Bunker Mulligan "Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." ~Mark Twain

As we all struggle through this election cycle, Ilana Mercer has an excellent piece at WorldNetDaily

The acme of athletic achievement, expressed in the immutable truths of speed, strength and skill, is uncontested. The charmed men and women gracing the podiums of modern Olympia are there for no other reason than that they are the finest in their fields. What greater contrast can there be between the Olympian, who powers himself to the pinnacle, and the politician, who drapes himself in the noble toga of idealism, in the famous words of Aldous Huxley, so as to conceal his will to power.

Competition, so hated by the far left, rears its ugly head. And guess, what. We like it.

It is simply coincidental, yet a little serendipitous, that Alex put together his essay Anti-Americanism in Part One, Part Two, and Part Three at about the same time as Norman Podhoretz published World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win in Commentary.

Podhoretz’s article is far longer than anything I typically read on a monitor, so I printed it out and read through it at my leisure. Alex’s first part I linked to earlier. He writes from the perspective of someone who has lived in Europe, not simply visited as a tourist, or even living on a military installation and making weekend forays into the civilian population centers. Sarah can attest to the differences.

First of all, Podhoretz writes in unglowing terms about Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton. He has little good to say about Dubya’s first months in the Oval Office, either. Understand, this is all in relation to our responses to terrorist actions. He makes no comment regarding other areas of Presidential prerogotive.

But he is nearly absolute in his assessment of Dubya’s approach to things since 9/11. So, for those of you who immediately want to characterize him as a “chicken-hawk,” you can click that mouse button and ignore the rest of this post.

What he saw was a transformation. I think we all saw it. Some didn’t like it. Some still hate it. Others always will. The transformation I saw was what makes me an unapologetic Bush supporter. The 9/11 attack woke us all up, but he was the one politician willing to say the things that needed to be said. And he was willing to do the things which needed to be done. Still is. Still is. I see in him all the things I admire about Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman, who were viewed by “their betters” as a cowboy and a dullard.

Few, if any, of Truman

La Shawn says to Bomb The Temple! Now, is that any way for a fine Christian woman to talk?

Actually, we destroy many churches here in the US every year, or turn them into pizza parlors. The church is simply a building. The Church is the people who worship there. We destryed many churches in Europe, although we often tried not to. A target is a target.

Not so in the Muslim world.

Am I the only one who sees al-Sadr as the Iraqi version of Jesse Jackson?

There is a very revealing scene in Lawrence of Arabia. The Arab forces, under Lawrence’s leadership, have taken Damascas ahead of the British. They own the city, but they now own all the responsibilities of making it work. And they can’t. And they won’t. Every problem is met with accusations of how some other tribe is responsible for making something operate properly, something required to make something else function. And there is some manual labor involved in many of these functions. Certain tribes are too good to engage in manual labor.

I had expected Iraq to not repeat this. The Iraqis are better-educated than those desert tribesmen of 1918. They also have a society which has functioned and operated those things in the past. But where their society has the know-how, their culture is still that of those Arabs who took Damascas.

It is a culture built on familial and tribal ties, where negotiation is the order of the day. It seems to be the major sport of the Arab world. The best negotiator wins.

This is the issue in Najaf. American forces could easily take out Sadr. But the US is no longer in charge. Our forces serve at the discretion of the Iraqis, and do not act without approval. And the Iraqis are none too eager to take him out, especially if they must allow infidels into Ali’s shrine. So, they negotiate.

The only thing Sadr has to offer is the shrine itself. That is his hole card. And he will play it as long as possible. His status as the son and grandson of two of Iraq’s most revered Imams gives him legitimacy within the culture, although nobody seems to take him seriously as an individual. He is a non-entity playing off the family name. But the family name means everything in the Arab culture.

So we continue to follow the mantra “Diplomacy is the answer.” It’s an Arab tradition Lawrence himself walked away from.

***UPDATE***
Alex at wanderingmind adds his own to this. (Trackback didn’t link for some reason!?)

I have to agree with Wallace, a new blog is added to my list, also.

David’s Medienkritik adds to the international flavor of the blogs I read.

I also have to delete my friends at Two Nervous Dogs. No more espresso updates as the site has gone blank.

Today, Wandering Mind, one of our very good Homespun Bloggers, gives us Part One of Three on Anti-Americanism in Europe.

By giving his employees a ‘piece of the action’, he said, he knew he could count on his employees loyalty and hard work. The Frenchman and his wife were aghast. They could not understand the employees allowing themselves to be so exploited and that even worse, those employees might somehow upset the balance if the company succeeded and others didn’t.

My friend then went on to say that Europeans regarded the working class as a ‘necessary class’ (read: not upwardly mobile) and that business succeeded on the stability of that class.

I remember Europe well in this regard. There is, to this day, a strong class system, although there are now fewer classes. When we speak of “class” in this country, it comes nowhere close to what the real meaning of that word really describes.

Do you think this has anything to do with the UN’s relationship with the Sunni minority in Iraq?

At the request of the UN, the Iraqi government delayed the National Conference, which was scheduled for July 31, by two weeks. The UN is applying considerable pressure on the conference organisers to ignore the results of recent elections, conducted around Iraq to select 550 of the 1000 representatives for the conference. The UN is not happy with the fact that the majority of winning candidates are Shia Arab, although in a country which is two-thirds Shia this doesn’t seem to be that surprising. Instead, the UN is trying to force Iraq to ignore election results and accept candidates of the UN’s choosing – notably excluding many election winners and considerably reducing Shia participation. If the UN is allowed to get away with this then Iraqis will lose faith in future elections and the entire democratic process.

A couple of weeks ago the Wall Street Journal (print) had an article on the bureaucratic nightmare that the UN has created in Kosovo. They will do the same to Iraq if we continue to encourage their involvement. A successful Iraq does not fit well into the UN scheme of things.

You can get this kind of information from Iraqi Prospect Organization. I get an email from them about once a month.