February 18, 2007

UNLIKE THE DEMOCRATS, NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN WANTED TO WIN

        Horsefeathers has been critical of the politically corrrect utopianism of the Bush administration's strategy in Iraq. We continue to favor application of overwhelming killing force on the grounds that we're in a war, and in war there is no substitute for victory. Further, we believe that in war there should be no sanctuary for the enemy, neither mosques, schools, hositals or national borders. Yet none of the obstacles we face on the battlefield constitutes a greater threat than that posed by our own Benedict Arnolds. The following just about sums it up:

"...Neville Chamberlain's naivete may have helped bring on World War II, but at least he supported his country when war began. Norway's Vidkun Quisling and France's Vichy government under Marshal Petain may have collaborated with the Nazi enemy, but after their countries' defeats, not before.

We'd have to go back to Benedict Arnold to find Americans as eager as Murtha & Co. to see an American defeat on the battlefield.

They are working on the game plan of al-Qaida's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri. In October 2005, Zawahiri outlined al-Qaida's plan in a letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, late head of al-Qaida in Iraq:

"The first stage: Expel the Americans from Iraq. The second stage: Establish an Islamic authority . . . over as much territory as you can spread its power in Iraq . . . in order to fill the void stemming from the departure of the Americans."

John Murtha and his perfidious friends are working on creating that void and completing Zawahiri's first stage. They are the appeasers Churchill warned about who hope that by feeding the Islamofascist tiger, it will eat us last."

See the rest here.

CHOOSING SIDES: AYAAN HIRSI ALI OR CONGRESSIONAL COWARDS

        On the same day that 56 white flag senators were rationalizing surrender as victory, cowardice as courage, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was on CSpan discussing her memoir, Infidel. For all those feeling despair about our situation, watch and be inspired that this courageous, articulate and beautiful woman has chosen to live among us, encouraging all to defend Western culture and its freedoms. Her refusal to be intimidated by barbaric savages should shame our lawmakers. It may take a foreigner, a woman like Hirsi Ali to recall us to our stronger selves. Do we want to become a nation of castrati, a cringing bunch of Chuck Schumers begging and pleading with totalitarians? For shame! Hirsi Ali may have arrived just in time.
See her talk here.

CONGRESSIONAL INFANTILISM

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But then I repeat myself.
-Mark Twain

When the fight gets bloody, our lily livered congressional representatives know what to do--praise themselves for boldness, then run away, dissemble, betray, cower, twist words, and above all blame Bush, to wit, "it's Bush's war."

Churchill was speaking of the British parliament but the words hold true for our own congress: "They are decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent."

February 12, 2007

MILTON FRIEDMAN SMILES BENIGNLY AS THE NEW YORK TIMES MISSES THE MARK ONCE AGAIN

There is a cynical old joke from Soviet Russia that goes something like this: What happens when you bring socialism to the Sahara Desert? Nothing happens for seventy-five years and then there is a shortage of sand.

The front page of the Sunday New York Times—usually a space devoted to hand wringing, heart wrenching stories of the luckless, the losers, the benighted, the oppressed, the victims of the nation who cannot even find their way onto the pages of the daily Times as political constituencies—had a really up-beat story about Niger.[click HERE] It took up about a third of the page and then another whole page further into the front section. The headline read: IN NIGER, TREES AND CROPS TURN BACK THE DESERT. “Farmers in Niger have used simple techniques to help a once barren region become greener.” Lydia Polgreen was the reporter who tells the story innocently, naively, as though the news is “the simple techniques” that are driving the desert back and saving this vulnerable nation from starvation. Unfortunately the reporter’s naiveté or ignorance was not understood or recognized by the front page editor so that the real meaning of the facts remained hidden.

The real story is this. Niger is a country about twice the size of Texas, just south of the Sahara. Only 16% of it is arable at all, but over the years more and more of its land was being lost to the desert. Why? Because of the gradual destruction of its trees. Over the years more and more of its trees were being cut down by the farmers for firewood and use as building materials. And when the trees disappear, there are no longer any tree roots to hold the water in the ground and the water table disappears. When this happens the ground becomes hard, dry, and resistant to planting crops.
Over the years much land had been lost and the nation, already vulnerable to seasonal variation, became susceptible to food shortages and starvation.

Thus, all of the downward spiral over the years, economically and agronomically, leads back to the destruction of the standing trees in the country since time immemorial. Behind the destruction of the trees is a law that goes back to colonial times that nationalized all trees, made them the property of the state. But the state had no way of protecting its property—no tree police, foresters—so the farmers simply cut them down and found uses for them. This, of course, has been going on for centuries, until it went too far. “About 20 years ago, farmers like Ibrahim Danjimo realized something terrible was happening to their fields.

“We look around, all the trees were far from the village,” said Mr. Danjimo, a farmer in his 40s who has been working the rocky, sandy soil of this tiny village since he was a child. “Suddenly, the trees were all gone.

“Fierce winds were carrying off the topsoil of their once-productive land. Sand dunes threatened to swallow huts. Wells ran dry. Across the Sahel, a semiarid belt that spans Africa just below the Sahara and is home to some of the poorest people on earth, a cataclysm was unfolding…. The desert seemed determined to swallow everything.
But in the mid 80’s the government has recognized the benefits of allowing individuals to own their own trees. Farmers make money from the trees by selling branches, pods, fruit and bark. Because those sales are more lucrative over time than simply chopping down the tree for firewood, the farmers preserve them. So Mr. Danjimo and other farmers in Guidan Bakoye took a small but important step. No longer would they clear the saplings from their fields before planting, as they had for generations. Instead they would protect and nurture them, carefully plowing around them when sowing millet, sorghum, peanuts and beans.

“Today, the success in growing new trees suggests that the harm to much of the Sahel may not have been permanent, but a temporary loss of fertility. The evidence, scientists say, demonstrates how relatively small changes in human behavior can transform the regional ecology, restoring its biodiversity and productivity.
Thus, because of the transformation of the tree economy from socialism—state owned trees—to capitalism—individually owned trees with a free market to buy and sell them and their products, seven million acres and the entire economy has been rescued from oblivion and transformed socially.

For example, Ms. Polgreen tells of Ibrahim Idy, a farmer who has 20 baobab trees in his fields. Selling the leaves and fruit brings him about $300 a year in additional income. He has used that money to buy a motorized pump to draw water from his well to irrigate his cabbage and lettuce fields. His neighbors, though, who have fewer baobabs, use their children to draw water and dig and direct the mud channels that send water to the beds. While their children work the fields, Mr. Idy’s children attend school.

The transforming economic ideas which have resulted in this surprising reversal of fortune for Niger were proposed two hundred years ago by Adam Smith and reprised again and again in the past fifty years by Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman. Do you think Ms. Polgreen or her Sunday editor ever heard of them? Probably not—they were only a pair of dead white males.

DON'T SEND MY BOY TO HARVARD

Larry Summers's pathetic serial apologies for his sins against P.C. dogma, made it inevitable that a Dr. Fausta would replace him. Here's Heather MacDonald on the decline and fall of a great University.

Heather Mac Donald
Harvard’s Faustian BargainAmerica’s oldest university selects a dreadful president.
9 February 2007

The feminist takeover of Harvard is imminent. The Harvard Crimson reported yesterday that the university is about to name as its new president Drew Gilpin Faust, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Harvard’s Corporation, which is likely to recommend Faust to the university’s Board of Overseers for confirmation, could not have more clearly repudiated Lawrence Summers’s all-too-brief reign of meritocracy and academic honesty, or more openly signaled that Harvard will now be the leader in politically correct victimology.

Faust runs one of the most powerful incubators of feminist complaint and nonsensical academic theory in the country. You can count on the Radcliffe Institute’s fellows and invited lecturers to proclaim the “constructed” nature of knowledge, gender, and race, and to decry endemic American sexism and racism. Typical guest speakers include left-wing journalists Susan Faludi and Barbara Ehrenreich. At Radcliffe, Faludi argued that 9/11 had triggered yet another “backlash against feminism,” while Ehrenreich lectured on “Weird Science: Challenging Sexist Ideology Since the 1970s.” It is received truth among Radcliffe Institute lecturers that obstacles throughout American society block women’s progress. Radcliffe speaker Rebecca Walker, for example, has created the “I Spy Sexism” initiative, which asks young women between the ages of 15 and 30 to keep logs of the “sexism, racism, and homophobia” that they see as they walk down the street or go to a movie.

With typical feminist hypocrisy, Faust has managed to wield massive power even as she rues female powerlessness. She headed the Task Force on Women Faculty, created after the firestorm over Summers’s recklessly honest speculations about women in science, that strengthened the feminist hold on faculty hiring and promotions. The Task Force won a $50 million commitment to increase faculty “diversity efforts” at Harvard, notwithstanding that for decades the university has tied itself in knots trying to increase female and black faculty representation. Faust’s Task Force also muscled into existence a remarkable new bureaucratic sinecure: the Senior Vice Provost for Diversity and Faculty Development. This new official sits with the president, the provost, and the deans of faculties, in order to push “diversity” quotas in every corner of the university’s academic operations. Naturally, Harvard gave the new position to one of Faust’s two co-chairs on the Task Force: Evelyn Hammonds, a professor of the history of science, and of African and African-American studies, who specializes in discerning bias against minority women in science and medicine. (Please do not question how Hammonds’s unobstructed rise through the most elite American universities comports with her thesis of pervasive discrimination against black women.)

Should the Board of Overseers confirm Faust, the Senior Vice Provost for Diversity that she created will be even more redundant than before. Expect a constant push for ever greater female and minority representation throughout the university, backed up by academic “research” showing widespread discrimination against those favored beneficiaries—research unclouded by the fact that women now run many of the nation’s most prestigious universities. Asked whether her appointment showed that gender inequities were ending at Harvard, Faust responded: “Of course not. There is a lot of work still to be done, especially in the sciences,” reports the New York Times. Unbiased inquiry into why certain groups may not enjoy proportional representation in scientific and technical fields, of the sort that Summers engaged in to his demise, will be even more proscribed. This triumph of feminist ideology is a tragedy not just for Harvard, but for the American academic world, which will undoubtedly follow Harvard’s lead in elevating feminist politics to premier intellectual standing.

February 05, 2007

GRASPING THE NETTLE: AT LAST, A WINNING STRATEGY FOR IRAQ

During World War II it came to the notice of seven or eight million GIs that their GI world was an imperfect one. Sometimes more and sometimes less but always imperfect. This they expressed in an acronym they made famous all over the world—SNAFU. In fact our greatest generation developed a set of acronyms which was capable of even expressing the degree of imperfection with which they were dealing. In order of seriousness there was:

SNAFU—SITUATION NORMAL, ALL FUCKED UP

FUMTU—FUCKED UP MORE THAN USUAL

TARFU—THINGS ARE REALLY FUCKED UP

And, best, or worst of all,

FUBAR—FUCKED UP BEYOND ALL RECOGNITION

Horsefeathers believes that the final stage of fucked-upness—FUBAR—has at last been achieved in Iraq. Not only is no one on the same page anymore, but no one can find the pages. No one can even find the people any more. Rumsfeld is gone, General Casey is gone, General Abizaid is gone, Bolton is gone, the Republicans are gone and have taken their chairs and chairmanships with them, and Nancy Pelosi seems to be too busy with her new toy gavel to pay attention to business.

The President acknowledges that things are not going well in Iraq and now proposes his new Surge plan which nobody likes—the retiring generals don’t like it, none of the 2008 Presidential candidates like it and Congress doesn’t like it. It seems that everyone who holds any office or who has held any office in the past, or who might hold any office in the future has ideas and strongly held opinions about Iraq. Most of them boil down to “send troops in” or “get troops out.” Those opposed to these strategies say that if we cut and run there will be civil war and chaos, and if we send more troops in we will be incurring more casualties in a lost cause. Probably both groups are right.

Things being what they are—FUBAR—Horsefeathers offers a few outrageous suggestions which may help us regain a constructive strategic perspective, reduce useless, uncontrollable and demoralizing casualties, and save us from more world-class humiliating foreign policy errors.

Horsefeathers’ new ideas about Iraq requires that the government give up its public relations model of foreign policy development, in which every pundit and media outlet make a contribution to policy. Foreign policy cannot be made by bureaucratic leaks, congressional investigations, public polls, the media, talk radio, or by Hollywood.
The true nature of foreign policy development in Western diplomacy has been too immoral, too sanctimonious, too hypocritical, too dishonest, to be viewed by any normal non-politician as anything but disgusting and shocking. But that is the only way that foreign policy can be formulated in the world of realpolitik, especially in wartime. Winston Churchill once wisely said in World War II that “In time of war the truth must be protected by a bodyguard of lies.”

Furthermore, we must confess our sins against common sense and history, and the cultural illusions that led us into Iraq in the first place.

First of all, we don’t fight non-conventional wars very well. Time is always on the side of guerillas and insurgents. So we must stop fighting on the enemy’s terms. We’ll never beat them with a conventional force. We don’t have to go native but it will be wise to use some of their own tactics against them.

We must give up our misguided attempt to transform Iraq and Arabia into Western civilization. The Arab street doesn’t get Western political values. Sophisticated Arabs may understand the value of freedom and the free market but they live in London or Jordan, and the average Joe Mohammed just wants to shoot off his AK-47 once in a while and get his two hours of Al Jezeera every night.

Iraq cannot be unified except by a political strong man. It was never meant to be a unified country back in 1922 when it was invented. It was created geographically to serve British political purposes. But even they soon realized that it wouldn’t work, and got out. We must give up the strategic aim of unification and let the three sects work out their borders, and their economic inequities on their own terms. This will mean civil war, dislocation, suffering, death, and political instablitiy for years, maybe decades. The same has been true when any country splits up. England/Ireland, India/Pakistan, our own Civil War, but wars never go on until there is no one left standing. No matter how long they last—several days or decades—they end when those fighting get tired of fighting and make up a reason for stopping. In Iraq, whether allies participate or not, the fighting will continue until the sects decide to stop or their allies decide to stop paying the bills.

Whatever partitioning occurs, whatever boundaries are finally agreed upon, whatever oil agreements are arranged, they will be finalized after much blood is shed and that fact will make the arrangement much more acceptable than any political arrangement between non-combatants.

TWO CHEERS FOR THE IRAQI CIVIL WAR AND ITS POLITICAL TURMOIL AND CHAOS

A civil war is, of course, a catastrophe for the Iraqi people, but not for the United States. Although there are those who will try to hold America and George Bush responsible for it. They will be wrong, just as Colin Powell was wrong when he tried to reduce American foreign policy to Pottery Barn etiquette when he uttered his famously simplistic and inappropriate warning “If you break it [Iraq], you’ve bought it.” Nothing of the sort is true nor has it ever been true throughout history. That was Powell’s middle class Bronx morality, similar to the sense of honor and fair play that almost cost us World War II when fighting a foe that doesn’t know or care about the rules of cricket. In wars past, the winners killed the men, raped the women, took the children for slaves, took anything that wasn’t nailed down, and burned down the rest.

Those who are and will be engaged in civil war are the extremists who are the enemies of peace in Iraq and the enemies of the United States everywhere. Arab hearts and minds, Shia and Sunni, it seems, are different from Americans’, they are in love with death and shooting AK-47s. The Sunnis and the Shias have been feuding with each other over the same thing now since 632 A.D.—whether Ali, Mohamad’s son-in-law, should have succeeded him as leader of Islam. In the short run nothing will change, they will go on killing each other because they love their tribalism and tribal values. Those who continue to fight each other are our enemies too—extremists, jihadists, and fundamentalists. Those Iraqi moderates who hate and fear violence have already left war-torn Iraq for neighboring countries and safer provinces and will continue to do so.

The situation as it stands today—FUBAR to the unimaginative—can be a unique opportunity for the pursuit of America’s long term interests. During the chaos that emerges during a civil war there is no better place for a small American force to be—an opportunity that rarely comes along. We can accomplish many Special Operations that are in the interests of America, under cover of the chaos. We can recruit intelligence agents during this time from amongst the warring factions to provide invaluable intelligence with little or no cost. We can identify targets of opportunity with the help of these bought and paid for informants.

This is the way out of the Iraq mess without losing another casualty. Publicly we remain strictly neutral, except for our humanitarian assistance in helping refugees who need it. Privately, we play the great game of Middle-Eastern strategy and covert exploitation. We do whatever has to be done to serve the interests of America in secret and deny publicly any culpability for anything.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” So goes an old Arab proverb. What could be more satisfying than knowing that one of our enemies is killing another of our enemies without our incurring any risk at all. And that this may be happening thousands of times a day.

The first step is to publicly acknowledge the de facto civil war and that the United States cannot fulfill any of its obligations until the different factions agree to peace so that rebuilding Iraq can continue. After such an acknowledgement we have to declare publicly that we stand as a neutral power and will undertake only humanitarian activities—medical supplies, food, and transport of refugees to distant camps that provide safety for either sect.
Under cover of these humanitarian activities performed by a force of twenty or twenty-five thousand non-combatant troops, a well-organized military intelligence program can be created that would include recruitment of spies from all factions, acquisition of human intelligence about our enemies and their operations, and the identification of targets of opportunity.

INSTEAD OF CUTTING AND RUNNING, OR SURGING, HOW ABOUT REDEPLOYMENT

“…but I tell you, my lord, out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety….”

In addition to exploiting the opportunities of the civil war there is one more important strategic aim that must be accomplished. Contrary to cutting and running we must carry out a plan of redeployment. A large component of our present force should be redeployed to a new and permanent base to be built in Northern Iraq—non-Arabic Kurdistan. There we will be welcomed by the cooperative, pro-American Kurds, and out of the way of harassment by IEDs, RPGs, and light artillery from hostile Arabs. Kurdistan is already a mostly autonomous country and desires to become completely independent of central and southern Iraq.

We need a long term base there much like the ones we have had in Korea and Germany for more than fifty years. What are the advantages of such an arrangement? For the Kurds it will bring dollars and employment. It will also bring political stability and reassurance—about their hostile neighbors, Iran, Syria, and Turkey.
In fact, an American base will tend to stabilize the Middle East as well as put pressure on America’s Middle-Eastern enemies, Syria, Iran, and Saudi extremists.

The strategic purpose of such a base should be as a center for the acquisition of and recruitment of human and signal intelligence and agents. And for the location of a large Special Operations cadre to do covert operations in and around the Middle East against our enemies and those who support our enemies

Such a permanent base in the region will put constant pressure on antagonistic governments. After all, we have demonstrated that an Arab country—a country in which political factions love death more than victory—is highly vulnerable to America’s newest weapon—political ineptitude. We have demonstrated unequivocally that we can reduce a country to impotence and chaos without dropping a single nuclear bomb.

February 04, 2007

THE NYTIMES: NORMALIZING PARANOIA

        One of the first things you learn as a psychiatric resident is not to try to talk a paranoid person out of his delusions. Horsefeathers remembers as a first year resident the futility of trying to persuade a patient that the FBI was really not interested in pursuing him for his political views. It took a while to realize that this paranoid belief bolstered his sense of self importance, protecting him from terrible feelings of worthlessness. Freud once remarked that there is always a kernel of truth in delusions, and paranoids find that small kernel and expand it to encompass all of reality. You can't compliment a paranoid person for he'll see the reverse side. Tell a paranoid woman she's pretty and she'll say "You're saying that because you really think I'm ugly." Tell a paranoid he's intelligent and he'll think "ah ha, you really think I'm stupid and are saying that to disguise you're real feelings."
        Today's New York Times offers a black wordsmith's paranoid view of race as if it were a perfectly reasonable description of reality. Lynette Clemetson offers a potpourri of paranoia from various black intellectuals who resent being described as 'articulate'. You see, the hidden message is 'how surprising that a black person can speak, reason and think'. The real problem inadvertently revealed by this article is the stance of victimization and grievance it expresses, aided and encouraged by the New York Times. Fortunately most blacks, like most others of whatever ethnic or racial background eschew the pleasures of victimhood for the greater satisfactions of real achievement. Most normal people, of whatever skin color, enjoy a compliment.

SUPER BOWL SUNDAY: LET BASEBALL BEGIN

        Super Bowl Sunday is here, and with it come the Marxist sociologists masquerading as sports writers. All this ink spilled over the skin color of the coaches, as if Jackie Robinson was just now breaking the color barrier. (By the way, when invoking Robinson, someone should remind these locker room Lenins that he was, horror of horrors, a strong Republican) and over the medical consequences of playing football. Is anyone shocked at the fact that concussions occur frequently when big strong men collide, and those collisions have health consequences? That's why most of us seek to avoid them and fork out big bucks to those who seek them out. But the delicate creatures who now cover sports are most interested in flattering themselves for noticing the phenomenon. They write as though they were deep thinkers, empathically concerned about improving the world so the unenlightened who play games don't hurt themselves and aren't exploited by greedy capitalists.

        Sam Johnson conveyed something essential about aging when he wrote:

"Condemn'd to hope's delusive mine,
As on we toil from day to day,
By sudden blasts, or slow decline,
Our social comforts drop away..."

        One of life's social comforts used to be reading the sports pages. Horsefeathers is old enough to remember when reading about a ball game in the next day's papers was eagerly anticipated. This was in the days when radio broadcasts of baseball often consisted of the sound of a teletype machine in the background followed by a 'recreation' of the events taking place far from the studio: "Here's Stan (The Man) Musial at the plate. The pitcher winds and throws a fastball high and tight. Musial uncoils from his question mark stance and lines one to the warning track. The right fielder leaps and can't reach it as it caroms off the wall in Sportsman's Park. Musial lopes into second with his league leading 60th double." Such descriptions were based on a teletyped message: "Musial, 2B, RF." Writing was vivid, evocative and at times almost poetic. There are lines written by Jimmy Cannon, Red Smith and Roger Angell that stay in the mind all these years later. "You're Yogi Berra who wanted to be like all the other guys. Now all the other guys want to be like you."(Cannon), etc.
        Still the games survive, at least until Sharia law prevails. Thankfully baseball begins in 2 weeks and on Super Bowl Sunday Horsefeathers will be staring at the tube--although we share Rogers Hornsby's sentiment that there is only one true American game, baseball. Maybe if television existed back in the 1920's Hornsby would have given a slightly different answer to a questioner, "What do I do in the off-season? I stare out the window and wait until spring."

February 03, 2007

STATE DEPARTMENT FANTASIES

''There's simply no reason to avoid the subject of how we get to a Palestinian state,'' Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said after meeting with foreign ministers from the European Union, United Nations and Russia.

        The U.S. State Dept. should be renamed the U.S. Dept. of Utopian Fantasy. The latest news from Gaza is that two barbaric gangs of Jew haters, Hamas and Fatah are turning their abundant arsenals on one another in Gaza's putative Palestinian state, rather than on Israel. Reality has a way of making a mockery of wishful fantasies like the bizarre notion that another Arab state devoted to the destruction of Israel is just what's needed to calm the blood lust of totalitarian Islam. In the face of this latest round of welcome Arab self-destructiveness, what do we hear from our Secretary of State? More blather about the need for a new Palestinian state whose leader, Mahmoud Abbas, is recast from Holocaust denier and terrorist ally of Arafat, to 'moderate' peace lover. This mode of thinking- wishing will make it so- dubbed "realist"(!) by the MSM, requires overlooking Abbas's pleas that Hamas and Fatah stop killing one another so they can train their weapons on their common enemy---the Jews.
        Perhaps this is a sick joke: those who favor a slow second holocaust are dubbed 'moderates' while those who openly favor a fast one are urged to join forces with the 'moderates. Perhaps a compromise can be found, whereby they agree to a fixed number of terrorist attrocities per month. That would be the kind of benchmark "progress" our State Dept. and Congressional Democrats could get behind in a gesture of bipartisanship.

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