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| Dealing with Guilt, Envy, and Indignation | Harvard Heading for Toilet |
Of course It's a Civil War
by Christopher Chantrill
March 08, 2006 at 3:29 am
IN THE WAKE of the bombing of the Shia temple in Samarra, the MSM is polling the American people and discovering that an “overwhelming majority of Americans believe that fighting between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Iraq will lead to civil war,” according to a Washington Post-ABC poll.
Conservatives like Rush Limbaugh are outraged. To him, it’s all about the MSM pushing their “action line” that the war in Iraq is a mistake and we are losing, and Bush should be impeached. So the MSM is saying:
”We're the ones that want the civil war! We've been hoping for it for three years. We're hyping it, and now we got 80% of Americans thinking it's going to happen.”
Come on Rush. Of course there’s a civil war in Iraq. Has been ever since our forces drove into Baghdad in 2003 and the Saddam regime suddenly disappeared and went underground.
But because of the power of the United States the Saddamite and Al Qaeda factions cannot conduct an open civil war with armies marching to and fro across Iraq. They would if they could, but they do not have the power to execute a conquer and hold strategy. Instead, they must use the raiding strategy of IEDs and suicide bombs and work on the international left-wing media to declare a disaster.
Our strategy is to build up a new regime in Iraq that will have legitimacy, in the sense used by Eric Voegelin in The New Science of Politics, and will have an army and police force strong enough in operational and moral capability to put down an outbreak of frank civil war. It would have the power to prevent any armed group, army or militia, from coming out of hiding and converting from a raiding strategy to conquer-and-hold.
Actually, when you think about it, there will, eventually, be an attempt to convert the current insurgency to frank civil war. It will come when we draw down our forces. Our strategy is that when that happens, the Iraqi government security forces will be strong enough to put the insurgents down and score decisive victory in the ongoing Iraq Civil War.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Liberal Coercion
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
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