Exiting Afghanistan

By Alan Caruba

Like others of my generation who lived through the Vietnam War, it was at the time the longest war that America ever fought. Now the longest war is the one in Afghanistan that began on October 7, 2001.

The Vietnam War began for the U.S. in 1963 when 2,000 military “advisors” were sent to aid the South Vietnamese government that had been established when the North and South was divided. In 1956, with U.S. support the South refused to hold reunification elections and a civil war ensued with the Communist North, beginning in 1958.

Suffice to say the South Vietnamese government was corrupt. It was a civil war and Lyndon B. Johnson’s intervention vastly expanded it in 1965. Along with the war, he launched his “War on Poverty” that would cost billions and achieve little except to expand the welfare state..

The public outcry against the war increased along with the casualties. It forced LBJ to forego running for a second term. From 1968 to 1973, efforts were made to end the war through diplomacy until in January 1973, during the Nixon administration, an agreement was reached. In April 1975, South Vietnam surrendered, thus uniting the North and South.

For ten years it seemed as if the war would never end. It tore the nation apart. Along with a lot of Americans I opposed the war. From the standpoint of the White House the war was seen as part of the larger Cold War but internally they were loath to admit that the U.S. military was not winning the war. These days the U.S. enjoys a robust diplomatic and economic relationship with Vietnam.

Following 9/11, the U.S. sent troops to Afghanistan on October 7, 2001. We are still there and the war, as noted, has become the longest in our nation’s history. After driving out the Taliban, we should have left, but we stayed on, supporting a corrupt government that Afghans do not trust. Presently, there are about 100,000 U.S. troops there, a significant military commitment.

The war in Afghanistan, according to Richard N. Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Affairs, is costing U.S. taxpayers between $100 billion and $125 billion a year. In 2010, the New York Times reports that U.S. troops experienced the highest combat casualties yet in the war; more than 430 service members died. Nearly 5,500 were wounded in action, more than double the total of 2,415 in 2009.

It is long past due for the U.S. to leave. It is a lesson the Russians learned after they invaded Afghanistan in 1979. It took ten years before they withdrew in defeat. The Afghans didn’t want them there and they do not want the U.S. there. We will leave and the only question is when.

The problem for America and the rest of the world is a Middle East in the grip of Islam, a religion that opposes Western values and modernization. It will remain in turmoil for the foreseeable future and it will have to be resolved by the people of its nations.

Isolating Islam from the governance of those nations and the maintenance of democratically elected governments must ultimately be secured by those in Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and the most tribal of these nations, Afghanistan.

In Pakistan today there is a significant debate over whether a Western-style government can prevail in the face of the barbarism of the Taliban and the threat of al Qaeda whose way of governance is through murder and terror. The Pakistani middle class knows what is at stake.

The presence of American and allied troops in Afghanistan and Iraq only exacerbates the prospect of progress toward a stable Middle East, a process that may well take decades or longer. Meanwhile, we are draining the treasury of the United States and spilling the blood of our troops.

Leaving Afghanistan will change little in a nation that has successfully resisted invaders for centuries. Meanwhile, the U.S. is in the process of drawing down troops in Iraq where we have set in motion the first steps toward a modern nation freed of its demonic dictator, Saddam Hussein.

There is much to be done to save America from its present financial crisis. Not spending billions in far-off lands is a good step toward achieving that.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Lone Gunman

By Alan Caruba

In 1247, the Bethlem Royal Hospital was established at Bishopsgate, just outside the London wall. It was better known as Bedlam and was the first asylum for the mentally ill in England. By 1403 it had some prominent guests. Bedlam had become the generic name for psychiatric hospitals and, more colloquially for a disturbance of the peace.

There was such a disturbance on Saturday when Jared Loughner shot U.S Representative Gabrielle Giffords in the brain at point blank range. He then shot others including a Federal judge and a nine-year-old child.

There is something like 25,000 laws on the books concerning the purchase and ownership of guns and not one single one of them could have prevented what happened.

This is not a defense of guns. The U.S. Revolution began at Concord and Lexington when a group of farmers picked up their guns and shot at British soldiers. No one is going to un-invent guns and everywhere they were banned, tyrannies of every description occurred.

This is about the Jared Loughner’s who, in my lifetime, assassinated men like John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Some nine U.S. presidents have either been killed or attacked by assassins. In 1981, John Hinkley Jr., in an effort to impress the actress, Jodie Foster, nearly succeeded in assassinating Ronald Reagan. Earlier Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Gerald Ford were shot at.

Anyone who has been a reporter as I have been will tell you that every American city has a section that local residents fear to travel to or through. Murder occurs in every American city, large and small, every day. Usually it is a drug deal or robbery gone bad or a gambling dispute.

For reporters, the killing of someone prominent is a news bonanza. It overrides the usual buzz in a newsroom devoted to the more commonplace stories. There’s a reason the news channels are into full coverage mode and why, by the end of the week, when they have exhausted the few known facts of the Tucson shooting, they will return to a normal coverage of the news.

Here’s what you need to keep in mind. It’s not about gun laws. It’s not about Tucson. It’s not about Arizona. It’s not about political analysis and dialogue, so you can ignore the hypocritical ravings of MSNBC’s Keith Olberman and others eager to blame Rush Limbaugh or the Fox News Channel.

Loughner is Hinkley redux. Described by all who know him as “a loner” and rejected for military service, invited to leave the campus of a local college, more than a few people understood that Jared had a screw loose.

The closest you can get to understanding what happened is to rent Martin Scorsese’s brilliant film, “Taxi Driver.” There you will see Robert DeNiro’s portrayal of Travis Bickle, the archetype of every lone gunman. And yes, also in the film, you will find Jodie Foster.

The shooting was about mental illness. It was about paranoia. It was about schizophrenia. It was about all the other killings where innocent people were gunned down by someone hearing voices in his head.

Say a prayer for Rep. Giffords, but remember, they walk among us.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Apocalpyse Not!

By Alan Caruba

There is no religion, past or present, that has not generated an End Times prediction. As the year 2011 begins, you can be sure that the media will begin to fill up with articles about the Mayan calendar prediction that the world will end on December 12, 2012.

There are two very good reasons to ignore this prediction. The first is that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old! The second is that the Maya civilization no longer exists, having achieved its peak around 900 A.D. and was in decline thereafter until the arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the late-1500s finished it off.

Recently there was a news item about James Byron Birkhead of Owensboro, Kentucky, who, after seeing the movie “2012”, became so frightened that he began to create a bomb making factory in his home to protect his family. When welfare workers visited his home to check on his 12-year-old daughter, they heard of his plans and notified the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. They paid him a visit. Making bombs in your kitchen is as likely a way to put an end to your own world as any other.

We live in a world of real and utterly false threats.

World War Two ended in a cataclysm of violence unleashed on the world with the invention and use of two atomic bombs. The world since then has had to deal with the acquisition of nuclear weapons by large powers and small. I grant that human nature suggests that, sooner or later, some nation will use them. It will not, however, exist as a nation for too long after that.

Since the 1980s, the chimera of “global warming” has existed to enrich those who heralded it and as the platform for the transfer of trillions from wealthy industrialized nations to those that have failed to keep pace with modernity. The reason for the latter is because they are ruled by predatory criminal thugs or because, as in the case of the Middle East, Islam has resisted change since its arrival in the seventh century A.D.

There is no “global warming” of the kind described by heads of state, deceitful scientists, and, in particular, the United Nations where the hoax was originated. The recently concluded UN conference on climate change all but abandoned the hoax while advancing its one-world government agenda.

There is no “global warming” because the Earth is a decade into a predictable and natural cycle of cooling, not unlike previous ones, but one which may signal an equally predictable new ice age. The interval between the Earth’s previous ice ages has been 11,500 years and we are at the end of the current interglacial period.

All that passes for civilization has occurred during the last 11,500 years. Humans spread across the face of the Earth. Empires have come and gone. Wars, large and small, have been fought and in the past century nations became locked in a struggle between capitalism and communism, the former offering opportunity and freedom while the latter offers only slavery to the dictates of the state and the oligarchy that runs it.

Dating back to the earliest origins of mankind, religions emerged. Central to the monotheistic religions has been a theme of violence. Judaism sprang from the story of Abraham sparing the life of his son Isaac whom he was prepared to sacrifice until God interceded.

Human sacrifice is believed to reach back to the earliest days of humanity and the tribes fashioned for hunting, agriculture, commerce, and conquest. As they grew into cities and states, expansion was determined by wars sanctioned by their various gods.

In a forthcoming book by the historian James Carroll, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited our Modern World”, he traces the marriage of faith and violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Though it will please no one to admit it, Carroll notes that “the Old Testament contains six hundred passages that speak of bloody killing, by everyone from kings to empires. War—not sex, love, faith, kindness, or worship—is at the center of biblical life”, adding that the “Christian scriptures themselves are also drenched in blood.”

Just as the Mayans concluded an End Time could be predicted, the Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse, revels in hallucinatory visions of the Four Horsemen, war, famine, plague, and death.

The Shiite sect of Islam has a comparable story of a Twelfth Imam who can only return after the world has been in a period of chaos, war, and pestilence. It is, for the Iranian ayatollahs governing their prison kingdom, an act of devotion to bring about such a period and an Iran that possesses nuclear weapons promises to do just that.

A 2007 book by Lawrence E. Joseph, “Apocalypse 2012”, examined the Maya prediction along with the creation myths of people throughout the world. He concluded that “doomsday has a profound if unspeakable allure for those who are unhappy with themselves, their society, their Maker. It’s a form of vicarious revenge that anyone can take on life’s unfairness.”

Life is, however, often unfair. Politicians offer utopian systems and schemes that promise fairness, but can never deliver because it is ultimately unobtainable. As for the various faith systems, their histories are stories of war, of scapegoating, and of an End Time myth that promises a better world.

It is just my opinion, but only mankind can make a better world and it must do so on a lonely planet hurtling through space toward an ice-covered age; a humanity in the grip of natural forces over which it has no control.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Cartoon Round Up

Obama, the Great Bloviator

By Alan Caruba

If Ronald Reagan was the "great communicator", then surely Barack Obama is the Great Bloviator.

We have reached the unhappy point in his first term when virtually everything he said to get elected and everything he’s said since being elected is either a lie or of such dubious merit as to be easily dismissed.

Consider his 2008 promise to go through the federal budget “line by line” to eliminate waste. At this point his administration has not produced a budget for the fiscal year. Even so it is unlikely he would find any element of any budget merits a reduction. This man is all about spending.

Watching him grandstand on Friday, Jan 7th, concerning the Bureau of Labor and Statistics announcement that the U.S. economy added 103,000 jobs in December and that the unemployment rate had dropped from 9.8% to 9.4%, I was happy that the Heritage Foundation’s “Morning Bell” analysis pointed out that that we are in the twentieth month in which the unemployment rate is over 9%, a post-World War II record.

Let us pause now while everyone at the White House says in unison, “It’s Bush’s fault!”

The Morning Bell noted that “The reality is that the only reason the unemployment rate dropped is because the U.S. labor force decreased by 435,000. More importantly, 260,000 Americans dropped out of the labor force entirely. This means that the Obama economy is now driving Americans out of the labor force faster than it is bringing them in.”

The Democrat Party is bleeding members, particularly white ones. I wonder why? Maybe it’s because from early 2007 through the end of 2010 when they had strong majorities in both houses of Congress, they did not do so well in comparison to when Republicans were in charge from 2003 to 2006.

In an American Thinker article by Yossi Gestetner, he noted that by comparison, under the Democrats 1,583,000 jobs were lost whereas, under Republicans1,672,000 were added.

The average budget deficits were $1.143 trillion for the Democrats and $285 billion for the Republicans.

The Dow Jones Averages went from 11.4% under the Republicans to 0.13% under the Democrats. Bank failures under Republicans totaled seven. Under Democrats, it was 317 and counting!

This isn’t rocket science. The numbers tell you everything you need to know, but listening to Obama’s numbers as he does another “photo op” can be as mentally destabilizing as his economic policies have been on the economy.

He just waved goodbye to his first team of economic advisors and everyone in the business community is praying that their replacements are not aliens from outer space.

You want to know what socialism looks like? Let’s just take tax rates as a measurement.

Bear in mind, we all had to suffer through a down-to-the-wire “compromise” to get Obama to go along with merely extending the Bush tax rates.

When you add income tax rates and value-added taxes that all Europeans must also pay whenever they purchase anything, it looks like this:

United Kingdom: Income tax 50%, VAT 17.5%. Total 67.5%

France: Income tax 40%, VAT 19.6%. Total 59.6%

Greece: Income tax 40%, VAT l6%. Total 65%

Denmark: Income tax 58%, VAT 25%. Total 83%

Suffice to say, I will not be moving to Denmark any time soon!

Under socialism, Europeans pretty much work for their government, giving up the majority of their earnings to taxation.

As Obama begins the final two years of his first—and hopefully last term—a December Bloomberg National Poll survey indicated that “more than 50 percent of Americans say they are worse off now than they were two years ago when President Obama took office, and two-thirds believe the country is heading in the wrong direction.” It was noteworthy that “The pessimism cuts across political parties and age groups, and is common to both sexes.”

Here’s a prediction, Democrats in Congress will fight any and all Republican efforts to get the budget under control before the nation goes belly-up. Why? Because they're socialists!

Oh-oh, I think I hear Obama about to give another TelePrompter-perfect speech on how great things are. Excuse me while I reach for the remote and hit the mute button.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Where's Al Gore?

Destroying the Credibility of Science

By Alan Caruba

Back in 1990 when I founded The National Anxiety Center as a clearinghouse for information about “scare campaigns” designed to influence public opinion and policy, I was mainly concerned about the torrent of lies about global warming.

Their beginning is usually dated to an appearance by James E. Hansen before a congressional committee in 1988 in which he claimed that global warming would destroy the earth. To this day Hansen heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and has held that position since 1981. There is no rational reason why he continues to be employed by the U.S. government.

Global warming has been widely discredited thanks to the November 2009 release of thousands of emails between UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “scientists” that revealed their collusion to rig the data that supported the fraud.

GLOBAL WARMING. Climate alarmists are already worrying that the public has grown so tired of their idiotic claims that huge blizzards are caused by “warming” they are beginning to pour money into the education of a new generation of “environmental journalists” to ensure that more such lies make it to the front page of your daily newspaper or via other media.

Meanwhile, billions of taxpayer’s dollars have been flushed down the federal government rat hole to fund “research” guaranteed to support the hoax. It gets worse. Despite the defeat of the Cap-and-Trade bill based on the Big Lie that carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases cause global warming, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is attempting an end-run around Congress to impose limits on the carbon dioxide emissions of utilities and every form of manufacturing and business in America.

The EPA is engaged in a perversion of science, but what else is new? Americans have been ill-served by the alphabet soup of government agencies supposedly in place to protect the food we eat, medicines we take, the air and the water. In the process they are just as often stripping Americans of the protection afforded by pharmaceuticals and beneficial chemicals.

VACCINES v. AUTISM. A case in point is an article in the British Medical Journal that “accused a disgraced British doctor of committing an ‘elaborate fraud’ by faking data in his studies linking vaccines with autism.”

The result of that fraud was to convince thousands, if not millions, of parents that vaccines to protect their children against measles and mumps were a threat to their health. The ancillary question is why Andrew Wakefield’s paper was published in 1998. Science journals are expected to peer review such papers and determine if the data presented is valid. If it cannot be reproduced, it fails that test.

DDT. Starting in 1972, an EPA ban essentially ended its use anywhere in the nation and other nations followed suit. A year later a court upheld the EPA and that is an object lesson in what happens when matters of science are decided by men and women, lawyers, with no training or background in science. The DDT hoax continues to cause malaria deaths, particularly in Africa and mostly affecting women and children.

The U.S. is experiencing an outbreak of the bed bug population, eliminated decades ago, because the EPA has banned or limited the use of virtually every pesticide to exterminate them.

ALAR. Recall, too, the fraud perpetrated by environmental groups against Alar, a chemical that was widely used by apple growers to ensure that the crop would ripen in a fashion that permitted an efficient harvest. The Alar hoax cost American apple growers millions in lost revenue until it became known that Alar posed no health threat whatever.

SACCHARINE. Though cleared of charges dating from the 1980s that saccharin was a cancer-causing substance, it took until the 1990s to get it removed from the 9th edition of the “Report on Carcinogens” and it took until mid-December 2010 for the EPA to finally admit what everyone knew by then. You can thank “consumer” groups for foisting this fraud on everyone and agencies of the U.S. government for maintaining it until they no longer could.

BPA. A similar campaign exists to ban BPA, bisphenol-A, a chemical used to line plastic bottles and containers. It is literally a worldwide effort and it too is without any scientific merit. In the same way the claim that linked vaccines and autism, BPA is under attack, particularly in the U.S. and Europe. I have written about this in the past and intend to follow this to demonstrate how these “scientific” frauds debase all science in the process.

Aside from the fact that these claims always begin with a dubious “scientific” study and then escalate as other “scientists” climb on the funding bandwagon, the other element is always the role that the mainstream media plays in keeping the fraud alive until the sheer weight of evidence makes it impossible to do so.

Ultimately, this destroys the trust we normally accord to legitimate scientists, exhausting our ability and willingness to embrace the science that has prolonged and protected the lives of millions.

© Alan Caruba, 2011