist daring as a clinical example of pre-emptive devastation, executed with breathtaking, ruthless accuracy.
But as detailed in American journalist Rodger Claire’s overlooked study of the mission, 2004′s Raid on the Sun – in which he spoke, uniquely, to all the pilots, their commanders, and key players on the Iraqi side of the raid as well – the bombing of Osirak was far from error-free. It was an astonishing, envelope-pushing assault all right. It succeeded, utterly, in destroying Saddam’s nuclear program – a blow from which he would never recover. It safeguarded Israel from the Iraqi dictator’s genocidal ambitions. But Raz’s mistake on the final approach was only one of several foul-ups that could so easily have doomed it.
Recognizing that Raz, the lead bomber, was not going to be able to hit the target, the No. 2 pilot in the squadron, Amos Yadlin, streaking along behind him, made the incredibly risky split-second decision to depart from the bombing sequence, cut in beneath Raz’s plane, and try to drop his two 2,000-pound bombs first. As he would later tell author Claire, Yadlin thought to himself: “I’m not going to end up being hanged in some square in Baghdad because of a screwup.”
Yadlin did indeed get his bombs away, and saw them pierce the Osirak dome and disappear inside as he peeled off.
Simultaneously, Raz was executing an astoundingly ambitious “loop-de-loop” in the skies above the reactor, and was able to come back over Osirak, at the correct angle this time, and hit the target.
The potential consequences of these radical departures from the intended bombing process – the potential for misunderstanding, for collision, for disaster – can hardly be overstated. …
John Fund enumerates the left’s electoral efforts. They think it’s their techniques that need work. When they lose this time will the face up to the fact their ideas suck?
… In 2005, billionaire investor George Soros convened a group of 70 super-rich liberal donors in Phoenix to evaluate why their efforts to defeat President Bush had failed. One conclusion was that they needed to step up their long-term efforts to dominate key battleground states. The donors formed a group called Democracy Alliance to make grants in four areas: media, ideas, leadership and civic engagement. Since then, Democracy Alliance partners have donated over $100 million to key progressive organizations.
Take Colorado, which has voted Republican for president in nine of the last 10 presidential elections. But in 2006, Colorado elected a Democratic governor and legislature for the first time in over 30 years. Denver will be the site for the party’s 2008 presidential convention. Polls show Barack Obama would carry the state today. This hasn’t happened by chance. The Democracy Alliance poured money into Colorado to make it a proving ground for how progressives can take over a state.
Offshoots of leading liberal national groups were set up including Colorado Media Matters in 2006, to correct “conservative misinformation” in the media. Ethics Watch, a group modeled after Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, was started and proceeded to file a flurry of complaints over alleged campaign finance violations — while refusing to name its own donors.
Western Progress, a think tank to advance “progressive solutions,” opened its doors as did the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute, one of 29 such groups around the country. Then there’s Colorado Confidential, a project of The Center for Independent Media, which subsidized liberal bloggers. CIM has set up similar ventures in Iowa, Minnesota and Michigan, with funding from groups such as the Service Employees International Union, and George Soros’s Open Society Institute. …
John Fund has a couple of good shorts. The first has a Scalia look.
… Mr. Scalia has some idea for avoiding public anger at the courts in future: Use them less. He thinks the United States is “over-lawed” and has too many lawyers. “I don’t think our legal system should be that complex. I think that any system that requires that many of the country’s best minds, and they are the best minds, is too complex,” he says. “If you look at the figures, where does the top of the class in college go to? It goes into law. They don’t go into teaching. Now I love the law, there is nothing I would rather do but it doesn’t produce anything.” …
Jack Kelly on the campaign so far.
WHEN your approval rating is only 14 percent, there’s nowhere to go but up. Unless you’re the Democrat-led Congress. A Rasmussen poll released Tuesday indicated the approval rating for Congress has declined by 36 percentage points from last year’s “high.” Just 9 percent of respondents said Congress was doing a “good” or “excellent” job, while 52 percent of us think it’s doing a “poor” one. That’s the lowest rating ever.
Much of the dissatisfaction with Congress is due to its unwillingness to do anything about the soaring price of gasoline. “Right now, our strategy on gas prices is ‘Drive small cars and wait for the wind,’•” a Democratic congressional aide told The Hill newspaper.
“So why are the Republicans running scared, and why aren’t they going after the ‘new Democratic Congress’ hammer and tongs?” wondered Web logger Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit. “Beats me. Because they’re idiots, I guess.”
I disagree. Some Republicans in Congress are crooks, and many are cowards. But few are idiots. For idiocy, you have to look to the campaign of Sen. John McCain. …
Slate’s Undercover Economist defends speculators.
When the economy is in turmoil, no one is demonized more than the speculator. First, we are told, speculators have driven up the price of oil, condemning us to expensive heating and driving. Then, they have driven down the price of bank shares, dealing vicious blows to the nation’s noblest banks. All of this, we are supposed to believe, is immensely profitable and highly destabilizing. …
Silly Telegraph, UK cow flatulence story is here just for the picture of the cow.