Another stable democracy in the Mid-East - Turkey

American Thinker: The Relative Stablity of Turkey:

"
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was one of the most fascinating, impressive, and unlikely figures of the past century. A Muslim from birth who became a champion of the secular state, a dictator who established the sole working democracy in the Muslim world, an ascetic visionary who died of complications of alcoholism, Kemal deserves to be much better known than he is. He accomplished with Turkey what many insist even today is an impossibility: dragging a battered, defeated, nearly medieval Muslim state into the modern era by main force, and without the wholesale brutality demonstrated by nearly all other nationalist leaders of his era."

Israel is usually cited as the only democracy in the Middle East - we forget that Turkey is a Muslim democracy (with Iraq struggling to enter the scene).

What Iran thinks of the French elections

Pajamas Media: Bonjour Sarkozy - Islamic Police Eject French Woman from Tehran Book Fair:

"The Cultural Heritage News Agency of Iran reported today that a French woman who attended the Tehran Book Fair on behalf of the French government was taken against her will from the French booth by the Islamic police and ejected from the fair site for an improper hijab. (A new campaign against laxity in the wearing of the hijab is in progress in Iran.)"
A CHN correspondent at the location reports that while the French representative was explaining about the books for the Iranian students and other visitors, the outside police rushed into the French booth and forced her out onto the fair grounds.

As people watched in disbelief, an Islamic Guidance and Culture ministry representative who happened to be there and witnessed the incident told the CHN reporter that he did not understand why the uniformed police entered, since the fair has its own custodial security force. He added that this type of behavior concerning a woman from a different culture is an indication of incompetence in the handling of the foreign visitors and guests of this fair."

Incompetence, or intentional abuse out of anger at the French election? The French have apparently gotten a clue out Islamic terrorism - making Iran's plans for world domination a bit more difficult to carry out.

The UN still doesn't get it

American Thinker Blog: More Kafkaesque behavior from the UN:

"Zimbabwe is about to become head of UN's Commission on Sustainable Development. This goes beyond Orwell; it is Kafkaesque.

Under the dictatorship of Robert Mugabe, all indexes of economic well-being, let alone political freedom, have plummeted. Life expectancy at birth for males has dramatically declined from 60 to 37 since 1990 (for women it is even lower), making it the lowest in the world. The infant mortality rate has climbed from 53 to 81 deaths per 1000 live births in the same period. Five and a half million Zimbabweans currently live with HIV. Inflation has soared; trade unions are repressed; opponents are tortured. "

We (the USA) are paying more for this than the rest of the world combined. Do you really think your tax dollars are being well spent?

Europe (finally!) gets the War on Terror

American Thinker: Europe (finally!) gets the War on Terror:

"Two headline-grabbing signals came from Europe this week, one from Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany, and the other from Nicolas Sarkozy, the presidential front-runner in France. Both show a new desire to heal the Atlantic alliance, which has been badly strained in the last several years.

The media on both continents naturally blame the Bush Administration for the breach; but there is no doubt that ex-Chancellor Schroeder and outgoing President Jacques Chirac exploited and worsened policy differences for their own political gain. Their aim was to separate Europe from America, in order to build up their own power by way of the European Union. Chirac was scheming to become the first full-term president of the EU. Schroeder kept his office by scapegoating the Bush Administration. The EU Constitution was supposed to carry it all over the top, and the European Union was supposed to sail into everlasting paradise. Breaking away from America was the key.

Well, it didn't happen that way."

Europe took many small steps towards PC & socialist lunacy - perhaps they're now ready to take some steps back from the brink of destruction.

"The US would be wise to attempt to bring Russia into the Western defense perimeter, while continuing to pressure Putin to act more responsibly at home and abroad. It will not be easy, but a shared anti-missile defense agreement would be a powerful incentive for better Russian behavior. Russia has always been torn between the West and its long history of Asiatic autocracy. It should be possible to encourage Russian Westernization against a common threat."

Now that is a truly interesting idea.

"Ideally, Europe wishes to control America as its own foreign legion; but Americans would be fools not to demand commensurate contributions from the 450 million people of Europe. Today Europe pays less than half of what we do for defense, but they still expect to be protected by us. That is an exploitative and one-sided arrangement. France and Germany must do much more for the common defense."

Add a renewed British navy to this list - it is essential.

"Over the longer term the EU still aims to emerge as an autonomous superpower, in competition with the United States. The European Left is extremely powerful, and it has indoctrinated four successive generations into wanting a United States of Europe. Such ambitions can be carried out in a rational and civilized way, but Europe's anti-American hysteria should not be indulged. The US has a tendency to overlook verbal slander by our nominal allies. But over the longer term, such 'allies' are ambivalent at best, and should not be treated as friends. We should not reward sabotage."

Amen

"In retrospect, the Bush Administration may look much like the Truman Administration, which first confronted the Stalin challenge in the Cold War. George W. Bush is a conviction politician just as Harry S Truman was. He has taken his stand, and it will have historic impact, just as Truman's did."

. . .

"The Iraq War may turn out to be much like the Korean War, a test of American resolve, and also of the limits of American commitment to an important but remote war. At the end of the Korean War, American forces withdrew from North Korea but not from the South. Because of that American willingness to hold firm, South Korea grew into a formidable bulwark against Asian Communist expansion, as it remains to this day. China's new prosperity can be attributed to the democratic capitalist successes of South Korea, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan, all of them dependent upon American support."

That's a hell of a good model to promote for the Middle East.

Bureaucracy - a necessary evil that isn't working well

American Thinker: Bureaucratic Failure:

"The reason bureaucracies fail, Fox tells us, is '...because they are, in some sense, inhuman.' By this he doesn't {mean} that they are vicious or cruel (although they can be), but that they are, by their very nature, at odds with human nature as it exists. Bureaucracies operate according to a certain fixed set of procedures. They are an attempt - heroic or otherwise - to force the world to conform to a rational system. But human beings, much as we pride ourselves on our rational thinking, are actually a grab-bag of instincts, intuition, and habit, with a handful of rationality thrown in to pull everything else together. This serves us well because it matches how the universe actually works, but it also means that there will always be a conflict between bureaucracies and human beings. "

This explains a lot. If you've ever been around government & it's workers, you realize that they're no more perfect, and frequently just as fallible as anyone else. Legislators may have had the best intentions in mind, but laws are implemented by people who are often more interested in their own concerns that yours.

"nothing is more irrational than warfare. We practice it only because it can accomplish things that rational behavior can't. The British forgot this. The Iranians did not."

hmmmm

"Bureaucratic functionalism had taken the place of the military virtues. Somehow the Iranians sensed this. Perhaps by observing the routine, perhaps by intercepting radio traffic. Perhaps simply through noticing that women were driving the boats. Seeing that they were not, in the strict sense, dealing with a military operation, they made their move, and they got away with it."

War is not politically correct ... don't expect it to be pretty or easy.

"a legendary navy, the navy of Gravelines, and Trafalgar, and the Falklands, the navy that destroyed the slave trade and the Nazi U-boats, is gone with scarcely a whimper."

. . .

"with this human bomb in their midst, what did the administration of Virginia Tech decide to do? They declared the campus a 'gun-free zone', apparently under the impression that stating the fact would make it so. This assured Cho that he could operate without being interfered with in any way whatsoever. (The legacy media has failed to grasp that 'gun-free' also applied to the school's security forces, who were effectively disarmed.)"

Repeat 5,000 times: "criminals don't obey laws", then explain to me why taking guns away from the innocent helps any situation.

"we're depending on this form of organization for our survival - and it is failing us. Bureaucracy is a major tool of our civilization, to a greater extent than any other before us. We can't get by without it, but we're rapidly approaching a point where we can't live with it either.

It used to be understood that there were situations where you threw out the rulebook. When FDR wanted to start a covert operations service, he ignored the established bureaucracy and turned instead to 'Wild Bill' Donovan, a Manhattan businessman (and Republican to boot). The result was the Office of Strategic Services, a ripe gaggle of New York socialites, lawyers, communists, homosexuals, and adventurers who got the job done while breaking every rule in existence. As soon as the war was over, the OSS was rolled up - there was never any hope it would fit in with a peacetime bureaucracy."

If you haven't done it, definitely find the time to read about the early days of the OSS .

"what can we do? There is no possibility of reform. 'The ‘internal contradictions' of bureaucracy,' Fox tells us, 'are indeed chronic; they are incurable. No amount of social science tinkering is going to do more than cover the patient with bandaids.'

Any attempted reforms will be carried out under bureaucratic procedure. They will meet all the criteria, they will be approved by every committee, and they will be perfectly satisfactory right up until the appearance of the next maniac with a pistol or gang of Jihadis attempting to flatten an American city.

Similarly, there's little point in asking for higher-quality, more spirited personnel. Such individuals will seldom attempt a career as a bureaucrat in the first place, and when they do, the bureaucracy often moves heaven and earth to stymie them. (See the recent adventures of Paul Wolfowitz.)

In the end we'll simply have to depend on ourselves. Forget all the bureaucratic procedures, promises, and guarantees. Events have proven them empty."

Survivalists living far from cities may have come to this conclusion earlier than most of us, but we can't all live like that - we must teach ourselves to survive in cities.

Are you getting the news you need?

American Thinker: Freak Porn News:

"On every controversial issue of the day, the mainstream media weighs in with advocacy in the guise of information, creating a demonstrably misinformed electorate.

For example, many people live in a carefully cultivated fear of the radiation from nuclear power plants, unaware that the coal-fired plants that are often built in their place emit far more radiation due to the uranium contained in coal. The Iraq War is declared an unsustainable and pointless loss of life that must be ended immediately by ignominious retreat, yet Salmonella kills more Americans every year. And Lord only knows how many Americans are killed by illegal aliens every year, because the media simply isn't going to keep track. Clearly, not all loss of life is equal when a debate is raging."

Media bias - what's that? :-)

"there's a more insidious bias that I've been thinking about increasingly: the media's love of freaks. When a man in Uzbekistan is found to have eaten his cousins, or some guy in Seattle wants to marry a goat, this is now international 'news.' But what is the relevance? What decision does this help you make? Suppose your precious 'right to know' went unfilled in regard to the goat groom, how are you intellectually impoverished exactly?"

AMEN!

Freedom vs. Security - Army Style

Army Squeezes Soldier Blogs, Maybe to Death -:

"'This is the final nail in the coffin for combat blogging,' said retired paratrooper Matthew Burden, editor of The Blog of War anthology. 'No more military bloggers writing about their experiences in the combat zone. This is the best PR the military has -- it's most honest voice out of the war zone. And it's being silenced.'"

It seems the military needs to create some sort of monitored blogging facility - a soldier writes their blog, but it doesn't go public until after review by the censors. They either don't have the budget (thanks Congress!), or the will to do this. Telling a soldier to get permission from a senior officer before blogging is absurd - ignoring the intimidation factor, those officers a re way too busy to review blogs in a timely manner (and know their superior officer will review the blog will intimidate most soldiers & result in less interesting blogs). The military certainly has a need to control information coming out of a war zone & other areas, but this isn't an effective way of obtaining full compliance - instead people will be finding creative ways to circumvent the policy.