Category Archives: Just War

Bush Shoed In Baghdad

As CNN reports, Bush traveled to Iraq

To celebrate the conclusion of the security pact, called the Strategic Framework Agreement and the Status of Forces Agreement, the White House said.
The pact will replace a U.N. mandate for the U.S. presence in Iraq that expires at the end of this year. The agreement, reached after months of negotiations, sets June 30, 2009, as the deadline for U.S. combat troops to withdraw from all Iraqi cities and towns. The date for all U.S. troops to leave Iraq is December 31, 2011.

During a news conference, “an angry Iraqi man jumped up and threw shoes at Bush… President Bush … ducked … as Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki tries to protect him Sunday. …Throwing shoes at someone, or sitting so that the bottom of a shoe faces another person, is considered an insult among Muslims.”

If only Muslims confined themselves to shoe tossing. It’s far preferable to bomb throwing.

“The man was dragged out screaming after throwing the shoes.”

Of course, Iraqis, of whom millions have been displaced and tens of thousands killed due to Bush’s war, have every reason in the world to throw boots, baklava, or even bombs at Bush.

Bush responded fast and well: He joked about the incident and asserted that protest was the hallmark of a free society, blah, blah.

As I have observed before, “the Bush administration might just have taken the wind out of the war as an issue for Barack Obama. As it is, Obama had grown weaker on that front, his position increasingly converging with McCain’s. But if Bush finalizes the withdrawal, he will have taken the issue and the decision away from Obama. Strategically, it’s a smart move.”

As for the shoeing Iraqi, I’ve said it again and again: impeachment and war-crimes prosecutions is what this administration deserves for launching an unjust war, an obligation the opportunistic Democrats would never fulfill.

Updated: Who’s Stupid? Not Sarah

Conservatism, Elections 2008, Federalism, IMMIGRATION, Intelligence, Israel, John McCain, Just War, Media, Republicans, Sarah Palin, War

The following is an excerpt from my new WND column, “Who’s Stupid? Not Sarah.” It is the first in a series of three (unless the news cycle changes the plan):

“Governor Sarah Palin’s alleged lack of cerebral alacrity is probably less in doubt after the first Vice-Presidential Debate. Prior to that, a bipartisan consensus had been developing among the ideologically converging political class and their parrot pundits that she was indeed an idiot.

The biggest hitter was conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, who demanded that Governor Palin bow out of the race. “Only Palin can save McCain, the Party, and the country she loves. Do it for your country, please,” pleaded Parker histrionically.

How like a woman to implicate causes not in evidence for the country’s undoing.

Where was Sarah Palin when the Bush/Bernanke bulldozer was running up debts and deficits financed by promiscuous printing and borrowing? Whodunit? Who so debased the country’s coin? …

Sarah Palin … has an alibi. When these characters were gassing-up the economy with hot air, she was in Alaska getting her house in order. This does nothing to excuse Sarah’s subsequent sell-out, but it doesn’t put her at the original crime scene.

Elementary, my dear Ms. Parker: Palin quitting will not save your Party or the country.

…. At the very least, the developing consensus as to Palin’s aptitude, I venture, is premature. …”

Read the complete column, “Who’s Stupid? Not Sarah.”

Update: A reader sent this YouTube clip along with the comment, “Explain this about your precious Sara! [sic].”

He apparently had not understood my column, wherein I condemned Palin for turning her back on a laudable cause she and Tod once supported: peaceful secession, which is as American as apple pie. I’ll repeat what I wrote:

Palin slammed a cause she had, at one time, saluted: that of the Alaskan Independence Party. It advocates what was once a fundament of the American founding: peaceful secession. As leading economic historian Tom DiLorenzo has documented in rich detail, the Union was a voluntary one. If the states had believed it was a “one-way Venus flytrap,” they would never have ratified the Constitution.

“Sarah Palin: Palling Around With Secessionists” convinces me that by joining McCain, Palin has forfeited a previously held, laudable libertarian principle.

I urge the reader to read “Quebec May be the Guard of Our Ultimate Freedom” and “Raise a Toast to Western Separatism and Canada’s Good Health.” Since Sarah seemed to have once supported peaceful secession, I am all the more convinced that she was a patriot, and has sold her soul by adopting McMussolini’s creed.

Updated: Honest Abe’s Anguish

History, Iraq, Just War, Literature

“[W]hile small-time functionaries like Scott McClellan can be big enough to express remorse, self-reproach is rare in the leaders they serve. A breast-beating Bush: now that would provide a truly teachable moment.

Although never belabored, it is believed that Abraham Lincoln may have suffered misgivings for his role in ‘the butchering business’—J. R. Pole’s turn-of-phrase. Pole is Rhodes Professor Emeritus of American History and Institutions at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford.

Before Pole, a number of prominent historians had floated the idea that Lincoln might have wrestled with remorse for shedding the blood of brothers in great quantities. …”

Read more about the literary “clues to Lincoln’s possible contrition” in “Honest Abe’s Anguish,” my new WorldNetDaily.com column.

Update (June 22): TIME magazine reports that “Scott McClellan … said President Bush has lost the public’s trust by failing to open up about his Administration’s mistakes and backtracking on a promise be up front about the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.”

The man does have a knack for stating the obvious.

Or as I wrote in this column, McClellan has “hindsight rather than insight on his side; what he [is] imparting [is] neither new nor even newsworthy.”

But in America the simple are celebrated.

Updated: Quote Courtesy Of Clyde N. Wilson

Ilana Mercer, Israel, Just War, War

Professor Clyde Wilson has a post on Chronicles magazine titled “What Is History? Part 11.” Alongside other worthies, the professor excerpts a line I wrote in “Betraying Brave Boys”:

“… a brave nation fights only because it must; a cowardly nation fights because it can.”

My gratitude to Judge Robert E. Reavis for letting me know. Judge Reavis writes:

“Clyde Wilson over at Chronicles has put you in the company of some pretty stout minds and spunky personalities. Of course I think you deserve it but it is good to see others think so as well.”

I briefly interviewed Professor Wilson, a noted Southern scholar, for my review of the film “Cold Mountain,” entitled “Hollywood’s Hateful Hooey About The South.”

With respect to the quote, Israel lived by the tenet it expressed up until its Lebanon Wars; the last taking place in 2006. Following the principle of monkey-see-monkey-do, Israel took a page out of the annals of unjust American wars, and waged such a war against Lebanon.

Update (April 16): In response to our reader’s comment below: As I explained in “Israel Risks Sundering Moral High ground,” a just war is proportional. It means you don’t level an entire country and kill a thousand innocents, because of a localized attack, where 3-4 people were seized. Such an attack is more efficiently and more justly dealt with by “Precision Pac Men.”

Granted, the Israelis were not nearly as unjust as we were in attacking Iraq, but neither were they as righteous as they had been in all past wars for survival. But unlike Americans, the Israeli people responded magnificently in rejecting the onslaught in Lebanon. Their government will not be prosecuting an unjust war anytime soon. That’s more than we can say about ours.