Parallels

In an American Thinker post by Andrew Walton, he takes us back to the halcyon days following Viet Nam and that icon of the left, George McGovern:

"Do we sit on the sidelines and watch a population slaughtered, or do we marshal military force and put an end to it?" -- Senator George McGovern, August 21, 1978

The "it" McGovern wanted US troops to put an end to was the killing of millions of Cambodians in the late 1970s by the communist Pol Pot dictatorship. Three and a half years after congressional Democrats made that slaughter possible by cutting off all US aid to anti-communist forces with their so-called December, 1974 "Foreign Assistance Act", their leader McGovern had made a complete reversal and was suddenly calling for a new US war in Southeast Asia.

Why is this little-remembered footnote in history relevant today? Congressional Democrats' March vote for phased withdrawal from Iraq is a replay of McGovern's treacherous thirty-five year old script with McGovern consulting from the sidelines. Last November, the sixty-two members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, led by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) sat down with McGovern to work out a strategy for withdrawal from Iraq. Those discussions led to the mis-named "Iraq Accountability Act", now heading for a veto from President Bush after passing the House and the Senate in March.

With Congressional Democrats, and a few Republicans, dancing to McGovern's tune, it might behoove them to break out of their December, 1974 mind frame and take a look to August of 1978-forty-four months down McGovern's Southeast Asia timeline.

One more snippet:

What will it take for those opposed to American victory in Iraq to wake up? The jihadis are not a progressive force. Today's anti-war leftists are motivated not to strengthen jihad but to weaken America in order that "progressives" around the world might once again have their day. This key element of the "progressive' value system must be recognized by writers working to defeat them. The examples of McGovern and Browder provide an answer: a reversal will require the jihadi threat to "progressivism" to outweigh the American threat.

This brings me to a post I read at American Future by Marc Schulman and takes us back thru WWII and after. It is a long piece but a few things jumped out at me. He is disecting George Orwell and his thoughts and essays, letters and standing as an avowed socialist but firmly anti-communist and virilent anti-fascist and against totalitarianism. This for one...excerpts from Orwells 1941 essay The Lion and the Unicorn.

In the last twenty years western civilisation has given the intellectual security without responsibility, and in England, in particular, it has educated him in skepticism while anchoring him almost immovably in the privileged class. He has been in the position of a young man living on an allowance from a father he hates. The result is a deep feeling of guilt and resentment, not combined with any genuine desire to escape.

Having disengaged itself from the common culture, the intelligentsia, during a time of war, disparaged patriotism and the worth of venerable English institutions. Its members formed “a sort of island of dissident thought”:

England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution . . . the negative, fainéant outlook which has been fashionable among English left-wingers, the sniggering of the intellectuals at patriotism and physical courage, the persistent effort to chip away English morale and spread a hedonistic, what-do-I-get-out-of-it attitude to life, has done nothing but harm . . .

Marc adds quoting Orwell "English intellectuals, especially the younger ones, “are markedly hostile to their own country.” In some circles, “to express pro-British sentiments needs considerable moral courage.” The people who should be “the guardians of freedom of thought” were anything but.

The intelligentsia’s verbal assaults on patriotism and institutions were not without consequences. During the last years of peace, the English people suffered “a real weakening of morale.” This contributed to the fascists’ judgment that the English were decadent. The “intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible” for the war.

During the war,

. . . the Nazi radio got more material from the British left-wing press than from that of the Right. And it could hardly be otherwise, for it is chiefly in the left-wing press that serious criticism of British institutions is to be found. Every revelation about slums or social inequality, every attack on the leaders of the Tory party, every denunciation of British imperialism, was a gift for Goebbels. And not necessarily a worthless gift, for German propaganda about “British plutocracy” had considerable effect in neutral countries, especially in the earlier part of the war.

The ideological cover for the Left was pacifism. In response to letters he received from D.S. Savage [4] and other pacifists, Orwell took off his gloves:

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist . . . If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other . . . pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.

Elsewhere in his response to Savage, Orwell averred that he was interested in how pacifists who began with an “alleged horror” of violence ended with “a marked tendency to be fascinated by the success and power of Nazism.” He went on to say that some pacifists “are beginning to claim that a Nazi victory is desirable in itself.”

With just a few substituting of nouns in Orwells writing, such as America with England and Nazi with Jihadists.we can certainly draw some striking parallels as we can with the moves to surrender in Iraq and elsewhere with the happenings in the 70s in SE Asia. Need I say, read both articles and see if you can draw the same parallels.

Global Swarming

George Will has an interesting article on the Fuzzy Climate Math of the Global Warming evangelicals at RCP.

In a campaign without peacetime precedent, the media-entertainment-environmental complex is warning about global warming. Never, other than during the two world wars, has there been such a concerted effort by opinion-forming institutions to indoctrinate Americans, 83 percent of whom now call global warming a "serious problem.'' Indoctrination is supposed to be a predicate for action commensurate with professions of seriousness.

He gives us a look at what could ensue if we did all that the GW crowd is extolling us to do.

Do they also disagree with Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist''? He says: Compliance with Kyoto would reduce global warming by an amount too small to measure. But the cost of compliance just to the United States would be higher than the cost of providing the entire world with clean drinking water and sanitation, which would prevent 2 million deaths (from diseases like infant diarrhea) a year and prevent half a billion people from becoming seriously ill each year...

Nature designed us as carnivores, but what does nature know about nature? Meat has been designated a menace. Among the 51 exhortations in Time magazine's "global warming survival guide'' (April 9), No. 22 says a BMW is less responsible than a Big Mac for "climate change,'' that conveniently imprecise name for our peril. This is because the world meat industry produces 18 percent of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions, more than transportation produces. Nitrous oxide in manure (warming effect: 296 times greater than that of carbon) and methane from animal flatulence (23 times greater) mean that "a 16 ounce T-bone is like a Hummer on a plate.''

Ben & Jerry's ice cream might be even more sinister: A gallon of it requires electricity guzzling refrigeration, and four gallons of milk produced by cows that simultaneously produce eight gallons of manure and flatulence with eight gallons of methane. The cows do this while consuming lots of grain and hay, which are cultivated by using tractor fuel, chemical fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides, and transported by fuel-consuming trains and trucks.

Newsweek says most food travels at least 1,200 miles to get to Americans' plates, so buying local food will save fuel. Do not order halibut in Omaha.

Speaking of Hummers, perhaps it is environmentally responsible to buy one and squash a Prius with it. The Prius hybrid is, of course, fuel-efficient. There are, however, environmental costs to mining and smelting (in Canada) 1,000 tons a year of zinc for the battery-powered second motor, and the shipping of the zinc 10,000 miles -- trailing a cloud of carbon -- to Wales for refining and then to China for turning it into the component that is then sent to a battery factory in Japan.

All I can say is heh, read it all. Another of my favorite columnists, Thomas Sowell also weighs in on the GW question here, here and here in a three part series titled Global Hot Air. In his first part he ends with this bit of non trivial information.

What about all those scientists mentioned, cited or quoted by global warming crusaders?

There are all kinds of scientists, from chemists to nuclear physicists to people who study insects, volcanoes, and endocrine glands -- none of whom is an expert on weather or climate, but all of whom can be listed as scientists, to impress people who don't scrutinize the list any further. That ploy has already been used.

Then there are genuine scientific experts on weather and climate. The National Academy of Sciences came out with a report on global warming back in 2001 with a very distinguished list of such experts listed. The problem is that not one of those very distinguished scientists actually wrote the report -- or even saw it before it was published.

One of those very distinguished climate scientists -- Richard S. Lindzen of MIT -- publicly repudiated the conclusions of that report, even though his name had been among those used as window dressing on the report. But the media may not have told you that.

In short, there has been a full court press to convince the public that "everybody knows" that a catastrophic global warming looms over us, that human beings are the cause of it, and that the only solution is to turn more money and power over to the government to stop us from our dangerous ways of living.

Among the climate experts who are not part of that "everybody" are not only Professor Lindzen but also Fred Singer and Dennis Avery, whose book "Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years," punctures the hot air balloon of the global warming crusaders. So does the book "Shattered Consensus," edited by Patrick J. Michaels, professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, which contains essays by others who are not part of "everybody."

In the second of his series he addresses the effort of Global Warming proponents to silence the scientists who question the veracity and "facts" being perpetrated on the public. And in his latest piece of the series, he blows the lid off of the media hype surrounding this latest crusade. I say latest because I have seen the same hysteria hyped before with not facts but lots of emotion. Carsons "Silent Spring" and the hysteria that caused resulting in millions of deaths due to the total banning of DDT in the third world and then there was Paul Ehrlich and his Population Bomb. The book predicted that "in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death", that nothing can be done to avoid mass famin greater than any in the history, and radical action is needed to limit the overpopulation. And then we went through the Global Cooling scare and so on ad nauseum. Be sure to read all threee of Sowells articles.

Update: Chuck S pointed me to this article by Steven Malloy of JunkScience.com in a Fox story. His first paragraphs sets the stage for an eye-opening look at the real science.

If you need further evidence that hysteria is outpacing science in the global warming debate, consider the study published this week about Northern Hemisphere forests actually causing significant global warming.

Researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reported in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" (April 17) that while tropical forests exert a cooling influence on global climate, forests in northern regions exert a warming influence — and it’s not just a trivial climatic effect.

He ends with this:

Finally, let’s not overlook the scam factor.

For years, global warming opportunists (aka “climateers”) urged consumers to compensate for their so-called “carbon footprints” by paying to plant trees. But as the facts slowly emerged about reforestation, the carbon-offset industry quietly backed off planting trees and moved on to other offset schemes.

One carbon-offset vendor, The Carbon Neutral Co., says on its Web site, “In those early days, the icon of a tree and its emotional appeal were critical to attract audiences. But, thankfully, the market has grown in sophistication — markedly over the last 4 years, and such obvious symbols are less necessary.”

Translation? Perhaps, “the facts have caught up with us and so we’ve changed shell games”?

Science is slowly, but similarly catching up with global warming alarmism. The only question is how the race will be won — with facts or fear?

Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and CSRWatch.com. He is a junk science expert, and advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Needles to say, read the whole thing...if you dare.

Wow, This is Striking

I swore I was not going to get into the Imus dust-ip even though I do have some strong feelings about the matter. But a good liberal friend of mine pointed me to this piece from Jason Whitlock, a sportswriter for the Kansas City Star.
Fair use being what it is, I will not print the whole thing, just a couple of excerpts but is is well worth the reading of it all. It says volumes.

Thank you, Don Imus. You’ve given us (black people) an excuse to avoid our real problem.

You’ve given Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson another opportunity to pretend that the old fight, which is now the safe and lucrative fight, is still the most important fight in our push for true economic and social equality.

You’ve given Vivian Stringer and Rutgers the chance to hold a nationally televised recruiting celebration expertly disguised as a news conference to respond to your poor attempt at humor.

Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it’s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred.

The bigots win again.

While we’re fixated on a bad joke cracked by an irrelevant, bad shock jock, I’m sure at least one of the marvelous young women on the Rutgers basketball team is somewhere snapping her fingers to the beat of 50 Cent’s or Snoop Dogg’s or Young Jeezy’s latest ode glorifying nappy-headed pimps and hos...

There is much more but just one more taste.
.

...In the grand scheme, Don Imus is no threat to us in general and no threat to black women in particular. If his words are so powerful and so destructive and must be rebuked so forcefully, then what should we do about the idiot rappers on BET, MTV and every black-owned radio station in the country who use words much more powerful and much more destructive?

I don’t listen or watch Imus’ show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it’s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they’re suckers for pursuing education and that they’re selling out their race if they do?...

I repeat, wow. Says volumes in a short space. I hope he has a job come Monday.

New Sidebar Feature

Just to dtaw some attention to the news feature in the sidebar. Just click in the links, UN,Pelosi, etc. at the top to find news of the day about that subject. More will be added according to what is the news du jour. Notice there is not a link to news about Anna Nichol, Imus, or other things I am not into at the moment.

The newest Comedy From the UN

This from Anne Bayefsky at NRO

On April 9, 2007 there was a United Nations believe-it-or-not moment extraordinaire. At the same time that Iran’s President Ahmadinejad declared his country was now capable of industrial-scale uranium enrichment, the U.N. reelected Iran as a vice chairman of the U.N. Disarmament Commission.

Yes Ripley, the very U.N. body charged with promoting nuclear nonproliferation installed in a senior position the state that the Security Council recently declared violated its nonproliferation resolutions.

So in Iran at the Natanz nuclear facility Ahmadinejad gloated: “With great pride, I announce as of today our dear country is among the countries of the world that produces nuclear fuel on an industrial scale.” And in New York, courtesy of his U.N. platform, Iranian Disarmament Vice-Chairman Seyed Mohammad Ali Robatjazi railed against “noncompliance with the NPT [nuclear nonproliferation treaty] by the United States” and “the Zionist lobby.”

It took the U.N. a mere five days to rehabilitate Iran after the British kidnap victims made it home alive. Just the night before on April 8, Faye Turney, the only female victim, revealed her Iranian abductors stripped her to her underwear, caged her in a tiny, freezing cell, and subjected her to mental torture such as leading her to believe that her death was imminent.

But while this was actually happening to Faye Turney, Ambassador Luis Alfonso de Alba of Mexico, the president of the U.N.’s lead human-rights body — the U.N. Human Rights Council — was making this announcement, March 26, 2006:

I would like to make the following statement adopted by the Council. One,…the Human Rights Council has in closed meetings examined the human rights situation in…the Islamic Republic of Iran…Two, the Human Rights Council has decided to discontinue the consideration of the human rights situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran…Three,…members of the Human Rights Council should make no reference in the public debate to the confidential decisions and material concerning [the Islamic Republic of Iran]…

And it just keeps getting better.

This is not simply a very bad joke. The U.N. is feted by many as the go-to address for international progress in the world today. Congressman Tom Lantos, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, declared at a hearing on U.N. reform in February that “the U.N. provides vital support to core U.S. foreign-policy initiatives” including on Iran and the way forward is to “ratchet up our level of diplomacy there.”

“Ratchet up” suffers from some elementary numerical challenges — not to mention the netherworld where that ratcheting is headed. Congressman Lantos and his close friend former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan have long been drinking from the same well. The “reformed” Human Rights Council was Annan’s creation. Lantos is the leading advocate of the United States joining the Human Rights Council — where presumably we could jump up and down while exercising one vote out of 47. Annan, of his own volition, went to Tehran last September and urged the world not to isolate Iran immediately after the Iranian president had ignored a Security Council deadline to suspend its nuclear activities. Lantos confessed to the House Committee at the end of February that he has been begging for a visa to go to Iran for the past ten years and “will be among the first ones to do so once this visa is granted.”

Lantos was pleased with his recent trip, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to Syria. The U.N. shares his view that one of the world’s leading state sponsors of terrorism ought to be a welcome player on the world stage. Following the election on Monday of Iran as vice chairman, the U.N. Disarmament Commission elected Syria as its rapporteur.

The line between U.N. diplomacy and farce has been crossed. The real tragedy is that the defensible border between our freedom-loving rights-respecting world and the cave of our enemies is fading along with it

And we get this from The Canada Free Press;

Pelosi and the Peter Principle

By Alan Caruba

Thursday, April 12, 2007

"Everyone rises to their level of incompetence," wrote Laurence J. Peter, the author of 'The Peter Principle', a book that enshrined that wonderful insight in American culture ever since its publication in 1969. Watching Nancy Pelosi since she ascended Constitutionally as Speaker of the House within Dick Cheney's heartbeat of the Presidency, I was reminded of that.

When the Washington Post takes you to task, as it did on April 5 in an editorial, "Pratfall in Damascus", you have to know that Nancy is in way over her head. Her trip to the Holy Land of Israel and the unholy one of Syria was a complete debacle. "We come in friendship, hope, and determined that the road to Damascus is a road to peace," said Speaker Pelosi. The Post editorial dismissed that as "ludicrous."...

Presumably, one does not achieve such success by being stupid. Yet, as Speaker, everyone has witnessed her saying and doing some astonishingly stupid things. The Washington Post admonished her, saying that, "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) offered an excellent demonstration yesterday of why members of Congress should not attempt to supplant the secretary of state when traveling abroad."

While being villified by the GOP and the Post and USA Today at home however, she is being praised and even given the title of Alternate President in other parts of the world. In an editorial in the Saudi Gazette dated April 6 we find this kudos from the Kingdom.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reminds us of the ambitious office worker who is surrounded by dunderheads who can't or won't get the job done. So she rolls up her sleeves and says for all the world to hear: "Well, it looks like I'll have to do it myself."

Pelosi, the rabble-rousing Democratic leader - or better yet the Alternate President - has apparently decided that President George Bush's refusal to sit down and negotiate with Syria and Iran is just plain silly. If we are going to inch closer toward peace in Iraq, slow down Iran's nuclear ambitions and create a stable region, perhaps folding our arms across our chests and frowning is not the right approach.

Bold added.

I have a plethora of praises from our "friends" in the ME for our Alternate President.Iran is looking forward to her possible visit.

Palestine, Pelosi and Perfidy

As expected, the Pelosi and Company trip to Syria and Israel has been met with a blogospheric firestorm. I have my own thought to add to this kerfuffle but that will have to be postponed a bit. It has been well covered by the blog world and I can't add much. I would like to draw your attention to this article written in The American Thinker. It is an eyeopening piece to anyone who has not been following the Palestinian problems. An Excerpt:

According to UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) tens of billions of dollars (one-third from US taxpayers, the rest mostly from Canada and European countries) have been spent over the last 50 years providing "Palestinian refugees" and their descendents. An estimated half million people 60 years ago, that number is now over four million and increasing daily.

UNRWA's purpose: to insure the "Palestinian Right of Return" - the destruction of Israel.

No Arab country except Jordan -- where they constitute more than two-thirds of the population - accepts them as citizens. Saudi Arabia, for example, recently passed a law allowing all foreigner workers in the country to apply for Saudi citizenship next year - except Palestinians.

More than 400,000 "Palestinian refugees" living in UNWRA-supported "camps" in Lebanon cannot work or even go to school outside their designated areas. Ditto for Syria.

Most "Palestinian refugees" listed by UNRWA (which includes Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, West Bank and Gaza) in 2002, don't even live in the camps, but in nearby villages and towns. All receive free assistance and services for the rest of their life, including their children, their grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, ad infinitum.

According to UNRWA's rules, anyone who applied for relief, claiming they lived in Palestine for at least two years prior to 1948 (when Israel was attacked) and claimed to have lost property and livelihood was entitled to assistance, regardless of where they came from, or where they live today. Once a "Palestinian refugee," always a "Palestinian refugee."

That is not all the writer has to say:

UNRWA openly admits that they don't monitor programs that support terrorism, or payments to families of terrorists by the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Hezb'allah and (until recently) Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

In fact, nearly all teachers employed by UNRWA are members of terrorist-controlled unions. Funding these teachers and the curriculum of hatred and bigotry, supports terrorism and terrorist organizations. This may explain why so many children are willing to blow themselves up, carry weapons and explosives and place themselves as shields for terrorists.

Although responsible for what goes on in the areas it administers, UNRWA ignores the fact that terrorists are being trained there, including the next generation of homicide bombers, that bomb-making factories flourish inside the camps, and that arms and ammunition are stockpiled there.

UNRWA ignores the launching of thousands of rocket attacks against Israel from within territory under its responsibility.

And most outrageous, UNRWA is accountable only to the UN General Assembly, dominated by the 56-member Organization of Islamic Conference which is also part of the 115-member Non-Aligned Movement -- an automatic majority in the 191-member U.N.

UNRWA violates its own UN mandate (Resolution 302), which states (Paragraph 5): "constructive measures should be undertaken at an early date with a view to the termination of international assistance for relief."

UNRWA (Paragraph 7) indicates only two responsibilities: to work with Arab governments to provide jobs for the refugees and to help Arab governments end (not perpetuate) international assistance. UNRWA has been doing the exact opposite.

The "Palestinian Right of Return" (to Israel) -- their basic, non-negotiable demand - encourages the refusal to accept Israel's existence and fuels Palestinian terrorism. It reinforces Palestinians' belief in their victimization, promotes a culture of denial and self-destruction, and sabotages any hope for change. UNRWA facilitates this mess.

And we pay for it. Had enough? Stop the funding, now.

As always, read the whole thing.

Hiatus is over

After taking a long time out from the blog, I am back. There is so much to talk about and so much venting to do, that I could not stay away. Hopefully I will get back to my former status (such as it was) in the ecosystem and get back in the game.Stay tuned. Thanks...Tom

Fatuous in, fatuous out

Eliot Cohen in the WSJ Online has another take on the ISG report. The part of his piece that jumped out at me was this:

...A fatuous process yields, necessarily, fatuous results. "Iraq's neighbors are not doing enough to help Iraq achieve stability" -- a statement only somewhat ameliorated by the admission that some are even "undercutting stability," which sounds as though Syria and Iran were being downright rude, rather than providing indispensable assistance to those who have filled the burn wards of Walter Reed, the morgue in Baghdad, and the cemetery at Arlington. The selected remedy is, first and foremost, rather like the ISG's credo for its own functioning, consensus. "The United States should immediately launch a new diplomatic offensive to build an international consensus for stability in Iraq and the region," as if our chief failure with Bashar Assad or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lies with the hitherto unnoticed laziness or rhetorical ineptitude of our diplomats, or as though Europe, Saudi Arabia and Israel have not yet figured out that stability in Iraq is a good thing. "Syria should control its border" and "Iran should respect Iraq's sovereignty."

No kidding -- but who is going to make them? That perennial solution, "resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict," makes its appearance, including direct negotiations between Israel and Palestinians, but only with "those who accept Israel's right to exist." The report conveniently forgets that the elected leaders of Palestine do not, in fact, accept Israel's right to exist. And it also neglects the grim reality that one of the most terrible things about Gaza, and possibly the West Bank as well, is that no one, not even Hamas, is really in charge.

Part of Iran's price for easing up on us in Iraq is pretty clearly taking the heat off its nuclear program; the ISG recommends that that issue "should continue to be dealt with by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany." Well, what deal should the U.S. be willing to cut on Iranian nuclear weapons? Do we think the Iranians would deliver? And what are the long-term consequences?

War, and warlike statecraft, is a hard business, and though this is supposed to be a report dominated by "realists," there is nothing realistic in failing to spell out the bloody deeds, grim probabilities and dismal consequences associated with even the best course of action...

Betsy Newmark summed it up well. "The commissions seems to have just decided how they would like Iran and Syria to behave in their fantasy world: not aid the insurgents in Iraq, stay out of Lebanon, not develop Iranian nuclear weapons, not attack Israel, the whole shebang of dream-world wishes about how some alternate universe Iranians and Syrians might want to behave. This is no way to win a war"

James v Neville

After reading the ISG report last night I couldn't help but think of the road to Munich in 1938. Apparently I was not alone in that thinking about how similar it seemed to the man of the hour Neville Chamberlain and his approach to dealing with the Czechoslovakian issue and what that led to. The idea of being able to sit down with our sworn enemies and expect them to cooperate in the stability of the region is on its face ludicrous. I was in the process of writing a fairly lengthy post about that aspect of the ISG report and then saw that somebody had already done it and done it better than I ever could. Jeff Jacoby, writing at Townhall.com has much to say and says it well.

Should the United States turn to Iran and Syria for help in reducing the violence bloodying Iraq? James Baker's Iraq Study Group, out this week with its well-leaked recommendations, thinks direct talks with Tehran and Damascus would be a fine idea. I think so too -- right after those governments switch sides in the global jihad.

As things stand now, however, negotiating with Iran and Syria over the future of Iraq is about as promising a strategy for preventing more bloodshed as negotiating with Adolf Hitler over the future of Czechoslovakia was in 1938. There were eminent "realists" then too, many of whom were gung-ho for cutting a deal with the Fuehrer. As Neville Chamberlain set off on the diplomatic mission that would culminate in Munich, William Shirer recorded in *The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,* Britain's poet laureate, John Masefield, composed a paean in his honor. When the negotiations were done and Czechoslovakia had been dismembered, the prime minister was hailed as a national hero. FDR saluted him in a two-word telegram: "Good man." The Nobel Committee received not one, not two, but 10 nominations proposing Chamberlain for the 1939 peace prize.

But 1939 would see neither peace nor prize. Chamberlain and his admirers had been certain that Munich would bring "peace in our time." Instead it helped pave the way for war.

How many times does the lesson have to be relearned? There is no appeasing the unappeasable. When democracies engage with fanatical tyrants, the world becomes not less dangerous but more so.

That wasn't the fashionable view in 1938, however, and it isn't popular today. According to a new World Public Opinion poll, 75 percent of Americans agree that to stabilize Iraq, the United States should enter into talks with Iran and Syria. "I believe in talking to your enemies," James Baker declares. "I don't think you restrict your conversations to your friends." ...

A Churchill quote comes to mind when I read something like this. " An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it eats him last"

...No regimes on earth have more to gain from an American defeat in Iraq than the theocracy in Iran and the Assad dictatorship in Syria. They have every incentive to aggravate the Iraqi turmoil that already has so many Americans clamoring for withdrawal. "There is no evidence to support the assumption that Iran and Syria want a stable Iraq," writes Middle East Quarterly editor Michael Rubin, whose experience in the region runs deep. "Rather, all their actions show a desire to stymie the United States and destabilize their neighbor. More dangerous still . . . is the naive assumption that making concessions to terrorism or forcing others to do so brings peace rather than war."

The war against radical Islam, of which Iraq is but one front, cannot be won so long as regimes like those in Tehran and Damascus remain in power. They are as much our enemies today as the Nazi Reich was our enemy in an earlier era. Imploring Assad and Ahmadinejad for help in Iraq can only intensify the whiff of American retreat that is already in the air. The word for that isn't realism. It's surrender. "

Iraq Study Group Report (Updated)

I am in the process of reading the Iraq Study Group Report and will try to dissect it as I go but just a perfunctory reading of the Executive Summary gives me more than just a pause. It seems to run a long gamut from Iraq itself to recommendations of a dialog with Iran and Syria as serious "partners" in Iraq. It also brings in the Israeli/Palestinian question and that does not bode well for US/Israeli relations. Of course knowing James Bakers past thoughts on Israel and Jews in general, I can't say that surprises me. Nowhere is terms such as victory to be found. Stay tuned and read it for yourself. I would be interested in any comments regarding your reading and interpretations.
Now this is earth shaking news...

The challenges in Iraq are complex. Violence is increasing
in scope and lethality. It is fed by a Sunni Arab insurgency, Shiite
militias and death squads, al Qaeda, and widespread criminality.
Sectarian conflict is the principal challenge to stability....If the situation continues to deteriorate, the consequences
could be severe. A slide toward chaos could trigger the collapse
of Iraq’s government and a humanitarian catastrophe. Neighboring
countries could intervene. Sunni-Shia clashes could
spread. Al Qaeda could win a propaganda victory and expand
its base of operations. The global standing of the United States
could be diminished. Americans could become more polarized.

Then we have this jaw dropper:

Given the ability of Iran and Syria to influence events
within Iraq and their interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq, the
United States should try to engage them constructively.

I'm not even well into the 4th page of the Executive Summary. This is going to be a page turner for sure.
(Update) Ed at Captains Quarters has a couple of very good posts about the ISG Report here and here. And NZ Bear has the report converted to HTML format here.

So far it seems to be as advertised but does have some good ideas that will mostly be overlooked by the media and the casual reader. I'll come back to those in a later post but lets just look at this and digest it.

There must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts: Lebanon, Syria, and President Bush’s June 2002 commitment to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. This commitment must include direct talks with, by, and between Israel, Lebanon, Palestinians (those who accept Israel’s right to exist), and particularly Syria—which is the principal transit point for shipments of weapons to Hezbollah, and which supports radical Palestinian groups. ...

RECOMMENDATION 15: Concerning Syria, some elements of that negotiated peace should be:

• Syria’s full adherence to UN Security Council Resolution 1701 of August 2006, which provides the framework for
Lebanon to regain sovereign control over its territory.
• Syria’s full cooperation with all investigations into political assassinations in Lebanon, especially those of Rafik
Hariri and Pierre Gemayel.
• A verifiable cessation of Syrian aid to Hezbollah and the use of Syrian territory for transshipment of Iranian weapons and aid to Hezbollah. (This step would do much to solve Israel’s problem with Hezbollah.)
• Syria’s use of its influence with Hamas and Hezbollah for the release of the captured Israeli Defense Force
soldiers.
• A verifiable cessation of Syrian efforts to undermine the democratically elected government of Lebanon.

Baker and company have been called "realists" in the past but if this is their idea of realism, a proposal that has no chance of happening, I would venture to say that they are more of the Pollyanna school than the school of realism. I guess their idea of success is to cooperate with our enemies and hope for the best while calling a defeat a success and walking away claiming victory. More later. I'm reading this missive again and suggest you do the same. It is not as long as it seems, several blank pages, addendum and lists of members etc. and the meat is double spaced to make it look more impressive a tome than it is.