Echoes in Eternity

My wife and I watched a fantastic movie this past weekend called "Taking Chance." The film, originally made for HBO but also released on DVD, depicts the true story of the escort home of the body of PFC Chance Phelps, a Marine killed in Iraq in 2004. It is very moving to see the care and respect and honor attended to the corpse throughout the trip home, both by his escort, LtCol Mike Strobl (played by Kevin Bacon), and by random airport baggage handlers and flight attendants along the way. Part of the greatness of this film is that it truly wants to honor the military dead rather than make a political or ideological point. Not once do we hear a politics-laden statement, nor does the movie indicate any position on the Iraq war. Instead, the focus, as it should be, is entirely on Phelps, his escort, and the thankfulness of a nation. Check it out!

I'm sure the mainstream media is doing all it can to avoid mentioning this story.

The leader of the nation's largest veterans organization says he is "deeply disappointed and concerned" after a meeting with President Obama today to discuss a proposal to force private insurance companies to pay for the treatment of military veterans who have suffered service-connected disabilities and injuries. The Obama administration recently revealed a plan to require private insurance carriers to reimburse the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in such cases.
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The Commander, clearly angered as he emerged from the session said, "This reimbursement plan would be inconsistent with the mandate ' to care for him who shall have borne the battle' given that the United States government sent members of the armed forces into harm's way, and not private insurance companies. I say again that The American Legion does not and will not support any plan that seeks to bill a veteran for treatment of a service connected disability at the very agency that was created to treat the unique need of America's veterans!"

Even I, who saw the evil coming this way long before Obama won in November, am amazed and shocked at how inept, incompetent, and even heartless Obama has been in his first two months. I guess I shouldn't be, since ultimately the worldview makes the man, and Obama's worldview has laid many in their graves. But still...

It's time to mark the end of the Iraq War. This Saturday, people across this nation and Iraq will celebrate VI Day. The Iraqi cabinet signed a security pact on Sunday approving the full withdrawal of American troops by the end of 2011. The streets of Baghdad are safer than those in Detroit, Chicago, or even Gary, Indiana. The terrorists are vanquished.

"During his trip as part of the CODEL to Afghanistan and Iraq, Senator Obama visited the combat support hospital in the Green Zone in Baghdad and had a number of other visits with the troops," Obama strategist Robert Gibbs said in a statement. "For the second part of his trip, the senator wanted to visit the men and women at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center to express his gratitude for their service and sacrifice. The senator decided out of respect for these servicemen and women that it would be inappropriate to make a stop to visit troops at a U.S. military facility as part of a trip funded by the campaign."
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One military official who was working on the Obama visit said because political candidates are prohibited from using military installations as campaign backdrops, Obama's representatives were told, "he could only bring two or three of his Senate staff member, no campaign officials or workers." In addition,
"Obama could not bring any media. Only military photographers would be permitted to record Obama's visit."

The official said "We didn't know why" the request to visit the wounded troops was withdrawn. "He (Obama) was more than welcome. We were all ready for him."

So he spurned the troops because he couldn't advertise himself. What a great president he'll make.

Remember when the mainstream media used to talk about Iraq? It seems like it has been months since they began every nightly news hour with a story about how we were losing the war or slaughtering innocents or breaking the Geneva Convention by tickling terrorists. Which makes one wonder, what has changed? Is the media just bored with the subject? That can't be, since now would be the time to really blitz the public with the failures in Iraq, since the media's candidate, Obama, needs all the help he can get. Nope, the real reason? The war is as good as over, with Al Qaeda having been crushed beyond any chance of recovery. Tony Blankley talks about it and the need for a debate on Iraq before November in his column today.

It has been fashionable -- indeed, de rigueur in political and media circles -- to view contemptuously President Bush's assertion that we are fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we wouldn't have to fight them here. Even conservative commentators have tended to tiptoe around the proposition. We are all far too sophisticated to believe such simplicities. Nor will any self-respecting public chatterer even raise the little matter of America not being hit by terrorism on our soil for the almost seven years since Sept. 11.

And yet the undeniable facts certainly would justify a debate -- if not yet a consensus of agreement -- on President Bush's assertions. Regarding killing Islamist terrorists in Iraq rather than New York City, consider the numbers: According to USA Today in September 2007, more than 19,000 insurgents had been killed by coalition forces since 2003. The number obviously has gone up in the nine months since then (these were midsurge numbers), but I don't have reliable updated numbers.

Of course, most of those 19,000 killed insurgents were not foreign terrorists, but local Iraqis moved to action by our occupation. However, according to studies by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and by the Defense Intelligence Agency, foreign-born jihadists in Iraq are believed to number between 4 and10 percent of the total insurgent strength. So it is reasonable to assume that we have killed -- as of nine months ago -- between 800 and 1,900 non-Iraqi terrorists who otherwise would have been plying their trade elsewhere. It only took a couple of dozen to commit the atrocities of Sept. 11.

Moreover, we know specifically that Al-Qaida in Iraq has been decimated recently. According to the British newspaper The Times in February: "Al-Qaeda in Iraq faces an 'extraordinary crisis'. ... The terrorist group's security structure suffered 'total collapse'."

And last month, Strategy Page reported: "Al Qaeda web sites are making a lot of noise about 'why we (al-Qaida) lost in Iraq'. Western intelligence agencies are fascinated by the statistics being posted in several Arab language sites. Not the kind of stuff you read about in the Western media. According to al Qaeda, their collapse in Iraq was steep and catastrophic. ... If you can read Arabic, you can easily find these pro-terrorism sites, and see for yourself how al Qaeda is trying to explain its own destruction (in Iraq) to its remaining supporters."

Now, it is doubtlessly true that our invasion of Iraq (and Afghanistan) helped al-Qaida's recruitment. I have been told that by U.S. government experts I trust. But that is an old fact. What Osama bin Laden famously said about recruitment is also true: People follow the strong horse. And the new fact is that as we are winning in Iraq, as we are killing al-Qaida fighters and other Islamist terrorists there by the truckload (along with other insurgent opponents of the Iraqi government we support with our blood and wealth), we are proving to be the strong horse after all and can expect to see a reduced attraction for young men to join the Islamist terrorist ranks.

Fighting and winning always impress. Even merely fighting and persisting impress. Shortly after the fall of Soviet Communism, I had dinner with a then-recently former senior Red army general. He told me that the Soviets were astounded and impressed by the fact that we were prepared to fight and lose 50,000 men in Vietnam, when the Soviets never thought we even had a strategic interest there. They thus calculated that they'd better be careful with the United States. What might we do, they thought, if our interests really were threatened?

The full effects of the vigorous martial response of President Bush to the attacks of Sept. 11 will not be known for decades. But if history is any indicator, military courage, persistence and a capacity to kill the enemy in large numbers usually work to the benefit of such nations.

On Sept. 10, 2001, many Islamists thought America and the West were decadent, cowardly and ripe for the pickings. (Hitler thought the same thing about us.) On the basis of President Bush's political courage -- and supremely on the physical courage, moral strength and heartbreaking sacrifice of all our fighting uniformed men and women (and un-uniformed intelligence operatives) -- America's willingness and capacity to fight to protect ourselves cannot be doubted around the world. This may prove to be the most important global political fact of the first decade of the 21st century -- with implications even beyond our struggle with radical Islam.

It is time to reconsider whether President Bush or Barack Obama was right on whether to fight. Obama has had a good political run on the early and inconclusive evidence. As victory starts to emerge in Iraq, more persuasive data begin to fall on President Bush's side of the argument. This is a debate worth having before November.

Yesterday, Mark Steyn addressed George Bush's statement at Israel's 60th anniversary that decried the push for appeasement.

President Bush was in Israel the other day and gave a speech to the Knesset. Its perspective was summed up by his closing anecdote – a departing British officer in May 1948 handing the iron bar to the Zion Gate to a trembling rabbi and telling him it was the first time in 18 centuries that a key to the gates of the Jerusalem was in the hands of a Jew. In other words, it was a big-picture speech, referencing the Holocaust, the pogroms, Masada – and the challenges that lie ahead. Sen. Obama was not mentioned in the text. No Democrat was mentioned, save for President Truman, in the context of his recognition of the new state of Israel when it was a mere 11 minutes old.

Nonetheless, Barack Obama decided that the president's speech was really about him, and he didn't care for it.
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And, taking their cue from the soon-to-be nominee's weirdly petty narcissism, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Joe Biden and Co. piled on to deplore Bush's outrageous, unacceptable, unpresidential, outrageously unacceptable and unacceptably unpresidential behavior.

Honestly. What a bunch of self-absorbed ninnies. Here's what the president said:

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

It says something for Democrat touchiness that the minute a guy makes a generalized observation about folks who appease terrorists and dictators the Dems assume: Hey, they're talking about me. Actually, he wasn't – or, to be more precise, he wasn't talking only about you.
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Increasingly, the Western world has attitudes rather than policies. It's one thing to talk as a means to an end. But these days, for most midlevel powers, talks arethe end, talks without end. Because that's what civilized nations like doing – chit-chatting, shooting the breeze, having tea and crumpets, talking talking talking. Uncivilized nations like torturing dissidents, killing civilians, bombing villages, doing doing doing. It's easier to get the doers to pass themselves off as talkers then to get the talkers to rouse themselves to do anything.

And, as the Iranians understand, talks provide a splendid cover for getting on with anything you want to do. If, say, you want to get on with your nuclear program relatively undisturbed, the easiest way to do it is to enter years of endless talks with the Europeans over said nuclear program. That's why that Hamas honcho endorsed Obama: They know he's their best shot at getting a European foreign minister installed as president of the United States.

Mo Mowlam was Britain's Northern Ireland secretary and oversaw the process by which the IRA's Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness became ministers of a Crown they decline to recognize. By 2004, she was calling for Osama bin Laden to be invited to "the negotiating table," having concluded he was no different from Adams: Stern fellow, lots of blood on his hands, but no sense getting on your high horse about all that; let's find out what he wants and give him part of it.

In his 2002 letter to the United States, bin Laden has a lot of grievances, from America's refusal to implement Sharia law to Jew-controlled usury to the lack of punishment for "President Clinton's immoral acts." Like Barack Obama's pastor, bin Laden shares the view that AIDS is a "Satanic American invention." Obviously, there are items on the agenda that the free world can never concede on – "President Clinton's immoral acts" – but who's to say most of the rest isn't worth chewing over?

This will be the fault line in the post-Bush war debate over the next few years. Are the political ambitions of the broader jihad totalitarian, genocidal, millenarian – in a word, nuts? Or are they negotiable? President Bush knows where he stands. Just before the words that Barack Obama took umbrage at, he said:

"There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words. It's natural, but it is deadly wrong. As witnesses to evil in the past, we carry a solemn responsibility to take these words seriously."

Here are some words of Hussein Massawi, the former leader of Hezbollah:

"We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."

Are his actions consistent with those words? Amazingly so. So, too, are those of Hezbollah's patrons in Tehran.

President Reagan talked with the Soviets while pushing ahead with the deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe. He spoke softly – after getting himself a bigger stick. Sen. Obama is proposing to reward a man who pledges to wipe Israel off the map with a presidential photo-op to which he will bring not even a twig. No wonder he's so twitchy about it.

If anyone ever wonders what true hatred (and idiocy) looks like, refer them to this (if they can stomach it):



Olbermann, as Dennis Prager said today, is by FAR the most disgusting, intellectually dishonest person on TV today. It really saddened me to see that NBC added him last year to their Sunday Night NFL Football halftime show, thus indicating that they don't mind extremism on their show as long as it is radically liberal. This stupid, intellectually small, and hate-filled man should be fired on the spot. I guess at least the one good thing is that only a handful of people watch his lunacy on MSNBC, and all of those are liberal nitwits.

Bush Lied, People Died

I am getting really tired of this mantra. Now a "study" has come out that claims Bush and his administration made over 900 "false" statements leading up to the Iraq War. The annoying part about this is that while it is technically true that any statements about Iraq's possession of WMDs have turned out to be false, it is not true that Bush INTENTIONALLY LIED about them, as this article and others love to say. A very disgusting blurring of the lines between INCORRECT and DECEPTIVE is being made here to politically hurt the president. If I honestly believe that my neighbor is raising meth, based on his prior known use of meth and the hearsay of everyone of my neighbors, and I tell the police about it and I turn out to be wrong, I was NOT lying. I was incorrect and perhaps reckless in my judgment, but I wasn't being deceptive. It's interesting how many people don't seem to understand the difference between the two. It must say something about our postmodern culture, but I'm not sure what.

... More proof of climate change. I'm sure someone will quickly attribute this to global warming. After all, if it's hotter than usual, it's global warming. If it's colder than normal, it's global warming. If it's wetter than usual, it's global warming. If it's dryer than normal, it's global warming. It's kind of like saying when flipping a coin, "heads I win, tails you lose."

Nevermind that the earth hasn't been warming for six years now. That's right, statistically 2007 was the same temperature as 2001-2006. Oh well, don't expect the Goracle to tell you that.

So here's Moveon.org's full-page ad as shown in the New York Times today. "Troops, we support you, but your leader is a liar and a traitor."

Mark Steyn's column today in the OC Register is, as usual, spot on.

Oh, it's a long, long while from September to September. This year, the anniversary falls, for the first time, on a Tuesday morning, and perhaps some or other cable network will re-present the events in real time – the first vague breaking news in an otherwise routine morning show, the follow-up item on the second plane, and the realization that something bigger was under way. If you make it vivid enough, the JFK/Princess Di factor will kick in: you'll remember "where you were" when you "heard the news." But it's harder to recreate the peculiar mood at the end of the day, when the citizens of the superpower went to bed not knowing what they'd wake up to the following morning.

Six years on, most Americans are now pretty certain what they'll wake up to in the morning: There'll be a thwarted terrorist plot somewhere or other – last week, it was Germany. Occasionally, one will succeed somewhere or other, on the far horizon – in Bali, Istanbul, Madrid, London. But not many folks expect to switch on the TV this Tuesday morning, as they did that Tuesday morning, and see smoke billowing from Atlanta or Phoenix or Seattle. During the IRA's 30-year campaign, the British grew accustomed (perhaps too easily accustomed) to waking up to the news either of some prominent person's assassination or that a couple of grandmas and some schoolkids had been blown apart in a shopping center. It was a terrorist war in which terrorism was almost routine. But, in the six years since President Bush declared that America was in a "war on terror," there has been in America no terrorism.

In theory, the administration ought to derive a political benefit from this: The president has "kept America safe." But, in practice, the placidity of the domestic front diminishes the chosen rationale of the conflict: if a "war on terror" has no terror, who says there's a war at all? That's the argument of the left – that it's all a racket cooked up by the Bushitlerburton fascists to impose on America a permanent national-security state in which, for dark sinister reasons of his own, Dick Cheney is free to monitor your out-of-state phone calls all day long.
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And that would be the relatively sane reaction. Have you seen that bumper sticker "9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB"? If you haven't, go to a college town and cruise Main Street for a couple of minutes. It seems odd that a fascist regime that thinks nothing of killing thousands of people in a big landmark building in the center of the city hasn't quietly offed some of these dissident professors – or at least the guy with the sticker-printing contract. Fearlessly, Robert Fisk of Britain's Independent, the alleged dean of Middle East correspondents, has now crossed over to the truther side and written a piece headlined, "Even I Question The 'Truth' About 9/11." According to a poll in May, 35 percent of Democrats believe that Bush knew about 9/11 in advance. Did Rumsfeld also know? Almost certainly. That's why he went to his office as normal that today, because he knew in advance that the plane would slice through the Pentagon but come to a halt on the far side of the photocopier. That's how well-planned it was, unlike Iraq.
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And what of those for whom the events of six years ago were more than just conspiracy fodder? Last week the New York Times carried a story about the current state of the 9/11 lawsuits. Relatives of 42 of the dead are suing various parties for compensation, on the grounds that what happened that Tuesday morning should have been anticipated.
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According to the Times, many of the bereaved are angry and determined that their loved one's death should have meaning. Yet the meaning they're after surely strikes our enemies not just as extremely odd but as one more reason why they'll win. You launch an act of war, and the victims respond with a lawsuit against their own countrymen.

But that's the American way: Almost every news story boils down to somebody standing in front of a microphone and announcing that he's retained counsel. Last week, it was Larry Craig. Next week, it'll be the survivors of Ahmadinejad's nuclear test in Westchester County. As Andrew McCarthy pointed out, a legalistic culture invariably misses the forest for the trees. Sen. Craig should know that what matters is not whether an artful lawyer can get him off on a technicality but whether the public thinks he trawls for anonymous sex in public bathrooms. Likewise, those 9/11 families should know that, if you want your child's death that morning to have meaning, what matters is not whether you hound Boeing into admitting liability but whether you insist that the movement that murdered your daughter is hunted down and the sustaining ideological virus that led thousands of others to dance up and down in the streets cheering her death is expunged from the earth.

In his pugnacious new book, Norman Podhoretz calls for redesignating this conflict as World War IV. Certainly, it would have been easier politically to frame the Iraq campaign as being a front in a fourth world war than as a necessary measure in an anti-terrorist campaign. Yet who knows? Perhaps we would still have mired ourselves in legalists and conspiracies and the dismal curdled relativism of the Flight 93 memorial's "crescent of embrace." In the end, as Podhoretz says, if the war is to be fought at all, it will "have to be fought by the kind of people Americans now are." On this sixth anniversary, as 9/11 retreats into history, many Americans see no war at all.

This story, as told to us by Oliver North, may be three years old, but it's worth posting.

"It's stuff you hear about in boot camp, about World War II and Tarawa Marines who won the Medal of Honor," Lance Corporal Rob Rogers of the 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment told the Army Times. Corporal Rogers was describing the actions of his fellow Marine, Sgt. Rafael Peralta, a Mexican immigrant who enlisted in the Marine Corps the day he received his green card.
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On the morning of November 15, 2004, the men of 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines awoke before sunrise and continued what they had been doing for seven days previously - cleansing the city of Fallujah of terrorists house by house. At the fourth house they encountered that morning the Marines kicked in the door and "cleared" the front rooms, but then noticed a locked door off to the side that required inspection. Sgt. Rafael Peralta threw open the closed door, but behind it were three terrorists with AK-47s. Peralta was hit in the head and chest with multiple shots at close range. Peralta's fellow Marines had to step over his body to continue the shootout with the terrorists. As the firefight raged on, a "yellow, foreign-made, oval-shaped grenade," as Lance Corporal Travis Kaemmerer described it, rolled into the room where they were all standing and came to a stop near Peralta's body. But Sgt. Rafael Peralta wasn't dead - yet. This young immigrant of 25 years, who enlisted in the Marines when he received his green card, who volunteered for the front line duty in Fallujah, had one last act of heroism in him.
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Peralta was proud to serve his adopted country. In his parent's home, on his bedroom walls hung only three items - a copy of the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights and his boot camp graduation certificate. Before he set out for Fallujah, he wrote to his 14-year old brother, "be proud of me, bro...and be proud of being an American." Not only can Rafael's family be proud of him, but his fellow Marines are alive because of him. As Sgt. Rafael Peralta lay near death on the floor of a Fallujah terrorist hideout, he spotted the yellow grenade that had rolled next to his near-lifeless body. Once detonated, it would take out the rest of Peralta's squad. To save his fellow Marines, Peralta reached out, grabbed the grenade, and tucked it under his abdomen where it exploded. "Most of the Marines in the house were in the immediate area of the grenade," Cpl. Kaemmerer said. "We will never forget the second chance at life that Sgt. Peralta gave us."

Here is one journalist's up-close view of how the Surge is working out in Iraq. Too bad the wannabe journalists for the New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN (you get the point) won't report this positive news.

This cartoon by Ted Rall is quite possibly the most disgusting thing I've seen out of the media. He should be fired on the spot, but unfortunately, he's more likely to win an award. The graves of over 3000 soldiers cry out...

Today is the 63rd anniversary of the Battle of Normandy. During the few days of that battle, approximately 50,000 Americans lost their lives fighting to end tyranny. Kinda puts the Iraq War into perspective. Read this account from Omaha Beach, the bloodiest landing on that day 63 years ago. 3000 soldiers were killed in just a few hours.

For those moral equivalency artists who claim dunking a terrorist's head under water or other scary techniques used by American interrogators to get information that will save lives is the same as what Al Qaeda does to its captives, check these pictures out. They entail crude images from the terrorists torture handbook and pictures of their torture tools as well as the scars on the victims who weren't killed. A bit disturbing to view, but necessary to know what kind of animals we are fighting.

It seems like every week, radical Muslims come up with a more disgusting low in human history. Of course, Christians know that there is "nothing new under the sun" and that man's heart is wicked to the core. But still, when you hear about kidnappers in Iraq returning a woman's infant beheaded and cooked or terrorists using children as a ploy to car bomb a military outpost with the kids still in the car, it is hard to believe that - please pardon the expression - humans could be that cruel. But once again, they have shown that they can be even worse.

The boy with the knife looks barely 12. In a high-pitched voice, he denounces the bound, blindfolded man before him as an American spy. Then he hacks off the captive’s head to cries of “God is great!” and hoists it in triumph by the hair.

I've shown you in a previous post what we're fighting FOR in Iraq... this is what we're fighting against.

I've added two more links to the left. Blackfive is a blog written by a ex-military officer who has many ties to the current conflicts in the Middle East. Basically, he tells the stories that the media won't tell you. The "Someone You Should Know" link is a sub-blog of Blackfive and tells stories of honorable people who are making sacrifices over there. Here is a sample. And the couple's wedding photo. Meanwhile, we have a Democrat-controlled and Republican-enabled Congress stabbing these brave soldiers in the back with a retreat strategy before they've even been given a chance to succeed.

We don't fight for oil, or Halliburton contracts, or hatred. We fight for this:























And this:

There are no curses strong enough to properly convey what I feel toward people capable of this. King David perhaps said it best in Psalm 11:5-6.

The LORD examines the righteous,
but the wicked and those who love violence
his soul hates.

On the wicked he will rain
fiery coals and burning sulfur;
a scorching wind will be their lot.

This is actually the only place I have found where the Bible indicates that God can hate people. We're taught that God hates sin but loves the sinner. But here, for those who love violence, He hates them within His soul. I do not want to be nearby when God pours out His wrath on the terrorists in Iraq who killed those children.

Sgt. Eddie Jeffers is currently serving in Ramadi, Iraq, and had this to say about the shameful lack of support for the war.

Here's a sample of what he wrote...

We are the hope of the Iraqi people. They want what everyone else wants in life: safety, security, somewhere to call home. They want a country that is safe to raise their children in. Not a place where their children will be abducted, raped and murdered if they do not comply with the terrorists demands. They want to live on, rebuild and prosper. And America has given them the opportunity, but only if we stay true to the cause and see it to its end. But the country must unite in this endeavor...we cannot place the burden on our military alone. We must all stand up and fight, whether in uniform or not. And supporting us is more than sticking yellow ribbon stickers on your cars. It’s supporting our President, our troops and our cause.

Go to the above link and read it all for yourself.