Time to Leave Afghanistan

By Alan Caruba

The Greek philosopher Plato said, “Only the dead know the end of war.” I doubt that in the five thousand years of what we call civilization there has ever been a day when war has not been taking place somewhere on the planet. All wars, in one fashion or another, however, have to come to an end.

The war in Afghanistan has degraded into a distraction from the nation’s desperately deteriorating financial situation. Even worse, it is part of that problem. On January 30, 2009, Bill Bonnor, best known for his newsletter, Dead Reckoning, wrote the following:

“’Bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy’, was what he (Osama bin laden) was up to, he said in a videotape. He even did the math. ‘Every dollar spent by al-Qaeda in attacking the United States has cost Washington $1 million in economic fallout and military spending’, said the report.

“’We, alongside the mujahideen, bled Russian for ten years, [in Afghanistan] until it went bankrupt…So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.’”

Can anyone deny that bin Laden was right? Can anyone deny that the U.S. under Presidents Bush and Obama has now expended billions in the name of bringing democracy to people who should be responsible for overthrowing their own despots? There was, after all, a time when the U.S. was an ally of bin Laden and even of Saddam Hussein!

On May 9, Rasmussen Reports noted that 56% of those surveyed favored bringing U.S. troops home from Afghanistan within a year. What do the people know that all the genius strategists in the State Department and Pentagon do not? They know these wars, Iraq included, are a distraction from our real problems.

I do not know how many times over the years since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq I have written that we should withdraw our troops. I have noted how extended military occupations and expeditions have historically always drained and destroyed empires from the Roman to the British and now the present day Pax Americana.

America is now over $14 trillion in debt and yet we keep sending billions to nations like Pakistan and to the United Nations, most of whom must think us stupid beyond belief.

The exception to this was the long Cold War that America fought against the former Soviet Union from the end of World War Two until the collapse of the Berlin Wall and eventual collapse of that Communist nation in 1991. That collapse, however, was facilitated by the decision of the former Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan!

Over the course of the forty-six years the Cold War ground on, the U.S. fought hot wars in Korea and Vietnam. We spent what we had to for a powerful military deterrent. From Truman to Bush41 Presidents remained firm in their determination to resist the Soviet Union.

The war with Islam is different. The asymmetrical war waged against America, Israel, and the West began in earnest after Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979 and continued through a succession of al Qaeda attacks on U.S. Marines in Beirut, U.S. embassies, the USS Cole, and ultimately 9/11. Israel has had to wage a war of self defense since its first day 63 years ago. Most recently, it resisted Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

Islam has been around since the seventh century A.D. Its initial success saw it sweep across vast regions of the Middle East, Africa, India, up into Spain and to the gates of Europe. The inherent failure of Islam has been its resistance to all Western values that confirm the dignity of the individual, representative government, and the advances of science, literature, and the arts.

Our global opponents, Russia and China among others, are pleased that America must drain its treasury and expend the blood of its children to hold the line against Islam, but it is a short-sighted strategic error because they will find themselves on the frontlines of the war that we have been waging with massive troop deployments. Consider how much more effective drones and special operations have been.

Europe has reluctantly discovered the enemy in their midst. The flood of Muslims it invited as workers because of its failure to ensure a sufficient native population is causing Europeans to grasp at measures to either placate the Muslim population or outlaw some of its practices. The fear is palpable and is why some now refer to it as Eurabia.

NATO nations, rarely credited, have been by our side throughout the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. They are now charged with determining the outcome of the insurgency in Libya, but Britain is making plans for an early withdrawal from Afghanistan for the same reasons outlined above.

It is a very old war. In 732 A.D., Muslims were defeated at Poitiers, France, halting their expansion. In 1492, Christians recaptured Grenada, the last Muslim stronghold in Europe. In 1683 A.D. Muslims were defeated near Vienna. Europe was safe, but that was then and this is now.

It is reason enough for America and European nations to put their financial houses to avoid a collapse that will leave us vulnerable to the most terrible scourge of mankind.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Armed Forces Day

By Alan Caruba

Saturday, May 21, is Armed Forces Day. Unless you are on active duty, a military family member, or a veteran, I suspect this is one national holiday that slips under the radar of most Americans.

I am a veteran, U.S. Army, Second Infantry Division, Second Engineer Battalion, formerly based in Fort Benning, Georgia. If you have ever served in the military, it is highly unlikely you will ever forget the unit in which you spent the most time. Military life indelibly imprints itself on all who have served.

Like my generation and earlier ones, I was conscripted for service by what was called the “Draft”. It ended in 1973, but young men between 18 and 25 must still register for Selective Service in the event a really big war breaks out. I am sure the voluntary military is sufficient, but it worries me that we are taking a great toll on the young men and women in combat zones serving repeated tours of duty.

To my good fortune, I never saw combat, but I look back on the experience fondly because it taught any number of useful lessons. For many it was their first experience with the need to practice a measure of self-discipline. Orders are issued. You obey them. It is the nature of the military that it takes in boys and teaches them to be men.

You have no doubt noticed I have written that it “teaches them to be men.” I do not much care for the creeping feminization of our military. I don’t much like the inclusion of women in the military except in an ancillary capacity exclusive of battle. I understand times have changed, but that doesn’t mean that human nature has.

I don’t believe the military is a place for homosexuals. Bill Clinton tried to integrate homosexuals in the military and was met with such resistance from “the brass” that he saddled it with the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, an invitation to hypocrisy. Recently there was a report that Navy chaplains had been told to get ready to perform same-sex marriages, but that idiotic idea was swiftly quashed, presumably in the name of morality and common sense.

If I sound like some cranky old man nostalgic for “the old days”, I would remind you that, for me, the old days were the Cold War that included some hot wars fought in Korea and Vietnam. From the days of General MacArthur onward, American presidents and Congress had been told not to fight a war in the Far East.

Likewise, every empire that proposed to fight a war in Afghanistan, from Alexander the Great to the former Soviet Union, got their butts kicked, but in 2001, instead of a short demonstration of why attacking the American homeland is a very bad idea, we turned that operation in a decade of wasted money, material, and personnel.

“Regime change” anywhere should be short and brutal. Leave it to the survivors to form a new government. Iraq turned into a quagmire because we invaded with too few troops to police the nation and because L. Paul Bremer, the presidential envoy, disbanded the Iraqi army, instantly rendering thousands of men unemployed and very unhappy about it. Billions of dollars and thousands of American lives later, we are still in Iraq. Expecting Arabs to behave in a rational fashion is a fool's errand.

Ask anyone in the military, particularly in the officer class, and you will discover that no one likes war less than those who must fight it for the politicians and too many ungrateful civilians at home.

We no longer fight huge land wars like those of World War Two. The conflict in Korea ended in a stalemate and a truce that exists to this day. At the time, no one wanted to go to war with Red China and that was probably the right judgment. Vietnam was essentially a lost war by the French, a colonial power, followed by a civil war between north and south. Inserting ourselves into any civil war is unwise. Vietnam became a meat grinder for more than 53,000 young men who came home in coffins.

On a recent edition of “Sixty Minutes”, outgoing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates described his job as “leading a department that is organized to plan for war but not to fight a war. And so everything that I’ve wanted to do to try and help the men and women in the field I’ve had to do outside the normal Pentagon bureaucracy.”

That department oversees a military that is deployed in 150 countries around the world with more than 369,000 of its1,580,255 active-duty in foreign nations. We still have 53,951 in Germany as a holdover from the Cold War. Some 28,500 are still in Korea and 32,803 in Japan. Simply put, there are real threats still in these locations that must be defended.

We are the world’s policeman. If we do not maintain this role, it will go to hell even faster than its current pace.

All of which brings me full circle to the worthy reason for Armed Forces Day. I have my arguments with some of the policies affecting today’s military, but hopefully they are transitory.

I have no argument with the courage, the patriotism, and the power our armed forces—yes, our men and women—project around the world.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Duped! Relentless Marxist Deception

By Alan Caruba

“The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But, under the name of ‘liberalism’, they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”   Norman Thomas, former U.S. Socialist Party president candidate

Those of my age—I am in my seventies—have a strong recall of the Cold War, fought from the end of World War Two in 1945 until the fall of the infamous Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. We grew up knowing that the Communists—Marxists—were the enemy.

All throughout that period, American liberals—Leftists—did what they could to ridicule efforts to rid the government of Communists, attacked those like Sen. Joseph McCarthy who spoke out against them, defended the likes of Fidel Castro who turned Cuba into a prison-state, and worked to “improve” U.S.-Soviet relations.

A book I wish everyone would read, liberals and conservatives alike, “Dupes” by Paul Kengor, went into a second printing in January of this year (ISI Books, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Wilmington, DE). Kengor, a PhD, is a professor of political science at Grove City College. His book runs just over 600 pages, all thoroughly documented, and tells the history of the effort to impose communism on America and worldwide, dating back to the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.

One of the characters in the book is Whittaker Chambers, a former Soviet spy who came to realize how evil Communism was and who revealed how the administrations of Roosevelt and Truman were shot through with spies and those cooperating with the Soviet Union, the most famous of whom was Alger Hiss, a high-ranking State Department official. Richard M. Nixon first came to public notice as a Senator from California who ran on an anti-Communist platform.

“While Communists make full use of liberals and their solicitudes, and sometimes flatter them to their faces, in private,” wrote Chambers, “they treat them with that sneering contempt that the strong and predatory almost invariably feel for victims who volunteer to help in their own victimization.”

Socialism has had a long, hard time establishing itself in America and has mostly been the gift of the Democratic Party that held control of Congress for forty years until that grip was broken in 1995. Despite that, Bill Clinton was reelected and, halfway through George W. Bush’s second term, congressional power returned to the Democrats.

Then, in 2008, a virtually unknown Senator who had not even served a full term, who had no paper trail of documentation regarding his life, who had written two memoirs that hinted at his far Left upbringing and associations, was elected President. Putting it bluntly, Americans were duped.

As Kengor points out, Americans “in poll after poll, year after year, have described themselves as ‘conservative’ over ‘liberal’ by a margin of roughly two to one, by approximately 40 percent to 20 percent.”

The political environment of America is conservative, but it has been the growing number of independent voters that have determined election outcomes. That says something about the disappointment that both political parties have created with their emphasis on enlarging the federal government, excessive spending, questionable wars, and general indifference to the voters.

The independents also reflect the sudden emergence of the Tea Party movement that occurred to protest Obamacare. They and others have swung back toward conservative candidates electing Republican governors in New Jersey and Virginia, a Republican Senator from Massachusetts, and sent Allen West and Marco Rubio to Congress from Florida, along with a host of candidates supported by the Tea Parties.

Independents along with conservatives in America have been demonstrating a level of political resistance to senseless spending and the rough-shod imposition of leftist legislation that suggests the 2012 elections will “save” America from Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and their far Left minions.

The election of Barack Obama was the result of the greatest act of political deception in the modern era. It was aided by a news media that not only ignored all the obvious signs that Obama was a denizen of the far Left, but was surrounded, not only by Leftists, but Communists like Van Jones whose Apollo Alliance helped write Obama’s budget-bursting $800 billion ‘stimulus’ bill.

The revolutionaries of the 1960s had mostly migrated to positions in higher education where they could influence a new generation, oblivious to the carnage that has always accompanied a Communist revolution, killing millions. Younger Americans in 2008 meant that those aged 18 to 29 made up nearly one in five voters or about twenty-five million ballots. They preferred Obama by a margin of more than two to one, 66 percent to 32 percent. They had no memory of the Cold War.

Seeking to dupe Americans Obamacare was an act of raw political power that ignored the same widespread rejection that an earlier version, dubbed “Hillarycare”, had encountered. “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it,” said then Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Its purpose was to completely socialize healthcare in America.

Americans, old and young, must not be duped again. The very future of the nation depends on the actions of a Republican-controlled House in the years remaining as America’s first Marxist President works his way, seeking always to make dupes of us all.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Living Through History

By Alan Caruba

We live our lives one day at a time and, at best, understand them only in hindsight. The chief advantage of old age is the ability to look back and, hopefully, to draw some lessons from the history through which we have lived.

My chief regret is that so many among the generations coming up behind me have so little real knowledge of America’s or the world’s history, be it recent or long past. Indeed, history books in our nation’s classrooms have become a battleground between competing ideologies because those who determine what history is taught will shape what history is to come.

The destruction of our education system since the 1960s is not an accident. It has been deliberate.

I have lived through seven decades of history. Born in 1937 in the midst of the Great Depression, I have lived to see a comparable Depression.

Anyone who persists in calling our present economic crisis a Recession is whistling passed the graveyard. You cannot have as many unemployed people as we do today, owe as much as we do to foreign central banks, and continue to spend as senselessly as the federal government, and not call this a Depression.

The main difference, as I see it, is that while Franklin D. Roosevelt and his advisors were sincerely, but ineptly, trying to turn the economy around, the Obama administration sees it as an opportunity to totally destroy the nation by bankrupting it, by refusing to seal off its southern border from an invasion of illegal aliens, by imposing a healthcare act that nationalized one sixth of the economy, and via other comparable abuses.

I have been thinking about the seven decades of my life because I have been reading about them in an excellent book, “American Dreams: The United States Since 1945” by H. W. Brands ($32.95, Penguin Press).

What struck me most forcefully and personally was the fact that I was so utterly clueless throughout much of my early years, despite having graduated from university, served in the U.S. Army, and been a working journalist until I approached my thirties. Even then, jobs with the New York Housing Finance Agency, followed by a stint with the New Jersey Institute of Technology, did not connect me with the events swirling around me.

It was not that I was unaware of events. My childhood coincided with the Cold War that had shaped national policy under Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. I graduated university the same year Fidel Castro took over Cuba in 1959 and I finished out my Army service waiting for the outcome the Cuban missile crisis, grateful that it passed like a quick storm. The only thing I knew with certainty was that Communism was evil.

My politics were not particularly nuanced. My parents were Democrats and liberals. I followed suit because I knew no better. To their credit, they both began to have doubts with the advent of the Vietnam War and the Great Society spending. They had, however, benefited from the tremendous prosperity that followed the end of WWII, owned their home, had happily purchased all the new appliances that enhanced everyone’s lives, and raised my older brother and me in comfort.

I, along with other Americans, had seen the nation put a man on the Moon, had seen the enormous productivity of our manufacturing sector and assumed it could not end. It not only could end, it began to end as globalization undermined domestic growth. America has increasingly become a service industry economy, one dependent on easy credit, and an ever-expanding federal government.

I was into my 40s by the 1980s and only beginning to connect the dots of the history happening in the nation and the world. By then I was enjoying a career in public relations that took me all over the nation and introduced me to a wide variety of people in business, industry, and agriculture. Until then I had not realized the enormous inhibiting effect the federal government had on the economy through its intensive, expanding regulatory powers.

The environmental movement had gained momentum by then and in time it would determine how much water a toilet could use, how many miles per gallon autos must provide, and the soon to be enforced edict that literally bans the incandescent light bulb! Significantly, the Greens have seen to it that more and more of the nation’s vast sources of energy were put off limits.

The era of Ronald Reagan transformed my thinking. I became a Republican. Others did too, but it was the Clinton years in the 1990s that confirmed my distaste for the Democrat Party. When the GOP regained control of Congress in 1994, Clinton was smart enough to adopt much of the legislation they proposed and take credit for it.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was followed by the most transformative event since WWII. September 11, 2001 and the subsequent military engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq flowed from that Islamic treachery. I suspect that history will judge George W. Bush less harshly than his peers. The financial crisis in 2008 plunged the nation into a downward economic spiral that brings us to today. The election of Barack Obama has only served to exacerbate it.

The Internet loosened the grip of the “mainstream” news media as Americans with access to information as no previous generation, discovered they had been betrayed for decades by the liberal “spin” the news included. The advent of talk radio was a revelation for many.

At a time when what is most needed is serious investigative journalism regarding a virtually fictitious President, Americans must depend heavily on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News to inform them of the damage being inflicted on the nation.

You cannot be, as I was, indifferent to who is in public office, intent only on your personal life as if some mysterious force will intervene to make things turn out right.

There is nothing mysterious about “the consent of the governed.”

There is nothing mysterious about the ability of Americans to put things on the right path again. The American Dream can be made to work if we elect the right people to represent us and begin to shrink the federal government. That is the lesson I have drawn from my years and one I hope to see reignited in the years to come.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

America's Enemies

By Alan Caruba

Listening to President Obama one might think that America doesn’t have a single enemy that could not be turned into a friend if only he was given the opportunity to just talk to them. He is a great believer in diplomacy even though diplomacy has rarely stopped a war if one party was determined to wage it. War doesn’t need the consent of both.

Perhaps because I was born just prior to the outbreak of World War II and grew up aware of terrible things happening in both Europe and Asia, followed by having an older brother who served during the Korean War, plus my own service in the U.S. Army, my attitude about wars has been shaped by a lifetime in which I cannot recall a minute when America wasn’t at war, engaged in a war, or threatened by a war.

To this day I have considerable antipathy for “peaceniks” and war protesters even though, as the ill-fated Vietnam War dragged on, I joined a march or two. If ever there was a wrong war in the wrong place, Vietnam was it. For those unfamiliar with it, it was essentially a civil war into which the U.S. inserted itself due to a “domino theory” that, if Vietnam fell to communism, all the other Asian nations would as well. At the time, the Cold War was still raging since the end of WWII and Chairman Mao was still in charge of China.

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t plotting against you, so it’s always a good idea to take a very general survey of those nations who wish us ill.

After a slow start, the U.S. is contemplating putting North Korea back on its list of terror-sponsoring nations. I suspect many Americans with no memory of the Korean War during the 1950s dismiss North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile capability. Not only will this thugocracy sell its WMDs to anyone, but the renewal of the Korean War is never more than 24 hours away. The U.S. is committed to intervene.

Iran, despite being on the other side of the globe, is working toward having its own nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems. As far as the Middle East is concerned, that’s a war just waiting to happen.

Americans seem to have forgotten that Saddam Hussein fought a war with Iran for eight years, settled for a stalemate, and then invaded Kuwait. If ever there was a good reason to fight a war to rid the region of this troublemaker, I cannot think of one. Now the problem has shifted to Pakistan, under attack from an enemy of its own making, the Taliban. Since Pakistan has nukes, it cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of fanatical Islamofascists.

Right next door India keeps a wary eye on Pakistan. Bordering Pakistan to the north is Afghanistan, a nation of tribes that, though occupied over and over again, has resisted all invaders for centuries. Just because 9/11 was planned there doesn’t mean the U.S. needs to maintain a military presence there. The prospect of an effective central government is quite distant despite the money, military manpower, and other efforts the U.S. is making.

So the enemies we can identify include any and all Muslims who support the view that Islam must rule the entire world. There are more than a billion of them.

Russia is no friend to the United States, but Russia is no friend to Europe or China either. Almost entirely dependent on the export of oil and natural gas, its fate rises and falls with the cost of a barrel or cubic foot of both. The fall of the Soviet government and the loss of its satellite nations in Eastern Europe have not significantly brought about a change of attitude in the Kremlin although much of the population would be more than happy to embrace the free market capitalism of the United States.

China is no friend either even though it is highly dependent on its ability to manufacture and export its goods to the United States. Our current economic woes worry the Chinese who own billions in U.S. treasury bills along with the fact that Americans aren’t buying as much of their stuff lately. China has perhaps the largest espionage effort regarding the U.S. of any other nation in the world.

Americans have been slow to respond to yet another enemy, Mexico. The U.S. has been literally invaded by Mexicans though they came looking for jobs and a better life. The result, however, has been enormous financial burdens on all aspects of our society from schools to hospitals to welfare and to crime. There are an estimated 12 million illegal Mexicans and others from south of the border and Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leaders, wants to push through another amnesty bill.

The last amnesties only resulted in a greater rush to enter the U.S. Only a handful in public office will address the fact that the Mexican government has openly encouraged this invasion because the money sent home is a significant part of its economy. It is a major trading partner, but it looks to become totally controlled by the narco lords.

We have been slow to say or do anything about Venezuela, led by the dictator, Hugo Chavez. This likely has much to do with the oil that nation exports to the U.S. Chavez, however, is closely allied with Hezbollah which, in turn, is allied and controlled by Iran. Chavez has been buying up a lot of weapons of late and it has nothing to do with defense and everything to do with his bad intensions. Once a democracy, Venezuelans are now totally under the control of their government.

The U.S. just got around to arresting two former members of the State Department who had allegedly been spying for Cuba for thirty years. President Obama wants to lift restrictions on that dictatorship that have been in place for at least 50 years. Since the Soviet Union fell in the 1990s, Cuba has fallen on hard times, but it is still an enemy.

Africa is fairly dormant though Somalia has fallen to the Islamofascists. The U.S. has conspicuously done little to relieve the horrors in Darfur, inflicted by the Muslim Sudanese government. Overall, there is little likelihood that the U.S. will become embroiled in a war in Africa. It too is a significant source of oil.

If there is a common theme to our present threat levels, it is oil and, more precisely, the failure since the 1970s of the U.S. to access the abundant reserves of our own oil in the interior of the nation and from its offshore continental shelf. Since the Obama administration is hell bent on covering the U.S. with wind turbines and solar panels, we shall remain hostage to oil-producing nations.

The enemy that is only beginning to make himself known to Americans is President Barack Obama who has swiftly created an administration that ignores its many cabinet departments in favor of “czars” that have been ceded power over all elements of our nation. They rarely hold any press conferences, nor do they seem responsive to the inquiries of Congress. The only function of the cabinet secretaries appears to be to stand behind the President when he makes various announcements. No wonder he greeted Hugo Chavez with a big smile.

Taking control of automobile companies is unconstitutional. Giving bailouts to them is unconstitutional. Permitting the Federal Reserve to print money without regard to the inflationary impact this will have is reckless. Voting for a “stimulus” bill without reading or even debating it is reckless. Running up the national debt is reckless. Putting the value of the U.S. dollar in doubt is criminal negligence.

Trying to take over the nation’s health systems and to require all Americans to purchase health insurance flies in the face of free market capitalism and cedes control over the most intimate aspects of our lives to the government.

We now have a Homeland Security Department that identifies any American who disagrees with the Obama administration as an “extremist.” This includes people who oppose abortions, oppose illegal immigration, support the Second Amendment right to own and bear weapons, and veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Terrorism is no longer part of its vocabulary, but “man-caused disasters” is.

If Americans don’t besiege and change Congress to reverse these assaults on the economy and the Constitution, this nation will fail and our liberties will be memories.

Torture? Who Are They Kidding?

By Alan Caruba

I come from a generation that, for 44 years, fought the Cold War with the former Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991. Occasionally that war got hot in places like Korea, Vietnam, and tiny Grenada. Over a succession of Presidents from Truman to Reagan, all maintained the Cold War until its successful conclusion.

Too many Americans think that we have only been fighting the Islamo-fascists since 9/11, but they have short memories. We have been in conflict with them since 1979 when the Iranian revolution seized American diplomats and held them hostage for 444 days until the inauguration of Ronald Reagan.

In 1982, the U.S. Embassy in Beirut was bombed by Muslim terrorists. In one incident after another Americans were repeatedly targeted. In 1985, the Italian cruise ship was seized and a 69-year-old American was shot and thrown overboard. In 1986, a West Berlin discotheque frequented by U.S. servicemen was bombed under orders of the Libyan dictator. One American died. In 1991 the U.S. went to war with Iraq after it had invaded Kuwait.

In 1993, on Clinton’s watch, the World Trade Center was bombed. That same year 18 American troops were killed in Somalia and one was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu as Muslims cheered. In 1995, five Americans were killed and 30 wounded by a car bomb in Saudi Arabia. In June 1996, a U.S. Air Force housing complex in Saudi Arabia was bombed. On August 7, 1998, U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed.

During the Clinton years the response was no response to these acts except for a lot of talk and, in the case of the first Twin Towers bombing it was treated as a local criminal act, not an act of war.

On September 11, 2001, the second attempt to destroy the Twin Towers was successful. Among the terrorists were 19 Saudis. More than 3,000 Americans died. George W. Bush was President and, by September 29, a poll reported in USA Today revealed that the “Public stands firmly behind war.” Approval for the action taken in Afghanistan stood at 92%.

Flash forward to today when we have a President in office who won largely by campaigning against the war in Iraq and refusing to admit publicly that the “surge” had proven successful. Once in office, he would authorize a similar surge in Afghanistan, declaring it the new front in the war on terrorism even though it was obvious that Pakistan was where it was being waged by the Taliban.

His opponent in the 2008 campaign was John McCain, a former Navy pilot who had been the “guest” of the Vietnamese for some five years, enduring torture that left him unable to raise his arms above his head. He, however, joins the Democrats in condemning torture. Medal of Honor winner, Col. Bud Day, was a prisoner at the same time suffering torture from 1967 to 1973 that I would not repeat here because it was so severe. He says, “Our President and those fools around him who keep bad mouthing our great country are a disgrace to the United States.”

The Democrats have made much of “waterboarding”, a procedure that many U.S. military endure as part of their training to resist “aggressive” interrogation if captured. It doesn’t kill and it doesn’t leave those receiving it permanently injured. It is unpleasant and, when it is necessary to extract information that will protect the lives of thousands of Americans, it works. That much is public record.

Adding to the waterboarding debate is the new factor of the Speaker of the House’s assertion that the Central Intelligence Agency “lies” to Congress “all the time.” The real question is who is lying; Rep. Nancy Pelosi, third in line for the presidency should both the President and Vice Present be killed, or the CIA?

The refusal to recognize who really engages in torture and barbaric acts has been one of constant denial by the Democrats and the White House. When President Obama takes the high moral ground it does not change the fact that the terrorists routinely engage in beheading their captives. This barbarism was dramatically demonstrated when Wall Street reporter, Daniel Pearl, suffered that fate and there is nary a word about the thirty years of butchery in which Saddam Hussein engaged while dictator of Iraq.

We are at war, not only with state-sponsored torture and butchery by non-state actors such as al Qaeda and the Taliban, Hamas and Hezbollah, but with a culture of cruelty that goes back centuries in the Arab world.

It is a culture that routinely stones to death women accused of adultery and excuses “honor killings” of women that are innocent only of refusing to be married off to men not of their choice or seeking escape from men who beat them. It beheads people deemed “infidels” or those said to have broken Sharia law.

The catalog of Arab Muslim depraved acts includes killing those at prayer in mosques and, of course, the campaign of terror unleashed against Israel called the “Intifada.” It has continued to this day with thousands of rockets fired into Israel by the very people with whom the present administration insists the Israelis make “peace” by giving up more of their land.

As recently as a week ago, four American Muslims were arrested for allegedly planning to kill Jews at prayer in two New York synagogues and shooting down a U.S. aircraft.

The willful refusal to admit that the United States and the West is at war stands in stark contrast to the Cold War.

The debate over so-called “torture” in Guantanamo or anywhere else is a smokescreen to distract Americans from the real enemy and the very long war that must be waged against them lest they bring weapons of mass destruction to our shores and kill millions of Americans.

The “mess” that President Obama blames his predecessor for kept this nation safe from attack for his two terms in office. Obama's first term began with a deep bow to a Saudi Arabian prince.

Putin v. Obama: Change is Stressful

By Alan Caruba

New times, we’re told, call for new thinking. Out with the old and in with the new. In America’s case, the new is President Obama. For the Russians in charge of the former Soviet Union it means figuring out who the new guy is.

For someone who spent most of his life during the Cold War, I have an almost nostalgic feeling about it. One knew who the enemy was and it was the Soviet Union. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union there was a feeling that a new, democratic Russia would replace it and, in many ways a new Russia has emerged.

I have a friend who visited Moscow in 2004 and again in 2008. Jim Camp is an internationally recognized negotiation coach. He described the difference that four years made as that of night and day. It was a grim place in 2004 but by 2008 he felt like he was in New York, a bustling city where Russians in the streets were smiling. CNN, he told me, is watched by everyone and English is a second language to Russians right down to taxi drivers.
(Read his commentary here)

In a recent article published in Yezhednevny Zhurnal, Alexander Goltz asked “Why is Russia’s leadership so annoyed with Obama?” Given his commentary’s open criticism of the Putin regime, one can see that some progress has been made.

Speaking of the televised inauguration of President Obama, Goltz reported that “I observed Russian journalists from the four government-controlled, nationally syndicated channels racking their brains, trying to outdo each other in slinging mud at the inaugural ceremonies.” Americans were described as “airheads” who had been duped by the Obama campaign propaganda. “Which begs the question: how has Obama—who has yet to do anything, good or bad—managed to irritate the Russian elite?”

Even a former foreign minister, Yevgeny Primakov, no fan of the U.S., was “amazed at the fact that nobody in Moscow is rejoicing over the complete absence of Neoconservatives (who swarmed around Bush and informed his foreign policy) in Obama’s circle.”

“As ridiculous as it might seem,” concluded Goltz, “I think it is because he is black.”

Whew! How politically incorrect can you get, but Goltz pushed on to say that the Russian governing elite have “an abiding conviction” that everything in the U.S. is the same as in Russia, i.e., “manipulated elections, strict control over the media, corruption, and nationalism. The Americans are just better at covering it up.”

Putin, like Bush, was operating from a Cold War frame of mind and both, in that respect, thought that they understood each other though Bush became less enamored of Putin over the years. It may account for why the invasion of Georgia caused so little alarm in U.S. foreign policy circles. The Russians were being Russians! And, having invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. was in no position to criticize,

It will probably require another generation or two of Russians before they finally let go of their fantasies about America and engage us and the rest of the world as a normal nation among nations. “Trust, but verify” said Ronald Reagan when dealing with the Russians. It’s still a good policy.

Whether President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton can establish some new diplomatic rapport with Putin and his colleagues will be interesting to watch.

My Little Street

By Alan Caruba

When I was age five back in 1942 my parents moved to the town of Maplewood, New Jersey, leaving behind a two-family dwelling in the Roseville section of Newark that was home to many Italian immigrants and Jews. Those who could do so during the perilous years of World War II left the city and this exodus accelerated in the go-go Fifties.

It was the birth of suburbs all over the nation. Maplewood, however, had a history stretching back to the days of the Revolution. By the time my family arrived, it was filled with many beautiful single family homes with expansive lawns, famous for its many tree-lined streets, and an excellent school system.

Maplewood had always been an upscale address, aided greatly by the fact that a commuter train, then known as the Erie-Lackawanna, could take executives into New York or at least to Hoboken where they grabbed a subway for the rest of the trip. These days, it is a quick half-hour direct into Penn Station.

I grew up on Brookside Road, as picturesque as its name, with just nine houses on a tiny street that had at one end an elementary school with a large playground area where the local kids could play ball games. It took its name from a brook that ran behind the homes across the street from mine. With time out for college and the Army, I would live there for sixty-two years.

I sold the house in 2004 after property taxes had virtually doubled and sensing that the market was peaking. I moved one town over to a new, luxury apartment complex. It allows me to shop in Maplewood’s “village” area and even get a haircut in the same chair I sat in as a child.

Living close by allows me to pay an occasional nostalgic visit; a slow drive on the short street to enjoy seeing my former home and to remember many happy years spent there.

Today on that street of nine homes there are three houses for sale, one of which has been up for sale verging on what I think is close to a year or more. Another for sale again has turned over several times since the new millennium and one on the corner of the street that shares its lawn with Brookside has also been waiting for a new owner for many months. My former home changed hands twice in the last four years.

Anthropologists, sociologists, and economists could surely draw some deep lessons from this rapid change and the stagnation of the housing market. No doubt it speaks to a larger picture of life in America, but in the sixty-plus years I lived there practically the only reason a house went up for sale was because the owners died. Those that replaced them also stayed for long stretches of time.

In addition to rapidly rising property taxes, what changed in recent years as homes gained new owners was the installation of fences. The tiny backyard in which I had played as a youngster became tinier as first one new neighbor planted a row of trees and then a newer one removed them and put in a fence. Then a new neighbor on the other side put one up as well.

In fairness, both had young children and keeping them safe was the reason. Still, it saddened me that three adjoining backyards that had never had any obstruction were now small impenetrable bastions. A number of the homes sprouted signs announcing they had burglar alarm systems.

It saddens me today to see three of those houses remain empty, waiting for families to breathe new life into them. The for-sale signs bespeak harsher times, less amendable to people seeking a better life on a tiny suburban street in a picture postcard town.

Those earlier times were different. Children were in and out of everyone’s home on the street and the grownups kept a watchful eye on all of them. The nearby schoolyard was filled with their laughter as we gathered on the swings, the metal slide, and the teeter-totters. All have been removed as a threat to life and limb, but no one ever got hurt.

Those of us who were kids growing up during World War II and the Cold War were aware of the threat of atomic bombs and, later, nuclear missiles, but we knew that nothing would ever harm little Brookside Road. We were safe. Our neighbors would live forever. Our doors would always be open.

Neither my parents, nor my original neighbors lived forever, but my memories of them remain. I like my new digs, but I miss Brookside Road.

Note: The illustration is one of several murals in the city hall depicting the history of Maplewood. This one depicts the Fourth of July celebration with races for the kids in the morning, baking contests, a circus, a concert and fireworks in the evening. Click on the image to see a larger one.

Vladimir Putin Elects John McCain

By Alan Caruba

I had the odd thought while watching the news coverage of the Russian invasion of Georgia that Vladimir Putin had locked up the election for John McCain.

Earlier I thought that President Bush had partially handed over the Oval Office when he announced in effect that U.S. troops would begin to come out of Iraq in the foreseeable future. That pretty much took that issue off the table for Barack Obama.

Obama had shot to the top of the Democrat heap of candidates by emphasizing he had been against the Iraq war from the days before he was elected Senator. Then, after that, Barack managed to find it in his heart to vote for every funding bill involving the war. This has come to be called “refining” his views. Indeed, one can witness Obama refine his views on almost any issue between breakfast and dinner.

I am pretty sure that Vladimir Putin wasn’t thinking “This is a sure way to remind everyone we live in a dangerous world, filled with people like myself who actually want to go to war if it involves a very small nation that can’t fight back.”

The net effect of the Russian invasion of Georgia was to remind anyone over the age of 65 that the United States, following World War Two, was locked into a Cold War with Russia for nearly fifty years. During that time, there were a number of hot wars as well.

I have an older brother who served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War and, in 1962, I can remember being in Fort Benning, Georgia, getting ready to don full battle gear in the event the Russians tried to run the Cuban “missile crisis” blockade that President Kennedy had imposed. You don’t forget stuff like that.

And, of course, you don’t forget seven years of the Vietnam War stretching from Kennedy to Nixon. That was a proxy war, albeit a civil war. Even I participated in peace marches around the Washington Monument to get an end to that confrontation.

I have a feeling that Americans have mostly forgotten the fear that gripped us all on 9/11. If you lived or worked in New York, you were always scanning the sky for another wayward jet airliner. Soon enough we were laughing at the Homeland Security alert colors. The problem, however, is that we are still locked into a war with Islamic fundamentalists and are likely to be for a very long time to come.

Yes, there actually is a reason we have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While the conflict in Georgia is occurring someplace most Americans could not find on the map, the video coverage of the long convoys of Russian troop carriers and tanks are a vivid reminder of the ugliness of war and the potential for an attack from anywhere at any time.

Ever since it became obvious that the U.S. had finally begun to win the war in Iraq, all coverage of that conflict disappeared from our television screens and the front pages of our daily newspapers.

The Georgia conflict is the kind of thing that influences voters; as well it should. Somewhere in the back of our minds we all know that McCain is an Annapolis graduate who fought in the Vietnam War and survived brutal treatment as a prisoner. Some of us may even know he comes from a family whose men served our nation in war going back to World War I.

The contrast between the statements issued by McCain and Obama was significant. McCain’s was clearly a strong denunciation of the Russians while Obama whimpered about the importance of the Russians and Georgians sitting down over a cup of tea to work things out.

So, thank you, Vladimir Putin. My guess is you just got John McCain elected.