Date ►►► September 24, 2005

Israel Raises the Pot In Gaza

According to the Associated Press, Israel has responded to Hamas's rocket attack from northern Gaza by calling up thousands of troops, deploying them to the border, launching air strikes on Hamas bomb-making factories, and vowing a "crushing" response still forthcoming.

"We have to make it clear to the Palestinians that Israel will not let the recent events pass without a response," Mofaz said in a statement, referring to the Hamas rocket fire. "The response needs to be crushing."

The overnight rocket barrage by Hamas was the first since Israel pulled out of Gaza nearly two weeks ago. Israel has said it will show "zero tolerance" for attacks after the withdrawal.

Mofaz decided to deploy troops on Israel's border with Gaza after meeting his security chiefs, an official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the meeting. Thousands of soldiers received call-up notices, and their leaves were canceled.

This is precisely the response that would have been impossible prior to the pullout: it was politically repugnant, even within Israel, to launch air strikes on a territory that Israel occupied. But now that they have withdrawn, and the Palestinian Authority is officially alien territory -- and now that there are no Jewish settlers in Gaza to serve as potential hostages -- Israel has begun to respond to the attacks they way they would to any other "nation" attacking them. The gloves are off.

I discussed how the pullout would change the military calculation several times: here, here, and here. But now we see it playing out.

Israel has, of course, used attacks from the air before:

Mofaz also said Israel might resume targeted killings of Palestinian militants. During more than four years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting, scores of militants were killed in targeted attacks, most by missiles fired from Israeli aircraft.

But they have generally shied away from actual aerial bombing of territories they were currently occupying: for example, in the wildly exaggerated "massacre" in Jenin, the Israelis deliberately eschewed aerial bombing in favor of more dangerous house-to-house searches, precisely in order to avoid the moral and political opprobrium that would come from bombing territory they were occupying and killing civilians legally under their protection.

We'll see over the next few weeks whether Israel has truly turned a corner in their response to Palestinian terrorism, or whether Ariel Sharon is all yarmulke and no goats.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 24, 2005, at the time of 5:49 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

The Mythical Three

Patterico was kind enough to link my Lizard's Tongue column "the Great Civilizer" over on Patterico's Pontifications; in the lively (and very legalistic!) discussion in the comments page, I noticed three great myths about same-sex marriage cropping up again and again. Having seen these tossed out before, always recited as if everyone already knew them to be true, I reckoned it's best to clear the air of the nonsense now, before we get around to further debate on the actual issue.

Here are the myths:

1. Allowing same-sex couples to marry will extend the same civilizing effects of marriage to gays; isn't that good for society?
2. Gays don't choose their sexual orientation any more than straights do, so a ban on same-sex marriage is just as discriminatory as a racial ban.
3. You can't point to any specific marriage that will be damaged by allowing gays to marry, so obviously it won't have any impact on society at large, either; there is a natural tendency to pair up; people will still get married, so what's the big deal?

Rather than duke it out in the comments over there, I'll respond here and link back via trackback. That way I get a chance to spread myself a bit more.

Myth 1: Same-Sex Marriage Is As Civilizing As Opposite-Sex Marriage

The most interesting observation about this claim is that it is purely defensive; it begins from the nervous premise that gays need to be civilized! This is an amazing admission from the proponents of same-sex marriage; if the gay lifestyle were fine as it is, then why would it be so urgent to offer them the possibility of solemnizing their relationships by legally marrying? Unlike the economic argument, where the negative consequences (to inheritance, community property, or alimony) can be laid at the doorstep of "anti-gay discrimination," this position assumes the fact that there is something inherently wrong with behavior in the gay community which needs fixing. I only note the defensiveness in passing.

The first point to make is that the burden of proof of this peculiar claim is on the proponents of same-sex marriage, the ones who want to change 200+ years of American tradition, not on the rest of us to justify not changing everything. Since no one who asserts that giving a marriage license to gays living together will, by itself, help to "civilize" them has ever bothered trying to prove it (certainly not that I've seen), the point fails at inception. But I'll assume the burden of proof myself, to a partial extent; I will at least show why it's highly unlikely to be true. Such a mensch I am!

It's facially dubious. What is the enforcement mechanism? Traditional marriage civilizes men by the specific mechanism of forcing them to live with women. Men are already partially civilized even by dating women, let alone living with them, let even more alone being married to them. But gay men already date each other and live with each other -- with little evidence that shacking up moderates their behavior.

Alan P. Bell and Martin S. Weinberg, Homosexualities: A study of Diversity Among Men and Women, p. 308, Table 7, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978: 75% of gay, white males admitted that they had had sex with more than one hundred separate males in their lifetimes; 28% claimed more than a thousand.

Being openly gay appears to exacerbate promiscuity. Paul Van de Ven, et al., "Facts & Figures: 2000 Male Out Survey," p. 20 & Table 20, monograph published by National Centre in HIV Social Research Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The University of New South Wales, February 2001: a survey in Australia in the year 2000 found that gay men who associated with the gay community were almost four times as likley to have had over fifty sexual partners in the preceding six months than were gay men who were not "out" and did not associate with the gay community.

But how does this stack up against men in heterosexual relationships? Robert T. Michael, et al., Sex in America: a Definitive Survey, pp. 140-141, Table 11, Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1994; Rotello, pp. 75-76: 94% of traditionally married heterosexuals had only a single sexual partner within the preceding year; in fact, 75% of cohabitating heterosexuals had only a single sexual partner. And among married heterosexuals, "a vast majority are faithful while the marriage is intact."

There simply is no dispute in the literature: gay men (and even lesbians) are more sexually promiscuous, as a group, than their heterosexual counterparts. So if gay men's sexual behavior is not moderated by dating and shacking up, then why would giving them the social approval of a marriage license do the trick?

You can't even argue that they act out because they're forced to hide their sexuality -- because (supra) it's exactly those gays who are completely "out" and connected with the gay community who are the most promiscuous.

There is not a shred of evidence in the voluminous research done on sexuality to indicate that gay men will moderate their behavior if they are allowed to legally marry -- instead of merely being religiously married or common-law married. Sorry, but that's the truth. If proponents disagree, let's see the studies. There are several European countries where "gender-neutral" marriage is the law; can any proponent point to a moderation of sexual behavior as a result?

Myth 2: Sexual Preference Is Fixed From Birth

It's a tangential issue, but it seems to carry great weight among proponents of same-sex marriage. It certainly seems to be true that the lion's share of heterosexuals never had any homosexual experiences; the opposite is less true: until quite recently, most gays had tried heterosexual sex and often even marriage. (Likely because of social pressure; recently, with homosexuality less of an issue, a much higher percent of gays have never had straight sex... but it's still lower than the number of straights who never had gay sex.)

But there is a large undistricuted middle here: bisexuals. Some bisexuals lean more one way than the other; some are equal-opportunity swingers. But all, by definition, can go either way. There is no question that the more homosexuality is socially "mainstreamed," the greater the number of natural bisexuals who will live homosexual lifestyles; contrariwise, the more it is socially discouraged, the less they will do so.

All right, so we get more people living a gay lifestyle. So what's wrong with that? Again, refer above: evidence pretty clearly indicates that the sexual standards of those living within the gay community are significantly looser than the sexual standards of those living within the straight community, even for gays and bisexuals. Again, more people openly living gay lifestyles, within the gay community, means more people on the margins engaging in high-risk or socially unacceptable sexual behavior: multiple partners, anonymous sex, unprotected sex, and ephebophilic sex; unprotected sex is especially likely, since the danger of pregnancy is nil.

So in fact, the preferences of a group of people of undetermined size who can switch back and forth from living as gay to living as straight may indeed make a significant difference in the society.

Myth 3: How Could Same-Sex Marriage Affect My Marriage?

When studying social questions, the proper approach is statistical -- not individual. This argument is structurally identical to arguing that just because we can never prove for any one particular person whether his lung cancer is related to his habit of smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, therefore we cannot say that smoking causes lung cancer.

But this is errant nonsense: statistically, those who smoke are at much higher risk of lung cancer than those who do not, regardless of whether we can prove causality in any particular case. The proof is that lung cancer is much more prevalent along the first group than the second. (Of course, to be completely scientific, you must account for other differences; but that is the essence of the proof.)

It's beyond the scope of this particular response to argue the case that same-sex marriage damages the institution of marriage; that argument will come later. But all that will be necessary to prove at that time is that the institution as a whole is damaged... there is no need to prove that any specific marriage is directly damaged by some measurable quantum; and the lack of specific cases is no more an argument for same-sex marriage than is the lack of a particular causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer in any specific person an argument that smoking isn't dangerous.

Three myths exploded. Now future discussion can proceed on a logical basis, not an emotional one. (Fat chance.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 24, 2005, at the time of 3:57 AM | Comments (19) | TrackBack

Date ►►► September 22, 2005

Arnold's Ads

UPDATE September 23rd, 2005: Most recent Field polling added; see end

(Not to be confused with Arnold's Abs, which we haven't seen since he became governor... and probably for good reason!)

Governor Schwarzenegger has finally debuted a television ad supporting his four major initiatives for the upcoming special election, to be held on Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 -- just shy of seven weeks from today. You can view the ad by following the link from Dan Weitraub's California Insider MSM-blog.

The initiatives proposed by the governor are the following; note that the titles are mine (more concise than the ones given on the ballot), but the brief, bulleted descriptions are straight off the California Secretary of State's website:

Proposition 74: Teacher Tenure

• Increases length of time required before a teacher may become a permanent employee from two complete consecutive school years to five complete consecutive school years.
• Measure applies to teachers whose probationary period commenced during or after the 2003–2004
  fiscal year.
• Modifies the process by which school boards can dismiss a permanent teaching employee who receives
  two consecutive unsatisfactory performance evaluations.

Proposition 75: Paycheck Protection

• Prohibits the use by public employee labor organizations of public employee dues or fees for political contributions except with the prior consent of individual public employees each year on a specified written form.
• Restriction does not apply to dues or fees collected for charitable organizations, health care
  insurance, or other purposes directly benefitting the public employee.
• Requires public employee labor organizations to maintain and submit records to Fair Political
  Practices Commission concerning individual public employees’ and organizations’ political
  contributions.
• These records are not subject to public disclosure.

Proposition 76: School Spending

• Limits state spending to prior year’s level plus three previous years’ average revenue growth.
• Changes state minimum school funding requirements (Proposition 98); eliminates repayment requirement
  when minimum funding suspended.
• Excludes appropriations above the minimum from schools’ funding base.
• Directs excess General Fund revenues, currently directed to schools/tax relief, to budget reserve, specified
  construction, debt repayment.
• Permits Governor, under specified circumstances, to reduce appropriations of Governor’s choosing,
  including employee compensation/state contracts.
• Continues prior year appropriations if state budget delayed.
• Prohibits state special funds borrowing.
• Requires payment of local government mandates.

Proposition 77: Redistricting Reform

• Amends process for redistricting California’s Senate, Assembly, Congressional and Board of Equalization districts.
• Requires panel of three retired judges, selected by legislative leaders, to adopt new redistricting plan if
  measure passes and after each national census.
• Panel must consider legislative, public comments/hold public hearings.
• Redistricting plan effective when adopted by panel and filed with Secretary of State; governs next statewide
  primary/general elections even if voters reject plan.
• If voters reject redistricting plan, process repeats, but officials elected under rejected plan serve full terms.
• Allows 45 days to seek judicial review of adopted redistricting plan.

The single ad so far (which covers all four initiatives) is pretty good, well produced: it reduces the argument down to the short and pithy version that is easily conveyed and long remembered. Once this ad and the ones that follow begin running in earnest, I expect to see support increase significantly for these initiatives -- which have been battered for weeks now by relentless attack from the Democrats, financed by the bottomless pit of money created by exactly the problem that Proposition 75 is trying to end.

To me, the two most critical are Propositions 75 and 77; they are the ones that strike most directly into the anti-democratic, corrupt campaign manipulations of the Left:

Paycheck Protection, to prevent labor unions from hijacking required union dues to spend on partisan campaigns, invariably supporting the left side of the aisle -- especially on social issues that have nothing to do with workers, such as abortion and same-sex marriage; and

Redistricting Reform, to break the steel-cage gerrymander, which shields the radical, New-Left Democrats from the opinion of the California electorate and immunizes the legislature from election results. If any incumbent in the legislature actually had to worry about how the voters might vote, the legislature would never have voted for half the loony-Left nonsense they have routinely enacted in the past.

I will keep you apprised of election-related issues as they pop up, starting with a before-and-after snapshot of the polling, once some respected post-ad polls have been released. (At the moment, prior to this ad, all these initiatives are running either behind or neck and neck; we'll see if the ad makes a difference.)

UPDATE: Latest Field Poll on the four initiatives

I don't know how well this will come across. I constructed the table in Dreamweaver, then just imported the code to Movable Type 3.2. If you can read it, I will be somewhat astonished!

Field Poll:	Late August	June
Prop. 74: Teacher Tenure	Yes: 46	Yes: 61
	No: 37	No: 32
	Undc: 17	Undc: 7
Prop. 75: Paycheck Protection	Yes: 55	Yes: 57
	No: 32	No: 34
	Undc: 13	Undc: 9
Prop. 76: School Spending	Yes: 19	Yes: 35
	No: 65	No: 42
	Undc: 16	Undc: 23
Prop. 77: Redistricting Reform	Yes: 32	Yes: 35
	No: 46	No: 46
	Undc: 22	Undc: 19

Actually, the numbers aren't too bad (except for Prop 76, which reduces education expenditures). They've drifted slightly away from the Schwarzenegger position; but then again, they have been subject to at least three weeks of intensive and expensive television attack ads with nothing on the other side. All in all, they've fared pretty well: Teacher Tenure and School Spending were subject to the most blistering attacks, and they've taken the biggest hit; but making it harder for teachers to get tenure is still in positive territory.

By contrast, the two I consider the most important -- Paycheck Protection and Redistricting Reform -- have barely budged. As the pro-initiative ads start to flow, I expect to see both move back towards the positive side. Paycheck Protection is strongly ahead, and Redistricting Reform is only moderately behind, well within striking range.

I believe there is a good chance for all to pass except for cutting education spending; but I'm not willing to make any predictions until I see some more polling.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 22, 2005, at the time of 7:29 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

Predictions: Judiciary-Committee Democrats Fail to Rise Above Lowest Expectations

Crash and burn on my prediction for the J-Com vote! I wildly overestimated the Democrats' ability to recognize their own best interest. The vote of course included five Democrats voting against, not just Ted Kennedy: what is astonishing to me is that Joe Biden, Charles Schumer, and even Dianne Feinstein voted against Roberts. Dick Durbin I can understand; he's not exactly the sharpest crayon in the tank. But Dianne Feinstein? She's never been a wacko before; liberal, but not a captive to the MoveOn crowd.

Oh well; this of course means that more than twenty Democrats are going to vote against Roberts in the full Senate... but are they going to get forty willing to filibuster? I don't think they can: Harry Reid, leader of the opposition, insists he will not vote against cloture; besides, Russ Feingold, Herb Kohl, and Pat Leahy voted for Roberts, while Mark Pryor, Tim Johnson, Max Baucus, and Ben Nelson have already declared support, with Mary Landrieu and Kent Conrad "leaning" towards Roberts; that should make at least ten Democrats ostensibly unwilling to filibuster, which would make a filibuster impossible. So Patterico's earlier prediction is still possible... though since he unwisely signed aboard my prediction, I get to split the ignominy!

My other prediction, about the Iraqi Constitutional vote, is still live, of course. I sure hope the Iraqi voters are smarter than the Democrats....

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 22, 2005, at the time of 2:46 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

The Lizard's Tongue Flicks Forth

I promised for this week the first of several (I'm tentatively saying five) great secular arguments against same-sex marriage... and I deliver. Here is the innaugural entry of my column The Lizard's Tongue, which wil be available weekly (or biweekly, depending on the press of other engagements) from the Articles page.

You can get there by clicking Articles in the navigation bar above, so you can see the cool drop-down menu for the Lizard's Tongue column; it's in the sidebar on the right. Or if you're impatient, you can just click here to go to the column directly. Please let me know in the comments if this intricate apparatus fails in some spectacular way; if your car explodes, don't blame the Lizard's Tongue!

This first column is titled The Great Civilizer, and it argues that in general, women civilize men, while men encourage women to be more assertive and competitive. Both need the other... and it is in society's extreme interest to promote the union of male and female to create a family that is greater than either sex by itself.

This is also the spot to comment on the article itself, in the comments to this post.

Brad Linaweaver is working on his own columns, which will be monthly; they will likely relate to politics, to movies, and to science fiction... and they, too, will be linkable from the Articles page. I will also announce them as they materialize, and link to them from here.

Ain't technology great? Soon you'll be able to eat, sleep, and breathe Big Lizards twenty-five hours a day!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 22, 2005, at the time of 5:58 AM | Comments (25) | TrackBack

Date ►►► September 21, 2005

Shia Need Come-to-Jesus Meeting

This is profoundly disturbing. We all cheered -- well, except for Cindy and George -- when the Brits raided a jail (and then a private residence) in Basra to rescue their two special-forces comrades.

But the more details come out about the jailing and what happened to the soldiers afterward, the more it appears a reckoning is due between the Coalition forces and the Shia in the Iraqi South.

According to the governor of Basra province, the British soldiers were handed over by Iraqi authorities to Muqtada al-Sadr's terrorist forces, which it pleases him to call the "al-Mahdi Army." Via AP, "Iraqis in Basra Slam 'British Aggression'," September 21st, 2005:

Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr disputed the British account of the raid that followed. He told the British Broadcasting Corp. the two soldiers never left police custody or the jail, were not handed over to militants, and that the British army acted on a "rumor" when it stormed the jail.

But Basra's governor, Mohammed al-Waili, said the two men were indeed moved from the jail. He said they were placed in the custody of the al-Mahdi Army, the militia of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

"The two British were being kept in a house controlled by militiamen when the rescue operation took place," al-Waili said. "Police who are members of the militia group took them to a nearby house after jail authorities learned the facility was about to be stormed."

These are the same terrorists who tried to rebel against Iraqi authority in mid-2004, seizing the city of Najaf at the same time the Sunni terrorists under the command of Abu Musab al-Zarwawi grabbed Fallujah, killing four American contractors and mutilating their bodies for the TV cameras. This was the worst insurrection of the entire war, the only one that threatened to start an actual national front of resistance to Coalition forces; it was thwarted by the controversial but ultimately successful strategy of abandoning Fallujah for a time while we focused on Najaf and Basra. Once Sadr's "army" was crushed, we eventually returned to Fallujah, this time with a joint Coalition-Iraqi force that could not only conquer the city but hold it in Iraqi hands.

So after all that trouble, why on Earth are Iraqi police in Basra handing captured British soldiers off to Sadr's terrorists?

Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a Shiite politician who has criticized the British raid as "a violation of Iraqi sovereignty," acknowledged that one problem coalition forces face is that insurgents have joined the ranks of security forces.

"Iraqi security forces in general, police in particular, in many parts of Iraq, I have to admit, have been penetrated by some of the insurgents, some of the terrorists as well," he said in an interview with the BBC on Tuesday night.

Officials in Basra, speaking on condition of anonymity because they feared for their lives, said at least 60 percent of the police force there is made up of Shiite militiamen from one of three groups: the Mahdi Army; the Badr Brigade, the armed wing of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq; and Hezbollah in Iraq, a small group based in the southern marshlands.

The militias have deep historical, religious and political ties to Iran, where many Shiite political and religious figures took refuge during the rule of Saddam Hussein.

This is grim news indeed; but it need not be catastrophic. Basra clearly needs a thorough sanitizing; and respected Shiite leaders, such as Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the highest ranking and most respected Shiite cleric in Iraq, must make it very clear to Iraqi Shia that they must choose. They can either be militiamen, or they can be Iraqis; they cannot be both, as the militias do not have the interests of Iraq at heart.

In fact, there are persistent claims that Sadr himself is an agent of Iran; certainly the Badr Brigade and Hezbollah In Iraq are fully creatures of that vengeful, bloody theocracy. From the Asia Times, "Iraq goes courting in Iran," July 19th, 2005:

If sincere, Tehran could help both Iraqi and US-led forces to better fight the largely Sunni-based insurgency in Iraq by engaging the 15,000 to 20,000 al-Badr Brigade, the military wing of the Shi'ite Supreme Assembly of Islamic Revolution of Iraq, formed, trained and equipped by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to oppose Saddam.

This astonishing action on the part of Basra police who are also members of the "al-Mahdi Army" terrorist group is a shot across the bow at the Bush administration's handling of the war. We cannot allow Shiite terrorist militias to take over the Iraqi South or North Baghdad any more than we can allow Sunni terrorists to take over the center of Iraq. President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair had better take this event seriously and start working with Shiite authorities to cleanse Shiite police forces of terrorist elements. The alternative may be to witness the birth of "Greater Iran."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 21, 2005, at the time of 7:33 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Patrick Leahy Says He'll Back Roberts

UPDATE: Crash and burn on the prediction about the vote in the Judiciary Committee! Read all about it here.

In a move that seems to have shocked everybody except Patterico and myself, Sen. Pat Leahy (D-VT), Democratic J-Com stalwart and filibustering fool, announced today that he will vote in favor of John Roberts, Bush's nominee to be Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Leahy, D-Vt., said he still has some concerns about Roberts. "But in my judgment, in my experience, but especially in my conscience I find it is better to vote yes than no," he said. "Judge Roberts is a man of integrity. I can only take him at his word that he does not have an ideological agenda."

Although Sens. Joe Biden (D-DE) and Charles Schumer (D-NY), both on the Senate Judiciary Committee, have yet to formally announce their votes either way, both gave interviews in which they said that Roberts was the best Supreme-Court nominee either had ever seen. I find it hard to believe they would say that -- and then vote against him.

In the meanwhile, as I expected, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) announced his own position:

Moments after Leahy spoke, Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, who also serves on the Judiciary Committee, announced he would vote against Roberts.

"There is clear and convincing evidence that John Roberts is the wrong choice for chief justice," Kennedy said. "I oppose the nomination, and I urge my colleagues to do the same."

There are other Democratic senators yet to announce: Dick Durbin (D-IL), Russell Feingold (D-WI), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Herb Kohl (D-WI); still, I think my prediction, that Roberts will get all of the senators on the Judiciary Committee except Ted Kennedy, is looking pretty prescient at the moment.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 21, 2005, at the time of 2:26 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Date ►►► September 20, 2005

Where Are All the Moslem Methodists II

Matt Barr over at New World Man has an interesting response to my previous post in this thread. He suggests that rather than needing more "Moslem Methodists," as I called them -- Moslems who took their religiosity with the seriousness of 21st-century Americans, rather than 12th-century crusaders -- what they really need are more "Moslem Republicans." He recounts a good history of the radicalization of several organizations originally set up for mainstream purposes (NOW, labor unions, and the teachers unions) but which metastisized into radical organs of the New Left, leaving the American people behind... and sparking a surge of voters to switch from the Democratic Party to the GOP.

I'm sure Barr is correct that more Moslem "Republicans" would be great for Islam, but I'm not sure the analogy works as well as the religious one I used (for all the controversy it sparked!)

The biggest problem in analogizing Democrats to Moslems is that the former did have other voices surrounding them, voices that were pointing out the radical nature of those organizations Barr mentioned (NOW, the unions, and the teaching establishment): first, the Republicans, of course; in our republic, the critiques from the GOP could not be entirely shut out, even back in the 60s and 70s.

But second and more important, we need to bear in mind what Barr himself noted: Democratic leaders and organizations were not always so insane. The switchover (I'm using Judge Bork's timeline here from, I think, Slouching Towards Gomorrah) was when the New Left began to arise following the Port Huron Statement, released by the SDS in 1962 (the Students for a Democratic Society was the group from which the radical faction the Weathermen later spun off).

Most older Democrats never particularly embraced the New Left -- which was radicalized, hard-core, and Stalinist, inexplicably combined with feverishly anti-science, anti-technology, Luddite "environmentalism" -- and the New Left didn't take over the Democratic Party until, to be blunt, the older generation died off.

Thus, there has been reasoned resistance to the radicalization of the Democratic Party from the very beginning, coming from sources with unassailable liberal credentials, such as Hubert Humphrey and Pat Moynihan. Many Democrats retained their basic love of America... and unfortunately for the new radicalized Democratic Party (but fortunately for the country), that meant a lot of people left the Democrats and joined the Republicans, bringing the two parties into rough parity (during World War II, I would guess the Democrats enjoyed at least a 2-1 advantage over the GOP).

Alas, the Moslem world did not have any history of modernity, and they did not suddenly became radical; as Bernard Lewis discusses in many sources (e.g., Freedom and Justice in the Modern Middle East, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2005), the history of modernity in the Moslem (especially Arabic) world is depressingly stunted. The first introduction of modernity was when Napoleon, then a general in the French revolutionary republic, invaded and conquered Egypt with nearly casual ease in 1798. He imposed French ideas of equality (concept well understood in the ummah) and "liberty" -- which the Arabs at first thought meant simply the lack of being a slave but later translated into their concept of justice, as in a just ruler vs. an unjust ruler.

During this period, the Moslem world was forced to confront its woeful technological and sociological retardedness, compared to the Europeans. Alas, what they most took from their abrupt contact with modernity was the technological tools of war and oppression; they were eagerly embraced by low-level local leaders to make themselves into caliphs and sultans. Thus, I believe (this is my analysis, not taken from the Lewis article above), the ordinary Moslem and especially the Moslem cleric would come to associate modernity with oppression by unjust rulers and despots using surveillance and control techniques never before seen in Islam.

And the second period of modernist influence -- back to Lewis's history, now -- was when the French government surrendered to Hitler, and the elements of the erstwhile French empire had to decide whether to declare alliegance to the Nazi-controlled French government of Marshal Philippe Pétain at Vichy, or to the Free French Forces under Charles de Gaulle, then in exile in London. The French Arab colony of Syria-Lebanon chose Vichy, and Syria became a haven for Nazi forces. Thus, the Moslem "education" in modernity that began with Napoleon ended with Hitler; the Baath Party was nurtured and eventually hatched just after the war, and many Arabist rulers embraced first Naziism and then Stalinism as a way to further their personal goals of pan-Arabism, totalitarianism, and empire.

Back to my own reading, not Bernard Lewis. There are basically two types of Islamic societies now: those that embraced modernism, which are still heavily influenced by totalitarian European political systems, such as Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and others; and those who rejected modernism, either all along (like Yemen and Sudan) or at least for decades, such as Iran. Since Islam never had a Reformation, they never had an Enlightenment (I believe the former, which leads to intellectual freedom, is necessary for the latter.)

Moslems, whether they live in pre-modern Islamic countries or modernist-socialist Islamic countries, probably reject the ideas of modernism with equal fervor: the former out of fear of the unknown; the latter out of memory of the particular form in which they did, in fact, know modernism. Leaders from both types of Islamic nation would reject the modernist ideas of freedom of speech (or thought), of the press, dissent, and democracy, as both radical Islamism and also Baathism and its ideological cousins condemn individualism.

But Moslems do have communication with the modern worlds of Christianity, Buddhism, and Judaism; they see the infidels living very different lives that seem better, easier, and richer. Western Civilization (especially American) is incredibly infectious, and a great many Moslems, especially in countries that are not majority Moslem, have succumbed ot its lure (thank goodness) and, well, westernized themselves. Their lives are materially better, but there is still that conflict with the religous leaders, hence with the religion itself. This conflict between how they actually live and how they are told they should live leads to feelings of guilt and restlessness.

In the West, Christians frequently "get religion" and become more conscious of and committed to their religion. Here, that means going to church more often, participating in charity drives, becoming a volunteer to help the poor, preaching to prisoners about self-control and taking personal responsiblity for their mistakes, and so forth.

In Islam, people often feel the same impulse to become more committed to their religion; it's a natural human trait. But in Islamic countries, while that often includes all of the above, it also typically includes leaders who preach jihad, hatred, and the denigration of the lives of infidels and apostates.

This, in longer form, is what I meant in my first post: before they can have a political divergence into peaceful parties separated by philosophy -- an Enlightenment -- as we have here, they first have to have a religious Reformation. Remember, even in the West, the Reformation caused the Enlightenment, which culminated in the rise of democracy in America and then everywhere else in Christendom. Look at the language our Founding Fathers used in creating democracy: the basic argument was that God had created human beings with freedom of choice... so who is Man to take it away from them?

Thus I say that without a Reformation to make Islam itself less all-encompassing and more modern, less like a crusader and more like a contemporary Catholic, Episcopalian, Baptist, or what have you, I cannot see how democracy can work.

The two Islamic countries we have been fairly successful at "democratizing" both came through a period of forced modernity. Iraq had been a secular Moslem state for decades before the war, due to the influence of the Baath Party; it's not so surprising, even given the tribal nature of Iraq, that democracy has caught on there... the people already had the taste of modernity -- and even though it was bitter, they could not go back again to the pre-modern beliefs of, say, Saudi Arabia: once tasting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, you cannot go back to the Garden. (The Kurds even had a fairly democratic society in the North during Saddam Hussein's reign).

Similarly, Afghanistan had been forcibly exposed to the brutality of the Soviety Union for a dozen years, from 1979 to 1991-1992, when the Soviets were finally driven out. But during those years, they too got their taste of modernity, both its abuses (Communism) and uses (the American Stinger missile that helped liberate them from Soviet occupation). In 1996, the Taliban religious maniacs imposed upon them by brute force the harshest form of sharia around. The contrast must have been shocking; fortunately, no generation had time to be raised entirely under it before we destroyed it. Thus, I believe many Afghans, especially in Kabul, are thrilled at the ability to select their own leaders by the vote.

We seem to do better with states that have already been exposed to the advanced ideas of modernity. I would imagine that Egypt is another likely target, as Hosni Mubarik (and Anwar Sadat before him) are more in the mold of the Baathists than the Taliban; the same goes for Syria and Lebanon, of course. Iran might be a good match for democracy too, because of the history of the shahs, who were modernist "Moslem Methodists." Likewise Pakistan under Musharaf; and of course Turkey is already the very model of a modern Moslem nation-state.

But we're likely to have a harder time creating real democracy in Saudi Arabia, the home of Wahabbism... because that has always been a strongly Islamic religious state. Likewise, the states in Africa have already demonstrated a serious inability to modernize, as do many of the smaller Islamic countries in the Middle East. I don't know enough about the Philippines and Indonesia (the largest Moslem county in terms of population) to guess how well democracy could take hold there.

But in any country, religious Reformation must come first, then an Enlightenment, then democracy, and only then can we even begin to imagine "Moslem Republicans." Thus, while Barr’s history of the radicalization of the Democratic Party is accurate, in those areas of the ummah that did not pass through the forced secularization of socialism, we need "Moslem Methodists" before we can have "Moslem Republicans."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 20, 2005, at the time of 8:43 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

Future Shock and Awe

The following is a repost from my post of the same name on Captain's Quarters back in July.

Extree, extree, getcha red-hot future combat today!

As has been the case for, oh, a few thousand years, the violent tendencies of human beings are leading the way to tomorrow's technology. War is not only good for business, it's good for science. Here are just a few of the goodies that await us in future battlefields.

Warning! This is a very long post, nearly all of which is tucked into the extended-entry section. Forewarned is four-armed!

Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation

The weak link in the combat chain is often the human body. We run slower than horses; we carry less cargo than a camel; our skin is more fragile than a rhinoceros; we can't even jump like a gazelle.

But all that is going to change, if DARPA has any say in it. Joe Pappalardo of National Defense Magazine writes that the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has been hard at work for several years now on the Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation (EHPA) program. The idea is to create a tough and powerful exoskeleton that would surround the soldier's body and augment his own native abilities.

At the moment, political correctness rules. Ever since the public-relations fiasco of the Terrorism Information Awareness futures market, DARPA has been almost paranoid about bad publicity... which can lead to investigations, budget cuts, and in a pinch, mass firings. So all they will admit at this point is the utility of exoskeletons for loading and unloading cargo:

“This is a fairly boring transportation program,” [DARPA project manager John] Main said, with a small grin. “We’re not jumping over buildings. We’re getting into rough terrain that is denied to Humvees.”

But the combat implications are obvious: a man who can carry 200 lbs of fuel or MREs can also carry 200 lbs of body armor or a 200 lb weapon (or a mix: a hundred devoted to armor, and the other hundred to weaponry). Although they're not really willing to speculate, it's hard to see, once you have the basic idea of exoskeletal augmentation, how you can fail to think of putting jets in the boots, heavy weapons that can be fired by merely pointing the hand, or all the other accoutrements of Robert Heinlein's 1959 novel Starship Troopers.

Stepping way, way out on a limb, the head of the UC Berkeley robotics engineering lab, which is working on a DARPA grant, Homi Kazerooni, reluctantly admitted the possibility:

Kazerooni conceded that robotic enhancements worthy of combat were feasible, given a system design that could keep up with soldiers’ reflexes. “Can the machine shadow our reflexes? These are not voluntary, and sometimes 200 microseconds is not fast enough.”

The first key is acceleration: no matter how well a soldier is armored, a fall from 100 feet is a fall from 100 feet, with the same sudden stop at the end. But if DARPA can control the acceleration -- for example, by using boot-mounted, gyro-controlled attitude jets -- the soldier can "leap" high into the air, then "land" safely.

The second key is psychological: will the American people accept Starship Troopers style "Mobile Infantry?" Or will the princes of the Senate strangle the technology in its cradle? As the song says, only time will tell.

Brain Machine Interface

But perhaps we don't need anybody in those suits at all -- if the human can stay safe several miles away, controlling the empty suit by a direct brain-machine interface.

Thoughts are not ghostly apparitions made out of ectoplasm, it turns out; they are electrocolloidal impulses that travel from neuron to neuron across the synaptic gap. And that slight spark is readable... if you have the code.

That, not coincidentally, is exactly what another DARPA project aims to do: crack that neural code, so that machines -- or weapons -- can be controlled by thought alone.

Some research projects funded by DARPA have already achieved significant success, according to a 2003 article in the National Journal, written by Bruce Falconer. Duke University neurobiologist Miguel Nicolelis headed a team that planted "100 hair-like sensors" in a South American owl monkey (coincidentally, the same owl monkey that has been directing the recent reactionary political reaponses by the Democratic Party). As the monkey used a joystick, the scientists could monitor its neural activity and program the impulses into a computer-readable code.

The monkey repeated the motion - only this time, two robotic arms (one in an adjacent room and another 600 miles away in a Boston laboratory) also moved in response to the wireless signals sent straight from the monkey's brain.

In a similar, more recent experiment, the same scientists taught a macaque to direct a cursor to illuminated targets on a computer monitor. When scientists disabled the joystick, the monkey gradually stopped moving its arm altogether and learned to do the experiment just by thinking.

The article in the National Journal notes some of the uses. Right now, the biggest limitation on military aviation is the inability of the human body to take stresses much greater than about nine Gs, nine times the force of gravity. A typical 185-lb pilot in a 9-G turn feels as if he tops the scales at a cool 1,665 lbs. At that force, it's so difficult even to raise his hand that modern jets use fly-by-wire systems that require only slight finger movements for the pilot to guide the craft. Grayouts and blackouts are commonplace -- and can lead to death.

But if a pilot could sit on the ground and control the plane by his thoughts, then the rest of the airplane could withstand far greater stresses; this means an aircraft that could outmaneuver any plane in the sky that carried human cargo, such as a pilot and flight officer.

The same is true with a tank. Rather than relying upon a true "ogre" tank, which is completely artificially intelligent (a daunting computational task, considering that we cannot even design an AI car), a gigantic, solid tank can be controlled by a full crew... who sit safely back behind the lines in a simulator, their thoughts controlling the tank via a satellite uplink. With the absence of the most vulnerable part of the weapon, the human crew, the tank itself would be virtually unstoppable, short of dropping a tactical nuclear weapon on top of it.

There are civilian uses too, of course, notably in the area of prostheses for amputees and paraplegics. But the subject of civilian spinoffs from military research is big enough to warrant its own post. Or article. Or multi-floor library.

Smart Bullets

We have smart missiles that find their targets by several methods. Some are literally connected to a wire that trails out behind them, allowing the missileer to guide the bomb to its target. Others home in on a laser dot "painted" on the target by a forward spotter. Cruise missiles actually have topographic maps programmed into their brains, so they can swoop and swerve through gullies and across mountains to find a target by its GPS coordinates.

So why can't we do the same with rifle and pistol ammunition? Imagine bullets that can literally chase the target, racing around corners and over obstacles to hit the poor terrorist in his own trench, as in the 1984 Tom Selleck movie Runaway.

Well, it turns out that United States Air Force (and likely other branches of the service -- and I wouldn't rule out DARPA) has not only been imagining such a thing, it has been actively trying to develop them for more than eight years, according to the 1997 article "You Can Run, But You Can't Hide...", by Justin Mullins, published in New Scientist (reproduced here by snipercountry.com).

The Air Force calls the program Barrel Launched Adaptive Munitions, or BLAM, in an unusual display of wit. The researchers agree that the guidance technology is the easy part; it's already available for missile systems and only needs to be made smaller. The difficult part is designing a bullet that can turn in mid air and can become aerodynamic to prevent falling towards the ground as it moves towards the target, in accordance with our ancient enemy, gravity.

Some programs have experimented with tiny attitude jets on the bullet to steer it. But BLAM uses a more exotic, science-fictiony method: the front of the bullet actually flexes to create lift in various directions. Lift on the bottom keeps the bullet flying at the same altitude it was fired, without dropping; lift on the right steers the bullet left, and so forth.

The mechanism is simple. The nose is connected to the body by a ball-and-socket joint, and held in place by a number of piezoceramic rods, or tendons, which change length when a voltage is applied to them. Increasing the length of a rod on one side of the bullet while shortening its opposite number changes the angle of the nose (see Diagram). The nose can move by up to 0.1° in any direction.

Snipers are the ideal persons to use smart bullets; slithering into enemy territory on their bellies, becoming invisible via ghillie suits, then drawing a bead on the target enemy personnel are pretty much the same skills needed to paint a target with a laser dot (which can be invisible to the naked eye, preventing premature target panic). The invisible dot would guide a smart bullet for a targetted assassination from an astonishing distance -- several kilometers, for example. Unless every bad guy spends all day, every day, in a room with no windows (or wears American power armor), he will be vulnerable to just such a "bolt from the blue."

In another arena, the New Scientist article notes that airplanes fitted with smart bullets can bring down bogies with just one or two well-directed shots, rather than the hundreds typically used to destroy a target. This can lead to cost savings, even though smart bullets would not be cheap:

Aircraft bullets cost more than $30 each. [Ron] Barrett [who tested the BLAM system] says the piezoceramic materials would add $10 to this while the microelectronics would cost another $100. But he argues that the increased strike rate would lead to cost savings. "You'd only fire one when otherwise you'd fire hundreds."

Smart bullets would also lead to less collateral damage, because there would be less lead (or depleted Uranium) flying around.

But I'm still holding out for small, man-portable and firable rail guns!

Heat Rays

Finally, bringing us up to today's technology, we have a "phaser" -- American style, not that touchy-feelie stuff you see on Star Trek, where the target just falls over unconscious. This version is actually more of a heat ray, manufacturing fake feelings of searing agony, like "touching a hot frying pan or the intense radiant heat from a fire," except it does no actual damage. The pain is all in the target's neurons.

In "US aims Star Trek ray guns at nuclear sites" on Vnunet.com, Robert Jaques writes that the Department of Energy has teamed with the Department of Defense to create a milimeter-wave directed-energy weapon system with the catchy title of Active Denial Technology (ADT). The first use will be to protect critical sites, such as nuclear power plants, from terrorist (or protester) intrusion.

ADT emits a 95GHz non-ionizing electromagnetic beam of energy that penetrates approximately 1/64 of an inch into human skin tissue, where nerve receptors are concentrated.

Within seconds, the beam will heat the exposed skin tissue to a level where intolerable pain is experienced and natural defence mechanisms take over....

The sensation caused by the system has been described by test subjects as feeling like touching a hot frying pan or the intense radiant heat from a fire. Burn injury is prevented by limiting the beam's intensity and duration.

Sandia labs have already tested a prototype, and they believe a smaller model will be ready to deploy by 2008. Perhaps it can be used in the White House briefing room whenever an MSM feeding frenzy erupts during the next presidential campaign.

So there you have it -- the three of you who managed to make it all the way to the end of this excruciating post: four windows into the brave new world of continued American military dominance over the rest of the world. And if you think that is a bad thing, well I suspect you're reading the wrong blog.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 20, 2005, at the time of 8:38 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

Movement vs. Presence -- Updated with bump

UPDATE: See bottom.

Over on the must-read blog Patterico's Pontifications, Patterico wonders at the timing of North Korea's abrupt about-face on its nuclear-weapons program. For those of you living in Carlsbad Caverns, the Kim Jong-Il regime agreed late yesterday night (or early this morning, depending on whose time zone you prefer) to end their nuclear-weapons development in exchange for basically nothing from the United States -- just the assurance that:

"The United States affirmed that is has no nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula and has no intention to attack or invade (North Korea) with nuclear or conventional weapons," according to the statement, assurances echoed by South Korea.

Here is what puzzles Patterico:

In the comments, AMac asks: why are the North Koreans making this concession now? One possible answer is in the linked story:

[U.S. assurance quoted above]

That is a concession that I believe we have been unwilling to make until now. So the relevant question might be: why is the United States making this concession now?

Patterico's question crystalized my own vague sense that something was funny here. Not wrong, necessarily, though of course I am highly skeptical of anything that comes out of the mouth of Kim -- especially in light of the rapid about-face from their previous about-face, now demanding that we first give them light-water reactors before they dismantle their nukes. We'll see if they get stubborn, of if this is just a last-ditch attempt to get something for nothing before finally agreeing to what they already agreed to.

Still, I have the sense that something momentous is motivating below the surface, like floating in the ocean and having a whale swim beneath you. That something is not North Korean: it's American; there is a reason why we're willing to make certain assurances today that we were not willing to make last year.

I'm not worried about North Korea cheating, assuming the deal even goes through; the agreement evidently includes boots on the ground in the DPRK verifying the destruction of their nuclear weapons and weapon-manufacturing facilities. As with Libya, I believe this will either be done honestly -- or else we'll know immediately that it isn't. Since we don't give them anything in advance, there's no particular incentive to cheat. (That's another reason we can't give in to their demands for the reactors: they would get something tangible in exchange for nothing but a promise to cooperate.)

There are some obvious possibilities to answer the "why now?" question: maybe the North Koreans finally figured out that Clinton really isn't president anymore (and won't be in the future -- no, not even via his wife). Maybe they'd gotten themselve in too deep and were just looking for a facesaving way to back out, and the declaration by the U.S. mentioned above finally gave them that. (Asians must save their faces; Americans have to cover their posteriors.)

But that still begs the Patterico question: why were we willing to make such a commitment today but not last year? I believe the real answer to Patterico lies in what Don Rumsfeld has been doing for the last few years (in between fighting a couple of wars and secretly running the White House, timesharing with Dick Cheney, Karen Hughes, Paul Wolfowitz, and Condoleezza Rice, of course): he has been busy with a radical restructuring of the armed forces, in composition, mission, and style of warfighting.

It's tough being a pundit. I don't actually know anything. Well, I know something about mathematics, since that was my field at university; but what I really need to be right now is a military historian, which I emphatically am not. So I'm going to play one on the blogosphere... all you real military historians out there, quick, shield your eyes! (Actually, I would appreciate just the opposite: please correct me where I go awry.)

I'm actually pretty sure of my basic point: Don Rumsfeld has been almost obsessed with reforming and modernizing the American military to fight the wars he envisions for the the twenty-first century... as opposed to what we had in the early 1990s, which was a military organized in 1947 to fight the Warsaw Pact and perhaps the ChiComs -- or when Bush-43 took office in 2001, which was the cut-rate, stripped-down, Clintonized version of the above.

I already had the basic sense, but for the specifics, I'm relying on this April 2004 story on GlobalSecurity.org; the details will evolve, but it's probably more or less accurate still.

Rumsfeld has a vision of what tomorrow's combat will be. In response, he is transforming our military, starting with the 3rd Infantry Division as guinea pigs, into a lighter and faster military with fewer non-combat personnel, organized into smaller units. Instead of focusing on the division as the basic warfighting unit -- say 15,000 to 20,000 troops -- he wants the basic warfighting unit to be the much smaller brigade... in fact, an even smaller version of the brigade. Instead of the classic three brigades per division, Rumsfeld wants four or five per division, plus an aviation brigade of attack helicopters. We currently have ten divisions comprising 33 brigades; the Secretary of Defense wants to have between 43 and 48 brigades.

Thus, instead of 5,000 to 6,000 troops per brigade, we would have 3,500 to 4,000 troops per brigade. Also, technology would take the place of much of the support personnel, so there would be fewer typists, storekeepers, clerks, cooks, and so forth traveling to the war. The brigade, not the division, would become the primary warmaking unit -- the idea being that we do not need to send a division when a modernized, fast, and every bit as lethal brigade will do. For larger conflicts, send several brigades. It gives us more flexibility and faster mobility.

The upshot here is, I believe, a radical change in how the United States responds to global threats. During the Cold War, our basic strategy was presence: we would have bases all over the world, putting a troop presence in every potential hotspot. This served two purposes: first, these American forces in Germany, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, and (recently, but no longer) Saudi Arabia acted as "triggers." To roll into Western Europe, for example, the Soviets would first have to attack the American forces in West Germany; this would not only delay them and remove any doubt about intentions, it would give us unassailable casus belli that not even the most dovish liberal in Congress could ignore or reject.

Second, having troops right on the scene meant that we had a force that could (we hoped!) hold off the enemy, or at least delay him for the months it would take to get a major army into the field. Our buildup in the Gulf War, Operation Desert Shield, lasted for four months before we finally attacked... and that was a comparatively small mobilization, compared to what we would have had to do in an all-out World War III in Europe.

But Rumsfeld's vision (it seems to me) is that we would move away from the "presence" model in future wars, relying instead on a strategy of rapid movement. Currently, I think it would take about fifteen days to plant a fully equipped division anywhere in the globe. This is pretty fast (assuming we can actually make it that quickly in a real situation), though not as fast as it ought to be. But if we're only planting a brigade, not an entire division, we could probably get them in much faster... a week, maybe, or even less.

The brigade needs to be tough enough to hold the line until more brigades can arrive, so it needs to be a lean and lethal fighting machine full of experienced soldiers who drop in from above, move too rapidly to be effectively countered, spread massive damage among the enemy, hunt them out in the dark and house to house if necessary, but which can disappear over the horizon like ghosts before enemy forces can truly be brought to bear... only to reappear shortly on another flank.

Donald Rumsfeld, in other words, wants the Mobile Infantry from Robert Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers: heavily armed and armored, veteran shock troops which can be dropped into anywhere on a moment's notice and hold the real estate until more troops can arrive.

If we could do that, it would not be as important to have large numbers of troops everywhere in the world: they need to be forward-deployed... but they wouldn't have to be actually in South Korea, for example, in order to get to the DMZ fast enough to make a difference.

And that may be why the president can now make those assurances to North Korea about what we will actually have in the Korean peninsula: Bush can say, in all honesty, that we don't need to have troops and tanks and especially nukes in country, because Bush knows that if we needed them, we could insert them into the country -- and North Korea could not stop us. What Bush did not and would not say is that we will never have nuclear weapons on the peninsula or that we will never have plans to invade the DPRK: that, after all, depends upon the facts on the ground.

Which should be a good incentive for Kim to keep his word. Assuming he can actually bring himself to give it!

UPDATE Sep 20th, 2005 05:34:

Commenter Teafran, a Marine, makes a very important point :

What is missing from this argument is the lack of Division level support once an area has been shocked and awed. Rumsfield has it right for the initial level of confrontation - the MI hits the ground initiating the kicking ass and takeing names phase, but they are not designed to hold and control an area which clearly is a Division level function for ordinary grunts and MP support.

Wretchard over at the Belmont Club has actually written about this; alas, I cannot recall exactly which post, or I would link it. He noted that the British during the days of the Empire truly understood how to "hold and control an area," not just for a few days or weeks but literally for decades... more than a century in some cases.

What they used was a "colonial corps." Hey, wait a minute! I think I -- yes, I did! I actually wrote about this already, over on Patterico's Pontifications -- and I do have a link. Doh!

Ahem. Wretchard over on the Belmont Club wrote a post called More Men on the Ground 2, in which he discussed this point. As I wrote about Wretchard's post back in May (this is Dafydd quoting Dafydd, not quoting Wretchard),

Wretchard contemplated what it would take actually to carry out the mission we seem to have chosen for ourselves: to institute regime changes around the globe, casting out the most repulsive, venomous dictatorships, the ones that test the will of civilization, in favor of democracies that allow the people of those lands the greatest expression of individual liberty they have ever known. Wretchard noted the obvious: the United States is ill-equipped for what we would really need: a “Colonial Corps” specifically designed for long term occupation of hostile nations, rather like the British army of the nineteenth century....

This Colonian Corps would not be entirely military; it would include administrators, engineers, diplomats, jurists, politicians -- everything needed to tear down the repugnant elements of a terrorist state and build on the ashes the foundations of a modern democratic, liberal state. One presumes it would not be hamstrung by the rampant racism that infested the Raj and other European colonial institutions.

I don't think he put the two ideas together, Mobile Infantry and the Colonial Corps. That was my contribution. I continue quoting myself... one of my favorite pasttimes!

So the question arises: is it possible for a military to be both a Colonial Corps and also a Blitzkrieg Batallion?

Conventional wisdom says no: it would require two entirely separate armed forces, one for colonial occupation, the other for warfighting against technologically sophisticated enemies... and no country could afford both at the same time....

And this is exactly where, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, the “army of one” trendline comes into play. Where is the empowerment of the individual American soldier headed? What is the omega? It is possible in theory that a single, “hyperpowered” soldier of the realistic future could defeat an entire army of today?

....Imagine an army with just one of these soldiers a scant twenty years from now. Now imagine ten of them. Imagine ten thousand “armies of one.”

Ten thousand soldiers is not a lot. It’s a single division. And one extra division of Mobile Infantry would hardly break the bank, leaving plenty of money left over for the Colonial Corps. If we were to go this route, we would end up the first “empire” in the world that conquered only to liberate, colonized only to build independence, and yet still could shake the Earth with our thunderbolts.

Yes, I think we really could do it -- if we wanted badly enough to do so. I'm not even sure I, myself, would want us to go this route.

It wouldn't be cheap; we would likely have to nearly double our military expenditure. But the possibility is there; only the will is problematical. (This is a big enough addition that I'm going to bump this to the top.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 20, 2005, at the time of 5:34 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

John At Power Line Loses It, part Deux!

In my previous post, John At Power Line Loses It!, I called your attention to John Hinderaker's excellent (if scorching) chastisement of Bill Clinton for attacking the current president... during which Clinton lied (there's a shock!) not only about the current facts on the ground but even about his own earlier belief that Iraq had stockpiles of WMD, a fact easily shown by a Clinton quotation from 2003.

Now, Patterico supplies much more of that quotation, which completely contradicts the charge Clinton now levels at his successor (and superior). Like a web, the pieces are falling into place; like a puzzle, the fine strands come together at the center. It's as clear as Christmas (at least to me) that the only thing that has changed between 2003 and 2005 is that somebody or other's wife is now gearing up for a run at the presidency.

The original Power Line post is here.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 20, 2005, at the time of 1:02 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Date ►►► September 19, 2005

California Linking Rings

Two great issues divide the most populous state in the Union. But they are inextricably linked together... and for those of us who support a California ruled by the people, not by professional liberals, it is vital that we win on both of them.

The first will also come to a head the quickest: the drive to take redistricting out of the clutches of the Democratic dominated legislature, which has gerrymandered the state so severely that the ordinary functions of democracy have been stifled. In the 2004 election, not one single seat in the legislature changed hands from Democrat to Republican -- or from Republican to Democrat. We remain encased in amber, like the hundred million year old mosquito in Jurassic Park.

The second great issue is longer term, and it will not be resolved this year; but it has a much greater potential to damage Western Civilization so severely it may never recover. That issue is the defense of traditional marriage from leftist suggestions for "improvement," such as "gender-neutral" marriage, polyamory, or the abolishing of marriage altogether.

Both of these issues will soon burst forth: the first in this November's special election, and the second in either the primary or the general election in 2006. And the two are linked, because it is the gerrymandered legislature, which has lost all fear of the electorate, which is trying to force same-sex marriage down our throats.

Not every blog has a focus, but some do: Power Line became the central blog in the Dan Rather-60 Minutes forgery; Captain's Quarters is the go-to blog for the news on Able Danger (and before that scandal broke, CQ was the blog of record for the Canadian parliamentary shenanigans); and of course, Patterico's Pontifications absolutely owns the Los Angeles Times -- or as he used to call it, the L.A. Dog Trainer.

Ordinarily, I'm not a "theme" guy; but these two issues are so important to me -- and to California, and I believe to our country -- that I will return to them again and again. So today, I only want to set the stage.

Note: This post is a rewrite of a Scaley Classic that was first posted on Patterico's Pontifications under the title Dafydd: Only a Brief Respite. It's longish, so read on only if you care anything about the culture you live in, you Philistine. (Not that I'm trying to load any guilt on you; if you don't care about anything, I'll just sit here in the dark and suffer. Oy.)

Traditional Marriage

Earlier this month, Gov. Schwarzenegger announced that he would veto the same-sex marriage bill, which had been greased through the legislature by the underhanded Democrats while real Americans were distracted by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. This gave the state some breathing room. But make no mistake: this is not victory for those who support keeping the traditional definition of marriage (that would be about 61% of the California electorate); it's only a brief reprieve.

His reason for the veto is not any heartfelt objection to same-sex marriage but rather the obnoxiousness of the legislature trying to enact same-sex marriage just five years after the electorate voted overwhelmingly to ban it. Proposition 22 passed with 61.4% of the vote; it read: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." Simple, direct, straightforward... but not to a leftist who knows better.

Schwarzenegger has since announced that he is running for reelection; but the odds that he'll win reelection in 2006 are at best 50-50; on the flip of a coin, the Democratic nominee may be the new governor.

California is not fundamentally a liberal state; but it's a split state with the Democrats stronger than the Republicans. And the California Republican Party is in such disarray -- probably the worst in the country -- that Democrats consistently win nearly all statewide offices. Arnold's win in the Davis recall election was a fluke; he was an outsider to California politics, and approval of the insiders was at its lowest ebb that I can recall since I was old enough to notice politics.

But now Schwarzenegger is an insider, too; add to that his abysmal job-approval numbers (unfair in my opinion, but my opinion is irrelevant), and the stage is set for the governorship to return to the party of Barbara Boxer and Nancy Pelosi, unless Arnold can pull another Hasenpfeffer out of his hat.

The Democrats have made themselves clear: the moment one of them is in the governor's mansion, the state senate and assembly will immediately (possibly on the first day of the new session) approve same-sex marriage, and to hell with the voters. The bill will quickly be signed by the new Democratic governor. There will be a donnybrook in the courts; maybe we'll win... maybe we won't.

So for anyone who believes it's important to stop the recognition of same-sex marriage, it is now more important than ever before to enact a traditional definition of marriage into the state constitution in the 2006 election (primary or general, depends on when the initiative petitions are filed).

I will not here explain why same-sex marriage is so dangerous. But I will post an article this week to this site (and excerpt and link it on this blog) that argues, from a completely secular viewpoint, why traditional marriage must be preserved and must be the only form of legal relationship specifically approved by the state. Patience the way of the Jedi is!

That still will not protect us from the numerous "Thelton Hendersons" infesting the federal district courts in California and the 9th Circus Court of Appeals. For that, we need a strong and conservative Supreme Court ("conservative" in the sense of ruling on the basis of what the Constitution says, not what they wish it said). But a state constitutional amendment will protect us from rampaging state judges, who tend to be far more numerous and aggressively prejudiced than their federal counterparts.

There are three initiatives to protect the special status of traditional marraige that are in various stages of preparation; they will shortly go to the people for signatures and eventually, I hope, be placed upon the ballot. Two of them also ban (or at least discourage) so-called "domestic partnerships." There was a time when I supported domestic partnerships; but since the California Supreme Court ruled that the state had to treat such relationships exactly the same as marriage, I changed my mind. To the court, it's just marriage under another name. I argue my case here.

Proposition 77 - Fair Redistricting

It is also vital to change the redistricting rules to have the lines drawn not by the state legislature but by retired judges. This is the crux of Proposition 77, which has already qualified for the ballot in this November's special election. (State Attorney General Bill Lockyer -- a Democrat, of course -- pulled a dirty trick to force Propl 77 off the ballot; it took the state supreme court to overturn the unjust appellate-court decision and restore the people's right to vote on the initiative.)

Under ordinary circumstances, I would be on the other side; I don't like judges, even retired ones, intruding into the democratic process. Alas, the California state legislature is so mind-bogglingly partisan, patrician, and pandering, that we no longer have a democratic process in this state. The legislature is under the complete dominance of the Democrats... and they have used their majority to lock in the gerrymander to end all gerrymanders. It is currently impossible for the Republicans to make any gains, no matter how close the parties grow... and indeed, even if the Republicans were to become the majority party, the Democrats would remain the majority in the legislature -- and would therefore control redistricting in 2010, as well, allowing them to protect their gerrymander.

That is why the Democrats are so willing to spit in the faces of the California voters: they know they are immune. There is virtually nothing voters can do about them, because the election process itself has been rigged. So long as the Dems pander to their überleft base, Republicans are locked out. And the Democrats have shown, time and again, that whenever they have the power to draw the lines, they will gerrymander to the fullest extent.

Therefore, the power to redistrict must be taken out of the hands of the corrupt legislature. Paradoxically, we must shift it to the undemocratic decision of retired judges in order to restore democracy.

Anatomy of a Gerrymander

How does a gerrymander work? Simple example. Let's say a state has 1,000,000 residents. And let's say each resident either votes Democratic or Republican. 530,000 are registered Democrats, and 470,000 are registered Republicans. Assume 80% of each party always vote for their guy, while 20% of each comprises swing voters who might vote either way.

Now, this is a 53 to 47 split, fairly close; if there are ten districts, 100,000 residents each, you would expect to find 5 Democrats in the legislature, 4 Republicans, and one seat that is usually D but sometimes R. (Assume a unicameral legislature, just for simplicity.)

But check this out; the Democrats get a chance to redistrict, and they create the following districts:

1. 69,000 Ds and 31,000 Rs;
2. 69,000 Ds and 31,000 Rs;
3. 69,000 Ds and 31,000 Rs;
4. 69,000 Ds and 31,000 Rs;
5. 69,000 Ds and 31,000 Rs;
6. 69,000 Ds and 31,000 Rs;
7. 69,000 Ds and 31,000 Rs;
8. 15,000 Ds and 85,000 Rs;
9. 15,000 Ds and 85,000 Rs;
10. 17,000 Ds and 83,000 Rs;

Since 80% (loyal Democrats) of 69,000 is 55,200, which is 55.2% of the vote, the Ds are guaranteed to win 7 of the 10 seats, even if the 20% of swing voters defect. Whatever the Ds want passes the state legislature every single time... and they even have more than 2/3rds, enough to override the governor's veto, if they must. So a tiny advantage is converted into total and eternal domination, all by clever use of their redistricting powers.

Actually, it's even worse: suppose Democrats go absolutely off their rockers, and this results in the Republican Party growing stronger. Let's say that 5000 Democratic residents of each district convert to the Republican Party. Then each of the seven Democratic districts would have 64,000 Ds and 36,000 Rs, while each of the three Republican districts would have 10,000 Ds and 90,000 Rs (actually, one would have 12,000 Ds and 88,000 Rs, but that's not important).

In this case, Republicans would outnumber Democrats statewide by 520,000 to 480,000, almost the reverse of the first example... yet the Democrats would still control those same 7 out of 10 districts. This is exactly what happened in Texas, resulting in a strong majority of Republican voters -- but an equally strong majority of Democratic legislators. It took political dynamite (and a powder-monkey named Tom DeLay plus many years of fighting) to finally correct that ludicrous situation.

Although this is a simplified example, this is basically the situation we're in right now, except the Democrats don't quite have enough guaranteed seats to override a veto, thank goodness.

Thus, even though the Dems would still have a legislative majority under fair districts, it wouldn't be as overwhelming as it is now... and it would be much harder to enact insane, hard-left legislation, because there would be a lot more districts whose voters were moderate and could flip either way. Seats would flip from Democratic to Republican, and that itself will force moderation on the Democratic Party.

In most other states, I agree the legislature should draw the district lines; but when the majority proves itself to be functionally incapable of behaving in a democratic fashion, they should not have the power to predetermine the results of the very elections that are the only way to redistribute power. It's like electing a party whose main platform is to abolish all future elections; if you do it, you're sunk.

Linked Rings

The two quests are tied together, because if we don't fix the shattered redistricting process, we'll have to face the same challenges to traditional marriage over and over, every election cycle, ad nauseum. And if we allow same-sex marriage to be crammed down Californians' throats, then there will be such bitterness and disgust within the Republican base that many will just drop out of politics altogether (or move out of the state) -- which is exactly what the Democrats hope for. (I would say "pray for," but, you know -- Democrats are to prayer as Superman is to Kryptonite.)

We need unassailable victories on both fronts. We need to win both of these for the Gipper.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 19, 2005, at the time of 5:13 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

Date ►►► September 18, 2005

John At Power Line Loses It!

Loses his ability to suffer lying weasels gladly, that is.

The recent fusillade of fabrications from former President Bill Clinton seems to have broken John Hinderaker's camel-shaped back; today, John lashed out at the smug, smarmy, decadent nihilist who used to suck up all the oxygen in Washington and is still trying... though John spots a bit of an ulterior motive in Clinton's stream of consciencelessness accusations against President Bush.

Bill Clinton flings his dirt like a monkey with a handful of monkey byproduct, and for the same reason: to mark his territory and ward off enemies -- Republicans who might stand in the way of Billary's return to la Casa Blanca. This is, of course, the open secret we're supposed to forget: that Hillary has designs on the presidency, and that her husband would of course go along for the ride... and possibly even take the wheel when she wasn't looking.

So now, Three-Term Bill suddenly decides that "there was no evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq after all (but read Power Line for a Clinton Cwote from 2003 on that subject), that the military has become too small for the job under George W. Bush (wait -- didn't we use to have sixteen divisions in 1992?), and that we've been "unsuccessful" in Iraq because the proposed Iraqi constitution is not "universally supported" (yes, we've lost the crucial Zarqawi - al Duri vote).

There's much more, all finger-licking good. This is one of John's most passionate posts... and not coincidentally, one of his best. My guess is that he didn't pause to ruminate and contemplate but wrote in a white-hot fury at the criminal thug and casual despoiler of American security who we used to have to salute.

Read, read now and come away simultaneously incensed, relieved, and a little bit anxious... as you contemplate past -- and present -- and future.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 18, 2005, at the time of 10:24 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Predictions, Predictions: the Iraqi Consitutional Vote

UPDATE: Crash and burn on the prediction about the vote in the Judiciary Committee! Read all about it here.

One of my favorite thrillseeking pastimes is making high-level predictions. Unlike those by psychics, mine are specific and near enough that everyone will remember to check -- thus I dance on the high-adrenaline tightrope between, as Charlie Brown would put it, being a hero or being a goat.

(I actually have a fairly good track record, because I do not make my predicions anywhere near as randomly as I pretend.)

The Iraqi constitution, which their parliament just voted to be put to the Iraqi people, can only be derailed by either a majority vote against (not politically possible) or by its rejection by three provinces, each with more than two-thirds against.

This time, I'll just flip a coin *: Dafydd the Great, wearing turbin and holding back of hand to forehead, predicts that no more than one province will muster the necessary 67% rejection. (Actually, I believe none will; but I'm hedging my prediction slightly.)

In an earlier, unrelated prediction posted on Captain's Quarters about the vote on John Roberts' nomination in the Senate Judiciary Committee, I prognosticated that every Democrat on the committee except Ted Kennedy will vote to support Roberts in the vote recommending his nomination to the full Senate.

All of my predictions will have the primary category "Predictions," to make for easy tracking. After each is decided by the quantum vicissitudes of time, I will update it, scoring Dafydd the Great either a hit, a miss, or a mixed result (a wash).

* I'm lying again, as I warned you I might. I don't make my predictions by flipping a coin. I've been following this upcoming election for some time. My thinking was also influenced by this post by Captain Ed over at Captain's Quarters. So there.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 18, 2005, at the time of 5:16 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Where Are All the Moslem Methodists?

UPDATED: See below

Way, way, way back when I first began this blog -- by which I mean yesterday -- one of the earliest commenters, pbswatcher, posed a very fair and hard-to-answer question:

The phrase "militant islamist" immediately raises the question of how to define a "non-militant islamist."

Actually, there are two questions here: first, what would a non-militant Islamist look like; and second, how many of them are there?

The first one is easier to answer. Centuries ago, Christianity used to be as aggressively militant as militant Islamists are today, attacking not only Jews and other infidels but also apostates, heretics, blasphemers, and witches -- all real or imagined. The crusades; Torquemada; Kramer and Sprenger.

But the Church, after bifurcating, underwent a transformation across all of Christendom that is collectively lumped together as "the Reformation," though it occurred at different times and paces in different places. By the time it ended, we had a Christianity spread across many different sects and churches more or less living in harmony with each other: I don't mean a complete, worldwide lack of religious violence among Christian sects and religions; I mean that there are no two Christian sects or religions that are at war nearly everywhere, nor is there any sect or religion that still wants to massacre everyone who isn't of their particular faith -- not even the Phalangists in Lebanon, to the extent they're even still there in any strength.

Today, it's commonplace to see a Catholic church, a Baptist church, and a Russian Orthodox church on the same block, with the pastors visiting each other and setting up combined charity drives. There are still billions of Christians (if we combine Catholic and Protestant religions); but the average guy or gal just doesn't live and die by the faith the way he used to do, in the days of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, for example.

Christians today are by and large domesticated. Some may sigh for the "old days;" but they imagine days that never really existed like that. In any event, real-life counterparts of those "good old days" are five hundred years in the past, and nobody alive today actually experienced them. The reality is that whatever most Christians (and Jews) may say about the depth of their faith -- in real-life encounters, faith is secondary to comity, commerce, employment, and secular-civic involvement (the PTA, for example).

And this is good. It means that I can live next door to Catholics and have no fear of an auto-da-fé. Also, a typical American Jew doesn't have to stubbornly refuse to eat at his gentile neighbor's house because it's not kosher; most Jews who claim to keep kosher really just mean they avoid the really obvious traif, like pork... and often not even that, if it's inconvenient. Heck, the rabbi who married my wife and I ate an Egg McMuffin just before one of the rehearsals! (Wait -- wasn't Egg McMuffin the sidekick of Johnny Carson? Or am I hallucinating again?)

This is exactly what I want to see happen to Islam: what the world needs are more Moslem Methodists.

I know there are some, because one works with Sachi: he's a Moslem, he claims to be kosher (he avoids pork; that's about it), and he prays at least once a month or so, when he remembers. I think it pretty obvious we're not at war with him.

Such a person could still think of himself as an Islamist, if he sees it as more of an internal thing: the mere fact that he tells himself that sharia is the goal may liberate him from having to live by it in practice. The trick is to divorce Islam (or at least Islamism) from the here and now and transplant it to the afterlife. Specific inconvenient rituals can be largely abandoned, even while the Moslem bemoans their abandonment in a general sense -- in the same way that even the great majority of orthodox Jews who keep strictly kosher don't treat their wives as "unclean" and refuse to touch them during the wives' menstrual periods (Leviticus 15:19).

I think we can envision a moderate Moslem, or even a non-militant (if not actually moderate) Islamist: for the latter, even if a person obeyed sharia in his home, it's not a foregone conclusion that he wants to kill everyone who doesn't. The real question is how many of these moderate and non-millitant Moslems and Islamists are there?

I don't have data on this; but my gut feeling is that the majority of Moslems are moderate as I have described it... but nearly all national or international Moslem organizations, whether overtly religious (like a mosque) or more secular in purpose (like CAIR), are strongly inclined towards militant Islamism and therefore dangerously tolerant of Islamic terrorism. If all that a moderate Moslem sees around him as the public face of Islam are groups that call for jihad, either overtly or slyly, he may well feel that there must be something wrong with him not to feel that same rage and hate. He'll probably fall silent, afraid to object, both because of physical threat, and more important, fear of social shunning.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. -- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Maybe if moderate Moslems would concentrate on creating Islamic organizations that give a sense of solidarity to "Moslem Methodists," showing them they're not alone, the natural tendency toward laziness would take over: hating is hot, hard work.

I wonder; how many secularized Moslems "live lives of quiet desperation?" There must be some way to persuade them "not to do desperate things."

UPDATE September 18th 2:55pm: There is an excellent discussion going on in the comments section about whether Islam is inherently militant or whether it's unfairly tarred with that brush because of religious bigotry. Several things to throw into the mix: I heard Dennis Prager point out -- though I don't know whether it was original with him -- that of all the most populous religions in the world that have actual, known founders, only Islam was founded by a warrior; a general, in fact, who personally led armies into battle. I have heard it said, though I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this statement (not having read the Koran myself), that the later writings of Mohammed, when he was an old man, are distinctly more angry, bitter, and bigotted, particularly towards the Jews, against whom he held a grudge for refusing to recognize him as a prophet.

To what extent do these two points color the religion of Islam itself? Does the "strain of pacifism" in Christianity arise from the fact that despite occasional references to violence by Jesus (e.g., coming to bring a sword and the incident in the Temple with the moneychangers), Jesus was mostly pacific Himself? (E.g., put away your sword.)

Also, I do wish to note to those who take some offence at my point that in Christianity and Judaism today, "faith is secondary to comity, commerce, employment, and secular-civic involvement," and who insist that religion is the most important thing to them... beware the danger of temporocentrism: people in the Mediaeval period really did think so radically different than we, that we barely even have words to describe what they meant by "religious."

Remember, the typical Christian at the time of the Crusades had no explanation whatsoever for anything he saw in the universe other than "God did it by personal command." They did not know the world was round, for example -- though the Greeks had, and the few educated people in Europe may have known; thus they had no other explanation for sunrise and sunset other than direct divine intervention every single day.

There were virtually no books and no library science, so even what "knowledged" existed was in an inaccessible form... even for scholars. The masses were illiterate, so they could not even read the Bible. The very basics of scientific (empirical) reasoning, which are second nature to everyone today, were unknown.

They knew no mathematics other than -- for a few people -- simple, accounting-level arithmetic. If they thought about the heavens at all (as opposed to Heaven, the place), they would have seen the sun, the Moon, the stars and planets as fixed to crystal spheres that revolved above the Earth. They lived, in Carl Sagan's term, in a "demon-haunted world," where the slightest religious transgression could result in nearly instantaneous attack by hellish creatures bent on destruction of all humanity.

Yet they were as intelligent as we, by and large; they had story-telling brains, as do we, and therefore, they created stories to explain the world around them... as do we. Their belief in the cosmic battle between good and evil was not metaphorical but literal, including the killing of "witches" who were Satan's agents; burning them alive was a kindness, because they might repent just before death and be spared eternal damnation.

A "religous" person back then would be one who attended every, single mass the local monastery or church conducted, which would be multiple times a day, every day; a moderately secular person would be one who only attended one mass per week.

What we today call "religious," which includes reaching out in friendship and religious solidarity to other sects and even to Jews and Moslems, would be considered daringly apostate if translated into their terms.

So no, the vast majority of religious Christians today are not "religious" in the same sense of the word as their counterparts in the 11th century, when it became a vital, burning desire in the hearts of average, everyday Christians in England, Germany, and Spain to go to war (on campaigns that took many years) to reconquer Jerusalem from the Moslems -- and to kill the Jews they accidentally met along the way.

They lived in a very different world, one so alien it may as well be another planet.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 18, 2005, at the time of 2:33 AM | Comments (55) | TrackBack

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