Watching baby-boomers learn how to exercise military power...

Is a painful thing.

Yesterday's WSJ editorial:

'[Joe Biden] was recently quoted by Newsweek's Jonathan Alter as saying that "in July 2011, you're going to see a whole lot of people moving out [of Afghanistan], bet on it." Defense Secretary Robert Gates flatly contradicted the Veep on Fox News Sunday, insisting "that absolutely has not been decided," and that the July 2011 date was only a "starting point" for withdrawal, contingent on local conditions.

'The President ought to put this debate to rest, rather than trying to appease his liberal base by promising withdrawal while winking and nodding to our partners in Afghanistan that the deadline is effectively meaningless.

'So far, his ambiguity has fueled the very infighting that led to General McChrystal's dismissal, persuaded our NATO partners to prepare their own exit strategies, and convinced Afghan President Hamid Karzai that he can't count on America's long-term support. The damage isn't merely the deadline but the sense projected by Mr. Biden that the U.S. will leave the Afghans in the lurch again, much as we did at the end of the Cold War.'


As painful as this is to watch, especially if you are assigned to a combat unit, if Americans left of center do not learn how to own a war and defend national interests, we will be stuck for another generation in the 1974 conditions of most of my lifetime. The baby-boomers' children are going to have to know how to fight.

Toy Story 3

Here is a full synopsis.

We went to see the movie because of the endorsement of someone we respect, but we did not stay for the end. The sentimental premise attacked our understanding of the human soul. The toys were like slaves or colonial peoples, used and exploited by the whims of those who do not understand them and who often have less developed souls than they. The toys were like children, except the ones who have joined the dark side. There was a Rousseauian theme that we do not sin as much as become corrupted by human institutions.

My daughter, like many children, has had hundreds of toys. Some were carefully purchased. Many were gifts. Many were handed out by the thousands at restaurants. Almost all were mass produced.

To foster sentiment for the unrequited love of toys is to confuse the idea of the eternal soul. To project souls upon everything is demean the dignity of the human soul as created by our Incarnate God. Yes, we could make a movie of what it feels like to be dumpster, but to cultivate sentiment for dumpsters is to distract us from the "problems of the human heart in conflict with itself."

My daughter hated the movie more than we did. Her moral and aesthetic sensibilities have been shaped largely by C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, who animate characters without projecting naturalistic or postmodern views of the human soul. We missed the entire Toy Story train until yesterday. We got off after a very brief ride.

Three thumbs down.

General McChrystal's firing...

As Harry Truman supposedly said of Douglas MacArthur, "I didn't fire him because he was a son-of-a-bitch. If I did, I have to fire all the generals. I fired him because he refused to obey the orders of the President of the United States."

Changes of high command during war are often ugly, and this one is no exception.

If anyone can execute a winning strategy in Afghanistan, it is probably General David Petraeus. It would be ironic if President Barack Obama, who like Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, came into office with an ambitious agenda of domestic reform if not cultural transformation, becomes identified in history with a barely understood foreign war.

I missed the President's speech.

But by all accounts, I did not miss much.

The Gulf of Mexico was my playground as a child. Hurricanes have destroyed much that I loved, and condo developers have paved over much of the rest. For those of us who grew up near the "Redneck Riviera," it does not get worse than this.

I have written for years that Americans love simple solutions to complex problems. Barack Obama campaigned to fulfill such expectations. Where he rings hollow today is that he sees the moral force of his office as legislative, and the voters know that the legislative process is usually promise betrayed by higher taxes and more regulation. President Obama, however, is constitutionally incapable of being a warrior, an executive, a king, a minister, or even a fatherly figure. He hears our problems and promises... legislation, comprehensive legislation.

Anybody else concerned?

“Indeed, I have moved from being curious to being genuinely concerned.” So said Admiral Mike Mullen recently about the Chinese.

Gordon G. Chang writes:

'It’s about time the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in public, expressed disquiet about the Chinese military buildup. For decades, American flag officers, many of them from the Navy, have remained optimistic about America’s military relations with China. And after every Chinese hostile act — even those constituting direct attacks on the United States, such as the March 2009 attempt to interfere with the Impeccable in the South China Sea — American admirals have either remained silent or said they were “perplexed” or “befuddled” by Beijing’s intentions.'


There is an old axiom of war that you prepare not for what you think the enemy will do but what a potential enemy is capable of doing. After half a century of Maoism now "reformed" into a state that exports for cash to support its one-party hegemony over a billion people (national socialism in everything but name), why should we expect the Chinese to be our allies? They might not be our enemies, but our interests re any major issue are not common. Have we thought out what we would do if China invaded any of its neighbors? I know we have plans on a hard drive somewhere, but are we mentally prepared to face a military crisis in the Far East while we are still deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Yes, I was born to be a hawkish backbencher. Liberty takes centuries to develop in habit and constitution, but slavery can occur after one night of slumber. I am not a soldier, but I have learned from practicing law that if you are extremely well prepared, the other side usually loses and often folds.

"War and History, Ancient and Modern"

Michael Totten interviews Victor Davis Hanson.

The Man Who Talks People Out of Suicide

The Anchoress posts on Don Ritchie, who lives near the place in Sydney Harbor where suicidal people go to end it all.

"Scales, Cosmos, Knowledge, & Faith"

The Anchoress blogs on epistemology (a million dollar word I am happy to use just thinking of the huge number of hits it will generate).

On her post is a link to The Scale of the Universe. I like such things to teach both science and math.

"'We Are Totally Unprepared': Nine Years After 9/11, A Chilling Complacency About WMD Attacks'

An excerpt from Peggy Noonan's column this morning:

'We may be witnessing again a failure of imagination, the famous phrase used after 9/11 to capture why the U.S. government was caught so flatfooted and was so stunned that such a terrible thing could occur. They neglected to think of the worst thing that could happen, and so of course they did not plan for it. If agencies within the government now are having a second failure of imagination, it is not forgivable.'

"The First Rule of Strategy"

Caroline Glick discusses Israel's need to prepare for open warfare with Iran. I hope she is wrong, but few people, even in Israel, seem serious about the problems of a nuclear-armed Iran.

Unintended consequences of peace movements

Walter Russell Mead notes that those who consider themselves peacemakers do not always bring peace:

'When Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich proclaiming that simply by giving Hitler the Sudentenland (the then-German speaking part of Czechoslovakia that happened to include the country’s mountainous border areas and natural defenses) he had won “peace in our time”, nobody was happier than the fatheaded peace clergy — unless it was the enlightened class of journalists and professors who set the tone for upper middle class enlightenment at the time.

'It was the same thing with Stalin. Half of the peace movement was in love with Communism; the other half thought that poor Stalin had no choice but to be brutal and tough because he was surrounded by hostile states. Recognize Stalin, trade with him, stop calling him nasty names. Treat him with dignity and respect, they said, and everything will work out for the best. There had been plenty of sympathy for Stalin in the West during the thirties — even as he was carrying out mass murder on a scale that poor Pol Pot could only envy, Stalin never lacked for apologists and defenders among the chattering classes in those countries where they were still permitted to chat.

'Understand and sympathize with their legitimate aspirations: that, the professors and preachers constantly told everyone else, was the sophisticated, modern and enlightened way to deal with these problems.'


I will be more blunt: If we do not stop buying oil from those who hate us by using borrowed money, we will become slaves. Aeneas' heartbreaking story about the fall of Troy will be ours.

Contraceptives and Mother Nature

Glenn Reynolds posts about contraceptives and strokes.

Are the universities the next business plan to be found obsolete?

Glenn Reynolds asks how the universities are different from the real estate bubble.

I can say that my Vandy degree was not a bad investment when I graduated, but I can no longer recommend that any student borrow money to go to school. Without cheap money from hopeful students, where would the universities be?

John Wooden, Requiescat in pace

Art Spander has a good column, and here are ten anecdotes you may not have heard before.

Eve Tushnet

Does not fit any conventional description in the news media. Of course, it is a scandal if a woman comes from a liberal family, identifies herself as gay, converts to Catholicism, and chooses to live a celibate life.

The return of Ottoman Turk ambition

It has now been almost a century since the Turks dominated everything between Black Sea and Baghdad. We have forgotten what they used to be: an intelligent imperial Muslim power. Last week marked how Turkey is reverting to its Ottoman model, and Victor Davis Hanson comments.

Ronald Reagan at Normandy in 1984

An excerpt:

'Forty summers have passed since the battle that you fought here. You were young the day you took these cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys, with the deepest joys of life before you. Yet, you risked everything here. Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here? We look at you, and somehow we know the answer. It was faith and belief. It was loyalty and love.

'The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead, or on the next.'

Allen Hunt spoke today in Atlanta

On his blog he is humble about the event, but it is the annual Eucharistic Congress of the Atlanta Diocese, an event that draws more than 20,000 people in a region whose Catholic population is doubling every ten years.

I linked to Fr. Dwight Longenecker's post about Mr. Hunt's conversion to Catholicism two years ago.

The Blown Call in the Otherwise Perfect Game

I have not had time to think much about it this week, but two women who are not sports writers offer intelligent thoughts about baseball, fairness, sportsmanship, and America: Peggy Noonan and Elizabeth Scalia, aka The Anchoress.

"The Lottery"

The most anticipated lottery in NYC is not to win a million bucks but to get your kid into one the city's best charter schools, The Harlem Success Academy, which is the school the teachers' union wants to destroy. A new documentary film tells the unflattering story:

'There she discovered that the majority of those protesting the proliferation of charter schools were not even from the neighborhood. They'd come from the Bronx and Queens.

'"They all said 'We're not allowed to talk to you. We're just here to support the parents.'" But there were only two parents there, says Ms. Sackler, and both were members of Acorn. And so, "after not a lot of digging," she discovered that the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) had paid Acorn, the controversial community organizing group, "half a million dollars for the year." (It cost less to make the film.)

'Finding out that the teachers union had hired a rent-a-mob to protest on its behalf was "the turn for us in the process." That story—of self-interested adults trying to deny poor parents choice for their children—provided an answer to Ms. Sackler's fundamental question: "If there are these high-performing schools that are closing the achievement gap, why aren't there more of them?"

'The reason is what Eva Moskowitz, founder of the Harlem Success Academy network and a key character in the film, calls the "union-political-educational complex."'

How American public schools became more centralized than East Germany and less efficient than Soviet agriculture is one of the saddest stories of the last 150 years.

More about the Peter Beinart article about the failure of the American Jewish establishment

Abraham Foxman criticizes the Beinart article linked below in my post "Liberalism and Zionism," and Peter Beinart responds.

"The Art of Seaborne Humiliation"

Victor Davis Hanson discusses modern piracy and the West's weakness against it:

'In each of these cases, the instigator dares a powerful Western nation to retaliate and thereby stupidly endanger its collective good life over a small matter of 19th-century-style national pride. And if violence follows, the props almost always ensure that the Western nation is transmogrified in the blink of an eye into a bully, pushing around the Other where it has no business being in the first place. No wonder that the Western nation usually instead sends diplomats to work out some sort of restrained apology, which gives the provocateur stature and pours more humiliation upon the provoked — another milestone on a long road of weakening Western stature and influence.'


Towards the end he suggests some ways the West might better defend itself.

Grim at Blackfive welcomes the idea of invoking Article V of the NATO agreement. That way, U.S. and Royal ships and marines could actually enforce Israel's blockade from "peaceful" Turks and Palestinians. An interesting thought.

Crime rate is falling...

So much for the conventional wisdom about criminology.

Drowning in your student-loan debt?

David Randall writes in Forbes about how you might deal with it. I will read more and post later.

"Michael Yon's War"

D.B. Grady writes in The Atlantic about America's most indefatigable war correspondent and the end of his embed in Afghanistan.

The U.S. in Vietnam... and Israel today

Cognitive failure is the only explanation.

Caroline Glick knows that you have to understand your enemy. Those who wish to destroy Israel are numerous, hateful, and cunning. Those who wish to defend Israel are not half as ruthless as their enemies; they do not have to be so long as they are coldly realistic about their enemies and more clever in the use of feint and force.

When I saw the video of the Israeli commandos rappelling to the deck of the "humanitarian aid" ship, I was dumbfounded. Dropping one-by-one on to a ship's deck into a crowd of armed "humanitarians" is foolish. Did the Israelis think those people were pacifists?

War is about killing the people who want to kill you before they can kill you. Diplomacy is about defending a nation's interests by persuading hostile nations that their interests are to avoid violent attacks. The Israelis, who once had the best pound-for-pound armed force in the world, now look beatable diplomatically and militarily. They look as if they have forgotten how to beat their enemies. They appear to have lost their strategic wisdom and tactical sense.

UPDATE: "Siege Fatigue and the Flotilla Mistake" in the WSJ today by Ronen Bergman.