And now Lebanon.  Iran is consolidating it's hold on the Middle-East.

Do we have the stones to confront this?  I doubt it.

HT:  Andy McCarthy at The Corner.

 
Meet John Smeaton:  One Kick and He Is the Hero of Glasgow:

Twas doon by the inch o' Abbots
Oor Johnny walked one day
When he saw a sicht that
troubled him
Far more than he could say...
Now that's no richt wur
Johnny cried
And sallied tae the fray
A left hook and a heid butt
Required tae save the day.
Now listen up Bin Laden
Yir sort's nae wanted here
For imported English radicals
Us Scoatsman huv nae fear

Orson Scott Card -- Learning From History:

"Only fools believe that an enemy cannot do what he threatens to do.

The Brits really believed that because they had a long reputation for ruling the ocean, Germany could not really challenge them. They ignored all the intelligence reports about Germany's effort to rebuild its army and, particularly, its air force.

They seemed to believe that just by being Britain, they could stop Germany whenever they wanted to.

Similarly, Americans seem to think that no matter what weapons Iran develops, when it becomes necessary we can stop them.

Well, maybe. But right now we could stop Iran without any threat of their detonating nuclear weapons anywhere. In a year or two or five (estimates vary, but the inevitability is not denied anywhere), we will have to stop Iran while facing the threat of the use of nuclear weapons against our armies.

If we invade a nuclear Iran, they will simply detonate nuclear weapons over their own soil to destroy our armies. And there is no technology currently foreseen that could stop them. "

UPDATE:  I have it on good authority that this column has been forwarded up the chain and is now laying on President Bush's desk.

 
Since America will doubtless be the target of a new round of terrorist attacks soon, I thought that we might review some of what has gone before. 

Dr. Laurie Mylroie predicts the attacks of 9-11... in 1996:

THE WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMB:  Who is Ramzi Yousef? And Why It Matters

A bunch of pretty smart guys think that there is no way an ammonium nitrate based bomb brought down the Murrah building:

The Mannlicher-Carrano Bomb.

The tireless, but embittered I think, Jayna Davis makes her case here.  

And, a couple of really smart guys revisit the anthrax attacks on the USA here.


 

 
An oldie but a goodie by Michael Crichton:

"I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.

We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears. "

Read the whole thing.

 
What experience and history teach is this--that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
-G.W.F. Hegel

Nathan Thrall at the Middle East Review of International affairs -- HOW THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION TAUGHT IRAN THE WRONG LESSONS.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

HT: Michael Ledeen 

 
At the Wall Street Journal Dorothy Rabinowitz takes on the Fitzgerald prosecution of "Scooter" Libby --  A Tale of Two Prosecutors.

Tom Maguire (and others) comment.

 

President Bush:

With regard to the Immigration Bill which was withdrawn from consideration by the US Senate last week:

It is my understanding that you intend to try to revive the bill and get it passed so that you can sign it into law. If you succeed in this undertaking you will go down in history not as the president who lead us into Iraq, but as the as the president who sold out American civilization in favor of Latin American civilization. See Samuel Huntington on the subject.

The broad spectrum of Americans are opposed to this bill. That should be apparent to you. If it is not, if you think that your inside-the-beltway high-and-mighty perspective is superior to the common sense of the American citizen, then perhaps you should be impeached. And a raft of Senators with you.

I say this as a man who has been, up until now, a staunch Republican. I have backed you to the hilt regarding the Iraq war and the wider war on Islamofacism. These are the defining issues of our time. I did this in spite of my dissatisfaction with your spending policies, and support for No Child Left Behind and McCain-Feingold. But stopping the Islamist horde only to allow our country to be overrun by a horde of culturally hostile low skilled Latin Americans will end our civilization just as surely. Rome fell in just such a way.

So I demand that you cease your support for “a comprehensive solution to the immigration problem” and instead focus on what should have been done early in the previous six years of your presidency; secure the southern border. In other words: BUILD THE DAMN FENCE. We can discuss everything else regarding the illegal aliens after that is accomplished. To do anything else is malfeasance of the worst order. Your first duty to the American People is the security of this country.

If, however, you succeed in your efforts to enact this bill, I will leave the Republican Party. I can assure you that many other like minded people will as well. We will have to back and start all over again and begin a new Conservative movement that does not involve the Republican Party. The problem is that by the time we are able to pull that together, there will no longer be an America to govern. The real estate will be here, but the American Culture will be on the ash-heap of history, like other great civilizations that have gone before.

I keep forgetting to check in with Yossef Bodansky at the International Stategic Studies Association. His input sure seems to be missing from the public discourse. Be sure to read the "Special Reports" in the upper right hand corner of the home page.

In July of 2006 they issued a special report on Iran -- Iran Believes it is Ready for Nuclear War:

"July 19, 2006, it had become clear that all the pieces were now in position for the Iranian clerical Administration under “Supreme Leader” “Ayatollah” Ali Hoseini-Khamene‘i and Pres. Mahmud Ahmadi-Nejad to escalate their conflict with Israel and the West in the manner which best suited their purposes. Pres. Ahmadi-Nejad said as much on July 18, 2006, promising a “rejoicing” for Muslims in the Middle East “soon”, and noting at an address in Mashhad that the “volcano of rage” at the “arrogant powers” was “on the verge of eruption”.

Pres. Ahmadi-Nejad made other references to the possible imminent destruction of Israel. And he did so with the knowledge that Iran was ready to escalate the conflict up to, and including, direct strategic-level military confrontation with Israel and the US. Iranian negotiators, particularly on matters related to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections of the Iranian nuclear weapons programs, had stalled successfully for some time.

It was clear, by July 19, 2006, that this stalling was no longer necessary. Alaeddin Borujerdi, the Iranian Majlis member who heads the national security and foreign policy commission, said that the Majlis itself could push through legislation suspending Iranian membership in the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) if the Security Council pressured Iran further on the nuclear issue. The week before, the UK, the People’s Republic of China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States decided to send Iran’s case back to the Security Council after Tehran failed to respond to demands that it cease uranium enrichment.

Iran, which is close to a domestic capacity to produce nuclear weapons, already has an arsenal of externally-acquired nuclear weapons, and its ready for conflict at a nuclear level."

Leor Halevi in the IHT -- The torture of the grave Islam and the afterlife:

Everyone knows, of course, that after death martyrs go straight to the Garden of Eden, where they recline on couches, savor meats and fruits and enjoy the company of dark-eyed houris while listening to the sound of flowing rivers.

But what happens to the vast majority of Muslims, those who do not die as martyrs?

Be sure to read the whole thing.

 
Claudia Rosett at the Weekly Standard -- Crying Wolfowitz:

Operating with even less transparency than the opaque U.N. Secretariat, and now channeling more than $5 billion per year worldwide in the name of development (at least $245 million of that contributed by U.S. taxpayers), the UNDP has made a practice of bunking with dictators from Algeria to Zimbabwe. It has done this while maintaining internal oversight controls lax enough to embarrass Enron in some cases. This January, in the Cash-for-Kim scandal, the UNDP got caught playing sugar daddy to North Korea's nuclear extortionist regime of Kim Jong Il. It further emerged that while forking over hard currency to Kim, UNDP officials in Pyongyang had been storing counterfeit U.S. banknotes in their own office safe.

What has not been disclosed until now is that the UNDP in Pyongyang was also busy shepherding and bankrolling "study tours" of the U.K. and Europe for North Korean arms experts, stocking Kim Jong Il's research libraries with specialized publications on global security matters, and dispensing funds on behalf of other U.N. agencies for such ventures as sending North Korean officials to a three-week conference on "statistics" in Iran. This went on even after North Korea's U.N.-denounced missile and nuclear bomb tests last year.

And though the U.N. has treated Cash for Kim as an anomaly (recently suspending UNDP operations in Pyongyang, but nowhere else), the program's odd activities hardly begin and end with North Korea. The UNDP is also supporting such endeavors as an upgrade for the state-owned national airline of Syria, a mullah-approved official youth group in Iran, and a network of women's groups in Burma that were recently accused of shaking down impoverished villagers for forced membership fees. In Zimbabwe, the UNDP is embroiled in unproven allegations that its vehicles have been used for smuggling from a diamond mining venture it has been supporting--which raises the question of why the UNDP is involved in diamond mining at all.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

 
Over at LGF -- John Bolton lets some fop from the BBC have it with both barrels. 

 
Speaking of those that are less than Human, and for that matter not even animal, let me re-post this from my old blog.
 

 
In Austria chimpanzees are human.

And in America humans are animals.

Or,  humans are nothing at all.

HT -- The Jawa Report and Michelle Malkin.

 
Over at No Pasaran -- KGB defector explains Marxist techniques on Demoralizing and Brainwashing the West