The Flag of the World

Though it’s no longer Christmas, I just spent the last half hour of that blessed holiday enjoying the first White Christmas I can remember experiencing. Spending every Christmas of your life in California or Washington will do that to you. It’s not a lot of snow–it never is around here, and compared to the stuff I get out in Minnesota it’s nothing at all. But it’s somehow different, being here at home (the last Christmas this will be home), in a place where you never expect it to come, then looking out the door and seeing a carpet, albeit thin, of beautiful white. It’s a good last minute gift, I think. A very good one.

It’s hard to tell, but it sounds as if Al-quaeda, or some Al-quaeda wannabe group has failed, again, to pull off an attack, this one apparently planned to be very similar to the September 11 attacks, with one major difference. Instead of taking off from within the US, the targeted flights were bound from France.

This should make it fairly apparent that the US is doing a lot of things right in regards to working towards homeland security. The fact is that our systems are too tight for these people to even think about trying an airplane-related attacks from within the US again. The fact that they can’t even pull it off from France of all places. What does that say about their organizational skills, compared to ours?

But I don’t think that, even if they make it onto the plane, there will ever be another terrorist attack just like Sept. 11. The passengers won’t stand for it. I know if anyone tries it on a plane I’m in, they’ll have at least one angry American to deal with before they do anything evil. And I think the terrorists know this too. So were they counting on the French not to fight back? Do they see the French as… well, as the people Americans tend to see them as? Something to think about.

It’s been a good Christmas. I got a digital camera, so you may be seeing some photos pop up on here. Or maybe not, it’s hard to say. Oh, I also sort of got engaged a few days ago, to the wonderful and beautiful Lorraine who posts here infrequently. So, yes, it’s been a very, very good Christmas.

I’d like to say more about the day itself, but I think I said everything I wanted to say here.

Well, this is a very good day, isn’t it? InstaPundit and The Command Post have good roundups. Omar, Ays and Alaa have reactions from the Iraqi side of things.

This is absolutely wonderful–catching him alive means that any conspiracy theories floating around Iraq about the US and Saddam being in league will be cut off. It means we can keep him around, and he will be in the news more, instead of him just dying and disappearing (like, say Osama bin Laden). It means no one can deny that we got him (like they do, say, with Osama bin Laden). It means that the wind will go out of quite a few terrorist sails, and the $750,000 he had with him will be kept out of their pockets, plus there is the possibility that we can get him to call for an end to the resistance (though I agree with Josh Chafetz about the probable sequence of events afterwards). It means that tyrants everywhere have a live moving picture of their possibly future if they wish to remain America’s enemy. It means that we can surprise European journalists who expect us to “just bomb somewhere off the face of the earth.”

It also has some very interesting ramifications for the presidential race. One one hand, it heightens the idea that there are many Americans, most of them Dean supporters, who would rather we fail, and are distraught about Saddam’s capture. Just like another important day in Iraq’s history, this is good news for everyone but a few. Tim Blair has a round-up of these few. Hopefully, this will demarcate more clearly for the American people the differences between Dean’s ilk and the rest of humanity. When something that is obviously good news for the American people is bad news for you, you are likely not to get all that many votes from those American people.

Second, it introduces into the campaign, via Joe Lieberman, a new way of pulling off that demarcation: the death penalty. Says Joe:

This evil man has to face the death penalty. The international tribunal in The Hague cannot order the death penalty, so my first question about where he’s going to be tried will be answered by whether that tribunal can execute him. If it cannot be done by the Iraqi military tribunal, he should be brought before an American military tribunal and face death.

This is and will be a hotly debated topic in the upcoming

And here’s something interesting to note: the last time a dictator was captured in this manner, it was Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania. I hope he gets the same treatment, though perhaps not televised… on the other hand…

Anyway, this is a great day for our country, a great day for our great president, and a great day for Iraq!

From an AP article:

Asked about comments by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder that international law must apply to awarding of contracts, Bush said: “International law? I better call my lawyer.”

Beautiful stuff. Absolutely beautiful.

Ok, so it came two weeks later than my original, overly optimistic estimate, but it came just the same. The Dow hit 10,000 today, and stayed there. As I mentioned before, this is an important psychological barrier, so hopefully reaching it in and of itself will boost the economy a bit, at least in the short term, but quite possibly in the long term as well.

A true miserable failure, and a great presidentI’m going to agree with the various people who have pointed out that President George W. Bush is far from a miserable failure, and that the real miserable failure is, in fact, Jimmy Carter. Jay Solo outlines some of the reasons why.

It’s hard to see Bush as a miserable failure, when he has accomplished essentially everything he set out to do–Medicare reform, perscription drug benefits, No Child Left Behind and the energy bill. He also did some things that weren’t necessarily on his original to do list, such as deposing the Taliban and deposing Saddam. His only campaign promise yet to be fulfilled is Social Security Reform, which he will be campaigning on hard for 2004. We won’t know how his policies will affect things for a while, but as a politician, it is ridiculous to call him a miserable failure, especially when we all know who the real miserable failure is. In fact, like some people, I think he is a rather great president.

Omar has a first-hand account of the big anti-terrorism demonstrations today. Nothing in the major media about it, of course, despite the fact that there were apparently over ten thousand people there. Zeyad will theoretically be supplying us with pictures of the event pretty soon.

In other Iraqi blogger news, Ays has become the first Iraqi blogger, to my knowledge, that has forthrightly and fully argued against the statements of another blogger. This is good. I would love to see some good, intelligent debate between Iraqi bloggers. But for some reason, the two earliest Iraqi bloggers, Salam Pax and Riverbend (who Ays criticized), are completely ignoring the new wave of bloggers. I hope this doesn’t continue, and that one or both of them respond to Ays.

UPDATE: Zeyad’s got a report, and he’s got pictures! And it does my heart good to hear that the population of Baghdad largely thinks as I do on quite a few issues:

The rallies today proved to be a major success. I didn’t expect anything even close to this. It was probably the largest demonstration in Baghdad for months. It wasn’t just against terrorism. It was against Arab media, against the interference of neighbouring countries, against dictatorships, against Wahhabism, against oppression, and of course against the Ba’ath and Saddam.

In regards to the American response to Iraq, two things need to happen. One, the media needs to report on the whole story, with articles like the one linked below. What the troops are doing while they (occasionally) get shot at is as important, if not moreso, than the fact they are getting shot at. Second, a Democratic candidate needs to say the following: “America’s troops are comprised of the finest young men and women in the world, and even though George Bush has [insert generic attack on Bush here], these men and women are doing their best and, in doing so, are preventing Bush’s mistakes from turning Iraq into a failure. Iraq is not a failure, nor yet a success, but a bad situation that is, no thanks to Bush, but thanks to the work of our marvelous Armed Services, steadily and continually getting better.”

Currently, the only candidates that can say that without the response of “well, then, it’s a good thing we went! Vote Bush!” are Gephardt and Lieberman. Kerry flip-flopped too fast to be able to take advantage of this.

Of course, because the situation is getting better, the successes will inevitably become impossible to ignore come the real election-time. At that point, even Dean will be able to, in fact practically required to, give that speech. It is, in a sense, unfortunate for the Republicans that Dean is emerging so clearly as the frontrunner this early, as there is still plenty of time to run to the right, especially regarding Iraq. But if the primaries do drag on so long that Dean, Kerry and Clark are still arguing over who hates Bush’s Iraq policy more when the betterment becomes evident even to the media, they will find themselves looking quite the fools.

Orrin Judd links to an article that sums up my beef with the media coverage in Iraq:

It’s a little-known footnote in postwar Iraq that an unassuming Army Civil Affairs captain named Kent Lindner has a bevy of blushing female fans.

Every time Lindner checks in on the group of young, deaf Iraqi seamstresses at their factory here, the women swarm him with admiration. “I love you!” one of them writes in the dust on Lindner’s SUV.

Such small-time adoration is not the stuff of headlines against the backdrop of a country painfully and often violently evolving from war. So on this day, when Lindner and his fellow soldiers are cheered as they fire the deaf workers’ boss, a woman who has been locking the seamstresses in closets, holding their pay and beating them, the lack of TV cameras on hand is no surprise.

But later that night, mortars hit nearby. Cameras are rolling, and 15 minutes later folks back home instead see another news clip of Baghdad’s latest violence. It’s a soda-straw view that frustrates soldiers, like those in Lindner’s Civil Affairs unit, who are slowly trying to stitch together the peace while the final stages of the war play out on television.

A “soda-straw view” is exactly right. My frustration with the media is not that they are “only showing the bad news.” My problem is that they are only showing part of the news. I wrote an editorial for my paper on this a few weeks back, and it, annoyingly, still holds true:

About six months ago, the United States military swept into Iraq, rumbled across the desert deposed the government of Saddam Hussein. Since then? well, all most of us know is that troops are still being killed occasionally, and there have been quite a few bombings. If we?ve been paying a bit closer attention to the nightly news, we may know that there?s a debate going on about how long U.S. troops should stay in Iraq. If, however, we have only been paying attention to the nightly news, there?s one thing that we probably aren?t terribly sure of. What, exactly, are our troops doing there, anyway?

I don?t mean this in some sort of broad, philosophical manner. I mean, what, physically, are they doing on a day-to-day basis? We hear very little about this. We hear about how we need more troops, or less troops, how they should or shouldn?t be there, but little on what it is the troops are doing at the moment. To listen, they?re just standing around waiting for the next sniper, ambush or suicide bomber to come by.

And that’s why people like John Kerry can get away with calling Iraq a “shooting gallery,” as if that was the defining characteristic of the nation. That is a boldfaced lie, and it undercuts the work the troops are doing. It is a lie begun by the media by their selective reporting (people getting shot at is exciting, rescuing deaf women from a sadistic boss is apparently not), and parroted by the Democratic candidates and their supporters. I don’t know that any of the people involved in this lie recognize it as a lie, but that’s exactly what it is, and that’s what they are furthering every time they characterize Iraq as a failure.

“Man’s maker was made man that He, ruler of the stars, might nurse at His mother’s breast; that the Bread might hunger, the Fountain thirst, the Light sleep, the Way be tired on its journey; that Truth might be accused of false witness, the Teacher be beaten with whips, the Foundation be suspended on wood; that Strength might grow weak; that the Healer might be wounded; that Life might die.” –St. Augustine

The Iraqi colonel who, it turns out, was the source of the much maligned figure of “45 minutes” in regards to Saddam’s ability to use weapons of mas destruction, has come forth, and reasserted that figure. In fact, “forget 45 minutes, we could have fired these within half-an-hour,” he said.