Anyone examining the beginnings of Operation Iraqi Freedom needs to read “War and Decision” by Douglas Feith. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the assessment, the level of scholarship in his 540 page memoir of his service as the 3^rd ranking civilian in the Pentagon is surpassed only by his 140 page appendix of notes.

For such a thoroughly researched document by a person of such seniority and access, media coverage of “War and Decision” has been conspicuous by its absence. Radio and new media have covered the book, but thus far newspapers and other mainstream media have not. 

In the interest of full disclosure, I love the Washington Post and rarely miss an article by their Pentagon Reporter, Tom Ricks. Today however, I was disappointed. In a conversation this morning, Mr. Feith informed me that the Post does not intend to review this groundbreaking work. Not now. Not ever.

To their credit, there are lots of books and one can’t review all of them. After all, “War and Decision” is only ranked #4 in Amazon.com’s “International Relations” category, #2 in the “Freedom and Security” category and #1 in “Terrorism.” I guess being the first and thus far only well documented inside view of the planning and execution of a major military conflict just isn’t what it used to be.

The Post ran a front page story on March 9^th, based on a leaked copy of the manuscript. Although it correctly identified the author and the title, the article mischaracterized the book and missed key points, specifically Mr. Feith’s exposition of the “Post-war Plan.” Apparently I am not the only reader who objected to this coverage, since the article triggered a letter to the editor by the executive editor of the book's publisher, Harper Collins.

I enjoy reading the Post and I enjoy reading Tom Ricks, but friends must hold one another accountable. 

The Bottom Line:
The Washington Post, and institutions like it, have a narrative: ‘The invasion of Iraq was a fiasco and the occupation an inescapable quagmire.’

Any rebuttle to this statement, no matter how well argued or researched, is simply not considered.

The Mainstream Press is not interested in the sort of historiographical work done by Mr. Feith. This would require knowledge and insight, not mere opinion.

Yesterday, Dec.7th, is an infamous day for most Americans and is widely known as a day to reflect upon the second world war.

December 8th is far less associated with WWII, but today I would like to draw your attention to this day's historical significance.

On 8 December, 1944, LTG George S. Patton called to his office the Chief Chaplain of the U.S. Third Army. Under Patton's command, the 3rd had experienced stiff opposition, not so much from the Nazis as from the weather. They were well equipped, well trained and well led, but the "immoderate" rain posed a serious challenge to both transportation and battle maneuver.

Their are many aspects of war that a commander can control, but their are infinitely more that are beyond his grasp, but Patton's philosophy of war defied this conventional wisdom.

When the Chaplain asked why he was summoned, Patton explained that victory in war came through three things: planning, work and prayer. When the chaplain reported that the third army did little little praying, Patton instructed that a prayer be written and upon reading it he ordered 250,000 copies made and disbursed among the men.

I believe, as Patton did, that the fervent prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective. Many Americans are eager to support the men and women of the armed forces with parades, care packages and other good and useful things. But let us not forget that along with these we must pray. This is not simple moral support or a stand of solidarity. It is a supplication to the ultimate power of the universe for good weather, effective bolt-carrier groups that won't jam from sand, and for the strength and skill to carry on fighting against a vicious enemy.

Pray continually.

"Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for Battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies and establish Thy justice among men and nations."

Read the whole story.

Rob Stevenson for New Media Connection
www.newmediaconnection.org

The most influential bloggers in the English-speaking world came together with the best of new media technology companies last Thursday and Friday. The delegates included Hugh Hewitt, Roger L. Simon of Pajamas Media, Yahoo, Townhall.com and all the other predictable big names in the blogosphere, but one group was unique in its heavy religious views and united sense of mission. Given these demographics, what brings fifty-nine born-again Christians to the Las Vegas Strip? 

GodblogCon does. This year’s GodblogCon, the third annual meeting of the minds for Christians in the blogosphere broke new ground, combining with The BlogWorld and New Media Expo in its inaugural conference November 8^th&9^th, in Las Vegas, NV.

That said, why is Al Mohler leading the all-star team of Christian blogging on a “D-Day” invasion of a secular trade show for new media technologies? The answer lies in a simple analysis of the history of Christian media influence, and few guesses at its future. 

By the 1920s, the emerging suburb Hollywood, CA was bustling with Cecil B. DeMille and D.W. Griffith pioneering a new medium: the motion picture. On the cutting edge of media tech was the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA). With one of the first and most influential radio stations of the time and a drive to push their message to the forefront of cultural thought, they embarked on a mission to saturate their culture with intelligent fundamentalism, goals that echo in the evangelical movement to this day. It was only natural for BIOLA to take the helm and play the lead role in the creation of Hollywood.

Then tragedy struck. Many Christians, appalled by ‘sinful’ movies and a culture moving ‘to hell in a hand basket,’ left the industry, boycotted the movement and complained about inappropriate content. Pious or impious, I will not judge. Suffice to say, this move was stupid. 

Decades later, Hollywood has flourished without Christianity. Sitting on the sidelines bewailing the ‘inevitable’ didn’t stop the movies, but it did excommunicate smart Christians from positions of power. This mistake cost us the greatest tool of cultural influence in the twentieth century.

As we step anew into the third millennium, we are bound and determined to learn from our mistakes. The internet will provide pornography, intolerance, deception and hate, but it will provide these regardless of our compliance. It is for us, the Church, rather, to take our rightful seat at the table of new media and wield such influence as we may attain, directing the future of our culture to the Glory of God.

Today 12 students from Biola University are driving home from a week in Las Vegas. They do so in an attitude of celebration, knowing that by their small actions the world will be a better place: a place where God is not ghettoized to niche markets, but shouted from the highest rooftops of the technological world. Those who stand in the way of our cause will continue to address the culture, but they will not do so alone. As long as GodblogCon continues to meet, the Christian voice will be heard, and a small cadre of evangelicals will always be in the arena to stand for the message of the gospel.

We will not be silent.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech and at Columbia legitimizes him on a global level.

Or does it?

Lee Bollinger, the President of Columbia University, prefaced the speech with a long diatribe against Ahmadinejad's human rights violations and speech restrictions. Furthermore, Ahmadinejad was interupted several times by laughter and booing.

Ahmadinejads visit will have two main effects on world relations:

1)      He will have virtually no credibility or legitimacy in the Western World. He has made a fool of himself on a world stage with the eyes of American and European academia intently watching. This will wake the left out of their apathetic slumber and galvanize what will become an appropriate unity against the sort of fear-mongering to which Ahmadinejad is so accustomed.

2)      Despite his insanity, his claims resonate with the radical extreme wing of Islam. Rather than being appalled at his claims, they will support him all the more fervently. There are fewer ways to gain popularity among the enemies of freedom than television clips juxtaposing you with the mainstream culture of the United States.

In summary, Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia will incite greater vitality in movements both for and against him, the final effect being increased tension and a giant step toward a cultural war between Persia and West that began 2,500 years ago when Thracians subdued Xerxes at the battle of Marathon. We have lived in relative peace for the last 300 years, but I fear that the time has come to steel ourselves once more.

“And Conquer We Must,
if Our Cause, it is Just;
And this be Our Motto:
In God do We Trust”
            -The National Anthem, Francis Scott Key

Tagg Romney, on "Five Brothers," made an great point today about the future of the republican party:

"I believe the reason we had such a tough loss in 2006 was that the grassroots of the party felt that the Washington politicians had let them down and gotten away from their core principles."

Tagg, the eldest son of Presidential Candidate and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, correctly identifies the source of GOP trouble in the midterms not as a referendum on the Iraq war, but as the direct result of a retreat by the elected officials of the party from conservative values. Essentially, Republicans lost when they stopped being Republicans. Their three fatal flaws were as follows:

1)      Retreat from the Border. After allocating the funding and receiving overwhelming financial and political support from their base, Republican leader, including the President, continued to drag their feet with regarding to building a fence across our southern border.

2)      Retreat from local issues. We are the party of states rights, small government and local control. Why then, in the wake of the 2006 defeat, did the remnant of lucky incumbents huddle together in the washingtonian “Bastille” and talk to each other about what went wrong. What they needed to do was stop playing party politics, get back home to their districts, and listen to the real wants and needs of their constituents

3)      Retreat from traditional jurisprudence. When Justice Samuel Alito’s nomination was being held up by a filibuster, a technique designed for legislation and never intended for Judicial Confirmation, seven prominent republicans compromised with the democrats when they could have merely used their constitutional authority to force an up-or-down vote. Their cowardice cost them dearly, of the three members of the “Gang of fourteen” who were up for re-election, only one maintained her seat. Furthermore, the actions of the other four republicans lost many other seats in their home states because of their constituents’ distrust of their ability to lead.

If republicans want to keep the White House, they will need to stay true to what Tagg has rightly called their “Core Values.” I believe Mitt Romney is up to this task. The time has come for us to return to Republican values and embrace the party of Lincoln, Reagan and Romney.

As the conservative base becomes more and more infuriated at the audacity of the democrat party, it also becomes unsatisfied with the weakness and inconsistency of it's own republican representation.

I have long thought that the solution to this would be the eventual rising up of veterans, particularly those who have fought in the Global War on Terror, into positions of power.

Jim Ogonowski may be a bit older that the generation I was considering, but his tough, experienced leadership is right on the money. Let's make an American Hero our next great statesman.

I have often overheard a person look at a piece of modern art and say, "Oh my word, how beautiful." Likewise, I have heard many people say, "that's hideous." Even more popular is the query in disbelief, "Can you believe the city paid for THAT?"

All of these responses imply an opinion about the work; a judgment of how good (or bad) the piece is. But how do people make such judgments?

Aristotle posited that the virtue of a thing was that property which made a thing most able to fulfill it's function. For instance, a knife is a virtuous (good) if it cuts things well. A chair is virtuous if it is good for sitting. A human being is virtuous if they fulfill the function of a human being, which Aristotle believed to be the pursuit of happiness; but that's another conversation. My question is, what is the proper function of a work of art?

Knowing the role of the Arts is the only way to assess the virtue of a specific work. It occurs to me that most people are quick to judge art, while they are slow to ponder why we have art at all. This habit ought to be reversed.

Some good resources for intelligent artistic thought is Fred Sanders, a professor at the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University, The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis, and Renee Jorgenson at Dismantled Thoughts. (Miss Jorgenson's site is also a great place for freshly updated new works of art.)

You gotta wonder if it's scarier for the guys doing the autopsy, or for the guy who wakes up on the table...

The Iraqi government has revoked the operating license of Blackwater USA. Blackwater, a private military contractor based out of Virginia, is paid by the American government to provide a variety of services for the U.S. Military including their main duty of escorting American supplies and key personnel, including Ambassador Crocker in dangerous areas of Iraq.

Although Blackwater is a civilian firm and is not under the direct payment or jurisdiction of the military, they are a military force. This is to say that they are armed, authorized to use deadly force, and most are prior servicemen in the Marine Corps or Army and Navy special operations units.

Today's news comes in the wake of a firefight  in which eight Iraqi civilians lost their lives, allegedly killed by Blackwater employees. There were many explosions around the diplomatic convoy in western Baghdad that Blackwater was guarding on Sunday, and it is unclear how events unfolded. A state department representative said,
"We believe some innocent life was lost. Nobody wants to see that. But I can't tell you who was responsible for that."

This is not the first incident of Blackwater personnel in violent confrontations with Iraqi civilians, but this is hardly surprising given the nature of their work.

For more information see the AP story here.


You may remember Blackwater from a 2004 incident in which four contractors were beaten, killed, dragged through the streets and hung on lampposts in Fallujah.

Patrick Ruffini has good thoughts on election '08

He acknowledges Rudy's lead in electability, but thinks Romney's edge in Iowa and New Hampshire can give him the upset. Read the post, as his thoughts on Fred are great too.

I agree that Romney will gain steam by picking up early primaries and caucuses, but I think the best thing Rudy has is his LOCAL appeal. I'm referring specifically to his post 9/11 popularity in New York City. If he takes Manhattan-and the already conservative upstate region-he can flip New York red. At that point Hillary can lure away any red state she wants, but the election would be a done-deal. Rudy can win Times Square and he can lead America.

...about the Daily Kos complaining that NPR isn't being liberal enough...

In High School, I was always taught to look at "both sides" of an issue. This means consulting multiple points of view in order to get the truth, somewhere in the middle. This strategy assumes that one source is heavily biased in one direction and that another source is heavily biased in the opposite direction. According to this idea, one should watch Fox News and MSNBC reporting the same subject and the average opinion between the two will be approximately the truth.

Problem: Sometimes people tell the truth.

When one side is interested in promoting their agenda and the other side is interested in letting facts be submitted to a candid world, the resulting view is skewed toward the idea tainted by agenda rather than fair reporting. This causes two huge problems:

1) If a news reporting source were trying to give a balanced report, they would be "counter-balanced" by a more biased report, giving the public a tainted picture

2) Given that this paradigm of news consumption doesn't give the truth a fair shake, it encourages bias. While it is true that every source is biased, there are degrees to this, and setting up a system that blatantly favors extremism and opinionated propaganda is no way to get the truth out of the mainstream media.

Over the last week, we have seen a third problem come up because of this news-gathering tactic, which may be even more culturally detrimental than the previous two. When people feel the need to consider multiple venues of news coverage, it is necessarily because they believe that each of them is in someway incapable of delivering the honest truth second hand, and this has caused a natural distrust of reporting. Unfortunately, we, as Americans, do not distinguish between primary and secondary sources.

One would think that the old balance of right-wing news and left-wing news would become obsolete in a “CSPAN” age where the average American has access to the same first-hand information that reporters use to compile their stories. Instead, Americans look at the information-the unbiased “facts” of the case without interpretation-and immediately categorize it into “liberal fact” or “conservative fact.” We have lost the mental category of “objective information.” This would be like reading the transcripts of a senate floor debate, but still feeling the need to get Keith Olbermann’s take on something you saw for yourself!

Why do I bring all of this up now? Because General David H. Petraeus, who was recently confirmed by a unanimous Senate-including fifty democrats and one independent- is now being called a liar and a pawn of the Bush administration. It is not so infuriating that these claims are being made about a four-star General whose ribbon-rack looks like a full franchise of home-depot, as it is that the claims were made long before the General said a single word.

Our society, which does not understand that it is viewing first hand material, reacts as if General Petraeus were a talking head for an interpretive news organization. He is not. His words are the basic, inarguable facts to be interpreted.

In my opinion, the news reporter is close to obsolete. I would shed no tears if Brit Hume and Wolf Blitzer both signed off once and for all. Certainly, we can use thoughtful commentators who acknowledge themselves as such, but the age of spin reporting is over.

Attention CNN: I am literate.

I can read the after-action reports that the military makes available from centcom and I watch Senate hearings for myself. The age of the newsman is over.

Why are there no conservative Evangelicals on the Supreme Court? The President is a Methodist, and he was elected widely by the powerful force of Evangelical protestant voters. (At least that's what my liberal friends tell me.) Why then, given two vacancies, are their no conservative Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians or even Episcopalians on the Supreme Court? The president nominated one, but she wasn't qualified. Surely, we can all remember newspaper articles fearing that conservative Protestants would become to powerful because Bush "owed" them for his re-election. Did he fail us? I tend to think not. We failed him.

There are 5 conservative Catholics on the court. Catholics aren't more conservative than Protestants, but apparently they are better at taking the best and brightest of their young people and preparing them for leadership in the public sector.

In the congress, Catholics, Jews, and Episcopalians are all over-represented-the latter group grossly so-and in the next presidential election, the top conservative is looking to be a Catholic or a Mormon.

It is high time that Evangelical republicans take a good, hard look at how these other denominations, and in the case of Mormonism, other religions, go about putting their own people in leadership positions. We are a camp of pro-lifers who don't have a single member qualified to overturn Roe. We would do well to study their methods and take our seat at the table of government.

After 13 years in British Legislature and 10 as P.M., Blair has some choice opinions on the modern media.

Text of Speech (Provided by the Telegraph)

Coverage:
Smart Mobs
The Guardian
The Times