Here’s a scathing analysis of Mr. Obama’s Libyan Adventure by Peggy Noonan. Usually I enjoy a scathing analysis of His Most Tremendous Majesty's…excuse me, President Obama's…blunder du jour. Not this time, though. Representative passage:

I cannot for the life of me see how an American president can launch a serious military action without a full and formal national address in which he explains to the American people why he is doing what he is doing, why it is right, and why it is very much in the national interest.… He has to sit at that big desk and explain his thinking, put forward the facts as he sees them, and try to garner public support. He has to make a case for his own actions. It's what presidents do! And this is particularly important now, because there are reasons to fear the current involvement will either escalate and produce a lengthy conflict or collapse and produce humiliation.

Now I have to say that I have very little use for this. What Ms. Noonan says is true enough in principle, but it has no bearing on the actual situation. The term “an American president” points to an abstraction. We’re living in the real world with an actual president—a gentleman named Barack Obama. How can he be expected “to sit at that big desk and explain his thinking,” when it’s quite clear that he doesn’t know what to think?

It’s startling—and rather depressing—to realize that the United States of America gotten itself embroiled in an Arab civil war without having first formulated a clear policy with defined objectives. Obama says that Qaddafi must go—but we’re not going to do anything to stop that from happening. Instead, we’re going to “defend civilians” from 30,000 feet—good luck with that! Oh, and the US is going to relinquish control of the whole operation to…somebody or other. Maybe NATO. We’ll see.

If Peggy Noonan would reflect for five minutes on these facts, she might realize why Obama isn’t keen on giving that Oval Office address. What on earth could he possibly say?

Posted by tmg110 at 12:08 PM EDT

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Lexi departed from South Bend this morning on the first leg of her long journey back to Afghanistan. Her mother and I were there at the airport to see our soldier off. It'll be five months and a few days before we see Lexi again.

Take care, PFC. I only wish that I was going with you…

Posted by tmg110 at 11:41 AM EDT

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PFC Gregg greatly enjoyed her leave, but now it's time to saddle up again. Lexi begins her return trip to Afghanistan tomorrow, leaving from South Bend. Keep her in your thoughts and prayers, please, as she embarks upon the second half of her deployment—and watch this blog for further news and photos.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:07 AM EDT

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A soldier of the 511th Military Police Company on patrol somewhere in Afghanistan, taken by PFC Gregg:

Posted by tmg110 at 9:18 AM EDT

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Wow. Over the course of the last decade, the population of Detroit has fallen by 25%—the city’s lowest population level since the 1910 census. This story in the Wall Street Journal explains why it happened. But really, didn’t we already know what’s going on?

The decline of American cities like Detroit and Chicago is a pointer to the catastrophic failure of progressivism’s political, economic and social dogmas. Every one of our urban wastelands is or has been a bastion of liberal orthodoxy—and look at the result. It’s a problem that no amount of stimulus spending or shouts of “Yes, we can!” will fix. Because the truth is, progressives, no, you can’t. Detroit proves it.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:50 AM EDT

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Here’s John Kass in the Chicago Tribune, opining on His Maximum Majesty’s…excuse me, President Obama’s…assurance that the mission in Libya will achieve “clarity” within a few days:

We'll have clarity in a few days?

Clarity in a few days, Mr. President?

You don't wait to find clarity a few days after you begin a war. You'd better have complete clarity before you ever give the order to fire in the first place.

Days after ordering the launch of cruise missiles at around $1 million a pop isn't the time to find clarity, Mr. President.

Days after you bomb a country — even one run by a murderous psychopath like Moammar Gadhafi—isn't the time to begin searching for clarity.

The president must find clarity before beginning such an enterprise. To do otherwise is to risk not only American lives and his own presidency and political fortunes, but to risk America's future security and its place among nations.

Amen. Kass was one of the few Chicago pundits to see through the glitzy haze that surrounded presidential candidate Obama. And he got no thanks for it from the Big O’s claque. See here, for example. I wonder what these good progressives think now, as they read his column to the accompaniment of Libyan bomb blasts?

Posted by tmg110 at 8:37 AM EDT

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Science fiction is open to criticism on a number of grounds, but failure to predict the future isn’t one of them. Few writers of SF see themselves as being in the business of prediction. They would describe themselves, rather, as speculative thinkers. “What if…?” is the genre’s iconic question, a question often applied to the future. So you can find many stories, published in the 1950s and 1960s, that tell of colonies on Mars, or asteroid mining, or androids, or world government by twenty-first century.

Sometimes, of course, SF does get the future right. Several years prior to the First World War, H.G. Wells wrote “The Land Ironclads,” a short story that forecast with startling accuracy the development of the tank and its impact on the battlefields of the coming conflict. Wells foresaw how technology in the form of mobile armored firepower could revolutionize the art of war. That he did not project his speculations a couple of decades further into the future, to describe how the tank, the airplane and the radio would combine to produce the style of mechanized warfare commonly termed “blitzkrieg” (lightning war) is no valid criticism of his achievement in “The Land Ironclads.”

But Wells was more often wrong than right about the future, particularly in the area of social and political development. Like many forward-thinking intellectuals of his time (and of later times), he confidently predicted the consolidation of humanity into a single political and social entity—a World State. Atavistic nationalism would gradually wither away, to be replaced by a cosmopolitan human civilization, free from the burdens of national rivalries and wars. No doubt Wells and others were influenced in this direction by the doctrines of socialism, which reviled nationalism and patriotism as forms of false consciousness, imposed on the minds of men and women by an unnatural economic system. Only when this system had been thrown off, to be replaced by a world-wide socialist commonwealth, would humanity reach its full potential.

Perhaps thanks to Wells, whose work fashioned the template for so many later writers, the vision of a world-wide (or system-wide or Galaxy-wide) human commonwealth became one of the most fundamental underlying themes of science fiction. In countless novels and stories, the action takes place against just such a background. The World State is not merely predicted—it’s presented as a foregone conclusion. And this seems to me to be one of the genre’s greatest imaginative failures.

Looking at the world as it is today, those confident predictions of the coming world state seem juvenile indeed. Ideologies that focus on the unity of humanity do exist—but in one way or another they are anti-human, preaching the need for repression, ignorance and poverty. Islam is only the most glaring example of this trend. It also manifests itself in progressive circles, e.g. in the environmental movement, where humanity is reviled as the enemy of the planet.

SF is a broad literary field, of course, and there are many examples of the opposing view. Perhaps only those writers and readers who refuse to grow up still cling to the view that the unity of the species would be a good thing. The history of the last century surely suggests that the converse is the case.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:58 AM EDT

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It’s a fair measure of the United Nations’ moral corruption that one of its key officials, Richard Falk, the UN rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories, turns out to be a 9/11 truther. That is, he intimates that the “official explanations” of the 9/11 attack may not be accurate. See, maybe it wasn’t al Qaeda that attacked America. Maybe it was, like, you know, Dick Cheney and the Zionists! (See here and here for examples of Professor Falk’s views.)

Another clear pointer to Professor Falk’s mind-set is the fact that he frequently—and stridently—condemns Israel for violating Palestinian human rights while remaining absolutely silent about the reign of terror by which Hamas maintains its position in the Gaza Strip. And of course he has nothing to say about the anti-Semitism that permeates Palestinian society, making peace impossible.

Now of course the world is full of conspiracy theorists. But when you find one occupying a plum position in the UN hierarchy…well, I suppose its no surprise. After all, until quite recently Libya occupied a seat on the UN Human Rights Council.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:32 AM EDT

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One happy subplot of the Libyan crisis is the alacrity with which progressives abandoned the good ship USS Obama after it launched a cruise missile attack on Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. (Incidentally, what’s wrong with that guy? How come he never made general?) My favorite example of this is Michael Moore, who vented his spleen via a torrent of adolescent wailing on Twitter. (Sample: “We're going to keep bombing countries until we get it right.”) Well, boo-hoo.

It gladdens my heart to hear these people squeal. Eat your spinach, ladies and gentlemen. You were the ones who advocated most forcefully for Mr. Hope and Change…excuse me, President Obama. Obvious though it was that the man is an empty suit, you convinced yourself that he was a figure of world-historical importance. When he uttered such crushing banalities as “We are the change we’ve been waiting for,” you swooned. Now the quality of your political judgment is on display in the Oval Office for all to see, in the form of a man with the backbone of a chocolate éclair. May I tell you why your hero decided in favor of the attack on Libya? Not because he believed it was the right thing to do, but because he was afraid he’d look weak if he did nothing.

So thank you very much, progressives, for saddling the country with one of its worst presidents ever. May you writhe with frustration and chagrin every time you see his face on TV.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:05 AM EDT

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Having decided at the eleventh hour to take action on Libya, the Great Strategist…excuse me, President Obama…is doing his incompetent best to make the no-fly zone an exercise in futility. How is that? Read the various news stories (see this one, for example) and you will find that Obama plans to wash his hands of the whole business in a matter of days, handing off the job to the Europeans and the Arabs.

This is surreal. The only reason that a no-fly zone now exists is because the US government finally signaled its willingness to do something about Qaddafi. Without US leadership, grudging and tardy though it proved to be, no effective action would have been possible. And continued US leadership is necessary to assure the success of this venture. If the President imagines otherwise, he’s living in a dream world.

We could get lucky. One of Qaddafi’s underlings might decide to get on the right side of the revolution by bumping off the tyrant. But I’m still not convinced that a few UN-sanctioned air strikes will be enough to turn the tide of war in favor of the Libyan rebels. Obama waited too long—and while he dithered, Qaddafi won the opening round. Now we have a complicated little war on our hands. And the only exit strategy that justifies the risks and costs of our involvement is one that takes us past Qaddafi’s dangling corpse on our way out. Frankly, I don’t believe that Barack Obama possesses the resolution necessary to make that happen.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:42 AM EDT

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