"After Baghdad falls to the US, I am cashiered out of the Air Force and take a job in one of the markets in my neighborhood. One night, some of my friends are visiting, and we have a barbecue and are watching videos of cowboy movies. There is a knock on my door. I open it and there is a US patrol. They ask if they can enter my house and I say, 'Sure, come in.' I offer them some barbecue, because we see them on patrol; we recognize them and know how long they are out before they return to base. They say, 'No, thank you. We have eaten recently.'

Then they ask if I have weapons. One of my friends says to me in Arabic, 'Tell them "No" because they will take your guns and you will be defenseless.' I tell him in Arabic, 'I will not lie to them or they will not trust us...'"

Here's where you can read the rest.

1. Be sure to have audacity and hope.

2. Believe in yourself. Remember, you are the one you've been waiting for.

3. Be nice.

4. Give a terrorist a job.

Rick: "Sam, if it's December 1941 in Casablanca, what time is it in New York?"

Sam: "Um, my watch stopped."

Rick: "I bet they're asleep in New York. I'll bet they're asleep all over America."

... click

Stephane Dion is again musing about a carbon tax. During his bid for the Liberal leadership in 2006, he called it "bad policy." Then, last spring, he suggested a carbon tax was a good policy, but not so good that the Liberals should adopt it. Now, Mr. Dion appears to be saying that a carbon tax may be the right policy for the Liberals after all. His most recent flip flop could not come at a better time for the Conservatives. With high gas prices already enraging consumers, Mr. Dion's idea will be suicidal at the polls.

My favorite pics of the Chaiten eruption are here.

(does anyone know the name of the musical composition?)

"It's appalling that defence is the biggest expenditure of government and yet there's no strategic documents to go with this supposed plan," Ms. Black said. "We waited two years for this, if you can believe it."

A bright, shiny nickel to the first person who can actually point to the "strategy" in the poorly-named "Canada First Defence Strategy" announced with great hoopla in Halifax yesterday.

Military funding in this country is always welcome, since our Canadian Forces is chronically underfunded. But promises by a minority government for cost-of-living funding increases that won't even keep up with inflation, projected out years beyond the next election, is nothing more than fluff. And without policy to anchor those promises, to lay out the need for such funding, to tie the money to the capabilities our country requires of the CF, they're nothing more real than whispers in the wind.

When politicians speak in vague terms about defence, and when they refuse to put any of their ideas into a written document, my spidey-sense starts tingling.

I wrote something two years ago before the Conservatives gained power, and unfortunately it still holds true:

Interestingly, my concerns with the Conservative platform (page 23 of the pdf, but 45 of the policy book) are exactly the opposite to those I harbour about the Liberal plan. While the Liberals have communicated a vision with mediocre details and follow-through, the Conservatives have laid out significant detail without an overarching policy. Perhaps the Tories assume the policy status quo holds unless contradicted, but I would have liked to have seen that affirmed in their platform. Because, as I've said before, without a cohesive policy thread to hold it all together, their platform is just a series of spending announcements. Welcome and needed spending announcements, mind you, but hardly a defence policy.

Ask yourself if you'd invest in a private enterprise that handled its single largest budgetary line item like this:

In a highly unusual move, the Conservative government will base its entire future rebuilding of the Canadian military on Mr. Harper's 10-minute speech and Mr. MacKay's 700-word address. No actual strategy document has been produced, or will be produced, according to government and defence officials. Neither speech went into any specific details about equipment purchases, costs or timelines or how the future strategy will unfold. Both speeches presented more broad-brush approaches to defence.

Asked about when the actual Canada First Defence Strategy was going to be released, Jay Paxton, Mr. MacKay's press secretary, replied: "It is a strategy that you heard enunciated by the prime minister and Minister MacKay."

"It is not a 'document' like a white paper -- it is the vision delivered today for long-term planning for the CF," he added. "As such, the speeches are the strategy."

The Department of National Defence is the largest branch of our federal government. With a budget of tens of billions of dollars, a written strategy that shows some tangible commitment to a definite plan isn't too much to ask.

More generally, in a world supposedly awash in anti-US sentiment, pro-American leaders keep winning elections. Germany's Angela Merkel is certainly more pro-American than Gerhard Schroeder, whom she replaced. The same is true of France's Nicolas Sarkozy.

More importantly in terms of Green's analysis, the same is also true of South Korea's new President. Lee Myung-bak, elected in a landslide in December, is vastly more pro-American than his predecessor, Roh Moo-hyun.

Even in majority Islamic societies, their populations allegedly radicalised and polarised by Bush's campaign in Iraq and the global war on terror more generally, election results don't show any evidence of these trends. In the most recent local elections in Indonesia, and in national elections in Pakistan, the Islamist parties with anti-American rhetoric fared very poorly. Similarly Kevin Rudd was elected as a very pro-American Labor leader, unlike Mark Latham, with his traces of anti-Americanism, who was heavily defeated.

Even with China, the Iraq campaign was not a serious negative for the US. Beijing was far more worried by the earlier US-led NATO intervention into Kosovo because it was based purely on notions of human rights in Kosovo. Such notions could theoretically be used to justify action (not necessarily military action) against China over Taiwan and Tibet. Iraq, on the other hand, was justified on the basis of weapons of mass destruction, a justification with which the Chinese were much more comfortable.

cross posted @ Celestial Junk

More Reading:

VDH takes a delicious shot at some of the world's chief Bush-haters ... the Europhiles.

How do all these diverse narratives and agendas add up? The vaunted European multicultural, multilateral, utopian and pacifist worldview is now on its own and thus will get hammered as never before in the unrelenting forge of history. Very soon there will be no more George W. Bush to dump on, hide behind, and blame for the widening cracks in the Atlantic alliance. Instead Europeans may well have to call on the old pro, Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama, to lead them in negotiating sessions with jihadists, Iran, and Russia.

Why is it then that so many Americans - and foreigners who come here - feel that the place is so, well, safe?

A British man I met in Colorado recently told me he used to live in Kent but he moved to the American state of New Jersey and will not go home because it is, as he put it, "a gentler environment for bringing the kids up."

This is New Jersey. Home of the Sopranos.

Brits arriving in New York, hoping to avoid being slaughtered on day one of their shopping mission to Manhattan are, by day two, beginning to wonder what all the fuss was about. By day three they have had had the scales lifted from their eyes.

I have met incredulous British tourists who have been shocked to the core by the peacefulness of the place, the lack of the violent undercurrent so ubiquitous in British cities, even British market towns.

"It seems so nice here," they quaver.

Well, it is!

Who would write such drivel?

click

"We sleep peaceably in our beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf." (George Orwell)

It has always been so. Civilization and the ability to inflict violence go together, are inseparable. Our pampered elites cannot understand this and have no ability to understand this. They look upon men with guns like apes gaping at The Last Supper.

Our venerable history books speak of Western Civilization as beginning with the Greeks somewhere around 700 BC. Not so. It began with the Hebrews pushing into what they called ‘the Promised Land' 500 years before. We forget that the most influential book in Western Civilization had its origins in the violence spread by the Israelite commander Joshua and his successors. The poetry of Solomon, the beauty of the Psalms, all rest upon the shoulders of Israelites with swords.