“Death to UK”

Our friend, Kamangir, reports that the rhetoric from the mullahs has been raised to a fever pitch……

I am not a fan of football but I know that much that when the two top teams, Esteghlal and Perspolis, play together, it is the big event. This time, the Islamic Republic tried to borrow some of that passion for its political agenda. So, as ISNA reports,

The spectators shouted “Death to UK” before the match. A black banner was attached to the entrance of the stadium showing the text “Death to UK”.

In another news, the Friday Prayers’ Imam of Tabriz, the capital city of East Azerbaijan Province, asked for the British sailors to be tried.

 

 

 

 

 

The Big Lie

The remembrances of the Cambodian killing fields are, to many people, reduced to photos of neatly stacked bones and skulls for the records of posterity. For the survivors, it is much more. But, being yellow-skinned, and half-way around the world, it is too simple for the demagogues of the Party of Defeat to dismiss them outright, or even blame the deaths on the government of the US, as I noted several weeks ago:

What do you think about what happened to the three million Vietnamese and Cambodians who died after the U.S. troops left Vietnam?

Jane Fonda: It’s too bad that we caused it to happen by going in there in the first place.

source

Nor was this the first time the leftist elite managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Algeria in the late ’50s was embroiled in an insurgency (FLN) that was being soundly defeated by the French and loyalist Algerian military.

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

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

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

As the democrats plot to not only betray the American military in Iraq, but also the hundreds of thousands of loyal Iraqis who have labored and fought along side the coalition, these all-too familiar consequences seem lost. And, just when you think they can’t get any lower, they hit bottom and keep digging.

Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zibigniew Brezinski, is rewriting the history of the fall of Viet Nam in his most recent attempt to prop up the Iranian dictatorship. Speaking at Duke University this week, Brezinski unveiled the THE BIG LIE:

Brzezinski said there’s no reason to think a bloodbath would necessarily follow a U.S. withdrawal (from Iraq).

“We expected that the U.S. leaving Vietnam would result in massive killings and genocide and so forth, and collapse of the dominoes in Southeast Asia,” he said. “It didn’t happen. How certain are we of the horror scenarios that have been mentioned in what will take place in Iraq?” source

I’ve thought for some time that the fellow travelers at moveon.org, and the marxists within the clintonistas, have made complete chumps out of the democrat party. Mainstream democrats are no more. They’ve been replaced by the opportunists and useful idiots who aid and abet the enemy, with the full knowledge and support of the MSM. At least the useful idiots like Fonda, have the emotional honesty to blame America. The complete and utter dishonesty of asshats like Brezinski threatens to balkanize the Republic.

To our Americans serving in Iraq

Kudos to Black and Right

(thanks, Bob. You said it, amigo.)

h/t Yankeedame

Bryan asks, “Where do we find such men?” a must see video at HotAir

Resignation Friday: Should Alberto go?

If you listen to the hue and cry of the Party of Defeat, and their allies in Big News, it’s only a matter of hours before Alberto Gonzales becomes the latest political casualty in the war against the culture of corruption in the Bush Administration. Fortunately for me, I haven’t listened to them since 1988, which coincidentally was the first time I voted Republican.

Should Gonzales resign?

Sandy Berger is not in prison, illegal immigrants continue to flood across the southern border, and Johnny Sutton was not among the eight US Attorneys who Gonzales fired. Gonzales serves at the pleasure of the President, so if the aforementioned problems aren’t enough to get him fired, then obviously they aren’t important problems to the President. I guess I’ll just have to chalk them up to areas with which I have a disagreement with the Administration.

But, there is no way in God’s green earth that Gonzales should resign over the US Attorneys kerfluffle. The following rogues gallery of corrupt democrats should resign before anybody else on the republican side. I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for Big News to demand accountability and honesty from the democrats. And, since they won’t, and because political attention spans are notoriously short, it is my pleasure to bring you this quick look at the top ten current crop of corrupt democrats who should absolutely resign.

By the way, I’ve included a news link with each photo. Just click on the photo to take you to the background story. Enjoy, and have a great weekend, y’all.

UPDATE:

How could I forget about Abscam Jack? Sheesh.

see also: Woman honor thyself, Hang Right Politics, In the Bullpen, Redneck’s Revenge, Dr. Bulldog, Velvet Hammer, Righteous Indignation

How to win in Iraq (and how to lose)

Howard points to the commentary “HTWII” that was picked up by Opinion Journal. It is truly an outstanding piece, written by Mr. Arthur Herman.

Congratulations to Mr. Herman for such a well-written article, and thanks to WSJ for giving it the audience that it deserves. And, special thanks to Howard for beating WSJ upside the head with a 2 x 4 until they relented and decided to publish Mr. Herman’s article.

Here are a few excepts:

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

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

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

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

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

Read it all