CALIFORNIA YANKEE

Kerry Gets It Wrong

In an interview with the Washington Post, Kerry indicated that as president he would "play down the promotion of democracy as a leading goal in dealing with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, China and Russia, instead focusing on other objectives that he said are more central to the United States' security."

In many ways, Kerry laid out a foreign policy agenda that appeared less idealistic about U.S. aims than those of President Bush or even fellow Democrat Bill Clinton. Although Kerry said it is important to sell democracy and "market it" around the world, he demurred when questioned about a number of important countries that suppress human rights and freedoms.

[. . .]

During the interview, he eschewed the soaring rhetoric on freedom and democracy that are commonplace in Bush's speeches and news conferences. At one point, he stumbled over the words when he tried to emphasize his interest in promoting American values: "The idea of America is, I think proudly and chauvinistically, the best idea that we've developed in this world."

Of promoting democracy overseas, Kerry said: "How fast you can do that and how rapidly others can embrace it and what can be expected over a period of time varies from place to place." Emphasizing his interest in setting realistic goals, he added: "Beware of the presidential candidate who just sort of says with a big paintbrush we're going to make everything all right overnight."

Kerry is mistaken in concluding promoting democracy is in the middle east is not an objective central to U.S. security.

In The Age of Sacred Terror Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon explain that the roots of Islamic extremism which spawns evildoers like Osama Bin Laden lies in the anger and frustration from all the difficulties under which they live—the poverty, unemployment, oppression. The only to eliminate the roots of the extremist movements is to give these people hope. To do that requires freedom and democracy. These sentiments are also expressed by Professor Bernard Lewis.

Last December the Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal published an article by Lewis, entitled “Democracy and the Enemies of Freedom.” In that article Lewis sets forth the objectives of the American military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq: first and more immediate, to deter and defeat terrorism; second, to bring freedom and democracy, to these countries and the rest of the Middle East. Lewis writes that while establishing democracy in the Middle East will not be quick or easy, history suggests it is possible.

The creation of a free society, as the history of existing democracies in the world makes clear, is no easy matter. The experience of the Turkish republic over the last half century and of some other Muslim countries more recently has demonstrated two things: first, that it is indeed very difficult to create a democracy in such a society, and second, that although difficult, it is not impossible.

The study of Islamic history and of the vast and rich Islamic political literature encourages the belief that it may well be possible to develop democratic institutions--not necessarily in our Western definition of that much misused term, but in one deriving from their own history and culture, and ensuring, in their way, limited government under law, consultation and openness, in a civilized and humane society. There is enough in the traditional culture of Islam on the one hand and the modern experience of the Muslim peoples on the other to provide the basis for an advance towards freedom in the true sense of that word.

Lewis then explains that we are engaged in a titanic struggle of global dimensions. If you read his books and grasp what type of civilization the terrorists want to impose on the entire world, you understand that we must not only take on this fight; we have to win it.

The war against terror and the quest for freedom are inextricably linked, and neither can succeed without the other. The struggle is no longer limited to one or two countries, as some Westerners still manage to believe. It has acquired first a regional and then a global dimension, with profound consequences for all of us.

President Bush understands what is at stake and has set us on the correct, probably the only course, which can guarantee that our way of life survives.

In a recent interview in The Atlantic Online, Professor Lewis stated that he was "cautiously optimistic about what's happening in Iraq." He is more concerned about "what's happening here in the United States." He's afraid we will abandon the Iraqis as we did in 1991. I pray we stick with President Bush and win this fight.

Pakistan's Education Minister Survives Attack

CNN reports that Pakistan's education minister survived a rocket attack outside the southwestern city of Quetta. 18 rockets were fired at Education Minister Zobaida Jalal's residence, killing one of Jalal's servants.

Jalal has been responsible for recent changes to the curriculum in Pakistani schools that reduce the influence of fundamentalist Islam and the concept of holy war.

Critics have said she acted under pressure from the United States.

Jalal said the attacks were "harrassment" and called them "disheartening," but said she would not be deterred from her duties.

"I will continue doing what I am supposed to do," she said.

I hope Jala is as tough as her rhetoric.

Thunder Rolls For President Bush

The Associated Press reports members of the Rolling Thunder motorcycling group visited with President Bush on Sunday:

The roar from bikers on the Mall nearby could be heard on the South Lawn as eight motorcycles, headlights illuminated and American flags jutting off the rear seats, rolled up the driveway to the South Portico where Bush was waiting to greet them.

[. . .]

Later, Bush addressed, via a telephone hookup, a Rolling Thunder rally at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in the capital.

The president noted the letter of endorsement he received from the group last week. "Artie, I thought you were going to offer me riding lessons," Bush joked, thanking Rolling Thunder for backing his re-election campaign.

Reuters explains that Rolling Thunder is a veterans organization founded to publicize the POW-MIA issue and which helps veterans with benefits.

According to the Washington Post the Rolling Thunder event dominated the heart of the nation's capital:

A younger generation of war veterans swept into town yesterday, shifting the tone of the city's Memorial Day celebrations from the long-ago heroism of World War II to the still-raw wounds of Vietnam.

Clad in leather, astride gleaming Harleys, they trailed American flags and the black flags that honor U.S. prisoners of war and military members missing in action. With horns blaring and fists raised, they rode into Washington more than 400,000 strong, according to organizers of the 17th annual Rolling Thunder "Ride for Freedom," to pay homage to buddies who never made it home.

Osama at the Pearly Gates

Caudia at Freedom of Thought has posted an entertainig entry about Osama at the Pearly Gates.

More Progress In Iraq

William Safire writes that Iraqi leaders are begining to act leaders:

But the naysayers were astounded, along with the U.N.'s Lakhdar Brahimi and the White House's Robert Blackwill, when Iraqi leaders started acting last week like Iraqi leaders. No thanks, they said to the U.N.-U.S. notion of an interim government of toothless technocrats, and rejected Brahimi's choice for the top slot. Like real politicians, they cut a few deals and chose one of their own — a secular Shiite, not an Islamist or a Sunni or a Kurd — to be prime minister.

Iyad Alawi is the Acceptable Arab. At the Ambrosetti conference in Italy last year, he and Adnan Pachachi — a Sunni in his 80's close to the Saudi royals — were the only Iraqis present. They spent most of their time in close consultation with Amr Moussa, head of the Arab League. Pachachi, whose exile ended with our overthrow of Saddam, was overtly ungrateful to the Americans.

Alawi, however, was noncommittal, so I plonked myself next to him at lunch and asked who was going to run Iraq after the U.S. left. He said only "I have a real political organization in Iraq." Mebbeso; at any rate, this tough-minded escapee from Saddam's assassins knows how to dicker with disparate colleagues and knew precisely when to make his move.

Present and former C.I.A. types, fresh from exacting their vengeance on their hated critic, Ahmad Chalabi, are telling media outlets that Alawi has always been their asset. This boasting by our leakiest intelligence agents is harmful to the presumptive prime minister because Alawi cannot let himself appear to be any outsider's puppet. But apparently some of our spooks feel that settling scores and falsely claiming credit takes precedence over U.S. and Iraqi interests.

Now the fast-fading three B's — Brahimi, Blackwill and Bremer — are joining with Alawi to put across Pachachi as figurehead president to appeal to the Arab League's Moussa. The Kurds, who have so far been outmaneuvered by Iraqi Arabs and, as usual, abandoned by our State department, prefer the younger Ghazi al-Yawar, sheik of the powerful Shamar Arab tribe and a businessman educated in the U.S.

The purpose of all this jockeying is to form an organization capable of holding an election in a country beset by Saddam loyalists and terrorists determined to block that election. This will take Iraqi politicians courageous enough to risk their lives, sensible enough to work closely with coalition generals to protect the voters from the killers, and persuasive enough to enlist many more Iraqis to join the fight for freedom.

Present Iraqi leaders like Alawi are clearly asserting themselves. We will not like all they insist upon. But they are lurching toward a democratic decision, and despite the hand-wringing of Gloomy Gus & Company, that's real progress.

This is indeed important "progress" on the road to a new Iraq.

Vicious Superbug

The New York Post reports:

The "superbug," as health officials refer to it, can cause anything from reddening of the skin, to abscesses, tissue loss, amputation or even death in severe cases, doctors said.

For decades confined to hospitals, where it preyed on patients and built up immunity to antibiotics, the bug -known officially as Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus or MRSA - has also grown in strength.

"Usually with infections you need a break in the skin to pass it," said Dr. Howard Grossman, who has a private practice in Chelsea.

"Not with this. It gets through unbroken skin with casual contact."

The city Department of Health first detected the infections outside hospitals early last year, according to health officials.

[. . .]

Dr. Brian Saltzman of Beth Israel, who has just completed a study of the spread of MRSA outside hospitals, said, "We are seeing very impressive, very large, very difficult-to-treat skin abscesses."

Now I even have to fear an itch.

Memorial Day

Today we contemplate the price of freedom and say thank you. Click here to watch a fitting tribute.

Libertarian Party Nominates Michael Badnarik

The Associated Press reports that Michael Badnarik was nominated as the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate:

Badnarik, 49, of Austin, defeated former Hollywood movie producer Aaron Russo on the convention's third ballot, after former radio host Gary Nolan, who was eliminated on the second ballot, endorsed Badnarik.

Badnarik is a computer programmer and teaches a course in constitutional law.

David Paul Kuhn, Chief Political Writer for CBSNews.com, got it wrong when he predicted the most likely candidates for the Libertarian Party's nomination were Russo or Nolan. The nomination of Badnarik makes it even less likely that there will be a third party threat for President Bush.

A Leader for Perilous Times

writing in the Los Angeles Times Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, explains why he will vote for President Bush:

Sept. 11 was a watershed, but it was new only in scope, not in kind. For three decades, Middle Eastern terrorists had assassinated our diplomats, brought down our airliners, blown up our servicemen in their bunks and berths. They even bombed the World Trade Center. Yet as long as they were killing us in small batches, we responded with passivity, fearing to stir up more trouble.

Even Reagan, tough as he was, decided to slink away when Hezbollah murdered 241 of our Marines in their barracks in Beirut.

On 9/11, however, the terrorists managed to kill us by thousands at a swoop, and what Bush understood was that our policy of passivity, like the West's efforts to appease Hitler in the 1930s, had only invited more audacious attacks. He saw that we had no choice but to go to war against the terrorists and their backers. If we did not destroy them, the terrorists would set their sanguinary sights higher until they succeeded in killing us by the tens or hundreds of thousands.

He saw too that this war would be, as President Kennedy described the Cold War, a "long, twilight struggle" waged on many fronts and by many means. This meant that we would fight and some of us would die on his watch, but that victory could not possibly be achieved within so short a time as to enable him to claim credit.

[. . .]

Are we safer now than we were before we began to fight back against the terrorists? Perhaps not, just as we were not safer when we began to resist Hitler, prompting him to declare war on us. Back then, we were not safer until we had won. And we will not be safe now until we have defeated the terrorists and their backers.

Would some other president have made the same brave choice as George Bush to shoulder this "long twilight struggle"? Not Bill Clinton, whose eye was always on the electoral calendar. Not the elder Bush, who didn't think much of "the vision thing." And surely not John Kerry, who tells us that he voted against the Iraq war of 1991 although he was really for it and voted for the Iraq war of 2003 although he was really against it. Kerry offers, in short, all the leadership of a whirling dervish. Truman? Reagan? Perhaps. But 9/11 came when George W. Bush was in office. He has risen to the challenge of a vicious enemy. I wish I could vote for him twice this time — to make up for having underestimated him so badly in 2000.

Read the whole thing. I have nothing to add

Two Iraqs

The Naples Daily reports that the mainstream media isn't providing us an accurate picture of Iraq.

Tom Foley spent seven months in Iraq. Foley was responsible for boosting growth of business and private-sector jobs and served as a deputy to Iraq Ambassador Paul Bremer. according to Foley:

There are two Iraqs — one is the one from the media, and the other is the one I saw; they are quite different.

[. . .]

He said Americans aren't getting the complete story about what's happening in Iraq.

Television media show a chaotic scene where nobody has a job, Americans are unwelcome and where few share the Bush administration's vision for Iraq, he said.

"I came to know the exact opposite," he said.

He said Iraqi citizens are grateful to the United States for liberating them and they share America's vision for their future.

"All Iraqis I met want to have stability, a representative government and share the same notions we have for them," he said.

He described progress that he said the media have neglected to report.

Unemployment dropped from 50 percent last summer to 20 percent in January, he said. Spending on consumer products, such as clothing and household goods, has boosted the country's gross domestic product 15 to 25 percent, he added.

It really rankles me that the mainstream media reports every "possible explosion," every soldier killed, etc., but the refuse to report on the good things that are being accomplished in Iraq and Afghanistan. The mainstream media has chosen sides in the war against terror and they are not on my side.