Saturday, March 31, 2007

Total Recall

A French oil giant's deals with a rogue regime--this time in Iran.

Wall Street Journal
Thursday, March 29, 2007 12:01 a.m.

Don't stop us if you've heard this one: French oil giant Total SA is being investigated for illicit dealings with a rogue regime in the Middle East. This time it's Iran, but maybe you recall its experience with another dictator and something called Oil for Food.

A French judge is investigating bribes that Total executives allegedly paid Iranian officials to secure business in the Islamic Republic. Last week, the judge issued preliminary charges of abuse of company funds and corruption of foreign agents against Chief Executive Christophe de Margerie. The company and Mr. de Margerie deny any wrongdoing, but the Total experience is all too typical of the way European firms cut deals with dictators while their own governments provide political cover.

Meanwhile, the same French prosecutor continues to investigate Total for alleged kickbacks paid to Saddam Hussein in return for Iraqi oil. In his report on Oil for Food corruption, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker found that Total, through intermediaries, had purchased some of the 11 million barrels of oil that former Iraqi officials claim was allocated to French Senator Charles Pasqua in thanks for his support of Saddam's Iraq. Total and Mr. Pasqua also deny any wrongdoing.


However the probes play out, Total's business with Tehran is probably a violation of the U.S. 1996 Iran-Libya Sanctions Act. The Clinton Administration thought so as far back as early 1998, when crude oil futures were selling for a quarter of the current price, and Tehran was desperate for cash to finance Hezbollah and, as we later learned, its nuclear program.
"We believe that transactions that substantially enhance Iran's ability to acquire the revenues necessary to acquire missile technology and weapons of mass destruction should not be in any way made easier," Defense Secretary William Cohen argued at the time. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was even more blunt: "As far as the French are concerned, I must say it passes my understanding why there is no realization that pumping money into the system of Iran is not helpful to the rest of us."

But after French carping and trade threats by the European Union, President Clinton waived sanctions on Total, Russia's Gazprom and Malaysia's Petronas for the $2 billion natural-gas deal they had inked with the mullahs in 1997. That waiver set an informal precedent, as both the Clinton and Bush Administrations have stayed silent as companies from Italy, Canada, the Netherlands, Britain, Norway, Sweden, South Korea and Japan have signed energy deals with Iran worth some $11.5 billion, as the nearby table shows.

That patience may be ending now that Iran is kidnapping British sailors, supplying bombs that kill Americans in Iraq, and defying U.N. orders to stop enriching uranium. The Bush Administration is pressing financial sanctions against Iran especially hard, but pressure is building on Capitol Hill for firmer action. Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg is talking about more severe penalties for U.S. firms that do business with states that sponsor terrorism, and stricter sanctions on the U.S. interests of foreign companies could be in the cards as well.


We've always thought sanctions are a blunt instrument, and they can backfire when used on the wrong target. It's also true that U.S. sanctions wouldn't hurt Total in the short term; the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act is limited to penalties for companies' U.S. businesses, and the bulk of Total's activities are in Europe and Latin America. But against a regime such as Iran's--which is now the biggest threat to world security--sanctions are also a form of diplomatic pressure short of the military action that European governments claim to want to avoid at all costs. Total executives and European politicians are fooling themselves if they think U.S. pressure for action against Iran will stop once the Bush Administration leaves power.

There's some debate in France about why prosecutors are suddenly showing so much interest in what is by now a 10-year-old case. Perhaps allies of Jacques Chirac have less political cover as his presidency winds down, or maybe big companies are no longer seen as untouchable on the Continent after a series of corporate scandals. Or it could be that investigative judge Philippe Courroye is anxious to close out his current docket before his scheduled transfer to another court. Whatever the reason, it's good to see someone in Paris take corrupt dealings with dictators seriously.

In Iraq 10 years ago, Total and its political protectors canoodled with Saddam and propped him up until the U.S. decided it had no choice but to act against him. Europe shouldn't make the same mistake in Iran.

How to Win in Iraq

And how to lose.

By Arthur Herman
Thursday, March 29, 2007 12:01 a.m.

"It is best if an enemy nation comes and surrenders of its own accord."
--Du You (735-812)


To the student of counterinsurgency warfare, the war in Iraq has reached a critical but dismally familiar stage.

On the one hand, events in that country have taken a more hopeful direction in recent months. Operations in the city of Najaf in January presaged a more effective burden-sharing between American and Iraqi troops than in the past. The opening moves of the so-called surge in Baghdad, involving increased American patrols and the steady addition of more than 21,000 ground troops, have begun to sweep Shiite militias from the streets, while their leader, Moqtada al-Sadr, has gone to ground. Above all, the appointment of Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, the author of the U.S. Army's latest counterinsurgency field manual, as commander of American ground forces in Iraq bespeaks the Pentagon's conviction that what we need to confront the Iraq insurgency is not more high-tech firepower but the time-tested methods of unconventional or "fourth generation" warfare.

In Washington, on the other hand, among the nation's political class, the growing consensus is that the war in Iraq is not only not winnable but as good as lost--Rep. Henry Waxman of California, for one, has proclaimed that the war is lost. Politicians who initially backed the effort, like Democratic Sens. Hillary Clinton and Joseph Biden, and Republican Reps. Walter Jones and Tom Davis, have been busily backing away or out, insisting that Iraq has descended into civil war and that Americans are helpless to shape events militarily. A growing number, like Rep. John Murtha, even suggest that the American presence is making matters worse. The Democratic Party has devoted much internal discussion to whether and how to restrict the President's ability to carry out even the present counterinsurgency effort.

In short, if the battle for the hearts and minds of Iraqis still continues and is showing signs of improvement, the battle for the hearts and minds of Congress, or at least of the Democratic majority, seems to be all but over. In the meantime, still more adamant on the subject are many of our best-known pundits and media commentators. According to Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who speaks for many, Iraq "is so broken it can't even have a proper civil war," and America is therefore now left with but a single option: "how we might disengage with the least damage possible." To the left of Mr. Friedman and his ilk are the strident and often openly anti-American voices of organizations like MoveOn.org.

It is indeed striking that war critics like Sens. Harry Reid and Joseph Biden, who in 2005 were calling on the Pentagon to mount a proper counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq, and to send enough troops to make it happen, should now be seeking ways to revoke legislative authority for that very operation. Exactly why they should have changed their minds on the issue is not obvious, although they and their colleagues do claim to be expressing not only their own judgment but the opinions and sentiments of the American people at large. If recent polls are to be trusted, however, these politicians may well turn out be wrong about popular sentiment. And if past history and our current experience in Iraq are any guide, they are certainly wrong about the war on the ground.

In fact, the historical record is clear. The roots of failure in fighting insurgencies like the one in Iraq are not military. To the contrary, Western militaries have shown remarkable skill in learning and relearning the crucial lessons of how to prevail against unconventional foes, and tremendous bravery in fighting difficult and unfamiliar battles. If Iraq fails, the cause will have to be sought elsewhere.


Most wars are lost, not won. To most Americans, the nearest example of a failed war is Vietnam. As in Iraq today, we came up against a guerrilla-type insurrectionary force led by ideological extremists; in the end, we were forced to withdraw and surrender the country of South Vietnam to the aggressors. But an even more striking parallel to our present situation exists in the French experience in Algeria almost exactly 50 years ago. There, French troops and a beleaguered local government faced an insurgency mounted by Muslim extremists who had managed to gain the upper hand. In response, the leadership of the French army had to figure out, almost from scratch, how to fight unconventional wars of this kind--with results that have influenced the thinking of counterinsurgency experts ever since.

The armed insurrection against French rule in Algeria began in November 1954. The insurgent force, the National Liberation Front (FLN), was a direct prototype of today's al Qaeda and the insurgent forces in Iraq. Its leaders were motivated less by nationalism than by virulent anti-Western (and, not incidentally, anti-Jewish) ideologies. Their goal was not military victory, which they knew was impossible in the face of French conventional force. Instead, they set out to provoke reprisals against Muslims by Algeria's whites in order to trigger an all-out civil war. To this end they employed terror bombings, torture and the savage murder of Muslim moderates and Algeria's professional class. "One corpse in a suit," an FLN leader was quoted as saying, "is worth 20 in uniform." All the while, the main audience they were trying to reach and influence was not in Algeria; it was in France itself. As the American counterinsurgency expert Bruce Hoffman has written, the Algerian rebels "were counting on the fatigue and disenchantment of the French to help turn the tide if the war lasted long enough."

It was a brilliant plan. Like American troops in Iraq today, French troops in Algeria found themselves reacting to one crisis after another, while a succession of commanders, strategies and resources were rotated into the effort in piecemeal fashion. Even with 140,000 soldiers on the ground, in a country with less than half the population of Iraq in 2007, the French government found itself helpless to reverse the course of events. The rapidly deteriorating situation prompted Algeria's white population to turn against its government. By late 1956, when terror bombings in the capital city of Algiers killed 49 people and maimed many more, the overstressed, overstretched French police and army were ready to throw in the towel.

But on Aug. 1, 1956, a French lieutenant colonel of Tunisian descent named David Galula had taken command of the mountainous and rebel-infested Aissa Mimoun area of Kabylia. To the FLN's unconventional mode of warfare, Galula responded with unconventional methods of his own. These proved so successful so quickly that they were soon adopted by French commanders in other parts of Algeria.

As early as January 1957, French Gen. Jacques Massu and intelligence chief Roger Trinquier were ready to apply some of Galula's techniques to the urban environment of the capital, Algiers. After weeks of hard fighting, Massu and his paratroopers broke the back of the insurgency in the city, installing a block-by-block intelligence network that kept the FLN on the run and encouraged moderate Muslims to step forward.

Indeed, the 1957 battle for Algiers marked a crucial turning point in the fight against the FLN. By 1959, Galula's principles had been extended across Algeria. Some 600 "specialized administrative sections" were set up, each headed by army officers to oversee civil as well as military affairs. The new structure finally allowed the French army to use effectively its superior numbers (including 150,000 loyal native troops, more than a third of the total) and conventional military hardware. Helping to put the guerrillas on the defensive were such tactics as the division of troops into "static" and "mobile" units to deal with terrorist outbreaks; the use of helicopters for counterinsurgency operations; and construction of a 200-mile, 8-foot-high electric fence (the so-called Morice Line), which shut down the FLN's sources of support from neighboring Tunisia. By January 1960, the war that many had considered lost three years earlier was virtually won.


Galula's subsequent book, "Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice," laid out the blueprint for success in this form of warfare. From the start, Galula had discarded the assumptions governing conventional conflicts. A decisive battlefield victory of the kind familiar from World War II, he saw, would never work against indigenous, loosely organized but deeply committed insurgencies like the FLN. As he had learned from watching the British mount successful counterinsurgencies in Malaya and Greece, neither heavy casualties, nor the loss of weapons and bases, nor even the loss of leaders, would stop the rebels. Ultimately, indeed, "military action [was] but a minor factor in the conflict."

What then? Essentially, Galula grasped that the new form of warfare had reversed the conventional relationship in war between combatant and civilian. No longer bystanders or useful adjuncts to the war effort, as in World War II, civilians were the critical determinants of success or failure. Without the help or at least the passive acquiescence of the local population, the government would be doomed. In a crucial sense, it did not matter how many guerrillas were killed, or how many regular soldiers were on the ground; the center of gravity was the opinion of the local community.

Thus, the key to success lay in bringing to the surface the portion of the populace that hated the guerrillas, and then turning that minority into a majority by a combination of political, social and cultural initiatives. But of course that crucial portion, Galula wrote, "will not and cannot emerge as long as the threat [of insurgent retaliation] has not been lifted." This was where military strategy came into play. Galula's approach boiled down to three stages, each with its own lesson for Iraq today.

The first was concentration of force. Whereas terrorists were able to do much with little (witness, in today's Iraq, the improvised explosive device or the lone suicide bomber), government forces could do but little with their much. Even after having expanded in number to 450,000 men--nearly one soldier for every 23 Algerians--French forces could not confront the elusive FLN everywhere. So Galula divided his own district into zones: "white," where government control was complete or nearly complete; "pink," where insurgents competed with the government for control; and "red," where the insurgents were in complete control. A successful counterinsurgency involved turning pink zones into white zones, then red into pink, through a block-by-block, neighborhood-by-neighborhood struggle to force the terrorists into the shadows.

The second of Galula's lessons was the need for a visible and continuous military presence, in order to build civil institutions of support and trust. In counterinsurgencies, the classic Clausewitzian dictum--that war is the continuation of politics by other means--turned in on itself. Through constant policing and patrolling, by running down insurgents and punishing them on, if possible, "the very spot" where they committed a terrorist attack or outrage, and above all by visibly supporting and rewarding allies, the military occupation would itself became a political weapon: outward and conspicuous proof that supporting the government translated into increased security, peace of mind, prosperity, and eventually social and political advance.

Toward this end, Galula's third lesson was that the counterinsurgency must project a sense of inevitable victory. The local populace had to see the military and civilian authority as the ultimate winner. For that, native troops were essential. In counterinsurgency terms, they were more than just auxiliaries in the fight; they were also signposts of the future, of a secure post-insurgency order around which the local populace could rally.


As recently as two years ago, Galula's book was virtually unknown in Pentagon circles. Today it has become the bible of American counterinsurgency thinkers like Gen. Petraeus, whose field manual (known as FM 3-24) it largely informs. Its masterful approach to breaking, isolating and then uprooting a terrorist insurgency is the core of our revised near-term strategy for Iraq, a strategy based, in Gen. Petraeus's words, on the principle that "you're not going to kill your way out of an insurgency."
The current surge of 21,500 troops in Baghdad is a textbook example of Galula's lessons in action. First, as in the northern city of Mosul in 2003-04, where he used a similar grid system, Gen. Petraeus aims to turn things around in the single most vital "pink" zone--namely, Baghdad and its environs, within whose 50-mile radius 80% of the violence in Iraq takes place. Critics have already charged that our recent successes in suppressing the militias in this area signify only a temporary respite. But Gen. Petraeus, like his predecessor Galula, understands that in counterinsurgency warfare, temporary respites are all there is. The goal is to make those respites last longer and longer, until eventually they become permanent. As he has said, "The idea is to end each day with fewer enemies than when it started." Anything more ambitious leads to overreaching, disenchantment, and ultimately failure.

The Baghdad surge also illustrates the second of Galula's lessons. "Increasing the number of stakeholders is crucial to success," writes Gen. Petraeus, again self-consciously following both Galula's model and his own prior experience. In the northern district of Kabylia, for example, Gen. Petraeus had his men operating schools for 1,400 children, including girls, offering free medical support, and helping with building projects and road construction. One of his proudest accomplishments was the help given by troops of the 101st Airborne in rebuilding and opening Mosul University.

Gen. Petraeus's field manual states: "Some of the best weapons do not shoot." They come instead in the form of meetings held with local leaders, wells drilled, streets repaired, soccer leagues organized. In the current surge, one of his stated goals is to get American soldiers out of Baghdad's Green Zone to meet, eat with and even live with Iraqi families. Such "cultural awareness," to quote Gen. Petraeus again, "is a force multiplier." Political victories won street by street and neighborhood by neighborhood do not so much destroy the insurgency--it cannot be destroyed in any traditional sense--as replace it, forcing the bond between insurgent and citizen to give way to a new bond between citizen and government.

Finally, in an application of Galula's third lesson, Gen. Petraeus's men in northern Iraq trained more than 20,000 Iraqi police who even now continue to patrol the border between Iraq and Turkey. It was, in fact, Gen. Petraeus's success in organizing and staffing a reliable Iraqi security force that convinced his superiors to put him in charge of training the new Iraqi army and to make him commander of American ground forces this year. Now his experience is being put to the test on a broader scale as we attempt, in his words, to "build institutions, not just units"--a process as vital to American success in Iraq as it was to French success in Algeria 50 years ago.


Will it work? That is not the crucial question. It has been done before, and it can be done again; at least, it can be done on the ground. The crucial question is whether the political will exists to see it through to the end. Here, too, the French experience in Algeria is instructive--in a wholly negative way.

In under two years, as I have noted, the fight against the FLN insurgents in Algeria was all but won. But the war itself was lost. By late 1959, even as the army was scoring victory after victory, President Charles de Gaulle had concluded that he had no choice but to offer Algeria "self-determination." Within two years, the French had pulled out and the FLN's leader, Ben Bela, was Algeria's president.

What happened was this: while the French military had been concentrating on fighting the insurgency in the streets and mountains in Algeria, an intellectual and cultural insurgency at home, led by the French left and the media, had been scoring its own succession of victories.

In its haste to defeat the FLN, the French army had left a crucial hostage to political fortune. Military commanders had authorized army interrogators to use certain forms of torture to extract information from suspected terrorist detainees. This is not the place to debate the merits or demerits of torture in counterinsurgency operations--for the record, Galula himself considered it counterproductive. Nor was French opinion particularly sensitive to brutality per se; the FLN's own use of torture and outright butchery--Arab loyalists routinely had their tongues and testicles cut off and their eyes gouged out--had aroused little or no outrage. But, as with the incidents at Abu Ghraib 50 years later, news of the army practice gave domestic opponents of the war a weapon with which to discredit the entire enterprise.

Led by Jean-Paul Sartre, a campaign of denunciation got under way in which French forces were accused of being the equivalent of Nazis--an especially freighted charge coming only a decade and a half after World War II and the German occupation of France. Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre's companion, went so far as to say that the sight of a French army uniform had "the same effect on me that swastikas once did." Although many of the antiwar agitators were communists or leftist fellow travelers, their petitions and demonstrations included enough authentic heroes of the Resistance and eminent liberals like Francois Mauriac to bestow upon the movement a credible public image. The constant message it conveyed was that the true authors of violence in Algeria were not the FLN at all but the French, and that only when the latter departed would Algerians be able to sort out their destiny for themselves.

The French military and political leadership was completely blindsided by the attack. No amount of justification of the selective use of torture, not even the cancellation of the original authorization, could halt the criticism or stem the loss of public support for the war. Even as the FLN took to setting off bombs in France itself, leftist Catholic priests continued to raise funds for it, while those like Albert Camus who harbored doubts about the wisdom of handing victory to the terrorists were derided and silenced. The consensus that had informed French politics as late as 1956--namely, that abandoning Algeria was "unthinkable and unmentionable"--fell apart.

Divisions over Algeria doomed France's Fourth Republic. For its successor, the price of political survival was handing over Algeria to a totalitarian band that had lost the war on the battlefield but managed to win a stunning victory in France itself. The result was the massive flight of Algerian whites and, at home, a bloodbath as FLN terrorists put to death tens of thousands of Muslim Algerians who had been loyal to the French regime. Soldiers who had fought alongside the French were forced to swallow their medals before they were shot.


Before long, a similar process would play itself out in Vietnam. By 1972, the American military there had broken the back of the Viet Cong insurgency, had fought the North Vietnamese army to a standstill, and had forced the government in Hanoi to the bargaining table. Here at home, meanwhile, the end of the military draft had removed the domestic antiwar movement's most powerful wedge issue. Nevertheless, reorganizing itself, the movement began to lobby Congress vigorously to cut off support for the pro-American governments in South Vietnam and Cambodia. The refrain, exactly as in the Algerian case, was that this would both bring the killing and suffering to an end and allow the Vietnamese and Cambodians to "find their own solutions to their problems." Once Watergate destroyed the Nixon presidency, and "peace" Democrats took control of Congress in the 1974 midterm elections, funding to keep South Vietnam free from communist control evaporated. Victory was turned into defeat; the "solution" advanced by the antiwar Left turned out to be the crushing and disappearance of the country of South Vietnam.

It is hardly difficult to see the same process at work in present-day Iraq. Of course, as in the past, one can point to mistakes made in the conduct of the war. From the Galula perspective, for instance, splitting civil and military functions between the Coalition Provisional Authority and Centcom was a grave initial error. Another lay in the assumption that war-making in Iraq would yield quickly to peacekeeping, the way it had in Bosnia in the 1990s. The difference was that in Bosnia, Americans arrived on the scene when Christians and Muslims had fought each other to a standstill, while in Iraq the military's main problem was not winding down a civil war but preventing one from breaking out in the first place.

Some critics have argued that there were also not enough American troops in Iraq to provide the kind of sustained visible presence demanded by counterinsurgency operations. In the first three years of the war, these critics point out, American soldiers and Marines were forced to abandon friendly territory and collaborative allies on account of the paucity of their numbers. Even Gen. Petraeus's district around Mosul fell into chaos, and much of his work was undone, when his troops had to leave before Iraqi forces were ready to assume the security burden (and as the Iraqi civil administration fell into turmoil following the handover of authority from the CPA).

But mistakes are hardly unknown in war; nor are they necessarily irreparable. In fourth-generation conflicts in particular, as the case of French Algeria suggests, turnarounds can be achieved quickly by changes in thinking and action. Gen. Petraeus's appointment and the early success of the so-called surge point to just such a major and hopeful change. Yet the current clamor to cut off funding, or to strip away congressional authorization for the Iraq effort, threatens to undo this potential turnaround before it has a chance to prove itself.

Under the slogan "strategic redeployment," for example--to cite the title of a position paper on Iraq released by the left-liberal Center for American Progress--we have been assured that what incites the violence in Iraq is not the terrorists or insurgents but the American "occupation." Left to themselves, the contention goes, Sunnis and Shiites will have no choice but to reach an accommodation and live together in peace. Indeed, to Sarah Shields, a Middle East expert at the University of North Carolina, today's jihadists are but the "latest example in a long line of peoples' fighting against occupation." The sooner we depart, she writes, "the fewer people will have been compromised by their connection with our occupation."

The argument is virtually identical to the one pursued by homefront defeatists in Algeria and Vietnam. What will happen to those already "compromised by their connection" with us, let alone to the hopes of millions of ordinary Iraqis, does not evidently concern its proponents--any more than it concerned Jean-Paul Sartre in Algeria, or Tom Hayden in Vietnam.


In fourth-generation warfare, whoever seems to own the future wins. To this day, thanks to Gille Pontecorvo's celebrated and highly propagandized 1967 film, most people assume that "the battle of Algiers" was an FLN victory when in fact it was anything but. Similarly, most people believe that the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam was a major setback for the United States, for so it was successfully portrayed in the media; in fact, it crippled the Viet Cong as an insurgency. The same happened more recently in the battle of Falluja in 2005, where our eradication of a vicious jihadist network was presented almost entirely in terms of too many American casualties and too much "collateral damage."

Thus far, the antiwar forces in both the United States and Europe have been greatly successful in presenting the Iraqi future in terms of an inevitable, and richly deserved, American defeat. Not even positive results on the ground have deterred them from pressing their case for withdrawal, or from winning influential converts in the heart of the U.S. Congress. If they succeed in their ultimate goal of forcing a withdrawal, they will take their place in another "long line," joining the shameful company of those who compelled the French to leave Algeria in disgrace and to stand by as the victorious FLN conducted a hideous bloodbath, and of those who compelled America to leave Vietnam under similar circumstances and to similar effect.

Unlike the French in Algeria, the United States is in Iraq not in order to retain a colony but to help create a free, open and liberal society in a part of the world still mired in autocracy and fanaticism. Will we stay long enough to defeat the jihadists, to engage Iraqis in the process of modern nation-building, and to ease the transition to a free society? Or will we quit before the hard work is done, leaving this vital part of the world to become an al Qaeda sanctuary, bathed in chaos, anarchy, and blood? As the polls suggest, a large constituency at home is waiting to learn the answer to this question, and so is a much larger constituency abroad. But time is running short.

"Act quickly," Gen. Petraeus wrote in January 2006, "because every army of liberation has a half-life." This is true not only in the field but at home. James Thurber once said that the saddest two words in the English language are "too late." Terrible as it is to think that our surge may have come too late, it is much more terrible to think that feckless politicians, out of whatever calculation, may pull the plug before the new approach is fully tested.

And terrible not only for Iraqis. For the French, the price of failure in Algeria was the collapse of one Republic and a permanent stain on the next--along with the deep alienation of the French military from the political establishment that it believed (with considerable justification) had betrayed it. Here at home, it took the American military almost a decade and a half to recover its confidence and resiliency after the failure and humiliation of Vietnam. How we would weather another and even more consequential humiliation is anybody's guess; but the stakes are enormous, and the clock is ticking.

Friday, March 30, 2007

A Lot of Reasons I Won't Vote for Obama

By Burt Prelutsky
Friday, March 30, 2007

I have a friend who could very well be a speechwriter for Barack Obama. Although I consider her a liberal, I'm sure she regards herself as a moderate. To prove it, she makes a point of condemning politicians of both parties as partisan hacks. Actually, with precious few exceptions, I agree with her. However, she likes to say she wishes that those on the Left and those on the Right could put their differences aside and come together for the sake of the country. It sounds so nice and reasonable, just like the bilge coming out of one of Sen. Obama's love fests. The problem, of course, is that when it comes to the issues, there’s no way to work out a compromise.

Obama is currently in the business of trying to be all things to all people. He figures that so long as he avoids commenting on actual issues, Hillary Clinton will eventually remind the country why so many of us couldn't stand her when she was merely the most obnoxious First Lady we'd ever had. But the fact remains that he’s a liberal from a very liberal state and, if elected, would bring a left-wing mind-set to the White House.

As I told my friend, I don't think all liberals are bad people, but I can't say as much about their stand on the issues.

For instance, the liberal position is to nullify the Second Amendment, making it impossible for honest citizens to own guns.

Liberals have made a religion out of the junk science revolving around Global Warming, and made a god out of Al Gore, a man who just happens to own an alternative energy company.

Liberals believe in encouraging America's enemies by announcing timetables for withdrawal from war zones. They also believe in extending Geneva Convention protections to terrorists and Constitutional rights to illegal aliens.

Liberals argue in favor of bilingual education in spite of the fact that studies show that Latinos, so educated, rarely catch up to other foreign-born students who aren’t similarly patronized.

Liberals promote open borders, higher taxes and an end to capital punishment.

Liberals favor affirmative action while simultaneously insisting that they, unlike conservatives, are racially color-blind. But, then, they are also the folks who see nothing wrong with U.S. members of Congress forming a Black Caucus.

Liberals believe that activist Supreme Court judges should be encouraged to ignore the original intentions of the nation’s forefathers so long as the judges are advancing a left-wing agenda.

Liberals see nothing wrong with academic tyranny so long as it's their professors who are ruling the ivy-covered roost.

Liberals have stretched the First Amendment beyond all recognition. What it says in regards to the so-called separation of church and state is this: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." It then goes on to proclaim freedom of the press and speech, and to acknowledge the right of the people to peaceably assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Only certifiably crazy people could interpret that to preclude schools from announcing Christmas vacation or a community from placing a 30-foot Christmas tree on the roof of its city hall.

Liberals believe that freedom of the press extends only to those newspapers, TV networks and radio stations, in lockstep with their beliefs. But let Internet websites, talk radio or Fox News, offer a viable alternative, and liberals start looking for ways to shut down the opposition. Apparently, it's only pornography they hate to see censored.

Liberals insist they're for religious tolerance, women's rights, democracy and intellectual freedom, but more often than not they side with the Arabs, who are for none of those things, and against Israel.

Liberals favor gay marriage, but refuse to say, if homosexuals are allowed to tie the knot, on what basis, if any, the state can deny the same right to consenting adults who just happen to be siblings, father and daughter, mother and son, or Pamela Sue Anderson and the Oakland Raiders.

Liberals want the U.N., not the U.S., to be the world's peacekeeper. But one only has to look at Darfur to see what a fine job the U.N. does of it. And how is it that the same liberals who can't bear the thought of American soldiers risking their lives in Iraq are so anxious to have them sent off to the Sudan?

Liberals are terribly concerned with respecting the rites and traditions of Muslims both here and in Guantanamo, but every holiday season happily attack the rites and traditions of American Christians.

Liberals have double standards where politicial scandals are concerned. Whereas Republicans lop the heads off their own (Tom DeLay, Mark Foley, Dan Crane, Trent Lott, Scooter Libby), even sometimes when the charges hardly warrant it, liberals have no problem giving leadership positions to such scoundrels as Ted Kennedy, William Jefferson, Robert Byrd, John Murtha, Gerry Studds and Barney Frank; or, for that matter, paying homage to the likes of Michael Moore and Jimmy Carter.

But perhaps there's no area in which their hypocrisy is on such blatant display as when it comes to abortions. Aside from the fact that the Supreme Court should never have heard Roe v. Wade in the first place -- abortion not being a Constitutional right -- liberals are simply loopy when it comes to this issue. Whether it's fighting for a woman's right to have a partial-birth abortion or abortions on demand for young teens, you can count on liberals being just plain wrong. It's sort of funny in a way because the same yahoos who insist that 18 and 19 year old men and women are too immature to enlist in the military seem to think 13-year-olds are up to having abortions without parental consultation.

If Barack Obama has a way to convince me that he's for the same things I am, fine. Otherwise, for all his sweet talk about building bridges, he strikes me as just another snake oil salesman trying to charisma his way into the Oval Office with a smile and a shoeshine.

Intolerance in the Twin Cities

By Linda Chavez
Friday, March 30, 2007

Tolerance is a two-way street, as a group of Somali taxi drivers in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., are about to find out. In May, the Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC) in the Twin Cities is set to adopt new rules that will punish cabbies who refuse to haul passengers carrying liquor, even though the drivers claim their Muslim faith forbids them to do so.

The issue has come to a head in the Twin Cities because a popular local imam issued a fatwa last June forbidding Muslim drivers from transporting liquor in their taxis. The prohibition is not widely shared among Muslims elsewhere in the United States, but it has caused quite a stir in Minneapolis and St. Paul, home to the nation's largest Somali community. More than 600 airport taxi drivers in the cities are Somali, most of them Muslim.

According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, about 100 passengers each month are denied transportation for carrying alcohol. But that will change if the MAC goes forward with a plan to suspend for 30 days the license of any driver who refuses customers for reasons other than safety; a second offense could lead the driver to lose his license for two years.

Some Muslim drivers claim the rules single them out for religious persecution -- and they vow to fight the penalties as an infringement of religious liberty. What the drivers seem to be saying is, we expect non-Muslims to respect our beliefs and practices, but we aren't required to tolerate theirs.

The Somali intolerance doesn't just extend to alcohol. Some drivers have also refused to carry blind passengers with guide dogs, on grounds that the Koran says dog saliva is unclean. And some Muslim store cashiers in the Twin Cities have refused to scan pork products, alleging this also violates their faith.

There is a strong tradition in the United States of granting great deference to religious practices and beliefs, but there is also a tradition of not forcing those beliefs on others who do not share them -- which is where the Somalis have run afoul.

Today, these drivers are objecting to contact with customers who have alcohol, pork or dogs with them; tomorrow it may be refusing to allow women with bare heads in their cabs.

How would the Somalis feel if the shoe were on the other foot? For example, what if most Twin Cities taxi drivers belonged to a religious sect that abhorred Islamic practices, insisting that women's heads never be covered? Would the Somalis think it was perfectly fine to allow cab drivers to pass up Muslim couples if the woman was wearing traditional dress with her head covered? I doubt it.

No one has forced the Somalis to become taxi drivers. If their religious views prohibit them from having any contact with people who do not share those views, they shouldn't choose jobs in the public service sector.

Some strict religious sects remain in their own enclaves to avoid what they see as the corrupting influence of non-believers. Others venture out into the world but pick professions that offer the least conflict. You don't expect to see an Orthodox Jew becoming a pig farmer or a devout Mormon becoming a wine taster.

Of course the Somali drivers could have sought a reasonable accommodation for their scruples. They could have courteously explained to passengers that they can't touch alcohol and asked if the passengers would carry the bags containing alcohol themselves. If they did so with genuine civility, I expect most passengers would oblige without resentment.

Instead, they've tried to force the issue and caused a confrontation that can only make adjustment to their adopted country more difficult.

Back to the Future

By John Boehner
Friday, March 30, 2007

The same folks who larded up the emergency war appropriations bill with billions of dollars in pork-barrel projects are at it again. Yesterday House Democrats voted to impose the largest tax hike in American history. Every spring Congress approves a budget blueprint that lays out its spending priorities and revenue assumptions for the next fiscal year and those that will follow. The budget approved by Democrats on Thursday reverses 12 years of Republican tax cuts and pro-growth policies. It lays the groundwork for increasing personal income tax rates on middle-income families, slashing the child tax credit, reinstating the marriage penalty and bringing back the death tax.

We've seen this play before. The last time Americans faced a massive tax hike was in 1993 -- the last time Democrats were in the majority. President Clinton campaigned on middle class tax cuts only to turn around and sign what was then the largest tax hike in history. But Clinton's tax hike pales before this one.

While Democratic friends may view them as just lines on a page, these impending tax hikes are real dollars and cents. Their budget would raise the tax bill for every working American -- 115 million taxpayers will see their taxes go up by an average of $1,795. And if you're married, have children, or own a small business, you're in for extra punishment.

For example, 48 million married couples will face an average tax increase of $2,899. Seventeen million elderly individuals will pay an average tax increase of $2,270; 26 million small business owners will be hit by an average tax increase $3,960. More than five million individuals and families who would have seen their income tax liabilities completely eliminated will now have to pay taxes. And by failing to reform or eliminate the alternative minimum tax (AMT) that's threatening to engulf more and more Americans, the Democrats' budget imposes an immediate $50 billion tax hike on middle class families.

That isn't all. By using a budget gimmick known as a "reserve fund," Democrats propose additional spending for federal programs, promising to pay for it later. How? Given their track record, the most likely scenario is that Democrats would burden the middle class with an additional $115 billion in new taxes.

The president's tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 are a principal reason the economy has enjoyed an uninterrupted string of monthly employment gains. Tax relief under the Republicans has fueled five straight years of overall growth and led to enormous capital investment. By coupling tax hikes with their insatiable appetite for political pork, the Democrats' budget could bring economic growth to an abrupt end.

Yesterday's budget resolution is not the first assault on taxpayers. On the first day of the 110th Congress, Democrats voted against a Republican proposal to ensure a two-thirds vote is necessary to raise the family tax burden. Once that was accomplished, the Democrats went on to impose more than $6.5 billion in new taxes on American energy producers, which will lead to higher gas prices and higher energy bills for consumers. They tied critical funding for America's troops to billions in pork-spending -- including $25 million for spinach farmers and $75 million for peanut storage. And they hid millions of dollars in earmarks in a giant spending bill.

While Democrats approved the raid on taxpayers' wallets, House Republicans have suggested Washington tighten its belt. We put forward a bold budget proposal that balances the federal budget within five years without raising taxes. Drafted by Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), our proposal includes critical protections for Social Security and significant reforms aimed at stemming the coming fiscal tsunami driven by explosive growth in entitlement spending -- something Democrats completely ignore in their budget.

There is no question that we Republicans could have done a much better job while we were in the majority. But last year we made a concerted effort to recommit to fiscal discipline, approving lean spending bills and implementing important reforms aimed at reducing the number of pork-barrel projects. We clearly have more work to do. But the Democrats' budget takes us two steps backward, and middle class families will be hardest hit.

To reach our goal of a balanced budget, we need to exercise fiscal restraint, keep taxes low and promote economic growth. We need to reduce earmarks, pass the line-item veto to crack down on worthless pork, and put an end to the excessive waste, fraud and abuse within the federal government. House Republicans have made this effort a top priority.

There are very real differences on Capitol Hill when it comes to fiscal responsibility. Democrats think we can spend our way out of every problem; Republicans will continue to work to help fiscal sanity triumph over fiscal recklessness.

10 Questions For Al Gore And The Global Warming Crowd

By John Hawkins
Friday, March 30, 2007

I'll be the first to admit that like most conservatives, I'm deeply skeptical of the idea that mankind is causing global warming. Is that because I take payoffs from the energy industry, don't like Al Gore, don't like science, or any of the other silly excuses global warming alarmists come up with to explain why people don't buy their theory?

No.

It's because "the Earth-is-going-to-burn-us-alive" crowd cannot answer the most basic questions about the theory that they haughtily insist is so beyond reproach that there should be no more need for debate. In fact, the most ironic thing about the global warming argument is that Al Gore and Company have declared that it's settled, but they have to use scary stories about cities being flooded a hundred years from now and fake tales about polar bears drowning to sell it. If they're on such rock solid scientific ground, why doesn't the science speak for itself? Does anyone remember Sir Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein trying to get people to buy into their scientific theories by coming up with doomsday scenarios? No, of course not.

Despite that, like most conservatives, I'm open minded and could be convinced that mankind is responsible for causing global warming -- but with science, not scaremongering. If the proponents of the manmade global warming theory can come up with good answers to questions like these, you can expect everyone, including me, to accept their theory:

1) The earth has warmed and cooled numerous times in the past and many of those temperature swings have been much greater than anything we've experienced so far. So, since we human beings don't really understand why those temperature swings occurred, how can we be sure that the very mild warming we've seen so far hasn't been caused by normal changes in our climate?

2) If greenhouse gasses produced by mankind are behind the roughly one degree increase in temperature over the last century, then why did the global temperature go down from roughly 1940 to 1975 even though mankind's production of greenhouse gasses was skyrocketing during that same time period?

3) We can't accurately predict whether it's going to rain or not a week from now. We can't accurately predict what the weather will look like next year (Remember that in 2005, they were predicting we'd be hammered with non-stop hurricanes in 2006 because of global warming. It didn't happen). Since that's the case, how can we possibly have any confidence in predictions of what the weather will be like in 50-100 years?

4) Mars has also been experiencing global warming. Since man can't be a factor on that planet, doesn't it suggest that perhaps a factor other than man, i.e. the sun, is responsible for the warming on both planets?

5) Back in the early seventies, the in-vogue scientific theory was that we were in the midst of global cooling that was caused by man. Now, it turns out that there was nothing much behind that except that the global temperature was getting cooler. So, where did they go wrong back in the early seventies and how do we know that we're not making the same type of mistake today in forecasting global warming?

6) Global warming alarmists will tell you that there is "scientific consensus" that mankind is causing global warming and that only a few scientists disagree. But, there are more than 17,200 scientists who say that, "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate." Since that's the case, how can anyone credibly claim that there is "scientific consensus" on the issue?

7) Even if mankind was responsible for global warming, how would the solutions that are being offered, like Kyoto or carbon credit trading schemes, fix the problem? Big developing countries like India and China are exempt from Kyoto and unlikely to sign on to any deal that hurts their economy, Europe isn't meeting its Kyoto goals, and environmentalists say Kyoto wouldn't fix the problem even if all of its targets are met.

8) In Bill Bryson's book on science, "A Short History Of Nearly Everything," (and yes, Bryson does appear to be a believer in manmade global warming), he notes that,

"For most of its history until fairly recent times, the general pattern was for earth to be hot with no permanent ice anywhere." -- P.427

That would seem to suggest that despite everything we hear about the "hottest temperatures on record," the global temperature is significantly cooler than it has been throughout much of earth's history. Since that's the case, is the small change in global temperature we've seen so far really out of the ordinary or anything to be alarmed about? 9) As Carl Zimmer has noted in Discover, at times in the earth's past, we've had considerably more carbon dioxide in the air that we do today, and yet it's debatable whether the temperature was significantly warmer,

"During the Ordovician Period, 440 million years ago, there seems to have been 16 times as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as there is today--and yet, judging from the gravelly deposits it left behind, there was also an ice sheet near the South Pole that was four-fifths the size of present-day Antarctica. The second exception is even more troubling. The Cretaceous Period, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and CO2 levels were about eight times what they are today, has been one of the most popular case studies for global warming forecasters. And everyone knows that the climate was like during the dinosaurs’ heyday: steamy. Or was it? The latest evidence, reported just this past summer by British researchers, suggests that temperatures in the tropics 95 million years ago were no higher than they are now; and while it was a lot warmer at the poles than it is today, it was still freezing cold."

Doesn't this suggest that there isn't anywhere near as much of a close relationship between greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide and the temperature as many people seem to believe?

10) Skeptics of manmade global warming have often pointed out that the rise in global temperature seems to track much more closely to increased solar activity than it does to an increase in manmade greenhouse gasses. Doesn't that seem to strongly suggest that the sun, not mankind, is more likely to be responsible for global warming?

Bonus Question) If people like Al Gore believe their own hype and think it's necessary for us to cut back our energy consumption, why aren't they practicing what they preach? If a global warming fanatic like Al Gore can’t get by on less than 20 times the amount of energy that a regular family uses, how can we reasonably expect the average family to dramatically cut their energy usage?

Quite frankly, if you buy into manmade global warming, you should have good answers for these questions or, if you don't, admit that your opinion is based more on faith and guesswork than it is on science.

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Year of the Donkey

Are the Democrats rising, or just listing to the left?

BY Pete Du Pont
Wednesday, March 28, 2007 12:01 a.m.

We do not know who will be the next president, but for now we know the worm has turned: The Democratic Party is gaining and the Republican Party is losing control of the government.

In the Bush years, the Republican Congress has spent like liberals. Federal spending is now $23,000 per household, a $7,000 increase in the past five years. There has been an annual 7.7% increase in nondefense discretionary spending, and the number of earmarks is up 57%.

In the past two years there have been four Republican congressional scandals (DeLay, Cunningham, Ney and Foley), and only one Democratic one (William Jefferson). So by last fall the national approval rating of the Republican Congress had fallen to 30%, resulting in a loss of six Senate and 27 House seats on Election Day, costing Republicans control of both Houses of Congress.

President Bush isn't doing much better. His approval rating has hovered in the low 30s since the beginning of the year. Four years of strong economic growth and two good Supreme Court appointments have helped him, but they weren't enough to make up for the four-year Iraq war, the failure of Social Security reform, and the increase in federal spending by 49% since he took office. Now come the political problems of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center matter, the U.S. attorney firings, and Scooter Libby's conviction.

So for the moment the Democrats have a significant political advantage. Last week's Pew Research Center poll showed that 50% of the public identifies or leans Democratic, and only 35% Republican. In 2002 the parties were tied at 43%.


The current GOP vision seems unclear. Republicans are unsure of where they are going and what they wish to accomplish, so their 2008 presidential candidate is likely to set the course for the party. On the other hand, the Democratic Party's vision is firmly established: 1960s liberalism redux in the form of higher taxes, bigger government, greater regulation and immediate withdrawal of our troops from a military effort abroad.

Several issues illustrate the difference between the 1960s superliberals and their semiconservative Republican opponents:

• The war against terrorism. The 2008 election will be the first since 1972 that the central issue of the campaign will be America's participation in a war on foreign soil.

America's current focus is in Iraq, but its challenge is global--in Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan and Iran, among others. A recent CNN poll showed that 21% of Americans want to withdraw from Iraq now, 37% within a year; and 39% want to remain as long as necessary.

All three Republicans believe the war in Iraq is important to defending America against Islamic terrorism around the globe. John McCain has a military background and makes the strongest arguments for fighting the war; Rudolph Giuliani was in charge of New York's dealing with the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center so he understands the challenge. Mitt Romney says success in Iraq "is in America's national security interest."

The three Democratic candidates are modern McGovernites. In 1972 Democratic nominee George McGovern was for complete withdrawal of all troops from Vietnam; today John Edwards and Sen. Barack Obama are for pulling our troops out of Iraq before Election Day, regardless of the consequences. Hillary Clinton's support of the war is fading. She initially refused to repudiate her pro-war vote, but later said that the number of American troops there should be capped--thus no current surge should be allowed--and now says that president Bush must "extricate our country" from Iraq before his presidency ends.

• Economic growth. The good news is the current strength of the U.S. economy. For the past four years--2003 through 2006--annual growth has averaged a strong 6%, with inflation at less than 2.9%, and seven million new jobs have been created. The Bush tax cuts are a principal reason for all this opportunity, and their future existence after their expiration in 2010 is the most important economic question for the 2008 election.

As mayor of New York, Mr. Giuliani cut some two dozen tax rates. He believes the Bush tax cuts should be made permanent instead of expiring in 2010. Mr. Romney agrees with that, and as governor he solved his state's financial problems by spending controls rather than tax increases. Mr. McCain is far less reliable; he opposed the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts and was against the repeal of the death tax. He did vote for the extension of the Bush tax cuts on dividends and capital gains, and now says he too wants to make them permanent.

On the Democratic side of the aisle, Mr. Edwards would eliminate all of the Bush tax cuts and raise taxes on oil companies. Mr. Obama voted against the 2006 dividend and capital gains tax cut extensions and against repealing the death tax. Mrs. Clinton supports higher taxes on oil companies and voted against the tax cuts too. It seems clear that if a Democrat becomes president, taxes will rise substantially.

As for government spending, control of it was once a Republican policy, but it no longer is. Both parties want to spend more, and after the next election they will, the Democrats probably slightly more than the Republicans.

• Free trade. The North American Free Trade Agreement shows how trade matters to our economy. It greatly expanded our trade with Mexico and Canada, more than doubling our exports and creating more than one million new American jobs.

But the Democratic Party is protectionist. Just a week after the last election, a majority of House Democrats voted against a Vietnam trade agreement. The new House has 16 more antitrade Democratic members than it used to, and five of the six new Democratic Senators are protectionists. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama voted against the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Mr. Edwards says, "Congress should make it clear to the president that it will override any agreement that does not protect American jobs and American interests."

On the Republican side Mr. McCain has voted for all the recent free trade agreements, and Mr. Romney says protectionism would make America "a second-tier economy" with a "second-class standard of living."

• Energy. President Bush wants to end America's addiction to and dependence on foreign oil, a good idea that can be accomplished in many ways: build more nuclear power plants; begin drilling offshore on the Outer Continental Shelf and Alaska, where there is enough oil to replace all foreign oil imports for 25 years and enough natural gas to supply America's needs for 19 years.

But Democrats are opposed to all of these opportunities; 155 of 195 House Democrats voted last June to block OCS drilling. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama are against any Alaskan ANWR drilling, and she is opposed to the construction of new nuclear power plants and any offshore drilling. Mr. Obama opposes lifting the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff on imported ethanol from Brazil--which would reduce our dependency of foreign oil--and is opposed to Gulf of Mexico oil drilling because it focuses on increasing supply rather than reducing demand. Mr. Edwards does not want to do anything that would "weaken the OCS moratorium on new drilling off our coasts."

On the Republican side, Mr. McCain voted against ANWR, but he and Mr. Romney support offshore drilling and all three candidates are for building more nuclear power plants.

• Global warming. Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" has moved global warming to the top of the political agenda, and all the candidates with the exception of Mr. Romney seem to have signed on to federal regulation of factory emissions. Mrs. Clinton is a global warming regulation advocate, and although the global climate warmed just one degree in the last century, Mr. Edwards says that "global warming is an emergency" and "a crisis today" that will no doubt require new taxes to do something about it.

Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama have sponsored a bill that would over time reduce emissions to one-third of 2000 levels, which unless other nations do the same would have a devastating impact on America's jobs and economy. Mr. Giuliani believes that the debate on global warming is "almost unnecessary" since "the overwhelming number of scientists" believe there is a significant human cause."

Only Mr. Romney sees the challenge: "Kyoto-style sweeping mandates, imposed unilaterally in the United States, would kill jobs, depress growth and shift manufacturing to the dirtiest developing nations." And "Republicans should never abandon pro-growth conservative principles in an effort to embrace the ideas of Al Gore. Instead of sweeping mandates, we must use America's power of innovation to develop alternative sources of energy and new technologies that use energy more efficiently."


There are many more clues to the Democratic Party's revitalized '60s liberalism. Mrs. Clinton has told us that "we are going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good," which means bigger government and fewer individual choices. She has also pledged to do in her administration what she tried to do in her husband's: "When I am president, we will have universal health care coverage in our country."

The Democratic Party does have some advantage at the moment, but if their modern McGovernism extends beyond the war to the '60s liberalism of higher taxes and bigger government and greater regulation, the president taking office in January of 2009 may just turn out to be a Republican.

Global Warming Heresy

By Walter E. Williams
Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Most climatologists agree that the earth's temperature has increased about a degree over the last century. The debate is how much of it is due to mankind's activity. Britain's Channel 4 television has just produced "The Great Global Warming Swindle," a documentary that devastates most of the claims made by the environmentalist movement. The scientists interviewed include top climatologists from MIT and other prestigious universities around the world. The documentary hasn't aired in the U.S., but it's available on the Internet.

Among the many findings that dispute environmentalists' claims are: Manmade carbon dioxide emissions are roughly 5 percent of the total; the rest are from natural sources such as volcanoes, dying vegetation and animals. Annually, volcanoes alone produce more carbon dioxide than all of mankind's activities. Oceans are responsible for most greenhouse gases. Contrary to environmentalists' claims, the higher the Earth's temperature, the higher the carbon dioxide levels. In other words, carbon dioxide levels are a product of climate change. Some of the documentary's scientists argue that the greatest influence on the Earth's temperature is our sun's sunspot activity. The bottom line is, the bulk of scientific evidence shows that what we've been told by environmentalists is pure bunk.

Throughout the Earth's billions of years there have been countless periods of global warming and cooling. In fact, in the year 1,000 A.D., a time when there were no SUVs, the Earth's climate was much warmer than it is now. Most of this century's warming occurred before 1940. For several decades after WWII, when there was massive worldwide industrialization, there was cooling.

There's a much more important issue that poses an even greater danger to mankind. That's the effort by environmentalists to suppress disagreement with their view. According to a March 11 article in London's Sunday Telegraph, Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, has received five death threats since he started questioning whether man was affecting climate change. Richard Lindzen, professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, said, "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves labeled as industry stooges." Nigel Calder, a former editor of New Scientist, said, "Governments are trying to achieve unanimity by stifling any scientist who disagrees. Einstein could not have got funding under the present system."

Suppressing dissent is nothing new. Italian cosmologist Giordano Bruno taught that stars were at different distances from each other surrounded by limitless territory. He was imprisoned in 1592, and eight years later he was tried as a heretic and burned at the stake. Because he disagreed that the Earth was the center of the universe, Galileo was ordered to stand trial on suspicion of heresy in 1633. Under the threat of torture, he recanted and was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.

Today's version of yesteryear's inquisitors include people like the Weather Channel's Dr. Heidi Cullen, who advocates that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) strip their seal of approval from any TV weatherman expressing skepticism about the predictions of manmade global warming. Columnist Dave Roberts, in his Sept. 19, 2006, online publication, said, "When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards -- some sort of climate Nuremberg."

There are literally billions of taxpayer dollars being handed out to global warming alarmists, not to mention their dream of controlling our lives. Their agenda is threatened by dissent. They have the politician's ear; not we, who will suffer if they have their way.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

The Gitmo Blues

Closing Guantanamo would hurt the war effort, and wouldn't appease the critics anyway.

BY David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey
Tuesday, March 27, 2007 12:01 a.m.

Winning a war is a difficult business under the best of circumstances. In democratic polities, the prospects for victory dim whenever there is strong domestic opposition, as there is today with respect to the handling of both Iraq and the broader war on terror. But far from merely challenging a particular military strategy or a discrete set of combat-related decisions, many critics deny that the United States is fighting a war at all. Terrorism, they say, is a manageable problem that modern American society must learn to accept as the price of its pluralistic institutions and role as a global super-power.

Nothing illustrates this better than the continuing challenges to Guantanamo Bay. Even European officials who have visited the American base acknowledge conditions there--including housing, food, medical care and recreation--are better than in most civilian penitentiaries around the world. What most critics really object to is the entire "laws of war paradigm" that has been employed since 9/11 by the Bush administration.

Some claim, incorrectly but passionately, that the U.S. cannot be at war with a non-state like al Qaeda, and that the classification of al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners as "unlawful enemy combatants" violates the Geneva Conventions. Others care less about the legal questions, but assert that Guantanamo and the "war on terror" have done fundamental damage to the U.S. diplomatic position around the world--sullying its reputation, straining its alliances and undercutting its leadership of the international community. Notably, the prescription of both the policy and law-driven challengers is to close Guantanamo, and to abandon the "war on terror" in favor of an internationally cooperative law-enforcement approach.

The critics rarely acknowledge that using the U.S. criminal justice system would present numerous problems. The most obvious: It would be virtually impossible to prosecute many al Qaeda detainees captured overseas by the U.S. and its allies. This is not because, as alleged by the various human rights organizations, they have been harshly interrogated and any evidence obtained in the process would be inadmissible. The more fundamental problem is the hyper-technical nature of evidentiary and other rules in America's 21st century justice system. Convicting people based upon physical evidence gathered on overseas battlefields, or relying on testimony of soldiers and intelligence agents who at the time of capture were operating in a stressful combat environment, would be exceedingly difficult. The likely result of trying captured al Qaeda members under criminal justice rules is that many of them would go free and return to the fight.


These costs aside, the benefits of adopting the law-enforcement model would be ephemeral at best. There is no doubt that the war on terror in general, and Guantanamo in particular, have cost the U.S. diplomatically. Al Qaeda and its supporters have won--at least for the time-being--this propaganda point. Even some high-level American officials have, according to a recent report in the New York Times, argued that the base should be closed and the detainees transferred to the U.S.

But whatever the immediate diplomatic benefit that might be gained by adopting this suggestion, it is naïve to imagine that closing the Guantanamo detention facilities, and even agreeing to treat captured jihadists as ordinary criminal defendants, would end international criticism of U.S. efforts to defend itself.

After all, many critics' appreciation for the American civilian judicial system is both new and very much conditional. Long before the war on terror, Europe already was refusing to send criminal suspects to the U.S. if there was any chance that the death penalty would be inflicted. So, in order to obtain the transfer or extradition of terror suspects from these states, the U.S. would have to agree not only that they would be processed through the normal criminal system--accepting the inevitable intelligence cost of presenting all of the evidence against them in open court--it would also have to agree to eschew the death penalty. And, once that point is won, the question immediately arises whether lifetime imprisonment is itself consistent with Europe's evolving human rights norms.

As for leading non-governmental organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, they have long promoted an agenda that requires the subjection of national justice systems to international institutions such as the International Criminal Court. (It was, in fact, originally proposed as a counter-terrorism criminal court.) The claims of bias and lack of independence such groups have leveled against American military commissions can equally be flung at American civilian courts. That was done in the case of the alleged 20th 9/11 hijacker, Zacharias Moussaoui, who was tried in the Eastern District of Virginia. The critics argue that, although federal judges serve for life, they are all employees of the federal government and have taken an oath of allegiance to the U.S. Constitution. The juries that would ultimately determine jihadists' fates are composed of U.S. citizens, the very men and women who are the terrorists prime and preferred targets. Some "human rights" activists will accept nothing less than internationally supervised tribunals, in which America and its enemies can be equally tried and punished for their alleged "offenses."


In short, closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facilities will not end U.S. diplomatic troubles. The U.S. has operated fully in accord with the laws of war, and although there have been mistakes and abuses, claims that it has systematically flouted the rules are based in an insupportable view of what international law actually requires and permits. The U.S. is entitled to be judged based on international law as it is, not as the critics would like it to be.

The critics are correct that the fight against jihadism cannot be won by military means alone. However, the war paradigm is an essential element. The U.S. may be able to punish some captured jihadists as ordinary criminals, but only the laws of armed conflict give it the necessary legal means to reach them before they can reach the American people. For decades, a strong U.S. international posture was justified back home, based on the premise that we would rather fight "them" over there, than on the Jersey beaches. That is as true today as in past conflicts.

New Form of Evil Is Why America Has Not Won Iraq War

By Dennis Prager
Tuesday, March 27, 2007

I never thought we could see a new form of evil. After the gas chambers of the Holocaust, the tens of millions murdered in the Gulag, the forced starvation in the Ukraine, the hideous medical experiments on people by the Germans and the Japanese in World War II, the torture chambers in all police states, I had actually believed that no new forms of evil existed.

I was wrong.

Of course, for sheer cruelty, one cannot outdo the Nazis; no depiction of hell ever matched the reality of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. But while Islamists and Baathists in Iraq have not devised new forms of torture -- there probably are no new ways left -- they have devised a new form of evil: murdering, maiming and torturing as many innocents among their own people as possible.

I do not know of an analogous form of evil. When the Allies conquered Nazi Germany, disaffected Nazis did not go around murdering and cutting off the heads of fellow Germans in order to make the Allies leave. Nor did disaffected Japanese blow up Japanese students so as to make the American occupation of Japan untenable.

Here is the latest example of this new form of evil as reported by the Associated Press: "Maj. Gen. Michael Barbero, deputy director for regional operations on the Joint Staff, said . . . the vehicle used in the attack [on Iraqi civilians] was waved through a U.S. military checkpoint because two children were visible in the back seat. He said this was the first reported use of children in a car bombing in Baghdad. 'Children in the back seat lowered suspicion, (so) we let it move through, they parked the vehicle, the adults run out and detonate it with the children in the back,' Barbero told reporters in Washington."

These same "insurgents" routinely blow up children who line up to receive candy from U.S. troops. Likewise, college students are targeted for death, as are men lining up to apply for civilian jobs, men and women attending mosques, physicians in hospitals, and so on. The more innocent the Iraqi, the more likely he or she is to be targeted for murder.

I submit that there was no way to anticipate this. And no one did. This includes all those who predicted a civil war in Iraq between Shiites and Sunnis. I include myself among those who predicted savagery in Iraq. On a number of occasions prior to our invasion of Iraq, I recounted to my radio listeners this chilling story:

As a young man, in 1974, I was riding on a bus traveling from Beirut to Damascus. The man I sat next to was an English-speaking Iraqi whom I asked at one point in our conversation, "Can you describe your nation in a sentence?" "No problem," he immediately answered. "We Iraqis are the most barbaric people in the world."

I obviously never forgot that man's words, and therefore anticipated great cruelties in Iraq. But neither I nor anyone who predicted a civil war had so much as a premonition of this unprecedented mass murder of the men, women and children among one's own people as a military tactic to defeat an external enemy.

It is, therefore, unfair to blame the Bush administration for not anticipating such a determined "insurgency." Without the mass murder of fellow Iraqis, there would hardly be any "insurgency." The combination of suicide terrorists and a theology of death has created an unprecedented form of "resistance" to an occupier: "We will murder as many men, women and children as we can until you leave." Nor is this a matter of Sunnis murdering Shiites and vice versa: college students, women shopping at a Baghdad market and hospital workers all belong to both groups. Truck bombs cannot distinguish among tribes or religious affiliations.

If America had to fight an insurgency directed solely against us and coalition forces -- even including suicide bombers -- we would surely have succeeded. No one, right, left or center, could imagine a group of people so evil, so devoid of the most elementary and universal concepts of morality, that they would target their own people, especially the most vulnerable, for murder.

That is why we have not yet prevailed in Iraq. Even without all the mistakes made by the Bush administration -- and what political or military leadership has not made many errors in prosecuting a war? -- it could not have foreseen this new form of evil we are witnessing in Iraq.

That is why we have not won.

There are respectable arguments to be made against America's initially going into Iraq. But intellectually honest opponents of the war have to acknowledge that no one could anticipate an "insurgency" that included people leaving children in a car and then blowing them up.

Liberal Myths about Radical Islam

By Dinesh D'Souza
Monday, March 26, 2007

As the Pelosi Democrats attempt to steer the debate on Iraq and the war on terror away from President Bush's approach, it is useful to examine the premises behind the liberal Democratic understanding of the war on terror. So far the Democrats have been successful in faulting the president's admittedly-flawed approach. But there is no advantage in trading one bad model for another. Here, then, is my critique of some of the major elements of the liberal explanation for "why they hate us."

They're very upset at us for the Crusades: James Carroll’s recent book Crusade, portrays the Crusades as a horrific act of Western aggression that still shapes the military thinking of America's leaders and inspires outrage in the Muslim world.

Is it reasonable to think that Muslims today are genuinely outraged about events that occurred a thousand years ago? Let us remember that before the rise of Islam, the region we call the Middle East was predominantly Christian. Inspired by Islam's call to jihad, Muhammad's armies conquered Jerusalem and the entire Middle East, then pushed south into Africa, East into Asia, and north into Europe.

Rallied by the Pope and the ruling dynasties of Europe, the Christians attempted in the eleventh century to recover the heartland of Christianity and to repel the irredentist forces of Islam. The Crusades were important to Europe because they represented a fight to recover Christianity's holiest sites and also because they were part of a battle for the survival of Europe.

By contrast, the Crusades have never been important to the Muslim world. Muslims were already in control of their own holy places in Mecca and Medina. Not once did the Crusaders threaten the heartland of Islam. From the point of view of Muslim historians, those battles were seen as minor disruptions on the periphery of the Islamic empire.

In summary, the Crusades were a belated, clumsy, and defensive reaction against a much longer, more relentless, and more successful Muslim assault against Christendom. The striking aspect of the liberal critique is that it stresses the horrors of the Crusades while virtually ignoring the Islamic jihad to which the Crusades were a response. Even if liberals detest the Crusades, however, there is no good reason for many of today's Muslims to care about them, and there is no evidence that they think about the subject at all.

They're angry about colonialism: Many on the cultural left, like the late Edward Said, attribute Muslim rage to the still-fresh wounds of Western conquest and subjugation.

But America—the focal point of the anger of radical Muslims—has virtually no history of colonialism in the Middle East. If the Filipinos or American Indians were launching suicide bombers in New York, their actions could perhaps be attributed to a reaction against colonial subjugation. But until the Bush administration ordered the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11, America had never occupied a Muslim country. This was not for lack of opportunity. After World War II, America could quite easy have colonized the entire Middle East, but never even considered doing so.

America's record is one of opposing British and French colonial initiatives, and of encouraging the European colonial powers to withdraw from the Middle East. So Muslim hostility to America has to be explained by factors other than colonial occupation in the Middle East, since prior to 9/11 America has no record of colonial occupation in the Middle East.

They're angry because American actions have killed so many Muslims: Actually America has actively fought on the side of Muslims in several recent conflicts. During the 1970s the United States supported the Afghan mujahedin and their Arab allies in driving out the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. In 1991 the United States assembled an international coalition of countries, including many Muslim countries, in order to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and restore the sovereignty of that small Muslim country. Later in the decade, President Clinton ordered American bombings and intervention to save Muslim lives in Bosnia and Kosovo.

True, many Muslims hold America accountable for Israel’s bulldozing of Palestinian homes and Israeli shooting of stone-throwing Palestinian youths. And Muslims frequently deplore the civilian lives lost in the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. These deaths, however, are small in number compared with the devastation that other invading armies, including Muslim armies, have wrought through the centuries right down to the present day.

More recent Muslim wars, such as the Iran-Iraq war, have also produced unbelievable horrors and casualty lists. Over the eight-year period of the Iran-Iraq war, for instance, between 500,000 and 1 million Muslims were killed. Islamic radicals know all this, which is why one cannot find in their literature the kind of indignation over America's killing of Muslim civilians that one routinely finds in liberal magazines, radio shows and websites.

My conclusion is that the main reasons leading liberals give to explain the antagonism of the Islamic radicals toward the United States and the West are false. Consequently we should be skeptical of liberal solutions such blocking additional troops, or squeezing funding, or calling for a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq. These "solutions" reflect muddled thinking about radical Islam, and they are likely to produce results far worse than the situation as it is now.

Monday, March 26, 2007

Moral Equivalence Revived

By Suzanne Fields
Monday, March 26, 2007

Not so long ago, moral equivalence was the name of the favorite game in salons of the intellectual elites. They couldn't see the virtues of Western civilization. "Western civ," in fact, became a sneer. Ronald Reagan, who recognized an evil empire when he saw one, ended all that. He knew that men and women trapped behind the Iron Curtain wanted freedom just like us.

When I visited newspaper editors in Moscow during "glasnost," they told me how American conservatives like the Gipper gave them hope that freedom was possible for them, too. On a later visit, after the Berlin wall came down and the Soviet empire with it, it was the Reagan Revolution in America -- so they told me -- that clarified the differences between the two systems. So successful was the American challenge to the Soviet Union that the Committee for the Free World, founded to nurture that challenge and to promote democracy behind that Iron Curtain, closed down because the job was done.

But if the dream had not died, neither has the nightmare. The intellectual elites of the left, both here and in Britain and Europe, are resuscitating moral equivalence, this time promoting the idea that the values of the West are no better than the nostrums of the Islamists. Bernard Lewis, the distinguished scholar of the history of the Middle East, doesn't like the terms "left" and "right," but he applies them to Europeans of the left who encourage radical Muslims who spout anti-American slogans and the Europeans on the right who encourage Muslims who vow to destroy the Jews: "In Europe, their hatreds outweigh their loyalties."

Bruce Bawer makes this point in his book, "While Europe Slept: How Radicalism Is Destroying the West from Within." One of the most disgraceful developments of our time, he writes, "is that many Western intellectuals who pride themselves on being liberals have effectively aligned themselves with an outrageously illiberal movement that rejects equal rights for women, that believes gays and Jews should be executed, that supports the cold-blooded murder of one's own children in the name of honor." Young Europeans who wear Che Guevara T-shirts and Palestinian scarves, to identify with a "glamorous" revolution that exists only in their naive imaginations, are dangerously out of touch with the authentic peril in the world.

When his book was nominated for the prestigious National Book Critics Circle award, an angry author accused him of "Islamophobia." Mr. Bawer does not suffer these fools. He draws parallels with Germany of the '30s, observing that the European elites are experiencing "a Weimar moment," a refusal to recognize the threat in their midst. Blaming America and Israel is more convenient. Safer, too. Neither Christian nor Jew is likely to go after them with a beheading knife.

Andrew Roberts looks for a parallel in the decay of the Roman Empire, whose destruction was midwifed more by "the vociferous critics within their own society" than by "the declared enemies without." In "A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900," he cites Marxists who blame Western imperialism, not Muslim extremists, and who teach Western history as "crimes against humanity," promoting multiculturalism to retard assimilation. The essence of the new moral equivalence was captured in a remark by one Muslim scholar to Bernard Lewis. "The Ottoman Empire allowed Christians to practice monogamy," he said, "why won't the West allow Muslims to practice polygamy?"

Tony Blair, who endures the increasing hatred of certain Englishmen for his resistance to jihad, identifies what's at stake. "The struggle in our world today therefore is not just about security, it is a struggle about values and about modernity -- whether to be at ease with it or rage at it," he told the Los Angeles World Affairs Council last year. "To win, we have to win the battle of values, as much as arms." Like a lot of the rest of us, he's incredulous that so much Western opinion blames the West for terrorism, for perpetuating poverty. If poverty is really a concern of the terrorists, where are the fanatics championing economic development? Terrorism, he says, is about preventing oppressive societies from becoming democracies, about erasing distinctions between church and state.

Establishing "dialogue" between the West and moderate Islam is a good thing to do, but talk cannot succeed with extremists who start the conversation with murder. Theo van Gogh's death at the hands of an Islamist radical in Amsterdam is a dramatic metaphor for the impossibility of reasoning with a terrorist. Just before he died on a darkened street, a witness heard him plead with his assailant. "Don't do it! Don't do it!" he cried. "Surely we can talk about this."

Gore's Faith Is Bad Science

By Michael Barone
Monday, March 26, 2007

Al Gore likes to present himself as a tribune of science, warning the world of imminent danger. But he is more like an Old Testament prophet, calling on us to bewail our wrongful conduct and to go and sin no more.

He starts off with the science. The world's climate, he reports, is getting warmer. This accurate report is, however, not set in historic context. World climate has grown warmer and cooler at various times in history. Climate change is not some unique historic event. It is the way the world works.

Not this time, Gore says. What's different is that climate change is being driven by human activity -- to wit, increasing carbon dioxide emissions. Which means, he says, that we have to sharply reduce those emissions. But what the scientists tell us is that some proportion of climate change is caused by human activity and some proportion by natural causes -- and that they can only estimate what those proportions are. The estimates they have produced have varied sharply. The climate change models that have been developed don't account for events of the recent past, much less predict with precision events in the future.

To which the prophet replies, with religious intensity, that all debate should be over. Those scientists with inconvenient views should be defunded and silenced. We should replace scientific inquiry with faith. We should have faith that climate change -- "global warming" -- is caused primarily by human activity. And we should have faith that the effects will be catastrophic, with rising oceans flooding great cities and pleasant plains and forests broiled by a searing sun.

Even The New York Times bridles at this. After Gore won the Academy Award for his film on climate change, the Times printed an article in which respected scientists -- not Republicans, not on oil company payrolls -- charged that Gore has vastly exaggerated the likelihood of catastrophic effects.

When you read the fine print of even the scientific reports that Gore likes to cite, you find the same thing. Gore foresees a 20-foot rise in sea level -- 240 inches. The IPCC panel report foresees a maximum of 23 inches. Gore says that "our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this." Geologist Don Easterbrook says there have been shifts up to "20 times greater than the warming in the past century."

Science says that we should learn more about possible bad effects of climate change and calculate rationally how we can mitigate them. As the economic journalist Robert Samuelson points out, there is little that we can feasibly do in the short term to reduce carbon emissions, though over the long term we may be able to develop substitutes for carbon fuels.

As the environmentalist Bjorn Lomberg points out, the Kyoto Treaty that Gore helped to write (but which the Clinton administration never asked the Senate to ratify) would produce very little reduction in climate change at very high cost.

But religious prophets are not concerned about costs. Gore calls for an immediate cessation of new carbon-burning facilities. In other words, stop economic growth. But stopping economic growth in the developing world means consigning millions to miserable poverty. And we know what stopping economic growth in the developed world can mean.

Read the history of the 1930s: fascism, communism, world war. There are worse things than a rise of 1 or 2 degrees Centigrade.

The natural human yearning for spirituality has produced in many people educated in secular-minded universities and enveloped in an atmosphere of contempt for traditional religion a faith that we vulgar human beings have a sacred obligation not to inflict damage on Mother Earth. But science tells us that the Earth and its climate have been constantly changing.

Gore and his followers seem to assume that the ideal climate was the one they got used to when they were growing up. When temperatures dropped in the 1970s, there were warnings of an impending ice age. When they rose in the 1990s, there were predictions of disastrous global warming. This is just another example of the solipsism of the baby boom generation, the pampered and much-praised age cohort that believes the world revolves around them and that all past history has become irrelevant.

We're told in effect that the climate of the late 1950s and early 1960s was, of all those that have ever existed, the best of all possible climates. Not by science. But as a matter of faith.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Europe, Old and New

The good, the bad and the--well, the French.

Wall Street Journal
Saturday, March 24, 2007 12:01 a.m.

Preparations for the European Union's big 50th birthday party this weekend in Berlin quickly degenerated into a petty brawl over the wording of the declaration for the occasion. Some countries wanted to push the bloc's stillborn constitution, others the euro, still others Christianity. What a fitting tribute to the EU's achievement.

We're not kidding. Such intramural trench warfare, be it over joint statements or milk quotas, is blessedly far removed from the wars that characterized the five decades before the EU's birth. Whatever its shortcomings, the EU can justly claim credit for helping bring peace and prosperity to the Continent's 490 million citizens.

The EU's seeds were planted in 1950 by the Franco-German statesman Robert Schuman. His proposal for pooling strategic resources--coal and steel--among a core of European countries would, in his words, "make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not only unthinkable but materially impossible." The Schuman Declaration led to the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952, which in turn paved the way for the 1957 Treaty of Rome that created a European Community, later christened "Union."

Though it won't be widely noted in Berlin this weekend, the Union would not exist without the U.S., which gave its strong backing from day one. The Marshall Plan assisted the Continent's postwar economic recovery, and an American military umbrella has since kept it safe. Whatever the trade or foreign policy disagreements, Washington hasn't wavered in its support for a stable, rich Europe.

This success has sometimes gone to European heads. Some in Brussels truly believe they have created a soft-power utopia that can talk its way out of any trouble, such as a nuclear Iran or Islamic terrorism. In reality, its peace has always depended on the will to spend blood and treasure, often American. Others, especially the French, imagine Europe as a check on the U.S. "hyperpower." Both delusions have helped keep the EU a small fry in foreign affairs. To become a more mature player, Europeans will have to pull their weight in the likes of NATO.

Fortunately, the EU's power of attraction has been effective closer to home. What begun as a club of six has grown to 27. From Greece, Spain and Portugal in the 1980s to the new members from the old Warsaw Pact, the EU has smoothed the path from authoritarianism to free-market democracy.


The bloc's economic record is mixed. This is still a Europe of wasteful farm subsidies, low growth and high unemployment, with rising protectionism and a regulatory zeal unmatched anywhere in the free world. Yet the bad ideas tend to come from bad leaders. When the Brussels bureaucracy and dreams of creating a super-state are checked by a vigilant media and national governments, the Europe construct itself can be market friendly. In the past two decades, the EU on balance has done more to open the door to greater competition than provide a back door, as Margaret Thatcher feared, for welfare policies.

Why? Most crucially, the 1957 Treaty of Rome was inspired by free-market principles. The EU is the world's largest zone for the free movement of goods, capital and people. When individual countries have tried to blunt those freedoms, Brussels has often fought back with vigor. The euro, the world's most successful currency union, has lowered interest rates, promoted internal trade by removing exchange-rate risks and--especially in the Latin countries--made it impossible for governments to inflate their way out of trouble.

Europe's diversity and growing size are also strengths. For each dysfunctional Italy, there's a booming Britain or Estonia or Denmark showing how market-friendly policies pay dividends. In a wider Europe, good ideas squeeze out the bad. The Eastern Europeans have popularized low and flat taxes. Boom-town London is home to hundreds of thousands of Poles and Frenchmen, whose departure is an electoral issue in their native countries, where politicians are realizing they must compete to keep their brightest at home.

On the edges of the Continent, a half-circle running from Spain to Ireland to Finland and down to Eastern Europe is a zone of strong economic growth. In the middle, the big powers of France, Italy and Germany cry out for deeper overhauls. As long as those economies are weak, voters will be anxious about global competition and, in turn, skeptical about opening Europe further. This explains the current unease about further EU enlargement, particularly to Turkey, and the backlash against freeing trade in services and cross-border takeovers.

The Continent's leaders could do worse than use their Berlin party this weekend to send the message that Europe's traditional openness--to trade, people, new countries--is the cornerstone of a half-century of success. These first principles from 50 years ago are still worth fighting for.