The Middle is Always Evil

How can this be? From the Jerusalem Post:

The IDF is drawing up options for a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities that do not include coordination with the United States, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

While its preference is to coordinate with the US, defense officials have said Israel is preparing a wide range of options for such an operation.

Israeli officials have said it would be difficult, but not impossible, to launch a strike against Iran without receiving codes from the US Air Force, which controls Iraqi airspace. Israel also asked for the codes in 1991 during the First Gulf War, but the US refused.

It is absolutely disgraceful that the United States is not actively aiding Israel on this. Yes, the immediate repercussions of a bilateral attack on Iran by the United States and Israel would be severe. Hezbollah and Hamas would mount huge efforts against Israel, and probably even against United States forces in Iraq. The consequences would absolutely be worth it, however, if we were able to rid the world of a nuclear Iran. But Bush won’t even give Israel the codes to Iraqi airspace, effectively eliminating any element of surprise that Israeli forces might have if they decided to go it alone, since they’d have to go around Iraq instead of through it (just look at the map). Iran would know they were coming hours before they got there.

Several news reports have claimed recently that US President George W. Bush has refused to give Israel a green light for an attack on Iranian facilities. One such report, published in September in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, claimed that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert requested a green light to attack Iran in May but was refused by Bush.

The shamefulness of Bush’s position is only intensified by reports that came out a few weeks ago that Iran is less than a year away from the ability to build one nuclear bomb. I wonder why Israel feels the need to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities all of the sudden…

Heck! Israel is only our sole ally in the region!

Unbelievable.

The war in Iraq– the unfortunate war, as I like to call it, has been going on for 5 years. It is now necessary to ask: Why are we there? What is the duty of the United States’ military in Iraq?

Months ago, when leaders of the 25th Infantry Division’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team returned home from Iraq, they did so seeking advice. But not military advice. Not advice on how to gain the respect of their troops; not advice on how to better prepare their men for the horrors of combat. No, they wanted the counsel of the mayor of Honolulu, Mufi Hannemann, on how to manage a large municipality. Why would US military officers, whose only charge is to defeat an enemy and protect American lives, need advice on how to run a municipality?

Because the brigade, according to Lt. Col. J.B. Vowell, the deputy commander, will be helping the Iraqi government build new infrastructure for the Iraqi people. Bridges, electricity, sewage centers, water pumps, all free labor for Iraq, courtesy of the US military.

The men and women fighting in Iraq have their hands tied, unable to respond with force if attacked by a civilian. If a man throws a molotov cocktail at US troops, they are not allowed to engage their enemy. Why? Why are we doing this? Because our government’s policy towards Iraq has been consistently altruistic.

As George Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address, “We exercise power without conquest, and we sacrifice for the liberty of strangers.” In other words, we are not masters, we are slaves. George Bush’s foreign policy calls on young Americans to spill their blood, not for the sake of American security, but for the security of those who hate us, who would see us dead.

If we’re going to be in a war in the Mideast, we need to be fighting our enemy, not building their sewers; no responsibility to the enemy or to the Iraqi people. Our government has no place spending billions of American taxpayers dollars to a largely anti-western people who hate us. This needs to end. America needs to take its gloves off.

Fight the war. Crush the enemy. Leave.

Since starting this blog, I’ve blogged about environmentalism a little more than I’d like to.

There are other issues out there; issues that are more pressing, that affect our country and our world much more directly– like Iran’s nuclear program, or the fact that they’ve been launching test missiles capable of striking Israel. But so often I choose to write about the Environmentalist Movement over other things for a very specific reason, which is:

The choice to accept environmentalism or not is the choice between industry and inactivity, civilization and primitivism, comfortability and suffering; it is the choice between life and death. Many may disagree with this claim, citing the good intentions of the environmentalists: taking care of the earth couldn’t be bad, could it? After all, not all environmentalists are nut jobs like Eric Pianka, a noted ecologist who wants to kill off 90% of human life; most are in fact quite moderate, and simply believe that humans have a responsibility to look after the earth.

Such people are not evil, but they are misguided. They accept the two basic premises of environmentalism: that the environment is good because it is the environment, and that the smallest human interference in the natural ecological structure is a desirable goal. The logical conclusion of these premises, of course, is that human activity must be restricted as much as possible in order to prevent such interference. If you accept these premises, chances are good that you would not be in favor of a mass culling of the human population. The danger is that men like Pianka also accept them, and they desire to see their logical ends carried out. Since you’ve already accepted their premises, they can use the power of guilt to get you to accept a gradually more oppressive environmental policy. Case in point:

Yesterday, the leaders at the G8 Summit agreed to cut their countries’ carbon emissions by 50% by 2050, a radically anti-industrial move that will dismember the economy and stunt the standard of living for the global population. No one can claim that such an act was motivated by anything other than a hatred for mankind. Last week, a measure was put up for conideration in the British Parliament that would institute a personal cap-and-trade policy for every resident of England. Was this act considered because its proponents love the earth, or because they hate humanity? You be the judge.

With the basic premises of environmentalism so common today, it won’t be long before such cap-and-trade proposals are made in the United States. Do you really believe that such a measure would be beyond the scope of a Barack Obama environmental policy? Maybe not now, but what about four years from now? This is why the environmentalism issue is so important to me.

But there is another reason I frequently choose environmentalism over other topics. Throughout history, the war against man’s productive faculty has been waged under the banner of countless different names and movements; tribalism, monarchism, feudalism– more recently communism, socialism, and fascism– and of course, there’s always been the monstrosity that is organized religion. All of these have been a part of an overarching war on Individualism and a hatred of humanity; environmentalism is no exception here– it is merely the newest leader in the same war, the latest manifestation of the same hatred. However, environmentalism is different from its ideological ancestors in one, very important way.

In the past, movements that sought to destroy humanity (the modern ones anyway) have disguised their hatred for man’s virtues, proclaiming them to be the immoral while holding up their own standards as the moral alternative. With the broad base of society accepting altruism, their unpracticeable moral code, they guilted people into embracing their own self-destruction in the name of the love of mankind. Environmentalism is different because it makes no attempt to disguise its contempt for humanity.

Now, I won’t run through my whole spiel on environmentalism again because I’ve already blogged on it and have stated my opposition to it in as clear terms as I can, both here and in other places. But I will say this:

“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”

-Barry Goldwater

The reason we cannot win this war is simple; it results from our inability to name our enemy. Thus far, we’ve called it a war on terrorism.

But terrorism is a tactic; the United States cannot win a war on a tactic. In World War II, we did not fight a war on Kamikaze pilots; we did not fight a war on blitzkriegs; we fought fascism and totalitarianism– ideologies. In the Cold War, we did not fight a war on espionage; we fought Communism– an ideology. You see, a tactic implies a tactician; a tactician with certain motives, beliefs, and goals.

But for some reason, we are unable to state the motives, beliefs, and goals of our enemy. We are unable to do so much as name him. This is the direct result of our low moral self esteem. There is such a cult of moral grayness in the west that any proclamation of moral superiority is immediately taken to be naive and immoral. Didn’t you know that whats wrong to you may not be wrong to someone else? The only people worse than those who preach this tripe are those who know it to be misguided but appease the people preaching it anyway. It is these kinds of people that are running the war. Instead of standing up and proclaiming moral superiority over the enemy, Islamic Fundamentalism, they appease the liberal intellectuals and call it a War on Terrorism.

I couldn’t invent a better example of such appeasement than this. A US military sniper was using the Qur’an for target practice; the wrong people found out, and he got arrested. Not only was he arrested, but George Bush officially apologized, and

U.S. military commanders in Iraq held a ceremony to formally apologize and presented a new copy of the Qur’an to tribal leaders in the area where the incident took place.

When your military commanders are presenting tribal leaders with a copy of the book that inspired the death of nearly 3,000 of your fellow citizens as an apology for an act of desecration taken against that same book, you’ve lost the war that you’re fighting, and you aren’t going to win.

If we are unable, as a country, to proclaim our moral superiority over Islamic Totalitarianism, then we can’t win, and we should end the war and come home.