At Politics Central, Richard Fernandez, more widely know as Wretchard of The Belmont Club, warns those in the West who would still look for courage in the face “the horde of Basiji:”

What Deity, race or tribe might we still raise against the horde of Basiji?

My own guess is that neither Israel nor the West at large can long resist radical Islam without some sustaining faith of its own, a faith it will not find unless it makes up its mind to look for it. Men will fight on for as long as there is something left to fight for and not otherwise. Despair comes when we are finally convinced that even our hopes are futile. Winston Smith’s final question in 1984’s Room 101 after having despaired of the existence of God was to ask after the possibility of freedom: the existence of the Brotherhood, the only resistance to Big Brother.

(Winston)”Does the Brotherhood exist?”

(O’Brien) “That, Winston, you will never know. If we choose to set you free when we have finished with you, and if you live to be ninety years old, still you will never learn whether the answer to that question is Yes or No. As long as you live it will be an unsolved riddle in your mind.”

That is the weakness of reason, Winston Smith’s weakness: to stop when there is no reason to continue. And that is the power of faith: to go on without the answers, but to go on.

As Fernandez suggests, we will need to find a “sustaining faith.”

A steely determination surely fortified that faith of the Basij that allowed Iran’s current President to drape the necks of children with dollar store trinkets, and march them off into minefields. Can we match our enemies in resolve, if not in sheer brutality?

We look into the face of pure evil, as we have before. What will we see this time? Where will be our resolve? From whence will come our hope of deliverance?

It will always be extremely hard to argue with those gentler souls among us, who would never rise to the challenge of the oppressor, or tyrant, or murderer. We can appreciate their natural reluctance in the face of threat. But we must not tolerate their interference in those actions necessitated to ensure our very survival.

I heard a couple of stories recently from a couple of our veterans. A Marine sniper, undergoing treatment for post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) describes having to take down a woman with an AK47 engaging his fellow Marines. Snipers, I am told, are taught not to look their targets in the eyes. He didn’t, but he couldn’t shoot between them, either. A well-aimed shot at one arm, hoping she would stay down, drop the weapon. She didn’t. A shot in the other arm, and then a leg, same reaction both times, up and threatening. Only then did the Marine place one in what he knows should have been his initial target, and she was taken out. All the while working against what he felt inside, “no women or children.”

Another Marine remembers the boy coming at them with a grenade. He knows the boy may have been forced, to protect his family, or promised some eternal reward, or even temporal approval or encouragement. Slam dunk, ROE-wise, and poof, he’s blown away.

They both have nightmares where loved ones take the place of the terminus of their torment. Another observes, “When you were in the fight, you did what you had to do, you saw it as a soldier, it was alright. Now, you remember it as a husband, a father, a civilian, and you war within yourself, against what you ‘know’ is right.”

The men and women of our military are among the finest our Nation can produce. They go to war, “with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right,” to quote Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.

With such resolve, many have faced the threat. We have seen the carnage from many hard and brutal fights, not all of them, unfortunately, political. Some have seen first hand the worst havoc that humanity can wreak.

Every man and woman in the fight must find their own sources for inner and outer strength. We need as a society to come alongside, nurture, sustain, encourage, and comfort them in their afflictions on our behalf.

But we need to do something more, as well. We need to find that sustaining faith in our own foundations, our principles, and the bedrock faith in the great experiment in Democracy that is America, and take a stand. That the civilization we lead, the values and principles our very existence embodies, is worth whatever price, whatever cost, whatever sorrow there may be in fighting against those who would destroy us.

(Via Instapundit)

I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of an issue with Christopher Hitchens, who yesterday offered a devastating critique of David Corn and Michael Isikoff in Slate.

As most of us have long suspected, the man who told Novak about Valerie Plame was Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's deputy at the State Department and, with his boss, an assiduous underminer of the president's war policy. (His and Powell's—and George Tenet's—fingerprints are all over Bob Woodward's "insider" accounts of post-9/11 policy planning, which helps clear up another nonmystery: Woodward's revelation several months ago that he had known all along about the Wilson-Plame connection and considered it to be no big deal.) The Isikoff-Corn book, which is amusingly titled Hubris, solves this impossible problem of its authors' original "theory" by restating it in a passive voice:

The disclosures about Armitage, gleaned from interviews with colleagues, friends and lawyers directly involved in the case, underscore one of the ironies of the Plame investigation: that the initial leak, seized on by administration critics as evidence of how far the White House was willing to go to smear an opponent, came from a man who had no apparent intention of harming anyone.

In the stylistic world where disclosures are gleaned and ironies underscored, the nullity of the prose obscures the fact that any irony here is only at the authors' expense. It was Corn in particular who asserted—in a July 16, 2003, blog post credited with starting the entire distraction—that:

The Wilson smear was a thuggish act. Bush and his crew abused and misused intelligence to make their case for war. Now there is evidence Bushies used classified information and put the nation's counter-proliferation efforts at risk merely to settle a score. It is a sign that with this gang politics trumps national security.

After you have noted that the Niger uranium connection was in fact based on intelligence that has turned out to be sound, you may also note that this heated moral tone ("thuggish," "gang") is now quite absent from the story. It turns out that the person who put Valerie Plame's identity into circulation was a staunch foe of regime change in Iraq. Oh, that's all right, then. But you have to laugh at the way Corn now so neutrally describes his own initial delusion as one that was "seized on by administration critics."

Corn plays the famous film homage perfectly:

Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
[a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.

Via Glenn Reynolds, who observes that this reflects poorly on President Bush, “for his failure to fire Tenet -- and to roll some other heads at the CIA -- shortly after 9/11.”

Hard to argue with that.

The Editors at National Review are no more charitable than Hitchens, and conclude:

There’s a lot of blame to go around. First up is Armitage. There was absolutely nothing illegal about the original leak he committed, but he chose to remain silent while others — principally Rove and Libby — endured years of accusations in the press. (Armitage’s close friend Colin Powell also deserves a dishonorable mention for keeping quiet after learning of Armitage’s role.) The administration’s leftist adversaries in and out of government who have spent years shrieking “traitor” should be ashamed of themselves. Likewise the New York Times editorial board, which screamed for an investigation until it got bit it on the backside in the form of the media subpoenas. Fitzgerald should ask himself whether his wild goose chase has shown the judgment and discretion one expects from such an experienced prosecutor. Finally, the higher-ups at the Justice Department — Ashcroft and Comey in particular — bear great responsibility for buckling under political pressure when their own investigators knew there was nothing to the story.

Shocked, I tell you!

Byron York eulogizes Plamegate at National Review Online, in the wake of confirmation that then Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was the anonymous source, who started the Perfect Storm of Washington gossip, insider Beltway politics, and partisan media manipulation.

Retelling the saga with the latest revelations added in, York makes a persuasive case for finding equivalence between Lewis Libby and Richard Armitage:

Certainly it appears that no one committed any crimes by revealing Plame’s identity, and one could argue that the Justice Department should not have gone forward with a wide-ranging investigation after it discovered Novak’s sources. But if Fitzgerald was going to indict Libby, then why not Armitage, too?
The answer may lie in the bitter conflict inside the administration over the war in Iraq that is the backdrop to the entire CIA-leak affair. Armitage’s allies have made it clear that they believe Armitage is a “good” leaker while Rove, Libby, and others in the White House are “bad” leakers. We do not know what CIA and State Department officials told Fitzgerald during the investigation, but we do know that fevered imaginings about the terrible acts of the neocon cabal were not the exclusive province of left-wing blogs; they were also present inside the State Department and CIA. Fitzgerald may have chosen the course that he did — appearing to premise his investigation on the conspiracy theorists’ accusations — because he was pointed in that direction by the White House’s enemies inside and outside the administration.

I think much of Washington’s political elites find discussion of “enemies inside…the administration,” discomfiting, and perhaps unbecoming. That’s too bad, given the ordinarily “Entertainment Tonight” sophistication of much of what passes for politics inside the Beltway.

The President’s enemies within the Administration arguably have done him – and our Nation, truth be told -- far greater harm than his political enemies of the opposition party.

I think opposition to the War in Iraq, and for that matter, against any effort we’ve undertaken in the global war on terror, ultimately reveal these rifts within the Administration. It’s like they want us to fail.

In the wake of 9/11, it’s apparent to anybody with any sense that the bureaucracies of our Intelligence Agencies failed our Nation, utterly. We were hamstrung by layers of bureaucratic constraint, Lilliputian in the specifics, but of incredible strength in its whole.

Conceived, architected, and painstakingly constructed by Bureaucratic elites, the Walls of Separation marked the turf between law enforcement and intelligence gathering, between agencies, between the bureaucracies and their elected but figure-headed Civilian Directors and Secretaries. The CIA. Departments of State and Justice. The FBI. Even the Military.

We can blame Nixon era hangovers and Big Brother paranoia for the constraints, but what may have started with good intentions crippled us for the fight to come. Inaction and avoidance, aided and abetted by malfeasance, and ignorance, the bureaucracies grew in power and permanence.

The 9/11 Commission came, and went, carefully avoiding direct responsibility, but largely exonerating the bureaucracies most responsible for the failures in preparation, threat assessment, and counter-terrorism. By avoiding direct criticism, they likewise avoided holding anyone accountable. A great triumph of the bureaucracy.

If 9/11 shook the core of these bureaucracies, they wasted no time shoring up their foundations. And seeing the target of their enmity for the threat he represented.

President Bush, at many turns since 9/11, has challenged the orthodoxies of these bureaucracies. He sees our enemies for who they are, and in so doing, provides a counterpoint to the bureaucracy.

They fought him agency to agency, they leaked politically damaging information, whether classified or not, they actively sought to benefit his political opponents and seek his defeat in re-election.

For President Bush committed the most unforgivable of all Washington sins: he chose to make decisions, big decisions, based on principles and inner conviction, in the face of bureaucracies who long had grown accustomed to unfettered control of their agencies in spite of political leadership.

With friends like these, who needed enemies?

Unfortunately for the people of America, while the bureaucrats sharpened their knives, our real enemies remain undeterred.

Greyhawk at Milblogs linked over the weekend to this piece in Today's Officer Magazine. A while back I posted a version of the interview that contributed to this article, which expanded quite a bit beyond what was highlighted. I didn’t recall until I pulled it up in the archives, but it became Why I MILBLOG.

A major impetus for the story was a memorandum from Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, requiring milbloggers to “register” with their commanders, and directing commanders to become aware of and monitor soldier blogs for possible OPSEC violations.

As to experiences with "registration," there's a lot less to the directive than one might think. "Registration" isn't a formal process. I met the requirement by discussing it with my Commanding Officer and my Battalion CSM. What they did with that knowledge, I can't say, but then again I stayed away from anything remotely operational, by choice.

Many of the Milbloggers who have voluntarily ceased blogging may have good reasons to think their immediate commands would react negatively or impose too many conditions. I was always afraid my BN Commander would insist on a puff piece highlighting his role. Otherwise, I had no problem.

I've read pieces by some of those most highly complimented for "war realism," and frankly, some have made me uncomfortable. Too much detail on procedures, specific battle drills, BDA, etc. Some have highlighted soldier reactions that are contrary to what good procedures dictate -- like turning the .50 cal on an exposed 155mm shell, which then went off, just missing fellow soldiers. (I cry either BS or “you're an idiot” on that one.)

I have deep respect for Greyhawk, who posts at Mudville Gazette. His blog was the model for many of us. He and Mrs. Greyhawk have long gone way beyond the extra mile in encouraging Milbloggers, and helping us find both voices and audience.

He’s Grandpappy Manly if you know what I mean, and I’d take seriously anything with which he expresses concern. He’s been more troubled by the new policy and some of its implications:

“It has discouraged a lot of folks who are ‘by the rules’ types, the kinds of guy who the Army would most like to have telling the story from Iraq,” he says. “Some are concerned about inadvertent OPSEC violations, others of being accused of violating OPSEC by an overzealous senior. But the maladjusted, antisocial types who really hate the Army aren’t going to play by those rules, so in the end my concern is that you’ll see fewer milblogs from the squared-away, professional military types and more from the bitter extremists.”

I do appreciate the concern that only the malcontents are left if all the positive voices "self-censor," but I think there was a time when there was way too much info out there.

I'd like to think this will be self correcting, as more soldiers are inspired to share their stories, and the military gets smarter about Milblogs, too.

I guess I’m with SGT Hook for a final takeaway, included in the TO article:

“Milbloging will be around as long as blogging is,” says Sergeant Hook. “Just as with anything new, there will be bumps in the road, but they will work themselves out, and milblogs will provide the American people with a great alternative to mainstream media in telling the military’s story.

“Who knows — they might even help recruiting efforts.”

Pamela Bone, writing an Op Ed in The Australian, bewails the silence of feminists in the face of Muslim oppression of women, and warns:

Hate Bush if you want, but please understand that your enemy's enemies are not necessarily your friends. 

This echoes my reflections on Elia Kazan yesterday, how left oriented ideologues, then and now, blind themselves to the true nature of those with whom they align, ideologically and illogically.

Bone sounds an alarm for feminists in the West:

It seems inconceivable that we could lose this war against terrorism. But if we do, the consequences will be awful. And they will be worse for women, for the women in the generations that will follow us. We have to fight not against Muslims but against Islamic extremism. Don't expect left-wing men to help. They're full of "I'm not scared" bravado. Don't expect all Muslim women to want to be in the fight. There have always been women who oppose rights for women. (Remember the petition, from women, against Australian women getting the vote?) But the least we can do is let the brave Muslim women who are pushing for reforms know they have our support when they want it.

Most of us 1970s feminists are grandmothers now. Lifelong socialist and humanist that I am, if fighting to prevent the possibility that my granddaughters - our granddaughters - will one day be forced to wear a burka makes me right-wing, then right-wing is the label I'll have to wear.

Call her right wing if you wish, but I call her an ally, someone who clearly “gets it.”

(Via Instapundit)

So THAT’S how they do it.

The Secret Mechanism.

You know, the bourgeoisie mechanism whereby the rich are able to divert all the financial benefits 6 years of economic growth. Without involving spending any of that money, thereby benefiting the middle or lower classes.

Not involving illegal immigration, and the all-to-visible pressure to keep salaries for low or no skilled jobs at a minimum.

Bearing no relationship to any discernable economic activity, transaction, or even human behavior. So secret, in fact, that even socialists who believe in the mechanism have absolutely no idea how it works.

I remain bewildered how those who hold such extreme views, so fervently, about economics and the worlds of trade, commerce, industry in wealth, can be in such absolute ignorance of the basic facts of how such things really operate. You know, in the real economic world.

Income inequality. It’s bad, it’s the fault of the rich, “through mechanisms we're not entirely sure of.”

Have a nice Proletarian Day.

(Via Iain Murray at The Corner)

Scott Johnson of Powerline links to some excellent commentary on famed (and defamed) Broadway stage and Hollywood film director, Elia Kazan. The occasion of Johnson’s survey of Kazan references was a review by Charlotte Allen in the Weekly Standard, in which Allen reviews last year’s Richard Schickel Biography of Kazan.

I happened to catch a portion of a PBS (!) special on Elia Kazan last night, which seemed to present a far more complex and sympathetic portrait than I would have expected.

I’m not sure why all the sudden interest at this particular time.

I spent many years in the theater, immersed in drama, delving into the pantheon of great dramatic literature, as well as the history behind a fair amount of 20^th century staging of then modern works. I developed a keen appreciation of the authors whose works Kazan brought to life so vividly: Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.

Kazan’s role in bringing to life many of the 20^th century’s great dramatic works – on stage and on film – firmly establishes him as a great among many lesser lights.

On the Waterfront, Death of a Salesman, Gentlemen’s Agreement, All My Sons, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Sweet Bird of Youth.

Man, these are credits to be envied.

I’m grateful for another link from Johnson, to an essay on Kazan by Harry Stein in City Journal. What a fantastic read.

It turns out the Hollywood Left has a long and storied history, which in terms of Stalinist apologia and communist sympathies is no new news. But I didn’t know that these fellow travelers first invented the blacklist:

Working slyly to advance these political changes were communist operatives, led by German theater veteran Otto Katz. According to historian Stephen Koch, Moscow had sent Katz to California to organize communist front organizations and radical unions, and he succeeded beyond all expectations. “Columbus discovered America,” Katz would boast, “and I discovered Hollywood.” The growing communist influence in the industry was clearest in the push for radical unionism. For instance, party activists, led by Kazan’s old Group comrade J. Howard Larson, dominated the newly formed Writers Guild.

As party members took up key positions in the studio hierarchy, they began to wield power. As associate producers, story editors, and even agents, they not only saw to it that fellow communists got work but—in a sort of reverse blacklist—made sure that anti-communists didn’t. “There’s no question they looked out for their own,” observes Hollywood writer Burt Prelutsky, a former liberal who has migrated rightward. “Morrie Ryskind had . . . written some great pictures, including A Night at the Opera,” Prelutsky continues, “but he’d broken with the party and become a Republican. For a time he couldn’t get arrested in this town.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, who spent his last years as a studio hack, well understood the political climate of that time. “The important thing is you should not argue with them,” he wrote of Hollywood leftists. “Whatever you say they have ways of twisting it into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind, ‘Fascist,’ ‘Liberal,’ ‘Trotskyist,’ and disparage you both intellectually and personally in the process.”

Well-positioned party members also worked to bar the making of anti-communist films. In a 1946 Worker article, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo noted with satisfaction that prominent anti-communist books of the thirties and forties such as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon never made it to the big screen. Nor did any script touching on the Ukraine famine or the Moscow show trials.

Moscow’s ultimate Hollywood goal, Koch explains, was to “Stalinize the glamour culture”—that is, associate in the public mind left-wing views and celebrated entertainers, lending those views respectability. This project could also enable the party to tap “Hollywood’s great guilty wealth as a cash cow.”

This history lends itself to compelling comparison to today’s political climate, and it’s foremost left-right arguments. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is no way to retain moral ground at all, let alone the moral high ground.

We must look past the hate we feel towards one kind of enemy – and see without artifice the true character of those we would make our friends, because they share our hate. There’s surely a lesson there for conservatives.

I doubt liberals and other anti-war types would be quite as receptive to the teaching point.

Stein described the change that happened in Kazan, what turned him to turn on his erstwhile fellow travelers. This, in spite of Kazan remaining a faithful progressive in all things, save the primacy of the USSR in the “international struggle,” and fellow communists’ demand, that he bow down to Stalin and his commands:

No longer sympathetic to the far Left, Kazan not only looked at the Soviet Union differently than they did, but also at the United States, which he no longer saw as a bastion of corruption and exploitation but, despite its flaws, as mankind’s best hope.

Yes, the committee was a nest of vile bullies; and, yes, some who opposed them had shown great courage. But what was getting overlooked—increasingly so as time passed—was the poisonous nature of the ideology that those on the other side were defending. Whatever the career considerations, Kazan’s loathing of communism weighed heavily in his decision to testify. “The ‘horrible, immoral thing’ that I did I did out of my own true self,” he maintained.

The great moral, ideological and even logical weakness of would be socialists and early day progressives in the 30’s and 40’s, was that they refused to reconcile their fervent desires for workers paradise, with the evil that any known examples of such experiments have always produced.

Then, it was blindness towards Stalin, enough that many so called “blacklisted” signed on as his agents. Later, blindness toward a similar figure in Castro, a blindness that remains unhealed. To Yassar Arafat, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient that did more to make peace in our time impossible than anyone in the Middle East.

Some can make comparisons, too, to a recently deposed tyrant in Iraq, and similarly slimy figures in Iran. As long as you don’t have a leftist orthodoxy that you’re unprepared to challenge, with those pesky little things called facts.

Joe Katzman at Winds of Change links to a review Oliver Stone’s new movie World Trade Center, written by Rev. Paul W. McNellis at the Democracy Project.

Rev. McNellis’s review stands as an excellent essay on what constitutes courage, as applicable on September 10^th, 2001, as it was on September 11^th. The difference, McNellis poetically underscores in his piece, is that courage built in the day to day, remains constant at a moment of greatest danger, and fear:

We see people putting others first, on this, the worst day of their lives because they’ve been doing it every day of their lives. And if you spend your life as a husband and father putting those you love first, then when the crucial day comes chances are that as a policeman you’ll put the people in the North Tower first as well.

(snip)

Courage is not the absence of fear. Anyone present at ground zero that day would have been a fool not to feel fear. We see that these men are afraid, but they overcome it. And fear isn’t overcome without leaders. Sgt. McLoughlin asks for volunteers; the others can say yes or no. Jimeno is the first to say yes, and then others follow his example.

Courage as a virtue is increasingly misunderstood in our society, especially among the keyboard class. As our lives become more comfortable and protected, we forget who does the protecting.

We in the military recognize this attitude of service, we’ve lived it, more or less, though always with less certainty of our own steadfastness and resilience, than what we see clearly in our fellow soldiers. “If you weren’t afraid, you’d be a moron,” one of my Master Sergeants often said.

Read the whole thing.

The upcoming publication of the MILBLOG Anthology The Blogs of War, published by Simon & Schuster, edited by Blackfive, and inclusive of a post of mine, has created some interesting opportunities, of which I hope to share news soon.

But as a consequence of these unfolding events, Mrs. Dadmanly and I have done a lot of soul searching. We are in a particular place and time, emotionally and spiritually. We confront the consequences of my deployment to Iraq, our 18 month separation, and changes. My changes, her changes, Little Manly’s changes. “There is a season,” the writer of the Old Testament Book Ecclesiates, “and to everything a purpose under heaven.” A most strange and passing wondrous season in our lives.

I’ve been struggling to capture a mess of feelings and impressions, most recently with this post. Mrs. Dadmanly experienced what she describes as revelatory – for those who don’t share our religious beliefs, call it inspired awareness – and she writes, as follows.

***

Mrs. Dadmanly:

It has been nine months since my soldier came “home.” I counted the hours, days, sometimes minutes, while he was deployed. What day is it today? It is a blessing to count months again.

I remember last summer 2005 when friends/family/co-workers would express “how quickly the summer is going by.” For me, it was the longest summer I could remember, and I prayed it snowed “tomorrow,” which would mean summer was over and my soldier would be home soon.

This summer is so much different then last. I look at the tree in the front yard, the same tree to which I tied the yellow ribbon and American flags, the tree that every time I would come in or out of the driveway, tears would flow. I sit at the kitchen table looking out the window, and remember wondering if my soldier was going to come home to me. I look across the table, and he is sitting there smiling at me, drinking coffee, the coffee I longed to share again.

I thank God for having him return to me, to our family. With all the joy and happiness that the end of deployment brings, it also brings a sharp reality, almost a contrast of sorts of what I had thought life would be like “after deployment.”

Many areas have gone amazingly back to normal or I should say normal for us. Some have not. My soldier and I are different, changed. That does not necessarily mean in a negative way, but some ways feel very “uncomfortable” for lack of a better word.

A reality has “hit” me in the past week. In the same breath that I speak of joy, happiness, gratefulness of the return of my soldier, I am experiencing sadness, grief, fear, anxiousness, anger. I can be looking directly at him and will begin to cry for fear that he will not be coming home. Odd, I think, he is standing right in front of me. I cannot speak or think the words of the past deployment without tears welling up in my eyes.

The reality that “hit” me this past week is this. During the deployment, I really thought I was dealing with the separation and all the emotions, thoughts, feelings, fears, anger, that would try to overpower me. I did not. “I’m a mess,” like one of our soldier friends likes to say.

What is wrong with me? My soldier is home, he is safe, and why can’t I get a grip? Why can’t I control the overflowing outpouring of emotions? It “should” be over now that my soldier is home again.

I have come to realize that it is just beginning, that is, me dealing with, working through, allowing all that I “thought” I dealt with, apparently suppressed, to be heard, to come out, to let happen.

In the past nine months I truly never thought, it was because of the deployment that I was experiencing all these issues. I pride myself on being “in touch” most of the time with “why I’m feeling the way I’m feeling,” but not this time. I tried all my old “fixes” to rid myself of these uncomfortable emotions and feelings.

Eating obsessively…did not work this time. Exercising…did not work this time. Losing weight…not working. Praying… not working. Taking trips…nope. Even trying all kinds of vitamins that say, “they will help me stop feeling this way.”

As much as I heard the counselors from the Vet Center, read articles, read peoples stories, even other soldiers wives sharing, I NEVER made the connection that I needed to finally experience, acknowledge, accept, work through, all that I had pushed down and inward while my soldier was away. It went off like a light bulb, it all makes sense.

I even remember telling myself in my head, “Boy, I’m glad I’m not feeling like they are,” or reading something and saying “that is not happening to me.” YES IT IS!!!!!! The one word, emotion that seems to overpower the rest is “sadness.”

I want to share this example, because the experience I had is part of the reason I am able to go forward, and work through all that I’m experiencing.

As I walked to the store I looked across the parking lot, and saw an elderly couple getting out of a car. The man had put the lady’s wheel chair as close as he could to her car door, and now had a walker with her balancing on it, to go from seat of car to seat of wheel chair. I watched as he carefully helped her, continuing to hold her and the wheel chair to keep it from moving.

My first thought was sadness that they had to go through this, getting old, not being able to just jump out of the car and walk swiftly into the store. I believe at that moment God spoke to my heart.

What came over me was this. Stop always looking for the sadness, and do something about it, pray for them, pray that they will have an easier time today, getting in and out of that chair, that they enjoy their day, that if she is in pain it is gone for today, pray for joy for them.

I did it, I prayed and “I felt good.” Then I prayed, Lord let me see this in all situations, remind me, convict me, prick my spirit in all areas to help when I can. Wow! I thought, Life is not over, it is just beginning.

Life is without a doubt different since deployment, changed, I need to deal with the separation that occurred, I need to let it out, I need to share it, and I need to let me be me. There is not a time frame on when I’m supposed to “be over it,” but to realize I am not, right now. It is O.K. I can be where I am. IT IS GOING TO BE O.K. but for today, even though the emotions are overwhelming, they are mine, I’m going to work through it. Life really is good! I made it through deployment, I will make it through now and God is taking care of me, carrying me, whispering in my ear that “all is well.”

I look at the tree as I drive in and out of the driveway and the emotion wells up, I cry, for past, for present, for future, sadness, happiness, uncertainties, reality. As the tree sheds its leaves in the fall, and regrowth occurs every spring, I too will lose some layers, add some new ones and keep some of the old. Everything in our lives is affected by a season, one ends, another begins, and sometimes they intermingle for a short while.

***

Dadmanly concurs, and wants to add, but to all, there is a purpose, unto heaven.

Jonah Goldberg proves himself foremost among those “most talented” young conservative writers Fred Barnes mentioned recently in a Hillsdale College speech, in today’s editorial at Real Clear Politics.

Goldberg takes on the illogic of Judge Taylor’s NSA decision, and examines the core hypocrisies of several of the plaintiffs of the case:

You do see the irony here, don't you? A coalition of pressure groups - Greenpeace, the ACLU and a bunch of left-wing professors - are arguing that the Constitution must be immutably inflexible, adamantine in the face of changing times. The fact that al-Qaida is using new technologies the founders could never have imagined is irrelevant, say the absolutists. If the government can listen in on bin Laden's phone calls without a warrant, what's to keep them from listening to a phone call between me and my Aunt Sally?

Isn't this just a bit hard to take with a straight face from the ACLU, which finds powers not created by the Constitution every day and periodically declares such inanities as the idea that the Constitution forbids teachers from reading "The Chronicles of Narnia" in class lest the tykes' young minds be corrupted by hidden messages about Christianity? Such concerns would have left the founders dumbfounded before the opening prayers of the Constitutional Convention.

I’d note that this is probably the best of all reasons for critics to insist that plaintiffs first establish standing, before they’re ever allowed to argue their case for harm.

Of course, if you are a jurist who favors a particular side in a legal debate, who seeks publicity, and wants to advance a political agenda, a plaintiff being on your side may be all the standing you need.

I couldn’t help myself, I read through some of the hysterical name calling and trash talking from the left, in response to Ann Althouse’s excellent Op Ed in the NY Times yesterday. Ann is this, Althouse is that, the rhetorical equivalent of “yeah, well you’re a poopy head!”

I am sick of being lectured on ethics, law, the Constitution, Government, and anything remotely related to National Security by those of a political persuasion that makes critical reasoning impossible. Who don’t even both with considering alternative points of view, or the logical strength of the arguments of their opponents.

There’s no hope for them, these leftists. They’ll need to retire, and eventually fade into angry obscurity. If God is merciful, they won’t entirely tear the country down – or so thoroughly collaborate with our enemies as to surrender what remains of our liberty.

Andi’s back to work again. Well, it was Andi’s baby in 2006, looks like another’s in the oven. (It’s almost as if she’s trying to keep up (pro)creation-wise with Army Wife Toddler Mom.)

Per Andi, the 2007 MilBlog Conference will be held on Saturday, May 5, 2007 in Washington, DC. Now you have plenty of time to plan... More details in the coming weeks.

Also linked at Milblogs.

Some things are just too tragic for words.

(Sigh.)

Another year of crap from the Yankees fans, who abound and no not the perpetual grief of a Red Sox fan (abated but once).

Ann Althouse notes a windy defense by Law Professor Larry Tribe of Judge Taylor’s terrorist surveillance decision, which I noted here.

Tribe is a celebrity jurist if ever there was one, on par with Court TV and all those defense attorney talking heads that show up on cable. You know the type, the ones that make a living offering commentary on the latest celebrity trial or sensationalist murder case. (Let’s face it, the real process of law is as deadly boring as sitting through televised town council meetings. Hence the need for professional TV attorneys and judges. “I am a real judge, but I don’t bother practicing law because a play a lawyer on TV!”

Here’s as much of Tribe’s defense as I’m willing to indulge (emphasis mine):

When a presidential program that wouldn't have been exposed at all but for leaks that the administration is trying not just to plug but to prosecute is manifestly lawless in the most fundamental respects; when that program challenges constitutional as well as statutory constraints on executive authority; when it is promulgated by an executive branch in the hands of characters who care little about the rule of law, much less about legal nuance; and when the lawmakers who are posturing as the program's critics have in fact engineered a statutory "fix" that amounts to little more than a whitewash in the offing -- when all these things are true, it's not costless to harp on the details of a basically correct legal denunciation of that program to the point of ridiculing the motives and capacities of the judge delivering the blow.

Gad, I thought I did the run on sentence thing to death. I’ve met my match.

Note the way Tribe describes the Bush Administration as characters who don’t care one whit about laws, and used that as excuse for why Judge Taylor didn’t need to exercise her authority as, well, a judge and not a blogger or other talking head. And hey, what do I know? Not as much as the more vocal critics of Judge Taylor’s opinion, who have pointed out the following.

Judge Taylor neglected to establish standing -- the legal term that refers to whether a specific plaintive has any personal justification for objecting to a law, program, behavior or event that. In this case, that meant, someone who’s communications had been monitored or intercepted. The idea is to prevent “just anybody” from bringing suits. They have to have been harmed or affected in some way.

Judge Taylor ignored important precedents. She ignored arguments in support of the program. She dismissed without discussion well-known tensions within the Constitution, between the Constitution and legislation. She refused to consider any special circumstances involved in terrorism, the fight against it, changes in technology, or any particular compelling reasons to think beyond what she obviously considers so obvious that it doesn’t require evidence or argument.

Talk about your naked assertions of power.

(Via Instapundit.)

Part 2: You Call That PTSD?

(This is belated follow-up in a multi-part series I introduced, entitled Conclusion.)

This post won’t seem to write itself, and I’m not doing much better getting it done myself.

I started with a disclaimer to what I planned on writing here, all well and good, but then it stalled right there. Lots to talk about, some reluctance I guess to pick it back up. So here goes. First, I’ll repeat a very short summary of my disclaimer to refocus.

A deployment to a combat zone – and experiencing combat first hand – changes a person forever. Yet some of our soldiers, including many Veterans of prior combat, seem quick to dismiss such thoughts from their consciousness.

Very few of our soldiers saw anything remotely like combat. Yet as leaders, we’re trained to look for, anticipate, and help our soldiers cope with inevitable effects of their deployment experiences. We try to help our soldiers deal with their experiences. If you lost something while you were there, if your mind and heart and feelings and attitudes changed, let people know. That’s a big part of what makes a MILBLOG, too, as I think about it.

So much of what we say can be twisted and used as anti-war propaganda by the usual useful idiots. But better that stuff that needs to get talked about, gets talked about. The useful idiots we will always have with us, biting ankles while the grown-ups talk things over like adults.

On the whole, most of our soldiers view their service in Iraq as an overall positive experience. Most are relieved it’s over. Here’s the bottom line up front for most: glad they went, gladder still to have it done.

I saw our Command Sergeant Major (CSM) a couple of months after our return, he wanted to talk about Iraq, our time, telling stories. He missed being in Iraq. He said so, most obviously, but even more than that, by his demeanor and expressions, I knew he missed being there. Gone was the easy (if forced) camaraderie, the shared purpose, the excitement, all the soldier and man time. Part of that was his ex-Marine self, that attraction to all things violent and combative, but there’s more to it than that.

It’s how I feel when I get a chance to slam back a few beers, play cards, tell stories, just talk smack with others who know exactly what I’m talking about. Shared experiences, but even more, shared mental states.

Sometimes it’s just some time to escape from the world of family, or work, or even just the mundane demands of the civilian day-to-day. Maybe for some, to get away from the world of women, who largely create the “nests” we men inhabit.

I think differently now about how this all works, than I thought before. During mobilization training, the focus was on preparing our soldiers physically and mentally for what we would face.

Extensive training on all phases of operations. Reports and administrative functions for headquarters staffs. Stocking spare parts and vehicle preparations, including up armoring, general motor maintenance for mechanics. Detainee operations for Tactical Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Teams (THT), leaders, really, all of us, as our Military Intelligence (MI) Battalion (BN) was to be responsible for one or more detention facilities. Defensive Lanes, Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT), Convoy Operations, and Casualty handling for everybody, because you never know who’s going to use it or need it.

Above all else, medical assessment (SRC) to clear soldiers for the demands of deployment to the combat zone. Finding the men and women with chronic health problems or other limitations, and assessing whether those were severe enough to warrant being coded “Red” (Non-Deployable).

The medical staff were very responsive to both soldier and command concerns, and in my view, always tried to make the right judgment between unit mission requirements and soldier capabilities and limitations. Permanent profiles exist in wartime as well as peacetime, but some limitations can get you killed in a combat zone.

Alcoholism and heart conditions. Back problems and obesity. Psychiatric or psychological problems. Age. Overall physical health.

I worried mostly about my two time veterans, the soldiers who had served in Vietnam, or Gulf War One, or even earlier tours in Afghanistan. Some soldiers who wanted to go probably shouldn’t. Some who didn’t want to, probably could. I fought to keep those who wanted to go and I thought could handle it well, but who had limitations that potentially made them Non-Deployable. I spoke privately to the medical staff for those soldiers not willing to admit that they were having a difficult time that was sure to get worse.

It was a moment of all kinds of decisions, for leaders and Commanders, certainly, but also for men and women who rarely get to ask themselves how far they’re willing to go, who much they really want to serve, what they’re really willing to endure. How they will view themselves in the future. I’d like to think we all made the right decisions, with only 2 or 3 exceptions out of 200, mostly the result of self-deception or a willful deception of commanders by the soldiers in question.

All through the medical readiness and mobilization training period, we grew hardened, no nonsense, coldly practical about a lot of things. Some of us copped attitudes towards those who failed the screenings, or couldn’t keep up, or otherwise let the process place them outside the deployment. Many of us started using derogatory terms for those who struggled, or fell out. This made redeployment more difficult for some.

The same attitudes we left with, didn’t survive long upon our return from Iraq.

Your average soldiers tend to be low maintenance, tough guys and gals, who pride themselves on endurance, strength, fortitude and getting the job done. “I’m okay. I don’t need a Doctor to tell me what hurts.”

Not everybody, mind you, but for citizen soldiers in the National Guard, most of us were something else first, and several things second and third and even more, before we were soldiers. Maybe it’s the lifestyle, the ethos, but many of us were quick to cop the tough guy stance, at least on the outside. I think it’s how many of us steeled ourselves to get through a combat zone deployment and a year more or less away from our families.

Some of our soldiers had no trouble at all describing every visit to sick call, every ill or ailment, to the Veterans Affairs (VA) counselors and medical staff upon our return. We had lots of encouragement. The VA was aggressively active promoting their services and advocating for soldier care immediately upon our return, thoroughly supported and encouraged by unit commands at every level. We must have had three Post deployment health assessments within the first 6 months of our return.

But even those soldiers who found it easy to report an ache, a problem, an injury or a burden newly carried in their lives, even these soldiers most ready to self-report, still encountered something we didn’t expect, but maybe should have: Guilt.

The average soldier returning from Vietnam felt abandoned by his country and military authorities, and shunned or scorned by his fellow citizens. We who serve today know this, largely from accounts of our Vietnam Veteran comrades, but also from living in America for the past 20-25-30 years. Many felt deep guilt that they survived while buddies didn’t make it out alive. Most left and returned in ones and twos, often isolated from comrades, and in many cases, going from jungle to transit point to home station to out on the streets in as little as 48-72 hours. No adjustment, little or no services or official debriefing, or even basic preparation, other than this: “Son, you’re gonna want to take that uniform off before you hit the airport. There’s an awful lot of hate and hard feelings out there, and that uniform’s gonna make you a target.”

Today’s veterans face very different circumstances, but can still end up in the same place, mentally and emotionally. We are often overwhelmed by the support and encouragement of our fellow citizens, family, neighbors, friends and co-workers. The American people seem bound and determined to never again make the mistake of blaming the soldier. The military stresses that we not keep anything to ourselves, and the entire deployment and redeployment processes reinforce constantly that we need to look out for each other, and refer ourselves and others for services if necessary. Even if we think just to be sure, just in case, somewhere down the road, we might possibly need extra care or services.

But in our heads, we’re thinking, “suck it up. Quit yer whinin’.”

Guilt again, but this time for a different reason. “I’m no hero,” most of us say. “I didn’t have a hard time at all,” or “I never saw any action,” or even, “I never really thought I was in any danger.” Boredom, tedium, routine, and more American style services and amenities than any prior generation of soldiers could dare to imagine. Like R&R all the time. For most, but obviously not all. Like a lottery in reverse, where only the very unlucky lost. The rest of us won.

Internet cafes, nice gyms and juice bars, café latte at the Green Bean, dining facilities (DFAC) that blow away stateside, institutional facilities, regular trips to the PX, Subway, Pizza Hut, and a 4 day pass to Qatr.

We had to deal with stray mortars, rockets, and explosions from vehicle born improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs) outside the wire or even at the gates, but these were infrequent and almost entirely ineffective, unless their aim was to lull us into complacency and a feeling of invulnerability. If that was the aim at the larger forward operating bases (FOBs), then they were largely successful. Our sense of security might have been illusory, or based on “safe from harm so far,” but that’s how it was for us in Tikrit. Results varied. Small, remote bases could be more dodgy. Big FOBs were well insulated, and the insurgent teams responsible for sporadic mortar or rocket fire never had a chance to get much practice before forced “retirement.”

This had to be one of the craziest, most unreal “combat” environment in the history of war, even by modern standards. And I don’t think we will fully appreciate what it was, or was not, and how uniquely whatever it was, affected each of us as individuals.

Some soldiers grew disgusted that there wasn’t any “action.” It seemed to make them angry. Maybe they hoped to take out some of the enemy, for any of the good or bad reasons people want to do that kind of thing. Patriotism, zeal, glory, bloodlust, a violent nature, repressed, or not-at-all-repressed anger.

Some breezed through their deployments, and several wanted to stay, or follow-up for contractor positions for a very commonly anticipated 100K tax free for all manner of specialty trades and occupations.

Some soldiers seemed to develop difficulties with the start and stop, sudden changes in security posture, on and off again vigilance, even the simple after-effects of basic, low level stress.

It really had nothing to do with whether you got shot at, or rode through an IED, or witnessed first hand a mortar or rocket strike. It had most to do with what was inside of you, what made you tick, how you coped, how you pushed both the crazy mundane, and the hopped up combat rush out of your mind, just to do the next necessary thing.

Because war really does bring a man or woman to a point of clarity, and maybe refinement, as in the way precious metals are refined by fire. Not everyone makes it through the “refiners fire,” as scripture reminds us, to be tempered like steel, or purified like gold and silver. Some end up as a lot more dross than treasure.

We had what I came to think of as “canaries,” and that’s most of who we dealt with as emergencies and situations to deal with while deployed. Canaries were the early warning soldiers, the ones who would likely have popped, in whatever way each was built to pop, when stress came. When the going got a little tough.

Canaries revealed themselves early in mobilization training. The same soldiers who were “problem children” in training, tended to be problem children overseas. Not always, but often enough that exceptions proved the rule. The canaries fell over in their cages, but things never got so bad that the rest started falling, too. Canaries fall over in their lives back home, at their jobs, with addictions or problems that were out of control when they were mobilized. Canaries were likely to make poor choices in dealing with stress, problems, or temptations, and deployment would only add to opportunity.

I often said to myself, as I tried to stay alert for warning signs, for trends, for weaknesses that would impact everybody, or symptoms that start to spread: “Keep an eye on the canaries. Judge the potential emotional and behavioral ‘casualties’ against the general population of soldiers. Once you start seeing non-canaries, you’ve got a serious problem.” I can honestly say, we pretty much only saw the canaries fall over.

One of my soldiers seemed the farthest from harm to many of us. He worked in a decidedly non-combat role. He played the clown, often, and never seemed to take very much seriously. He had a wild streak from time to time, but seemed to settle down before anything got too out of hand. He might have gone outside the wire a couple of times, traveling to the next FOB. He might have taken a drive to our more remote site once, admittedly a more dangerous ride, but as a passenger, not truck commander (TC), driver, or gunner. He worked a short, late night shift, skeleton manning in an Admin tactical operation center (TOC). Walked back to his billets by himself, which he admitted was the scariest part of his tour.

He came back, did the VA thing, ended up with a disability and a ticket to immediate, lifetime drill pay and no need to continue staying in the Guard. He also found himself out of place in his own skin, uneasy and anxious, and now finds it difficult to work his civilian job that used to be second nature. “I’m a mess,” he says, but for the first few months we thought it was just his shtick.

Those of us who had copped that hardness towards the Non-deployables, found ourselves confronting the flip side of our prejudices. The sick, the lame, the lazy. Another term that I won’t share, but starts with “broke.”

My disabled soldier carries something beyond his injuries from this deployment to Iraq. All of us want to think we did something important, that we made a difference. That we served our country, and through that service, served in some small way the people of Iraq. That we are better men and women for our experience in Iraq.

That’s pretty hard when you think your fellow soldiers think you’re a shammer, or a shirker, or a whiner, like that “broke-thing.” Harder still, when you start thinking of yourself that way.

Which is part of the change that has to happen, each in his or her own private way. Few of us saw combat in any meaningful way. Fewer still suffered casualties or witnessed death and destruction close up. Compared to any prior generation of soldiers, we had it easy. No Greatest Generation, we. No Depression through which to survive childhood. No flaming hell like Pearl, no wall of lead like Normandy, no surf of blood throughout the Pacific. Days and days of tedium, heat and boredom, punctuated by rare minutes of adrenalin, with only the slightest chance of catastrophe in any given moment. Lots worse for some, admittedly, but just about that for most of us.

We can suffer serious and long-standing injury, if we can’t make peace with our service, our changes, ourselves.

I have another soldier who struggles with the same troubles he left home with, amplified in some way now that he sits alone in an apartment. Away from his fellow soldiers, he’s suddenly away from the forced communal living that makes a kind of family. Alone before Iraq, he’s more starkly alone now. Home can’t ever feel like Iraq, thank God, but home doesn’t feel like home anymore, either.

He’s a smart one, can quote you paragraph, line or letter about what he’s going through, what makes him tick, what a mess he really was before deployment, but hadn’t needed to confront his problems. Suddenly he finds himself unable to leave his apartment. He’s too smart and well educated to believe in God, he says, but educated by life enough to know that one can still live the life of the damned, as an atheist or agnostic.

Maybe if he could just find a volleyball club of some kind, or maybe just some kind of hobby or fellowship, just not that whole church thing. Something that can get him out of the house and around other people. Sure, he wouldn’t mind if somebody checks up on him form time to time, even as he knows we have to if we’re leaders or NCOICs. “You have a responsibility to make sure I get help, so that’s what you’re doing.” And true to form, one of the NCOs threatens to tell the CSM that he said he’ll kill himself – he hasn’t said any such thing – if he doesn’t see the counselor at the VA. (And he sure doesn’t want the CSM to be the leader who feels obligated to check up on him. His immediate NCOIC and even First Sergeant sound a whole lot better to him.)

So he knows he came to the combat zone with pre-existing issues that somehow got bigger with deployment and redeployment. Not that the VA cares, nor should they, nor should any of us. He’s our knucklehead, he’s struggling, he’s one of our own, and we aren’t going to leave him behind.

One of our soldiers had two businesses when he deployed, and came back to neither. Bust, gone broke, nothing left but debt and obligations.

The guy who went AWOL at the start, prompted by a demanding wife, brought back in, counseled, encouraged to do the right thing. Deployed, only to find out his wife was busy making other plans in his absence. Who still wanted to cash his checks and keep his money, but use it to prepare a nest-egg with her new squeeze.

We all took turns working on him until he severed the financial ties and saved what was left. He made quite the turn around in assertiveness, seemed to make himself a new man from the experience. Re-enlisted, earned himself $15,000 tax free, then returned stateside and disappeared somewhere in Florida. Won’t return phone calls, won’t resurface, and may soon have government officials chasing after him to recover the re-enlistment bonus.

We talk about our experiences a lot during drills, during social events. We talk about those soldiers who are still on medical hold, dealing with the Army medical process for injuries while deployed. This involves huge and somewhat Byzantine paperwork, medical consultative and care management processes, beginning with that most important Line of Duty report and medical assessment.

First time and second time around Veterans talk over who seems to be doing well, who’s suffering, whose marriage went south, who needs what surgery that most will refuse, rather than let Army Doctors try out sports medicine, back, and other complex surgeries. Who stayed active duty or Active Guard Reserve (AGR), who took the plunge to Washington Agencies, either GS or contractor.

We talk over dealing with the VA. Those who know the VA from Vietnam days marvel at how much support we get, how aggressively everybody makes sure we know what help is available.

My Master Sergeant Vietnam Vet, the one I wrote about in this Profile, overhears one of our conversations, with one of our soldiers talking about difficulty sleeping, anxiety, a litany of disturbances. The soldier mentions how the VA counselor describes it as a low level kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD).

“You call that PTSD? That ain’t PTSD,” he finally blurts out with obvious impatience. “When you wake up screaming in the middle of the night, start beating on your wife in your sleep, or run outside in your underwear at 3:00 a.m., yelling ‘incoming,’ then you can talk about PTSD.”

He’s told us about his experiences after his time in Vietnam. The months of flashbacks, night sweats, waking nightmares, and all the rest.

“It stopped after a while. I don’t get bothered much anymore.”

Maybe. I remember the many months Harry was working full time for one of our Intel missions, and we would visit him once a month at the site. He always seemed glad to see us. “I don’t really get out much, just stay in my room.” He stayed in largely empty BOQ billets. He never seemed to need much social contact, otherwise. I always thought his alone-ness, his preferred solitude was the way he was able to make peace with his wartime experiences.

In the grand scheme of things, Harry went to hell and back early in his military career. Nearer its end, he had a different kind of experience in the combat zone. His deployment to Iraq involved a different kind of stress, dealing with an HQ, officers, and a staff that included a lot of people he vows never to work with again, if he can help it. He’s gone back to working full time as a Guardsman on extended Active Duty Special Work (ADSW) orders, but he still keeps his Guard slot by coming to our drills once a month.

So for a Vietnam Vet, what we’re going through is nothing compared to what guys like him went through. In the days when they were a lot more on their on, with little support, where the best thing to do was get rid of the uniform and sneak back home in ones and twos.

And maybe in the end, with everything else we have available, what’s most valuable has been the least appreciated from the start. The memories and experiences, the heartbreak and the anger. Whatever worked for those who came before, who have been there, done that, but back in the day when doing it was one big piece of yourself you never got all the way back. Even when we have to hear it in the form of the caustic wit of a two-time combat veteran, putting it all into perspective.

I’m glad the Army made it easier on Harry this time around. For one thing, he deserved better than he got then, and the Army had a chance to make it up to him. (Other than sending him to Iraq, that is. At least that neutralized the threat he always imagined was the worst that they could do to him.)

Good for Harry that the Army does things a whole lot better nowadays. That’s good for us, too, because he’s still one ornery son of a gun to deal with now. I can only imagine how tough he’d get with us if he had to live through a Vietnam type experience twice.

And we’re the better for both of his experiences.

I made Norm Geras’s short short short story list!

You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you? See here for details on Norm’s fun little project. (My entry was number 22.)

Quite a challenge, participants were asked to craft a short short story of 250 words or less. I really enjoyed the challenge, and he’s generated some very fine results.

Thanks, Norm, I’m honored, please express my appreciation to the judges!

Grim posts a harshly beautiful essay at Blackfive, On the Virtues of Killing Children, that’s an absolute must read -- if only to consider a deeper truth revealed beyond the sensationalist title. Follow-up, too, with the comments, Grim and his readers add some excellent post-scripts to his reflection.

Grim transcribes an all too realistic dialog with a perhaps hypothetical pacifist friend, or if not pacifist, someone thoroughly immersed in the “war is bad for living things” kind of philosophy. “A peaceful, gentle soul” is how Grim actually describes his antagonist. Note: 2^nd definition per the American Heritage Dictionary , “2. The principal character in opposition to the protagonist or hero of a narrative or drama.”

Gentle soul that she is, she’s still the antagonist to Grim’s protagonist. There’s a post all of its own in the Latin forms here, but that’s for another day.

And as the Antagonist of Grim’s timely drama, the Gentle Soul starts and frames the old argument:

The gentle soul -- how I respect her! -- will begin by pointing out how many innocents have died in the recent wars, and especially the children, who are the most obviously innocent. She will point out figures for Iraq, for Afghanistan, for Lebanon, and ask: "How can you justify this? These poor children, who might have been good men, good women, lain in the cold earth?"

We have all had the conversation that far, have we not? We are accustomed to reply: "But the enemy is the one that targets children. We try our best to avoid hurting children. That makes us better. Furthermore, the enemy hides himself among children. As a result, in spite of our best efforts, sometimes children die on the other side also. But again, it is not our fault -- it is his fault. He endangers them."

She replies: "But how can you justify their deaths? Regardless of how hard you try, will you not kill them? Some of them? Should we not choose peace instead?"

Grim’s vignette is worth the whole read, if only to walk through the unassailable logic of his argument against the self-defeating and contradictory claim to pacifism, however well intended, here excerpted:

"Consider: when the enemy seeks to kill our child to motivate us to surrender to his will, is it not because he believes that the danger to the children will move our hearts?"

"And when he hides among children," I add, "why? Children do little to deflect artillery. Must it not be because he knows that we -- we ourselves -- fear for the children, even his children?"

"It is our love of these innocents that endangers them. If we did not care if children died, they would be in little danger."

"If we did not care if our children died, they would not be targets. There would be no reason to target them, because we would not be moved by their deaths.

"It must be," I tell her sadly, "Here: That we pursue war without thought of the children. That we do not turn aside from the death of the innocent, but push on to the conclusion, through all fearful fire. If we do that, the children will lose their value as hostages, and as targets: if we love them, we must harden our hearts against their loss. Ours and theirs."

I would add, if only as post-script. We have an example, a supernatural one as you allude, for the kind of selfless sacrifice that in the end may be required of all of us. "No greater love," a Book of wisdom says, "than that a man lay down his life for a friend."

There is a higher love, a love that goes beyond the mere mortal, and we only glimpse it as if looking through a clouded glass.

By looking past the deaths of innocent as we fight against evil, we can remain resolute, confident that there are the lives of many more innocents that hang in the balance, critically dependent upon our success.

It is for the lives of all those innocents yet threatened that allows us to stand strong and ignore the innocents who will surely die in the course of defeating the evil that threatens them, threatens us all, threatens our very humanity.

In fighting, we do not surrender our humanity, rather we do what's necessary to preserve it.

Tender hearted fools find that a contradiction, and thus a lie.

(Via Winds of Change)

Michael Ledeen, posting at The Corner, provide an extensive link to a piece by Robert Tracinski, editor of The Intellectual Activist, in which he argues that it’s Time to Fight the Real War.

Ledeen excerpts from another piece by Tracinski in TIA Daily, Five Minutes to Midnight.

Tracinski’s primary thesis is that the left id desperate to retain faith in diplomatic solutions in the face of naked aggression, because to surrender it means the collapse of their entire world view:

The left senses that a regional war is coming, that Iran is hell-bent on starting it, and that there is no way to avoid it. But all of this runs directly counter to their whole world-view. Rather than questioning that world view, they simply assert that this can't be happening. They have to believe that something, anything—no matter how implausible—will stop it from happening. If we just get everyone together and talk, and we keep tinkering with diplomatic solutions until we find something that works, surely we can find a way to avoid a regional war in the Middle East. Can't we? Please?

Tracinski notes Richard Holbrooke’s recent peon to Diplomacy, to which I greatly objected, and remarks:

Note that the idea that we can settle all of this just by sitting down and talking with Iran and Syria—with no reference to the ideas, statements, goals, and actions of the Iranian regime—give the left's pronouncements on the coming war an air of unreality.

Thus all the analogies on the right to the 1930’s, and the stark failure of negotiation and appeasement with Hitler and his fascist ideology and ambitions for conquest.

Read the whole of Ledeen’s excerpt.

I am frankly surprised and disappointed with some commentary appearing today over at The Corner, courtesy of Andrew Stuttaford.

Stuttaford expresses alarm over the current impasse in Lebanon, describes Belgravia Dispatch as “currently a must read.” If you view Diplomacy as a zero-sum net good and the current Administration’s Counter-terrorism foreign policy a disaster, then yes, BG’s a must read.

If you think the failed policies of the past led us precisely to where we are with Islamic Fascism, its rogue state sponsors, and “moderate Middle East state” Vichy Governments, then you might have a different perspective.

I think it most significant that the deadly, avowed enemies of Israel and the US are the ones screaming most loudly for an unconditional ceasefire, and negotiations for an International Peacekeeping Force to separate Hezbollah from the Israeli Defense Force (IDF).

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind such a ceasefire, such an eventually, under any conceivable scenario, timetable, architect or participants, is a perfect return to the status quo in terms of Hezbollah capabilities for terror – and an even degraded potential for the Lebanese to defang or prevent Hezbollah from resuming their proxy terror war.

Those who suggest this is a disaster for US relations in the region are naïve, ignorant, or stupid, or feigning one or more of the above.

Remember 1979 in Iran? Remember the 1983 attempt against the doomed World Trade Center? Remember 9/11? I think that’s pretty indicative of (at least a virulent strain) of foaming at the mouth Anti-Americanism in the Muslim world.

Anyone who is at all familiar with the constant and unwavering stream of hate spewing from Madrassas and even “moderate” Islamic scholars for the past 30 years knows how ridiculous it would be to suggest that anything we’ve done in the past 5 years could possibly have worsened our standing in the world. Every time the Muslim world gets offended, that’s one more in an orderly succession of justifications and “causes” of one brutality or crime against humanity after another.

It’s sick, immoral, and pathological in the extreme. It’s the basis of the “blame the victim” mentality that our enemies want so very much for our ruling elites to adopt. After all, such a first step is essential to our eventual submission to Islam as dhimmi.

I don’t know if Stuttaford admires “the most talented foreign policy practitioner currently active in the Democratic party,” Richard Holbrooke, but Gregory Djerejian certainly does.

In today’s Washington Post, Holbrooke conflates Lebanon and Iraq into “a single emergency,” the resultant chaos of which only benefits “Iran, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and the Iraqi Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr.”

I don’t doubt for a minute that the current war between civilization and Islamic fascism provides opportunities which Iran, Al Qaeda and their proxies can exploit. That in no way necessarily implies that we are wrong to continue to push the attack, in Iraq, Lebanon, or less directly in Syria, Iran or the rest of the Middle East.

The implication from “diplomatic realists” like Holbrooke is that, had Israel conducted more of a “Clintonesque” gesture of response against Hezbollah provocations (definable acts of war in any previous century), achieved some phony negotiated settlement while pragmatic-minded and self-interested “moderate Middle Eastern states” were still angry at Hezbollah and Iran and unwilling to criticize Israel, then all would be well.

That’s the bizarro world of International Diplomacy, always ready to create pretend peace at someone else’s expense. (And if at the expense of Jews, all the better.)

Holbrooke bases his argument on an incongruous historical comparison to JFK and Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis:

This combination of combustible elements poses the greatest threat to global stability since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, history's only nuclear superpower confrontation. The Cuba crisis, although immensely dangerous, was comparatively simple: It came down to two leaders and no war. In 13 days of brilliant diplomacy, John F. Kennedy induced Nikita Khrushchev to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba.

How in keeping with the new DNC talking points, being flown aloft this month in the wake of Israel’s latest war for survival: only Liberal Democrats can keep us safe.

Just to mention some problems of historical accuracy: contemporary analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis suggest the outcome had a lot more to do with Cuban and Soviet conflicts, mistrust, power plays and pure dumb luck than “brilliant diplomacy.”

Holbrooke places deep significance in the influence upon JFK of Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August,” and quotes this centerpiece:

"The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit."

Based on his premise, Holbrooke offers this assessment:

Preventing just such a trap must be the highest priority of American policy. Unfortunately, there is little public sign that the president and his top advisers recognize how close we are to a chain reaction, or that they have any larger strategy beyond tactical actions.

World War One can surely be described as a complex nesting of convoluted alliances and defensive treaties, and involving grand schemes of empire building and competition. Tuchman makes a valid assessment about the tragedy that was The Great War, and recall too that much of the world agreed that this needed to be the war to end all wars, and the last of the “world wars.”

Too bad Holbrooke didn’t reflect on the equally tragic good intentions gone foul in the aftermath of WWI, and how the most destructive seeds to germinate in the aftermath that led to the unthinkable WWII, spawned most of all through naïve and ill-considered diplomacy. Instructive too, would be the pre-WWII attempts at compromise, appeasement, and an assumed equivalence of both morality and legitimacy, even in the face of naked aggression, brutality, and oppression.

Such counter-examples are of no use to the realists. What we need most is more diplomacy, according to Holbrooke, despite the almost total absence of successes against this particular enemy and threat:

But the United States must also understand, and deal with, the wider consequences of its own actions and public statements, which have caused an unprecedented decline in America's position in much of the world and are provoking dangerous new anti-American coalitions and encouraging a new generation of terrorists. American disengagement from active Middle East diplomacy since 2001 has led to greater violence and a decline in U.S. influence. Others have been eager to fill the vacuum. (Note the sudden emergence of France as a key player in the current burst of diplomacy.)

American policy has had the unintended, but entirely predictable, effect of pushing our enemies closer together. Throughout the region, Sunnis and Shiites have put aside their hatred of each other just long enough to join in shaking their fists -- or doing worse -- at the United States and Israel.

So what else is new? It’s hard to imagine a more brutal and catastrophic “consequence” of anti-American sentiment than 9/11, which need not require the reminder, happened before we invaded Iraq. Flashback to any point in time since Islamic radicals began spewing their hate-filled venom since the rise and fall of that earlier, European inspired Fascism.

Holbrooke seems to know what’s best for the Israelis than the Israelis themselves:

Every secretary of state from Henry Kissinger to Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright negotiated with Syria, including those Republican icons George Shultz and James Baker. Why won't this administration follow suit, in full consultation with Israel at every step? This would clearly be in Israel's interest.

With precious little to show for it, I’d argue. Just because you ignore a cancer and allow it to metastasize, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. And would Hobrooke seriously argue that the Bush Administration isn’t coordinating our responses and actions with the Israeli Government? If so, he’d be the first critic to suggest it. What makes him think that’s not already happening? If Israel wanted us to negotiate with Syria, I am quite certain we’d be pursuing that avenue.

There is a kind of perverse, reflexive logic in most Clinton era appointee pronouncements on the global war on terror, a logic that is immune to reason. “This wouldn’t have occurred if it weren’t for George Bush,” the thinking goes, “we would have remained engaged diplomatically and avoided unilateral action.”

The problem is, this kind of thinking, this approach, the presumption of good intentions that lies at the heart of realist diplomacy, is absurd against an enemy that uses our civility against us. We saw it with North Korean duplicity on nuclear agreements, we saw it in the UN-facilitated fraud known as Oil for Food in Iraq. We are living through it again with Iran.

Once we start down the diplomatic primrose path with openly violent and avowed terrorists like Hezbollah, then surely we have fallen into the trap of our enemies making.

Stanley Kurtz talks about Castro at National Review Online , but he’s also speaking volumes about other rogue states:

We need to appreciate the immensity of Castro’s achievement in preserving Cuba’s Communist dictatorship for 17 years after the collapse of his chief patron, the Soviet Union. It’s remarkable that, absent any great-power protection, and even after becoming, without Soviet subsidies, a permanent economic basket-case, Castro’s regime has not collapsed.
Let that be a lesson to those who wait for the collapse of regimes in Iran, North Korea, or Palestine because of long-term economic failure and/or economic sanctions.

Collapse may be inevitable, but that doesn’t make it imminent.

Why does this not surprise me? We ought to know by now, bad science makes worse law, and junk science makes law beyond bad, but unethical, and perhaps criminal.

Instapundit links to this New York Sun article by Ted Frank, who explains why Merck might be wise not to settle with litigants suing over alleged health complications, injury, or death resulting from use of their product Vioxx:

Take, for example, the last case Merck lost, that of Leonel Garza in south Texas. Mr. Garza, who was said by plaintiffs to have taken Vioxx for three weeks, was a 71-year-old overweight smoker, with high cholesterol, decades of heart disease, and a history of a heart attack and a quadruple bypass, yet a jury awarded his survivors $7 million in "compensatory" damages, and punitive damages to boot.

But even that story understates how outrageous the verdict was. Mr. Garza never had a prescription for Vioxx. Mr. Garza's widow testified that Dr. Michael Evans gave her husband an eight-day sample of Vioxx in a brown vial, and that then Dr. Juan Posada gave her husband two more vials filled with fifteen pills each and told him to return in thirty days. Her testimony contradicted what she said at her pretrial deposition, but she argued that her memory had improved over the intervening time. The Garza family never produced these brown vials: Mr. Garza's son testified at trial he threw them away — though his trial testimony also contradicted his deposition testimony. In turn, Dr. Posada testified that he never gave out thirty days worth of Vioxx, and never gave Vioxx to Mr. Garza. Dr. Evans testified he gave out samples only in eight-pill blister-packs. Nevertheless, the jury bought the "brown vial" theory, and held Merck liable.

There were other shenanigans at the Garza trial; one of the plaintiffs for whom lawyers sought millions of dollars of damages for Mr. Garza's death was his daughter from a previous marriage who met her father only a few times.

Mr. Garza's case is hardly an exception. In the most recent New Jersey trial, Thomas Cona tried to become a "long-term" user by telling the jury that he had taken Vioxx for twenty-two months: he asserted that he only had seven months worth of prescriptions because his doctor gave him fifteen months worth of free samples. The Wall Street Journal reports that jurors in the federal Dicky Irvin trial were suspicious that Mr. Irvin had been taking several medications, but the plaintiffs "lost" all but the Vioxx. And the New York Times reports that, in the Alabama case originally scheduled to be the first Vioxx trial, the plaintiff's physical evidence of Vioxx usage consisted of a package manufactured after her husband died. (The parties agreed to a postponement on the eve of trial after Merck moved for, and the judge denied, summary judgment.) Plaintiffs dismissed with prejudice a federal case on the eve of trial under suspicious circumstances. So out of eleven cases that have gone to trial or almost gone to trial, there is a reasonable suspicion that plaintiffs faked Vioxx usage in as many as five of them. How many more of the tens of thousands of pending plaintiffs have similar flaws?

Bad science for sure makes worse law. Product liability law remains in shambles without tort reform. When civil liability cases can rely merely on non-specific and non-causal relationships between products and unfortunate circumstances, and not on definable cause and effect, any “liability” judgment is irrational.

A certain number of individuals in any population will have heart attacks, suffer strokes, become infirmed or die from any number of natural or unrelated causes.

That an obese man who smokes, with a history of heart disease dies of a heart attack should not only be anticipated, but render any judgment of secondary causation irrelevant from a liability standpoint.

For class action and other rapacious litigators, stepping on the gravy train merely requires that they find the survivors of any heart attack victim, and dig long enough to find some link to secondary or tertiary causation, however remote or tenuous. For some, even that minimal effort to find such causation is too much work, and such links too easy to fabricate.

This is a good argument for legislation placing this area of law out of existence, now.

Linked from Laurie at Soldiers’ Angels New York Soldiers’ Angels New York. If you haven’t seen this effort, consider joining up (if you have a blog, that is.) I saw this earlier on one of the Milblogs, and signed up then.

911 Calling All Bloggers

Some of you may have heard about 2,996. This is an effort to remember each individual who lost their life in the terror attacks on the U.S. on September 11th, 2001.

Each blogger who signs up receives a name and will post a tribute to that person on their own blog on September 11th, 2006. If you have not signed up for this, please consider doing so. All of the names have not yet been assigned. Here is an update from 2,996:

But before I go too far here’s the latest progress report. As of this posting there are 1062 people signed up to tribute. That’s 35.5%. Unfortunately, that means that by 9/11 we’ll have just short of 2,000 volunteers.

I’ve been spending a lot of time sending information about 2,996 to some of the big blogs, online newspapers. I’m hoping that some big publicity will speed up the sign up rate. So far I’ve got some interest, but nothing concrete.

Bottom line is we need more bloggers. That’s where you all come in.

1. What if each of us got 2 new bloggers to sign up? I’ll tell you what…we’d have more than enough to put this thing over the top. So tell everyone about it. Remember the old commercial? You tell 2 friends…then they’ll tell 2 friends…

2. We do need some publicity. And the bigger the better. So send requests to the big blogs you read. Ask them to join. And them to do a story. Ask them to help. It might be easy to overlook one email from the guy running the whole thing, but it’d be much more difficult to overlook fifty or a hundred emails.

So, do as Laurie suggests. It’s for a great cause. And look forward to my tribute to Michelle Coyle-Eulau, one of the victims of 9/11, who perished at the World Trade Center, Tower 1, on September 11, 2001.

Regular readers here know I have often spoke about the problems inherent in any attempt to summarize reality in easy packages. Just yesterday, I criticized a University of Chicago Political Science Professor. In that case, I objected to attributing (individual) human motivations to a Nation State collective, for ascribing motive and plan in the absence of information, and discerning cause and effect between media criticism and the ongoing actions of Israel.

On reflection, I note this train of thought through many of my posts critical of the mainstream media (MSM), including You Don't Support Us, and False Picture of Defeat. I even touch on what I think is a related problem, that of our Intelligence Analysts falling into Patterns of Analysis. This reflects on the phenomenon, that when the data points you study are all improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and other bombings, all you’ll see is violence, everywhere you look. Because you don’t see the lack of violence, i.e. the white space between the data points.

I so often slam the MSM for their distortions about Iraq (and now, Lebanon), not because I dismiss their view of reality in favor of an alternate reality more to my liking. Rather, I object to willful distortion of fact, or willful ignorance about additional ways to validate our impressions. I hate false assumptions, intellectual laziness, and taking for granted pints of view that are based on nothing more than prejudices, politics, and even personal likes and dislikes.

I can accept that people don’t feel comfortable about the military. I can appreciate that the organized violence that war – and other measures to protect national security – make some people nervous, or expose them to facts that they would prefer to ignore. I can even, grudgingly, acknowledge the value of a knee-jerk mental assumption that “jaw jaw jaw beats war war war.” Trivial and juvenile, yes, but of value. A good default position for a civilized society, to be sure.

But what I cannot abide, I refuse to condone or encourage, is the kind of intellectual dishonesty that lies behind treating each little data point as some kind of “vote” towards a collective, subjective impression of what the truth is. This goes way beyond the “fog of war,” in any classic sense.

How often are we asked to agree with a proposition, merely because a majority of some subject group thinks such a proposition is true?

On such a basis all atheists should be compelled to believe God exists, because so many of their fellow citizens believe He does!

Today I see a post from Iraq The Model, courtesy of The Corner, who speaks angrily about the distortions of the Arab media, but I think his criticism applies just as forcefully to Western MSM as a whole.

Whether one believes that the MSM is a willful, consenting partner in enemy propaganda efforts, is in some ways a different argument entirely than whether in fact media reporting serves propaganda purposes.

Here’s how Mohammed introduces his essay:

Although we have greater issues to be concerned about here in Baghdad I feel I must talk about the Arab media and its deception campaign and that's because wars in both Lebanon and Iraq are largely the same.
In both cases the media functions not only as a means to deliver news but had long turned into an effective weapon that is not the least interested in objectivity or factuality. The Arab media shamelessly sided with terrorism (or resistance from their perspective) and this propaganda machine funded by the evil powers in our region continues poisoning the minds of their Arab audience to feed the totally needless hatred towards the world.

I'm frankly tired of all this, tired of showing defeats as victories and tired of all the lies about power, heroism and legends…lie, lie, lie and then lie again and add some flavor to the report with some poetry or irrelevant words of wisdom and turn that report into a commemoration of a fading era of countless defeats.
I wish the world could see what we are watching here and know the truth about this war, if what you outside the middle east are watching is news, know that here we are getting lies, deception, propaganda and slogans in the outfit of news and analysis, all for the purpose of keeping the region and especially Arabs in the seemingly forever lasting dream that is directed to keep them on the same side with terrorists and , sooner rather than later, collapsing regimes.

Actually, Mohammed, we’re getting pretty much what you’re getting from Arab media.

Mohammed derides the ugly scenes of Hezbollah press minders (Green Helmet Guy et al), parading around the corpses of children, as “an attempt to sell the dead childhood to serve an evil cause.”

He compares to the over-exploited and perhaps manipulated Qana (interestingly the scene of similar media manipulation in 1996), to terror attacks in Baghdad in 2004 and 2005, “in 2004 in Hay al-Amil and 2005 in New Baghdad.” He asks, why not UN Security Council emergency sessions then, why no shedding of tears in the media, why “no demonstrations in the so called Arab street?”
Mohammed answers:

I tell why, it's because the murderer was Arab and Muslim and holding him responsible would've blown away the ideology of "resistance"…and to me the criminal in Qana is the same and I wish the people here open their eyes and identify the real criminal, it is Nesrallah and Saddam and al-Qaeda who used and keep using civilians as human shields.

Mohammed is even more direct in offering a solution for the Arab world:

We need another ' June 67' more than anytime in the past because like that defeat put an end for the days when pan-Arabism was in the top we are now in need for another defeat that wakes the region up and open its eyes to see the danger of terrorism and extremism and remove it from the top and put it where it belongs to.
Again I hope to see no half-solutions because we have had enough. I do not want to see the terrorists and their allies open their mouth when the war ends to brag about how "courageous and devoted" they were in defending the faith and the nation.
Meanwhile, let Europe argue for another decade to agree on a definition for terror…I thank God it isn't Europe handling this war, the cowardice and reluctance of Europe disgusts me as much as the Arab media does.

Opponents of our efforts in Iraq chant, “US Home Now,” and claim that the Iraqi people resist our “occupation.” Many Europeans, even majorities, share that view. Critics of the war, as always, point to the negative public opinion, of sentiment in Europe, as evidence that we need to come back into agreement with our one-time partners for peace.

Iraq The Model suggests a very different point of view: Thank God America and President Bush are handling this war. Thank God the Iraqis are not dependent on the cowardice and reluctance of Europe.

In the end, Mohammed’s view is highly subjective. His view, after all, is a lonely data point in a sea of the white space of who knows what the Truth is.

I can accept that too, if the MSM could make just a tiny amount of room for the data points of ITM, and others like them.

Cicero at Winds of Change passes along a link from Andrew Sullivan to a speech by British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Like Sullivan, Cicero is quite taken by Blair, at least as reflected by his rhetoric:

We only win people to [our] positions if our policy is not just about interests but about values, not just about what is necessary but about what is right.

Which brings me to my final reflection about US policy. My advice is: always be in the lead, always at the forefront, always engaged in building alliances, in reaching out, in showing that whereas unilateral action can never be ruled out, it is not the preference.

Cicero wishes Blair were his President. Here’s how Sullivan responds:

Blair is calling for a "complete renaissance" of our war on Islamist terror. He fuses the best insights of the right and left in a strategy that makes sense for the West as a whole. We must be unrelenting in hunting down the enemy - but we must never abandon our ideals and values in the process. We must aggressively move toward a low-carbon economy. We must redouble our efforts for an Israel-Palestine settlement, however daunting the prospects. We have to be confident in our own way of life, and refuse to engage in the masochism of the far left. This may be the Fulton, Missouri, speech of our day. I sure hope it is. All we need now is a Truman.

Quite remarkable, considering that the only evidence against a conclusion that the US has already “fused the best insights of the right and left,” is the incessant carping from a hostile (and left leaning) media establishment and Opposition Party. I suppose, since everyone says the US is unilateral, dismissive of human rights, and imperial minded, why, we must be. Gosh, the world just can’t stand our President, or for that matter that rude and mouthy UN Ambassador Bolton.

What is our Foreign Policy but an assertive combination of the best qualities of the historic high water marks of the left and right sides of our politics?

Our foreign policy fights tyranny, terrorism, and the deprivations of autocracy, and we are the leading financier of altruistic efforts all over the world. We save Muslims, we treat our enemies as we would wish to be treated, we absorb all manner of mistreatment, abuse, and criticism, and only in the mildest terms offer objection or attempt to suggest that our adversaries consider a more peaceful way.

We carry the values of diversity and civil rights and the principles of our founding into every aspect of international affairs. We hold ourselves to the higher standard, and Americans are the first to call foul when Americans stray into wrong. American military misdeeds are first reported to military authorities by military men and women, because they live our values. They then suffer in silence the indignities then foisted upon us by both domestic and international, hate-filled media.

We rarely fight our enemies militarily, and only when provoked by 9/11 or the perceived threat posed by the emergence of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of rogue nations. We even refrain from entirely warranted military responses, when such might endanger our allies or risk grave collateral damage. Kim Jong-Il still breathes free.

I love the man to death for his courageous stand with President Bush on Iraq, but Blair is either naive or playing to a hostile press.

The US constantly acts on the basis of our values, often to our detriment and against a wall of ignorance, hypocrisy, envy and even hatred.

We always approach situations and problems with evenhandedness, even bending over backwards to give what amount to enemies the benefit of the doubt. We have saved and protected more Muslims in the world than any other nation, we respect the will and interests of our enemy's populations vastly more than their own governments, and we are reviled.

We take the lead, both financially and with heavy lifting, on almost every front imaginable, and it's never enough. That's why we as a people are entirely ready to tell the rest of the world to go to h*ll.

We have moral purpose. We try at all times to act justly. But we do so in a world dominated by the amoral if not immoral leaders of non-democratic nations.

Can PM Blair seriously believe that the "Regional" powers he mentions will be swayed to see the light and work cooperatively and justly and morally and beneficently, if we are only more just or true to our values? What's been stopping them thus far? What hope is there they will want to in the future? I might give India a pass, but Russia or China?

That is the folly of all follies.

God bless him for his courage to date, but Blair is just mugging it up for the cheap seats. He can't possibly be that naive.

One last point. What Blair and his many admirers are really saying with all this is, they really want another Bill Clinton. He's got all those virtuous qualities in his speech, demeanor, and public character. Quite unlike his successor, right?

Mark well what that brought us the last time. Well might we remember the siren song of the charismatic, and what evil was afoot all the while the Emperor of Empathy had his way.

As I recall it, the world hated and mistrusted us then, too. It is only in hindsight that we think somehow they were more fond…

I read an Op Ed in the New York Times today that warranted closer scrutiny, beyond the particulars of its argument. If this piece reflects the level of mastery of logic possessed by a typical Political Science Professor, than God help those students of the political arts.

The basis for my prayer is Ground to a Halt, written by Robert Pape of the University of Chicago. Here’s how he launches his argument:

ISRAEL has finally conceded that air power alone will not defeat Hezbollah. Over the coming weeks, it will learn that ground power won’t work either. The problem is not that the Israelis have insufficient military might, but that they misunderstand the nature of the enemy.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Hezbollah is principally neither a political party nor an Islamist militia. It is a broad movement that evolved in reaction to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. At first it consisted of a small number of Shiites supported by Iran. But as more and more Lebanese came to resent Israel’s occupation, Hezbollah — never tight-knit — expanded into an umbrella organization that tacitly coordinated the resistance operations of a loose collection of groups with a variety of religious and secular aims.

In terms of structure and hierarchy, it is less comparable to, say, a religious cult like the Taliban than to the multidimensional American civil-rights movement of the 1960’s. What made its rise so rapid, and will make it impossible to defeat militarily, was not its international support but the fact that it evolved from a reorientation of pre-existing Lebanese social groups.

Hezbollah. Not a terrorist gang, not a radical Islamic militia, not a tool of the Iranians and Syria. Hezbollah, more a state of mind or movement, just like the US Civil Rights Movement. Rights for terrorists and other dreamers of the 7^th Century Caliphate. That’s more reprehensible a comparison than oft-criticized Hitler and Nazi allusions (made by those all over the blogosphere).

I think it folly for casual observers such as Pape to assume that Israel somehow “conceded” anything, or that the chain of events from initial Israeli response to Hezbollah aggression to the current ground offensive weren’t part of a long range plan. Wretchard of The Belmont Club makes the point better than I in posts here and here.

That’s the same false assumption that lies behind a lot of uninformed reporting about Iraq, where the US military and Iraqi Security Forces continue to work through a long and involved process that may have bumps and unexpected developments, but pretty much going as one might expect, and the smart folks at the Pentagon clearly understood and anticipated. Not that that convinces the chatterers.

Israel may as well surrender, this line of thinking goes, because the enemy they face is against ideas and states of mind, a “multidimensional movement” rather than an armed militia. (A movement, by the way, that sustains its existence by force of arms, violence and physical intimidation.)

I say baloney. Hit them hard, attack their terrorist-making and violence making capabilities. Deny them safe havens anywhere. Block their retreat and supply lines. Make it very difficult for their allies. Kill them. Once they are destroyed by overwhelming force, let’s see how much staying power the “Hezbollah state of mind” retains. I have a hunch that the other long-suppressed political factions in Lebanon may have a different point of view when the Israeli’s finish the job and pull back to wherever they choose to pull back to.

Back to Pape’s thesis in a moment, time now for a theoretical discussion about the basis for attributing motivations to Nation States and other non-state, non-governmental organizations (NGO).

Digression on Reality, Truth and Perception

We want to know what’s going on, news confuses, and we crave someone to explain it all for us in a way that’s simple, direct, and helps us make sense of it all. For that, we turn to the chattering class. This rare group of self- and media-appointed sages does the heavy lifting for us. They scour the media, they track events against history and expectations, and they formulate opinions. They report, we decide.

Disclaimer. In the thoroughly modern world, a new set of voices self-nominate themselves into the chattering class, and use their blogs to promote alternative opinions, views, and other odd elements of the pubic discourse. Often not much more informative than barroom chatter, these opinion addicts nevertheless add to the world of commentary. So in the following, I and my fellow bloggers are un-indicted co-conspirators in the crime as charged. End of disclaimer.

As events occur, the chattering classes, well, chatter. In chattering, commentators and editors summarize events, draw conclusions, and prognosticate what things will happen next. In doing so, the commentator often loses grasp of the difference between what worlds he or she conjure up as speculation, and that world which constitutes the only one we know.

Nowhere does this form of disconnect occur most often than in trying to discern the motivations of Nation States and NGOs.

Most probably, Nation States don’t ever mean to do anything for any one reason at all, but rather, individual leaders and decision-makers agree to a course of action imperfectly executed, using a combination of both rational and irrational justifications. They jawbone amongst themselves, chatter in fact, work through one form of consensus or another, maintain their private sense of “what’s going on and why,” and publicly make statements about their actions, which likewise align imperfectly with what is thought privately.

Much like the nonsensical but ubiquitous anthropomorphism of inanimate objects, it makes no sense to attribute human emotions and motivations to the actions in the collective called Nation State (or NGO for that matter).

So why do I make such a fuss reading Pape’s Op Ed? Because his entire argument hinges on a core fallacy of thought. And truth be told, the core fallacy of much of what gets written by the chattering class about foreign relations. Which are very different animals indeed than the relations of their domestic counterparts, national, state, or regional politics. (See, if not anthropomorphizing exactly, I’m at least animating my subject.)

What’s that core fallacy? That Israel was in fact acting completely in accord with what opinion-makers said, and now that they are doing something different than what they did originally, they must have “changed their mind.” (This kind of projective logic has a philosophical name, I’m sure, but I am not a trained philosopher and apologize for the lack of a definitive label.)

We’ve watched a similar philosophy play out with reporting of Bush Administration actions and priorities. President Bush, if ever he takes a different tack than that expected or forecasted by his critics, it was directly due to their incessant scolding. It’s easy to note the headlines or opening ledes in the Washington Post: “Bush Sees Light, Bends to Criticism.”

We also witnessed this self-absorption in the way Senator Voinovich explained his reversal on Ambassador Bolton. (“He listened to my criticism. I was pretty hard on him, but he clearly knew I was right and straightened up his act.”)

Back to Pape’s Thesis

Only to sum up the rest of his argument. Pape concludes that, because Hezbollah enlists “non-fundamentalists” as their fodder for suicide bombings, that represents a commitment to resisting a foreign occupation. I tell you what, I’ll bet you’ll find they don’t as a class like McDonald’s and other Western fast food places, either.

What difference does it make where the terrorist planners recruit the poor saps and dupes? The poor of intellect you shall always have with you, to borrow from the New Testament. A strong Israeli offensive no doubt can credit some recruiting opportunities for potential bombers, but for the rest of the Arab world, what they also see is something much different. They see the strong horse of parable and legend. They see something very different from the typical Western reaction to terrorist intimidation of the past three decades.

Pape makes the other strange observation that Israel is squandering “goodwill,” as if they ever really had any from anyone he mentions:

Equally important, Israel’s incursion is also squandering the good will it had initially earned from so-called moderate Arab states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The countries are the court of opinion that matters because, while Israel cannot crush Hezbollah, it could achieve a more limited goal: ending Hezbollah’s acquisition of more missiles through Syria.

This again represents Pape falling victim to the established mythology. Because Arab states criticized Hezbollah and refrained from typical rapid denunciations of Israel (for two weeks), that meant Israel had earned goodwill? Not in any geopolitical universe I’m familiar with.

Enough. In an alternate vein, Lee Smith bucks the prevailing mainstream media spin on behalf of an unconditional cease-fire (and, by proxy, a desperate Hezbollah who would benefit most) over at the Weekly Standard. (Courtesy, again, of Michael Totten, guest Instapundit.)

This underscores my point that Pape and his mainstream media (MSM) colleagues have constructed a virtual reality which they insist on inhabiting, contrary to common sense or fact:

There are many Lebanese imagining, fantasizing, hoping against hope that Hezbollah will be wiped from the face of the earth. Some are even joking about it.

"The new one," Fawaz says, "is that they're going to play the next World Cup in the Daheyh [the Shiite neighborhood]--the whole thing's been leveled nice and flat."

This narrative, including the morbid jokes at the expense of the heavily Shiite southern suburbs and the spectacular number of Hezbollah dead, runs against the current Western news narrative. It seems that U.S. and Western press outfits are determined to claim that the Israelis have driven all of Lebanon, Shiite or not, Islamist or not, pro-Hezbollah or not, into the waiting arms of the Islamic resistance. It is not clear why Western journalists believe this is so, though it seems to comport nicely with the idea that the Israelis are killing too many civilians--a cynical storyline, given that the Israelis are fighting against a militia and without the benefit of weapons capable of targeting only the bad guys.

Pape and the MSM are not the only ones retaining faith in an alternate narrative of their own liking, that’s the basis for delusions elsewhere, according to Smith:

Even now, three weeks after it has been proven beyond a doubt that Hezbollah's arms are incapable of protecting one inch of Lebanese soil from the Zionists, there are still many Lebanese, including in the government, who credit Hezbollah with having driven Israeli forces from southern Lebanon in 2000. And thus the seeds of Lebanon's current crisis were sown in that willing self-deception of six years ago. The Lebanese could not then discern that Israeli politics all but forced then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak to withdraw from the South; nor could they imagine how the voting citizens of a liberal democracy would later compel its leadership to protect them at any cost. And if the Lebanese thought that an Islamist militia had beaten back the region's most powerful military, then they could hardly forecast, in spite of repeated warnings, that that "resistance" would end up reducing parts of their country to a soccer field.

Will Israel achieve their objectives for neutralizing the threat of Hezbollah aggression? Will they construct the foundation for a meaningful peace sometime in the future?

It’s way too soon for anyone to tell. But if we want to make an informed assessment, we need to discard these elaborate but misguided mythologies and start dealing with reality.

Let’s see how Hezbollah deals with Israel getting serious.

If Hezbollah gets any angrier, Lord knows what they’ll try next.

“And if you continue your insane aggression against us, we shall throw our mighty rockets even further, and cause them to land upon the Egyptians and Jordanians! That will show you our anger and power and might, and cause you to despair!”

Meanwhile, the ever predictable Palestinians cheered on their own destruction, and threw a party in response to the errant Hezbollah targeting.

Talk about learning the lessons of the last war in the next. David Ignatius, writing at Real Clear Politics, looks back at the Yom Kippur War of 1973 in search of understanding modern Islamic terrorism and Middle East violence.

Ignatious thinks he finds lessons applicable to today’s situation, and says that to find a unique opportunity for a negotiated peace, Israel (and their US sponsors) must “alter its view” of the Palestinians and the Lebanese. I’m not sure he means us to think of Hezbollah as “Lebanese,” and mentions not at all how we’re to view Iran or Syria.

For Ignatius, it’s all about perceptions and understanding. Israel and Egypt and Syria forged lasting peace, because Egypt enjoyed a very short tactical advantage because of a surprise sneak attack, which gave them dignity, in contrast to earlier ignoble defeats. Israel was ready to “bargain” because they learned that their Arab enemies “wouldn't run from battle.”

Looking at today’s war, Ignatius thinks the same kind of “opportunity” awaits. Israel the “will have to revise their doctrine that their adversaries can be coerced solely by military force.” Arabs can now make peace as “plausible negotiating partners,” due to their “resistance on the battlefield.”

Pity Ignatius’ perceptions lead him to such grand misunderstanding. His comparisons ignore the real consequences of 1973 (and any and all previous negotiations and peace-making efforts. He assimilates Hezbollah propaganda, exaggerates their performance, fully ignores their terrorist methods, and virtually exalts their depraved Secretary General Nasrallah.

Ignatius has a laughable interpretation of Israeli life since 1973:

Yet in the long lens of history, the importance of the 1973 war is that it opened the door to peace.

Whatever we thought then, does anyone now think that 1973 opened the door to peace in the Middle East? Aside from some fatuous Nobel Prizes, and Egypt and Jordan relieving themselves of axiomatic Arab war-making against Israel, what peace was achieved? If peace was forged, someone forgot to tell Israel, oh, and where are all those suicide bombs, rockets, and terrorist attacks coming from?

As he exaggerates the peace, Ignatius likewise exaggerates the object lesson itself, the Yom Kippur War. Here’s how he describes it, setting up the false premise upon which to shape his imagined truisms:

The 1973 war seemed like the ultimate disaster: Israel's very survival was at stake in the early hours of the battle. As the war dragged on, there was a risk of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear confrontation; and the conflict triggered an Arab oil embargo that devastated the global economy. Because of its close alliance with Israel, the United States was isolated from many of its European and Arab allies.

In the past 30 years, has the US not been isolated from many of its European and Arab allies? Really, I’d be curious to understand the basis for that kind of assessment. Ignatius makes it sound like US isolation over Israel was a wartime anomaly. Because we vouchsafed an Israeli existence in 1973? Based on his own argument, we’d have to acknowledge it wasn’t our support in 1973 during Yom Kippur that caused this, but our continuous support for Israel for the past 50-60 years.

No doubt, the Arab Oil Embargo and the formation of OPEC painfully demonstrated our over-reliance on fossil fuels, but since Jimmy Carter, has this been a serious concern? Didn’t OPEC fall apart soon thereafter, and in many ways, didn’t the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the threat to everyone (many Arab states included), shift allegiances and create new opportunities?

Ignatius longingly remembers the active diplomacy “masterfully orchestrated by Kissinger,” in marking the 1973 war as an “historic turning point.” I guess he would, as he likewise reminisces how “Even the terrorist group of the day, the PLO, was drawn into a web of secret liaison with the CIA.” Ah yes, well we remember those good old days when the CIA controlled every action of the compliant and trustworthy PLO.

This then is the commonly accepted mythology of Diplomacy At All Costs. For diplomacy and negotiation to maintain their undeserved status as always better than “war war war,” one must revise uncomfortable history, and inflate diplomatic successes in place of the less convincing results that actually accrue.

Folly follows foolishness in Ignatius World:

The key missing element, so far at least, is a Kissinger-level diplomatic commitment by the United States. Condoleezza Rice came close to a Lebanon peace deal last weekend, but to pull it off, she will need to move more toward Kissinger's stance of honest broker.

Yep, and to be an honest broker, you just need to be willing to make a deal with the devil. With honesty, I suppose. No obligation or necessity of the other partner in negotiation to actually want to negotiate in good faith.

As a convincer, Ignatius wants his readers to believe that smashing Hezbollah (or for that matter, other terrorist threats) militarily is simply falling into the terrorist trap. Beware the protracted conflict! Ignatius buys off on the Powell Doctrine, so named after the ultra cautious former Secretary of State, who held to the view that wars must always be short, outcome certain, before undertaken.

I think most reasonable observers today would acknowledge that, overwhelming military might and a prompt, violent response cause our current terrorist adversaries to rethink their strategy. In contrast, a focus on diplomacy and negotiation in the face of continued aggression signal weakness and lack of will. Why can’t we listen to what our enemies say in this regard?

Instead, trifling commentators like Ignatius would have us believe that we are playing right into our enemies hands. Like some terrorist version of Br’er rabbit, we’re to believe, Israel falls right into the Hezbollah trap by attacking Hezbollah head-on. Like killing Hezbollah fighters and eliminating Hezbollah strongholds is just what they wanted Israel to do.

Of course, for Ignatius, holding that view allows him to compare the current Israeli situation with the US in Iraq. Ignatius quotes Lawrence Wright, writing about Osama Bin Laden in "The Looming Tower:''

"His strategy was to continually attack until the U.S. forces invaded; then the mujahadeen would swarm upon them and bleed them until the entire American empire fell from its wounds.''

News flash to Ignatius: the mujahadeen are not “swarming,” they’ve not been “bleeding” America very successfully, and we’re not very soon going to “fall from our wounds.” If anything, Al Qaeda’s almost utter defeat in Iraq against US forces have led to some remarkable changes in tactics, brutality against fellow Muslims (and civilians), losses and frank admissions of Jihadi failure. The Israelis should want to fall into that kind of trap.

If Ignatius hadn’t thoroughly discredited his own argument by this point, the following howler would have been sufficient:

The evidence grows that you can't achieve real security without negotiating with your adversaries, and you can't succeed in such negotiations without offering reasonable concessions.

Consider that assessment for a moment, against history if not common sense. Consider decades of Communist deceit throughout the Cold War in any region such regimes were present. Reflect on North Korean or Iranian perfidy in their nuclear programs. Think about Palestinian opting for Intifada in the face of an Oslo-driven Two State solution after the years of the “fruits” of Kissinger’s “masterful orchestration.”

Please. If you’re going to construct these peons to Diplomacy you’d best start with examples that actually demonstrate success. The IRA, for an easy alternative.

The evidence grows, indeed. Let the evidence show that radical, violent Islamic Terrorists and their state sponsors show no signs of relenting from their goals: to destroy Western Civilization and subjugate or slaughter the infidels, men, women and children. Using the most vicious and brutal means possible. Showing no mercy even on those willing to surrender or make peace at any price.

Associated Press reports a stunning find of ancient Biblical texts in an Ireland bog:

DUBLIN, Ireland - Irish archaeologists Tuesday heralded the discovery of an ancient book of psalms by a construction worker who spotted something while driving the shovel of his backhoe into a bog.

(snip)

"This is really a miracle find," said Pat Wallace, director of the National Museum of Ireland, which has the book stored in refrigeration and facing years of painstaking analysis before being put on public display.

"There's two sets of odds that make this discovery really way out. First of all, it's unlikely that something this fragile could survive buried in a bog at all, and then for it to be unearthed and spotted before it was destroyed is incalculably more amazing."

He said an engineer was digging up bogland last week to create commercial potting soil somewhere in Ireland's midlands when, "just beyond the bucket of his bulldozer, he spotted something."

(snip)

The book was found open to a page describing, in Latin script, Psalm 83, in which God hears complaints of other nations' attempts to wipe out the name of Israel.

Okay, for those of you who wouldn’t otherwise research the source, Psalm 83, New King James (courtesy of BibleGateway.com):

 1 Do not keep silent, O God!
         Do not hold Your peace,
         And do not be still, O God!
 2 For behold, Your enemies make a tumult;
         And those who hate You have lifted up their head.
 3 They have taken crafty counsel against Your people,
         And consulted together against Your sheltered ones.
 4 They have said, “Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation,
         That the name of Israel may be remembered no more.”
 5 For they have consulted together with one consent;
         They form a confederacy against You:
 6 The tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites;
         Moab and the Hagrites;
 7 Gebal, Ammon, and Amalek;
         Philistia with the inhabitants of Tyre;
 8 Assyria also has joined with them;
         They have helped the children of Lot.  Selah  

 9 Deal with them as with Midian,
         As with Sisera,
         As with Jabin at the Brook Kishon,
 10 Who perished at En Dor,
         Who became as refuse on the earth.
 11 Make their nobles like Oreb and like Zeeb,
         Yes, all their princes like Zebah and Zalmunna,
 12 Who said, “Let us take for ourselves
         The pastures of God for a possession.”
 13 O my God, make them like the whirling dust,
         Like the chaff before the wind!
 14 As the fire burns the woods,
         And as the flame sets the mountains on fire,
 15 So pursue them with Your tempest,
         And frighten them with Your storm.
 16 Fill their faces with shame,
         That they may seek Your name, O LORD.
 17 Let them be confounded and dismayed forever;
         Yes, let them be put to shame and perish,
 18 That they may know that You, whose name alone is the LORD,
         Are the Most High over all the earth.

I just want to point out for those not familiar, the place names and peoples referred to in verses 6-8 bear historical connection to a great many of Israel’s current enemies.

Hezbollah enjoys first class and insider access to Washington Post columnists (well, at least one). But if informed commentary has it right, that Iran’s proxies desperate, then it may well be that Hezbollah indeed find themselves “like the whirling dust, like the chaff before the wind.”

(Via Memeorandum)

Science strains to reduce human life to a universal commodity, but only underscores the likelihood of our uniqueness.

Iain Murray has written an intriguing essay, surveying the current state of scientific efforts to detect extraterrestrial life, at American Enterprise Online.

Like John J. Murray, who links to this piece at The Corner, I find Iain Murray’s conclusions persuasive. I feel gratified that I now have something a bit more than my own highly subjective and spiritually informed opinion as grounds for my belief.

Do read the whole thing, but for the purposes of commentary, Murray concludes that we are probably “alone in the universe:”

For life as we know it, we are today left with the unpalatable but rational conclusion that instead of Carl Sagan's millions of civilizations, there is a very good chance we are the only one. The latest decade's discoveries and arguments do not mean that we are alone for certain, but they are probabilities that point strongly in that direction.

Iain’s conclusion is one I have come to myself, but without much of a knowledge basis, rather more of a sense that probability and statistics are against us. Murray indulges one of many hopeful hypotheses, that what seems to us the rigidly determinism of the mathematics involved, may not need to apply across the entirety of the physical universe.

Sure, but maybe only in that exact spot where God happens to be sitting. I’m joking, of course, but it seems a hungry science indeed, that at the point of statistical near-certainties, one needs to invoke a “time-out” for the applicability of mathematic principles. Ack, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. Here’s Murray again, by means of clarity:

Those who want to believe sometimes argue that the mathematical probabilities against intelligent life may be less certain than we think. They cite "complexity theory"--which suggests there may be a certain irregularity and unpredictability even in the laws of nature. But others think the mathematical odds must be respected. "Nobody knows why equations work so well in describing things. Maybe it's the handprint of God, or an ancient, advanced, powerful alien race," says NASA scientist David Grinspoon, but "there is something spooky about the way mathematical relationships are so enmeshed with the physical nature of our universe." For the moment, cold rationality suggests that Jacques Monod was right when he said that "Man at last knows he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he has emerged only by chance."

Monod sees Life on Earth, alone in the Universe, and sees the speck against the immensity, revelatory of nothing more than unfathomable loneliness, like a child somehow alone on a deserted isle in barren seas.

Full disclosure, for those who don’t know: I am a born-again Christian. I first found faith on a path from atheism, that led by means of rational introspection and logic to convincing proof of deity, on to revelation (with the help of scripture, people, prayer, and circumstances).

I retain a faith in scientific method, but only to a point, and never beyond the constraints and limitations of those areas of life where science can inform, rather than portray. And as science advances in its ways, and the mysteries of this world get defined in greater detail, I am powerfully struck by an overriding fact.

The more science explains, the more questions it creates. That, and the probability that this only world we know was the product of pure chance, becomes ever more absurd. Those who become most familiar with the most extreme details that form the basis for the mechanics and processes of this world, are ever more bewildered by the completeness and consistency of its design.

If not “intelligent” in itself, certainly reflective of a consistency of structure and order, beyond our feeble attempts to tease out the chaos from the design.

I vote for the handprint of God, myself, and feel no shame in saying so.