Melanie Morgan has a new Hot Talk column out at World Net Daily that’s a must-read.

An excerpt:

The men and women of the United States Armed Forces have made tremendous progress in Iraq, but Tucker Carlson and his ilk are largely ignorant of this or ignore such progress because it doesn’t fit with their own agenda.

The foreign terrorist threat posed by al-Qaida sympathizers who poured into Iraq from Iran and Syria has largely been defeated. You hear almost nothing from the news media about the fact that al-Qaida in Iraq has been effectively destroyed by our military. The violence today is largely sectarian violence between competing religious and ethnic groups. The greatest need in Iraq today is to ensure that a sense of stability and security can allow this newly freed nation to chart a course for a peaceful future, free of sectarian violence.

Carlson sat silent and stunned, along with anti-war Democrat strategist Rich Masters, when I pointed out that the number of fatalities in Iraq had been dropping over the past several months. You see, both Carlson and Masters are creatures of that political-media world where truth is concocted out of do-gooder liberal ideology and facts are ignored.

So far this month, there have been fewer U.S. troops killed in Iraq than died in the month of July. July’s fatality figures were lower than those of June. June’s were lower than May’s. And May’s fatalities were lower than April’s. The news is that we are WINNING!

Does this information surprise you?

It should, because the mainstream media has done everything it can to paint Operation Iraqi Freedom as a failure. The progress that is made in rebuilding Iraq on a daily basis is seldom reported.

The humanitarian efforts of U.S. troops are almost entirely ignored. Liberal journalists scoff at the daily reports by U.S. Central Command outlining our military’s success in apprehending or killing terrorists and death squad leaders. These left-wing reporters seem hell-bent to rally the American public to oppose the mission in Iraq.

Read the entire column here.

H/T Joe Wierzbicki

This is proof enough that even a judge can be a fucking moron.

Hurricane Harry at H H Blowhard has a great post on how to negotiate with terrorists, LOL, that you’ve just got to check out, it’s pretty funny but at the same time couldn’t be any truer.

It is purely amazing that western leaders still haven’t figured out what happens when they extend Arab Muslims any kind of trust, as in the trust that they will honor peace agreements.

While it’s true that Israel left a lot of room for improvement in strategizing their ground war in Lebanon — not the fault of the IDF, but the fault of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his jolly retinue for taking it upon themselves to manage the war rather than let his generals do what they’re paid to do — the result has been a sort of aimless deployment of reservist troops who don’t have a clue as to what, exactly, their objectives are — President Bush lived up to the liberals’ claim that he is “dumb”, in this case, by reversing his earlier policy and endorsing a cease-fire. As a two-time Bush voter, I am, at the very least, profoundly disappointed.

I mean, what does it take for the most powerful politician in the world to finally “get it?” A man who’s been spearheading a global war against Islamic terrorists for nearly five (count ‘em 5) years, who has had all that time to learn, from vast experience, the charactar of the enemy. This has to be one of the biggest screw-ups of our President’s career, one that will ultimately result in putting our troops in Iraq and elsewhere in greater danger than they need be, to say nothing of what Israel will now have to deal with.

And Olmert shares the blame, for signing off on the cease-fire.

Naturally, the Lebanese government and Hezbollah also signed off on it — why not?

Just as the Arab Muslim world viewed Israel’s previous withdrawal from Lebanon as a victory for Hezbollah — giving the terrorist organization the dubious reputation as the only Arab entity ever to beat Israel in war, they will do so once again. U.N. resolution 1701 is not law, Olmert could have told Bush, Kofi and the capitulative socialist powers of Europe to go piss up a rope, instead he agreed to a plan that not only may never see the return of two abducted Israeli soldiers, assuming they’re really even alive at this point, but one that places the responsibility, for the moment, of disarming Hezbollah in the hands of their comrades in the Lebanese Army. It also leaves, for the time being, the same impotent U.N. presence in southern Lebanon — you know, the one that has thus far been more a help than a hindrance to the terrorist organization — that’s been there since the last U.N. resolution regarding the Israeli-Lebanese border area. This means that in short order, Hezbollah can be back to the business of firing rockets into Israel and launching the occasional cross-border raid.

In the convoluted, primitive Muslim mind, this will be a major victory for Hezbollah and, as we’ve seen in the aftermath of past perceived terrorist victories, this perceived victory will inspire Hezbollah and all other Islamic terrorist groups to increase their attacks, not only against Israel, now that they will have perceived weakness there, but also against U.S. forces in Iraq, as President Bush’s support for the cease-fire plan will send the Islamofascist terrorists and backers of terrorism in Iran, and indeed throughout the Arab world, the message that our resolve has been weakened by world opinion.

Caroline Glick has an on-point analysis up at GAMLA’s website.

There is a good reason that Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah has accepted UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which sets the terms for a cease-fire between his jihad army and the State of Israel.

The resolution represents a near-total victory for Hizbullah and its state sponsors Iran and Syria, and an unprecedented defeat for Israel and its ally the United States. This fact is evident both in the text of the resolution and in the very fact that the US decided to sponsor a cease-fire resolution before Israel had dismantled or seriously degraded Hizbullah’s military capabilities.

While the resolution was not passed under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter and so does not have the authority of law, in practice it makes it all but impossible for Israel to defend itself against Hizbullah aggression without being exposed to international condemnation on an unprecedented scale.

This is the case first of all because the resolution places responsibility for determining compliance in the hands of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Annan has distinguished himself as a man capable only of condemning Israel for its acts of self-defense while ignoring the fact that in attacking Israel, its enemies are guilty of war crimes. By empowering Annan to evaluate compliance, the resolution all but ensures that Hizbullah will not be forced to disarm and that Israel will be forced to give up the right to defend itself.

The resolution makes absolutely no mention of either Syria or Iran, without whose support Hizbullah could neither exist nor wage an illegal war against Israel. In so ignoring Hizbullah’s sponsors, it ignores the regional aspect of the current war and sends the message to these two states that they may continue to equip terrorist armies in Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority and Iraq with the latest weaponry without paying a price for their aggression.

The resolution presents Hizbullah with a clear diplomatic victory by placing their erroneous claim of Lebanese sovereignty over the Shaba Farms, or Mount Dov - a vast area on the Golan Heights that separates the Syrian Golan from the Upper Galilee and is disputed between Israel and Syria - on the negotiating table. In doing so, the resolution rewards Hizbullah’s aggression by giving international legitimacy to its demand for territorial aggrandizement via acts of aggression, in contravention of the laws of nations.

Truncating {that’s the “sophisticated” version of snip}

Aside from the resolution’s egregious language, the very fact that the US has sponsored a resolution that leaves Hizbullah intact as a fighting force constitutes a devastating blow to the national security of both Israel and the US, for the following reasons:

It grants the Lebanese government and military unwarranted legitimacy. The resolution treats the Lebanese government and military as credible bodies. However, the Lebanese government is currently under the de facto control of Hizbullah and Syria.
Moreover, the Lebanese army is paying pensions to the families of Hizbullah fighters killed in battle, and its forces have actively assisted Hizbullah in attacking Israel and Israeli military targets.

Indeed, the seven-point declaration issued by the Lebanese government, which the UN resolution applauds, was dictated by Hizbullah, as admitted by Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora and Nasrallah last week.

It incites Shi’ite violence in Iraq. From a US perspective, the resolution drastically increases the threat of a radical Shi’ite revolt in Iraq. Hizbullah is intimately tied to Iraqi Shi’ite terrorist Muqtada al-Sadr. In April 2003, Hizbullah opened offices in southern Iraq and was instrumental in training the Mahdi Army, which Sadr leads. During a demonstration in Baghdad last week, Sadr’s followers demanded that he consider them an extension of Hizbullah, and expressed a genuine desire to participate in Hizbullah’s war against the US and Israel.

It should be assumed that Hizbullah’s presumptive victory in its war against Israel will act as a catalyst for violence by Sadr and his followers against the Iraqi government and coalition forces in the weeks to come. Indeed, the Hizbullah victory will severely weaken moderate Shi’ites in the Maliki government and among the followers of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

It empowers Iran. Iran emerges as the main victor in the current war. Not only was it not condemned for its sponsorship of Hizbullah, it is being rewarded for that sponsorship because it is clear to all parties that Iran was the engine behind this war, and that its side has won.

The entire article can be read here.

You mean, it was those surveillance policies the left snarls about that saved the lives of thousands of airline passengers?

Let’s emphasize that again: The plot was foiled because a large number of people were under surveillance concerning their spending, travel and communications. Which leads us to wonder if Scotland Yard would have succeeded if the ACLU or the New York Times had first learned the details of such surveillance programs.

All I can add to that is “Amen!”

It certainly must rankle the leftists over at the NYT that they didn’t have the scoop in time to sabotage that one!

Former Undersecretary of Defense(Bush 1 Administration) and author Jed Babbin has some spot-on reasons why it would be irresponsible in an extreme for the “global community” to interfere with Israel’s prosecution of their war with Hamas and Hezbollah, and by extension Syria and Iran.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and British Prime Minister Tony Blair want to send an international force to separate Israel from Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon. Mr. Blair said a U.N. force should be sent to “stop the bombardment coming over into Israel and therefore [give] Israel a reason to stop its attacks on Hezbollah.” Mr. Annan said such a force could “pursue the idea of stabilization.” But their idea assumes, first, that a cease-fire would protect those worthy of protection and, second, that restoring the region’s antebellum “stability” would promote long-term peace. Both assumptions are utterly false.

Hezbollah is not some small, ragged band scattered around Lebanon. It is a huge terrorist structure, built over decades, that includes thousands of men, weapons, positions, offices and everything that enables it to control southern Lebanon. Israel is now destroying that infrastructure. A cease-fire would benefit Hezbollah and threaten Israel. It would protect both Hezbollah and the nations that support it–Syria and Iran–as well as the Lebanese who have accepted the terrorist organization as a legitimate part of their government. A cease-fire would allow Hezbollah to rebuild its power base and enable it to resume its attacks whenever Damascus and Tehran desired. For Israel, a U.N. force would create no security whatever against future attacks.

It has become rather tiresome, over the years, watching the same stupid jackass politicians, including a President I happen to like, continuously pressuring Israel into cutting off defensive actions before they’ve been completed and forcing them to go through a whole lot of diplomatic posturing in order to engender “peace” in the Mideast. I say these politicians are jackasses in this regard because they are too liberal-like when it comes to negotiating with Arabs — Hamas, Hezbollah and all the rest of Islam’s terrorist organizations break every agreement, no matter what, and these stupid, moronic, imbecillic politician dumb-asses go right back the next time and do it again. Even during “peace” negotiations, Arab bombs go off on Israeli streets, in stores and restaurants and on buses.

And every time, their only accomplishment is to get the Arabs a break so they can regroup and be fresh for their next treaty violation. I’m sorry, but these western politicians are effin’ boneheads — the only way Israel will ever have any peace is if they are allowed to destroy all the terrorist infrastructure over there, root and branch, and waste every last one of the terrorists’ leaders and supporters.

Sometimes the only way to achieve peace is through winning a war, and this is something the rest of the world has been keeping Israel from doing for a long time. These “peace” processes that all these Presidents of ours like to give themselves cudos for only serve to escalate terrorism and get more Israelis murdered.

I’m sorry, but when I hear Blair and some others want to pull the same crap yet again, it makes my blood boil. At least George W. Bush seems to have realized that his entire “Roadmap” enterprise was a complete waste of his time, to say nothing of a waste of the lives of innocent people killed by terrorists his “Roadmap” got released from Israeli prisons, and has given his blessing to Israel to do what they need to do, and that at least partly redeems him from some of the less delicate references in my above rant.

Anyway, read the rest of the OpEd here.

Finished? Good, because I’m not done yet.

Now let’s talk about the damage Israel’s liberals and the general complacency of their government have done.

Daniel Pipes is right on top of it.

For 45 years, 1948-93, Israel’s strategic vision, tactical brilliance, technological innovation, and logistical cleverness won it a deterrence capability. A deep understanding of the country’s predicament, complemented by money, will power, and dedication, enabled the Israeli state systematically to burnish its reputation for toughness.

The leadership focused on the enemy’s mind and mood, adopting policies designed to degrade his morale, with the goal of inducing a sense of defeat, a realization that the Jewish state is permanent and cannot be undone. As a result, whoever attacked the Israel state paid for that mistake with captured terrorists, dead soldiers, stalled economies, and toppled regimes.

By 1993, this record of success imbued Israelis with a sense of overconfidence. They concluded they had won, ignoring the inconvenient fact that Palestinians and other enemies had not yet given up their goal of eliminating Israel. Two emotions long held in check, fatigue and hubris, came flooding out. Deciding that (1) they had enough of war and (2) they could end the war on their own terms, Israelis experimented with such exotica as “the peace process” and “disengagement.” They permitted their enemies to create a quasi-governmental structure (the “Palestinian Authority”) and to amass hoards of armaments (Hizbullah’s nearly 12,000 Katyushas in southern Lebanon). They shamelessly traded captured terrorists for hostages.

And they gave the Palestinians — Hamas, a terrorist organization whose goal is the destruction of Israel — territory annexed in 1967 specifically for the purpose of having a security buffer zone in case of another invasion attempt by Syria. In the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the IDF had to fight tooth and nail to kick the invading Syrians off the Golan escarpment. So now an enemy sponsored by Syria occupies the security buffer zone with Israel’s blessing. Was that a brilliant move, or what?

Somewhere I was reading recently — I can’t recall exactly where, someone compared the “useful idiots” {western liberals, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s term}, of the USSR years who believed all the B.S. of Marxist propaganda spewed by communists and responded by joining the Communist Party, etc, and today’s “useful idiots”, who are this time swallowing all the “Religion Of Peace” folderol and to compound their gullibility, are so ignorant of Israel’s history and current affairs that they believe all the “occupation” and “apartheid” rhetoric generated by Islamofascist propagandists.

Now, I can see where that might be the case with western liberals, who get all their “news” from leftist bastions of bullshit like the New York Times and who know absolutely nothing about people and human nature, but from Israelis who have lived with terrorism and broken peace agreements by Arabs for so many decades, you’d expect a little more intelligence, or at least the wisdom born of long experience.

UPDATE

My blogger friend Always On Watch has indicated that the Saudis and fellow travellers have done a John Kerry and flip-flopped on us, going from condemnation of the “irresponsibility” on Hezbollah’s part that brought the wrath of Israel down on Lebanon to the standard form, general purpose condemnation and blame laid on Israel.

It is here.

These folks, and I’m speaking of Arab Muslim leaders, are about as mature as kindergartners.

A few days ago, I posted on the impotency of those diplomatically responsible for addressing the threat, very possibly in its Eleventh Hour status, of Iran’s producing nuclear weapons and using them forthwith.

Well, columnist Jeff Jacoby is apparently thinking along the same lines as I am,

”It is not on the table. It is not on the agenda. I happen to think it is inconceivable.”

That was British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in September, telling the BBC what he thinks about the use of military force to prevent Iran’s homicidal theocrats from acquiring nuclear weapons. Last week Straw went further, declaring that even economic sanctions would be an overreaction. ”I don’t think we should rush our fences here,” he told a conference in London. Much better to turn the whole thing over to the UN Security Council, so long as any action it might take ”is followed without sanction.” What he recommends, in other words, is a Security Council resolution with no teeth. That’ll fix the mullahs’ wagon.

To be sure, not every British politician has been so weak-kneed. Tory MP Michael Ancram has called for Iran to be — brace yourself — expelled from the World Cup tournament in June. Barring the planet’s foremost sponsor of terrorism from soccer matches — now there’s Churchillian grit. Ancram says it will send ”a very, very clear signal to Iran that the international community will not accept what they are doing.” Sure it will. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s rabid president, must break into a sweat thinking about it.

Not to be outdone by Great Britain in the going-wobbly department, Germany’s foreign minister assured a television audience Sunday that Berlin ”will refrain from anything that brings us a step closer” to military action against Iran. Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned against ”a militarization of thinking” on how to keep one of the world’s worst regimes from acquiring the bomb. ”Rather, we should see that we use and exhaust to the best of our powers the diplomatic solutions that remain available.”

In short, we’re placing the prevention of a profoundly premature Armageddon in the hands of a bunch of people who would rather not offend the protagonists than take any assertive steps to prevent what we are dependent upon them to prevent.

Fortunately, not everyone is off in Cloud Cuckoo Land when it comes to dealing with Tehran. The acting prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, put his government’s position bluntly: ”Under no circumstances, and at no point,” he said on Jan. 17, ”can Israel allow anyone with these kinds of malicious designs against us [to] have control of weapons of destruction that can threaten our existence.” As the Jewish state has good reason to know, dictators who publicly vow to commit mass murder generally mean what they say — and are generally not deterred by threats of ”diplomatic solutions.”

What comes next is anybody’s guess, but my own would be that, absenting a preemptive move by the Israelis, the U.S.A. will deal conclusively with the problem.

Jeff Jacoby’s column pretty well spells out the situation, and can be read in its entirety here.

In a column today in Jewish World Review, Paul Greenberg gets down!

Dana Priest of The Washington Post sounds shocked — shocked! — to discover that George W. Bush ordered a complete remobilization and reinvigoration of the CIA immediately after September 11th:

“The effort President Bush authorized shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to fight al-Qaida has grown into the largest CIA covert-action program since the height of the Cold War, expanding in size and ambition despite a growing outcry at home and abroad over clandestine tactics . . . .”

This is news? Isn’t this just what W. told the country he would do in the aftermath of September 11th?

Read the entire column here!

Nathan Tabor, in Human Events Online, goes streamlined and point blank with If Spying Works, Let’s Do It.

As I wrote in a previous post, I don’t believe there should be a set-in-stone policy regarding treatment of all prisoners we take in Iraq and elsewhere in the course of the War on Terror.

To be a little more specific, there are two general factions we are fighting in Iraq, the Sunnis who are themselves Iraqis and are, therefore, attempting to regain their former status in their own country, and the so-called “foreign fighters,” al-Qaeda members and others whose presence in Iraq is strictly to disrupt the democratization of a country that is not even theirs.

Arguably, then, while the latter group can only be called terrorists, the former might rightly be called insurrectionists. Both groups are the enemies of the overwhelming majority of Iraqis who want their new democracy to flourish, therefore members of both groups must be captured or killed until their respective forces have been broken.

While we may consider rules of conduct for blanket humane treatment to the insurgents we capture, this should not apply to terrorists nor to anyone else who has been involved in the murder of innocent civilians or the beheadings of abductees — al-Qaeda members are mass murderers who deserve no consideration as human beings. Some speak of a moral high ground, that’s all well and good, but when applying such concepts to fighting terrorists, we are doing so at our own peril and that of our troops and of civilians. I don’t believe that a terrorist’s rights, comforts or life should even be a consideration if the life of a single U.S. or Iraqi soldier or citizen might instead be saved.

In today’s Washington Times:

President Bush yesterday abandoned his opposition to expanding a ban on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of terror suspects, but only after winning legal protections for CIA interrogators.
The agreement was a victory for Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, who for months has pushed for an expansion of the ban in spite of strong opposition from the White House, including threats of a veto.
“It’s a done deal,” Mr. McCain said after meeting with the president at the White House. He said the legislation would protect “all people, no matter how evil or bad they are.”

Well, Senator McCain, that last part definitely disqualified you from my list of possible candidates to vote for in the next Presidential election.

Conservatives were not impressed.
Legal scholar Mark Levin of the Landmark Legal Foundation called the McCain proposal “the al Qaeda Bill of Rights.” He predicted it would subject U.S. soldiers to civilian courts.
Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh said the proposal would harm Mr. McCain’s expected run for the White House in 2008, but he acknowledged the Arizona Republican was relentless in pressuring the Bush administration.
“He wasn’t going to back down,” Mr. Limbaugh told his audience. “He’s attached this to the defense appropriations bill, and the president, really, I think was up against a wall because money for the military runs out at the end of the year.”

Read the rest here.