A disarmament crusade is not merely “naïve,” it’s a waste of valuable diplomatic energy, chided French President Nicolas Sarkozy following Brother O’s praise for the United Nations Security Council’s resolution calling for a world without nuclear weapons.

“We live in the real world, not the virtual world. And the real world expects us to take decisions,” Sarkozy said.

American newspapers saw fit to blackout Sarkozy’s mockery of their president’s “naïveté regarding the realities of nuclear technology.” 

Brother O lauded the agreement as a major step in stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and beginning multilateral disarmament:

“We must never stop until we see the day when nuclear arms have been banished from the face of the earth.”

Sarkozy saw fit to address Brother O’s obvious myopia and point out the glaring difference between the forest and the trees:  

“President Obama dreams of a world without weapons . . . but right in front of us two countries are doing the exact opposite. Iran since 2005 has flouted five security council resolutions. North Korea has been defying council resolutions since 1993.

[W]hat good has proposals for dialogue brought the international community? More uranium enrichment and declarations by the leaders of Iran to wipe a UN member state [Israel] off the map.”

Sarkozy concluded his derisive remarks with a call for sanctions:

“If we have courage to impose sanctions together it will lend viability to our commitment to reduce our own weapons and to making a world without nuke weapons.”

Although America’s newspapers chose not to inform the American people of the clash between Presidents Obama and Sarkozy, at least they have been spared from listening to another racism/right-wing conspiracy screed from former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

The media coverage of two journalists captured by North Korea who were released today does not pass the sniff test. The basic facts are not in dispute:

• Laura Ling and Euna Lee work for former Democratic vice-president Al Gore’s Current TV media venture.
• They went to China to interview defectors living along the Chinese border with North Korea about trafficking of women.
• They were detained for illegal entry into North Korea on March 17 by border guards.
• They were tried, convicted, and sentenced to serve 12 years of “reform through labor” in a North Korean prison.
• The U.S. public was emotionally engaged in this heart-rending story through breathless media coverage, a media-facilitated postcard campaign, advocacy websites, and candlelight vigils.
• This afternoon, former Democratic U.S. president Bill Clinton secured their release from North Korea’s “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il and the two ladies left for the U.S. with Clinton on his private plane.

There are, however, some suspicious factors in this syrupy story.

• Laura Ling is Chinese-American. Euna Lee is a South Korean-born U.S. citizen. They should both be familiar with the region both geographically and politically. It is hard to imagine that they made a blunder unaware of the consequences.
• A South Korean activist who helps North Korean refugees seek asylum, the Rev. Chun Ki-won of the Seoul-based Durihana Mission, helped the two journalists plan their trip. If they weren’t aware of the dangers, he certainly was, and he was their advisor. There is also the question of his motivation and involvement, given his professional bias.
• With full tear-jerking media coverage, their families said, “If they wandered across the border without permission, we apologize on their behalf.” Wandered across the border? It’s a RIVER. At the time, it was frozen, and they were walking on the ice (a tidbit from the Asian media, which the American MSM conveniently omitted from its reports).



• The U.S. media coverage consistently described the two as “girls.” They are NOT. Both are married, middle-aged women, one with a daughter. Ling is 32, and Lee is 36. Both were portrayed prior to this event as seasoned journalists, with Ling routinely reporting from political hot spots. I’m not alone in this observation — check out this article by Heather Michon at Open Salon.
• Then there is the extreme coincidence of precisely timing the guards’ location along the 521 kilometer-long Tumen River. Heather Michon notes:
  

  The real mystery is how the North Koreans happened to serendipitously be at the exact right place at the right moment.

• There is the sponsorship of Al “the hypocrite” Gore. Here is a man who foisted the myth of global warming on the world, while scientific data indicated the climate is cooling, and then became wealthy selling carbon offsets to the industries he victimized. If he really believed in global warming, would he be living in a mansion with a heated poolhouse and flying around in a gas-guzzling private jet? I’m suspicious of anything he is managing — there is most likely a hidden agenda. What are the random chances of this happening to obscure web journalists, and not, say, to someone from a major news outlet?
• Finally, there’s just the mere fact of the “coincidental” involvement of high-profile Democrats like Gore and Clinton.

So here’s the picture the fawning mainstream media painted for us with their disingenuous choice of wording and strategic omissions of fact. A couple of wide-eyed innocent MTV-type media ingénues — girls — inadvertently wandered across a poorly defined border, were captured by ruthless evil North Korean soldiers, and sentenced to hard labor in a wretched prison. Their worried families prayed for their safety.

The truth is that a couple of women, seasoned journalists accustomed to world hot spots, climbed from the border road in China down the steep bank to the boundary river and walked out onto the ice. They were detained by border guards, sentenced to reform through labor, and detained in a government guest house.

Remember these dear Obama friends?

Here’s my theory. Obama, who has openly demonstrated his affection for the likes of socialists Raila Odinga and Hugo Chávez, wanted more open relations with North Korea. Although he has made many bold moves toward totalitarian control in a few short months, nationalizing major banks and auto manufacturers and co-opting the census, he was concerned about awakening the American public with a quick rapprochement with North Korea.

So he and a few close confidants, Gore and the two Clintons, set up this journalistic expedition to China to create a cover for an initial softening. Who could criticize the “humanitarian” effort of Bill Clinton on behalf of two innocent young “girls” for whom a whole nation was lighting candles and praying? It all ended with this touching photo-op, showing the triumphant and successful diplomat Bill Clinton but only the black pony tails of the two “girls,” whose faces might reveal their age.

Our electric power grid is vulnerable to missile attack, and Congress is doing nothing about it, according to the author of the book One Second After. The detonation of a small nuclear warhead above the center of the country would create an electromagnetic pulse sufficient to take out the national grid. (Remember what one little surge did in August 2003?)

From the National Review, here’s how it would work:

…one missile, properly targeted, could degrade the electronic grid of the entire continental United States… …even North Korea has weapons capable of doing this…

Rather than target the warhead at land, enemies deliver their payloads from 25 to 300 miles above the Earth’s surface. There, radiation from a nuclear explosion would interact with air molecules to produce high-energy electrons that speed across the earth’s magnetic field as an instantaneous, invisible electromagnetic pulse. Such an explosion would release a pulse strong enough to disrupt power grids, electronic systems and communications over the lower 48.

The United States never has prepared for this threat because experts long assumed it wouldn’t matter. An EMP attack, the theory goes, would come as a precursor to a full-scale nuclear exchange with our Cold War nemesis, the Soviet Union. At that point, the state of the power grid would be the least of our problems.

But today, we must consider a giant electromagnetic pulse (EMP) a significant threat on its own. The congressional Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack, calls EMP “one of a small number of threats that has the potential to hold our society seriously at risk and might result in defeat of our military forces.” ….

During Bush’s presidency when the EMP commission did its research, United States Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security, to which the commission reported. He had this to say:

[EMP is] a major threat to the United States, not only from terrorists but from rogue nations like North Korea.

An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack over American soil, one of the expert witnesses at the hearing said, is one of only a few ways that America could be essentially defeated by our enemies, terrorist or otherwise. A single nuclear weapon, detonated at the right altitude, would produce an electromagnetic pulse that — depending on its location and size — would knock out power grids and other electrical systems across much of the country, for months if not years.

Few if any people would die right away. But the long-term loss of electricity would essentially bring our society to a halt. Communication would be almost impossible. Powerless refrigerators would leave food rotting in warehouses, marooned by a lack of transportation as those vehicles still operable simply run out of gas (which can’t be pumped without electricity). The unavailability of clean water would quickly threaten public health, not to mention leave the inevitable fires raging unchecked. As we have seen in areas of natural and other disasters, this kind of scenario often results in a fairly rapid breakdown of social order.

Our society has grown so dependent on computer and other electrical systems that we have created our own Achilles’ heel of vulnerability, ironically much more so than less developed nations. Deprived of power in occasional blackouts, we are in many ways helpless. Typically, power is restored relatively quickly, but a large-scale burnout caused by broad EMP attack would create a much more difficult situation. Not only would there be nobody nearby to help, it could take years to replace destroyed equipment. Transformers for regional substations, for example, are huge and are no longer manufactured in the United States (emphasis mine).

Recent missile tests by North Korea and Iran involved trajectories over open water. Average citizens in the western world brushed them off and were not alarmed, because these did not look like the successfully targeted down-range tests we are familiar with. But that is because we always think of missiles as being aimed at a target. If the goal of rogue nations is simply to detonate a nuclear warhead over the continental United States to create an electro-magnetic pulse, then the delivery system only needs lauch and distance capability, not the technological refinement necessary for aiming. Iran declared its last test a success. For their purposes, most likely it was. This is not to say that Israel has no cause for concern, but that we should also.

The book One Second After by William R. Forstchen is fiction. But it is predicated on a very real situation. Its current popularity serves as a wake-up call to a dangerous threat.

Related:

Book website — One Second After

Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack — Website

Report of the Commission — Executive Report, 2004 (PDF)

Report of the Commission — Critical National Infrastructures Report, April 2008 (PDF)

Wall Street Journal — What a Single Nuclear Warhead Could Do

Heritage Foundation — The risk of electromagnetic pulse devastation is greater than ever. Why does Washington dismiss it?

CNN Inside Politics — FBI concerned about threat of terror-induced blackouts.

Wikipedia — Northeast Blackout of 2003

Tail wag: Larry Braden

I have been aware of the writer below for a while. He says, probably with more authority, what I have been saying since 1989. This article should be read by any American interested in our nation’s survival. Hint: that excludes most Democrat politicians. Following are a few paragraphs and a link to the rest of the article:

ONE CLENCHED FIST
by J. R. Nyquist

Two recent items reveal Moscow’s intentions. First, President Vladimir Putin has announced that he is suspending Russia’s commitment to follow the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty (CFE). This means that Russia can move tank and motorized infantry divisions to NATO’s doorstep. Second, Russian radio news broadcasters have been ordered to make 50 percent of their reporting on Russia “positive,” and that the United States is – from now on – to be described as Russia’s enemy.

President Putin’s intentions are clear. The Cold War is to be renewed. America is the “main enemy” once again. It has been my contention, for many years, that this was the KGB’s intention from the outset. The collapse of Communism was a staged event. It was a repeat of Lenin’s New Economic Policy of the 1920s, in which Russia pretended to liberalize and move toward capitalism, drawing investment and technology from the West. I believe that the political process in Russia, from 1989 to the present, was guided to this end. In 1989 America’s leaders could not see the Kremlin’s intentions because intentions are invisible to the naked eye. And so America’s leaders were fooled. Now Russia and China will emerge together as “one clenched fist,” and their intention is to smash America….

Read the rest of this article by J. R. Nyquist here.

Every day we hear more reports about the rising Islamist threat. Stephen Emerson reports alarmingly about the Islamists hidden among us. Al Qaeda is reportedly alive and spreading all over the world – morphing into a many headed snake. Meanwhile, Iran has moved from bluster to bully as it seizes British sailors on the open sea and blatantly ignores worldwide demands to cease its nuclear program, while continuing to arm Iraqi terrorists in direct defiance of the United States. Islamist militants in Palestinian-controlled areas and Lebanon visibly flex their muscles both militarily and diplomatically, while Muslims worldwide stridently demand absurdly special treatment in the non-Muslim societies where they have settled. As a friend once said, paraphrasing Trotsky: “You may not be interested in Islam, but Islam is interested in you.”

Without diminishing the threat these worldwide activities suggest, it is important nonetheless to recognize that they are a distraction, a deliberate provocation designed to keep our eyes focused on the wrong enemy. The true threat is and always has been the worldwide communist movement, spearheaded by the Soviet Union (oh sorry, I keep forgetting, “Russia,”) and Communist China. And given the cacophony currently being raised by their Islamist provocateurs, I fear the sucker punch is not long in coming.

We are obsessed with routing out “al Qaeda” in Iraq but almost willfully ignore that the insurgency remains largely driven by the Iraqi Ba’athist party’s highly organized network, with assistance from their Ba’athist cousins in Syria. I fear that if we merely defeat al Qaeda, our misidentification of the enemy will lead us to give up the fight early, leaving the much more dangerous Ba’athist infrastructure in place. In such circumstances, we will soon be facing another Saddam. Similarly, it is easy to see a Shia-led Iraq fall into the Iranian camp if we leave. (I described this potential problem in great detail before the war started. See: Regime Change Means Eradicating the Ba’ath Party.)

The Russians initially trained, funded and equipped the Ba’athists in both Syria and Iraq. They taught them the tactics being used now in Iraq against us. They continued to provide Saddam with military advice during the first Gulf war and at least the beginning of the current one, and I remain confident that they provide the Ba’athist insurgents with some manner of support to this day. They assisted in the removal of Saddam’s WMD to Syria. According to defector Ion Pacepa, the former Romanian Intelligence chief, Russia long ago developed a contingency plan for all puppet states to hide WMD should Western powers appear close to exposing them. (Read all about that here.)

Russia is helping Iran develop nuclear weapons. Russia’s Ba’athist puppets in Syria train and arm Iran’s Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, as well as practically every other terrorist group operating around the globe. As for Iraq, Russia is indifferent as to whether it falls under the Iranian sphere, or returns to Ba’athist rule. In either case, it’ll be just another puppet. Russia only cares that we lose.

Russia’s strategy has always been to use others to do their fighting for them. It is also to make surrogate powers a threat to the US in and of themselves, both as a tactic to distract us from the true threat and to help insure that we fire first at the wrong enemy if it ever comes to that. And just as the notion of “Stateless” terrorist groups is a red herring, so is that of “rogue states.”

[Note: to understand why the whole idea of “Stateless” terrorists is absurd, you need only examine the funding requirements for such activities and realize that their prospects for defeating a large nation unassisted are virtually zero. You have to believe that these groups have unlimited resources and will squander them on activities that can get them killed for no ultimate purpose. And if your answer is “Bin Laden” read here to understand why this is false too.]

North Korea remains attached to Russia and China at the hip and does not operate independently on the world stage. It is just one front on the offensive line, as is Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Syria and so, so many others.

I foresee, for example, a possible scenario where a so-called “rogue state” like Iran or North Korea fires a nuclear weapon at us. We respond in kind, and the Russians, feigning fear that they are the target, launch a massive retaliatory strike against us. Whoops, sorry comrade, our mistake!

The US needs to get clearer on who and what we are fighting. For starters, we need to eliminate the Ba’athist power base and obliterate Iran’s covert networks to win a decisive victory in Iraq. This will demonstrate both to ourselves and our enemies that we can win this kind of war and serve as an object lesson to the enemy that we are capable of making their chosen tactics very expensive.

By this measure we are currently losing.

However, I fear that if we give up, it will be the last time any politician musters the political courage necessary to confront this kind of warfare, and we will continue to face more and more of it until we are an island alone in the world against a sea of enemies. At that point it will start here at home, or we will merely be given an ultimatum with nuclear blackmail, and our feckless political class will fold like a reed in the wind.

For the longer term, we need to significantly increase both our military size and effectiveness – more troops, effective anti-missile defenses, as well as conventional weapons, where we may not have as much of an advantage as we think – and dramatically improve intelligence gathering.

I am not optimistic that any of this will get done. But if Hillary Clinton or some other Democrat is elected in 2008, we will assuredly go in the polar opposite direction.

Hard times ahead.

Businessman and freelance writer Jim Simpson is a former White House staff economist and budget analyst (1987-1993). His writings have been published in the Washington Times, FrontPage Magazine, DefenseWatch, Soldier of Fortune and others. You can read more of his articles on his blog, Truth and Consequences.

By Jim Simpson

It’s official. The war in Iraq is now a “Civil War,” according to our vaunted Fourth Estate. In the Sunni Triangle especially, things have not been going well. Every day, dozens of Iraqis (yesterday it was over 100) are killed in bombings, kidnappings, assassinations and drive-by shootings. Every day U.S. casualties mount.

If you believe the media, this is not and never was a “central front in the ‘Global War on Terror.’” It only provoked Islamic terrorists to take up arms in a country that was stable, if not exactly democratic. Saddam died ignominiously and probably should have been spared. Iraq is descending rapidly into a chaos we can’t prevent in a conflict in which we will never prevail.

Despite these unassailable facts, and the equally unassailable recommendations of the venerable Infirm Seniors, whoops, Iraq Study Group, knuckle-dragger George W. Bush has ignored everyone and willfully proceeded with his plan to “surge” 20,000 plus troops into Baghdad.

Not enough! Won’t help! Too many! Lost cause! Blah, blah, blah…

Meanwhile, the new Democrat led Congress has reliably reaffirmed its status as the Treason Party with a demoralizing resolution of no confidence in the troops’ ability to finish the job. Predictably however, they have also shown their inveterate cowardice by being unwilling to make it a resolution with any teeth. It only serves to demoralize without offering solutions.

Okay, okay, enough already! Instead of drawing battle lines and calling names, let’s really ask the question: Why should we stay?

Finishing the job in Iraq is absolutely critical to our future national survival, but not for the reasons generally cited.

Yes, “Bush Lied” nutcases, Saddam did have WMD, and his connections to al Qaeda were beyond doubt. If Bill Clinton’s 1998 statements don’t convince you, then the many documents since seized in Iraq proving the same thing probably won’t either. But then, why should they? You are nutcases after all. Anyone else interested in revisiting this issue is directed here for an exhaustive treatise on the subject.

Sure, Iraq is a rallying point for terrorists. It was before we invaded, so why not now, when they can practice on real, live targets? Sure, it’s better to kill them over there than over here. Of course, an Iraq left to the terrorists will descend into a horrible bloodbath (as though it wasn’t one now.) Indisputably, an abandoned Iraq will become a new outpost for Iranian aggression. Undeniably, the entire region, including our key ally, Israel, will come under immediate threat.

Absolutely. Without a doubt.

Well, if those aren’t good enough reasons, then why should we stay? Actually, they are good enough reasons. But they are not the critical reason.

The critical reason we must stay is that we are not so much fighting an enemy as we are a strategy. This strategy has defeated us multiple times over the years, and we have yet to effectively confront it. No matter the enemy, no matter the circumstance, it has always been the same. It finds succinct voice in the words of Moscow trained North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap, who first articulated it in 1950 as the strategy the communists would use to defeat the French (as quoted in Bernard Fall’s prophetic book, Street Without Joy):

The enemy will pass slowly from the offensive to the defensive. The blitzkrieg will transform itself into a war of long duration. Thus, the enemy will be caught in a dilemma: he has to drag out the war in order to win it and does not possess, on the other hand, the psychological and political means to fight a long drawn-out war.

As every American should know, almost every enemy we have faced since Hitler has adopted this strategy in one form or another. Indeed, we would have faced the same thing during WW II as well, had Hitler not made the fatal error of invading the Soviet Union. In doing so, he turned the vocal and widespread American communist movement –- even then disproportionately represented within our media, entertainment and political establishments –- against him. Overnight, prominent American isolationists (read communist sympathizers) miraculously converted into strident patriots clamoring for war. For a full treatment of this untold story, read my article, The Great Unpatriotic War. You won’t find it in many history books, but it is essential to a complete understanding of the problem we face.

What we must realize is our greatest enemy has been ourselves. At critical times, against a myriad of adversaries, we have fallen victim to self-doubt. What we have lacked in all these conflicts is the will to do what is necessary to win. And if we are ever going to successfully defend ourselves against a growing list of deadly foes, we must overcome this chronic failing.

The first time was Korea. Despite their bluster, neither the Soviets nor the Chinese had the wherewithal to defeat us in Korea had we chosen to win. We made plenty of mistakes, but the issue was never really in doubt. We demonstrated our ability first against the North Korean army then against the communist Chinese. But instead of deciding to win, we decided to merely stop and hold. We lost resolve. This critical loss of will against communist aggression set the stage for the many more that were to follow.

We had our next big opportunity in Vietnam, but we blew that too. As in Iraq today, we were winning. The Phoenix Program and other efforts had effectively pacified large portions of South Vietnam. The Communists lost the Tet Offensive. We obliterated the Viet Cong infrastructure, something Walter Cronkite apparently forgot to mention in his defeatist broadcast often cited as the turning point for public opinion against the War. From then on the North Vietnamese had to use mostly conventional forces against us –- forces we almost always defeated in battle.

Realizing that about 80 percent of North Vietnam’s war materiel came by boat, Nixon’s decision to mine Haiphong Harbor brought North Vietnam’s critical military resupply operations to a standstill. Shortly after, the communists came back to the Paris Peace Talks. They had no choice. The instruments of war had been denied them. This idea, like many other good ones, was posed early on, but Johnson, cowardly Democrat, ignored them.

We could have succeeded in Lebanon, Nicaragua, Angola, Somalia and countless other places as well, but in each circumstance we were defeated by our own self-doubt. We can refight those intellectual battles too, if you like, and I will win, because the facts are on my side. But these are irrelevant, because the truth is, we lost. We left, often after some particularly harrowing event, such as the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, or “Blackhawk Down” in Somalia. Or we gave up after some perceived loss, like 1968′s Tet Offensive. We compounded these “losses” into humiliating defeats by walking out. In each case, our decision sprang from national self-doubt.

Like most problems of the twentieth century, the root causes can be traced to the Left. It has been said elsewhere, but cannot be repeated enough: the American Left wants the United States to fail. They are a genuine fifth column, and their stiletto-tongued liars have killed as many American warriors as enemy bullets. Their propaganda machine has enlisted countless millions of our gullible youth, and their subversive tactics undermine the effectiveness of churches, schools, institutions and government, while they divert funds to favored projects and leaders. The Left is a blood-sucking parasite on the body politic, and we are losing a lot of blood.

As American Thinker contributor J.R. Dunn explains:

The Iraq War was a godsend for the American left, something they’d have had to invent if it hadn’t happened on its own. It allowed the entire War on Terror to be chopped and fit into the already existing intellectual template, enabled all the old slogans to be revived, all the dusty concepts to be trotted out anew. It has turned the overall war, one of the most justified conflicts in this country’s history, a belated defensive response against an ugly and murderous enemy, into the traditional shadow play of murderous military officers, bloody-handed CIA operatives, and cackling businessmen, all overseen by a bulging-browed Karl Rove, operating from some Goldfingeresque headquarters buried far beneath the Crawford ranch. The result is a nation slowly edging toward the same paralysis that afflicted it during the 1970s.

It is a familiar refrain, easy to recognize and widely understood by practically every one of us. When things begin to look a bit messy; our stridently Leftist media takes up the mantle for the enemy and pounds home our losses. My Lai, Abu Graib, Guantanamo Bay become slogans for an opposition determined to vilify our efforts while calling demonic enemies “Minutemen.”

Their hyper-criticism fans the flames of division within Congress, the administration, the military and the country at large. Patriotic politicians begin to quail. Liberal politicians, those self-serving mouthpieces for the treasonous movements who feed them, protest, demand, accuse, hold hearings, press conferences, etc., as they are doing right now, for the sole purpose of reinforcing our self-doubt. Before the war, many of these same critics spoke the popular mantra of “getting behind the president,” but then lunged at the political opportunity created when inevitable and often tragic mistakes of a shooting war started to occur.

This is one of the most revolting demonstrations of the political Left’s utterly self-serving nature. The public’s acquiescence in this behavior also reflects on a broader scale the long-term impact these repeated assaults on our national conscience have had. We should all be out there calling for their heads! Instead we just throw up our hands in a futile gesture of exhausted disgust. People like this should not have a forum, much less a grand place of honor within the fourth estate.

The point is, this problem is entirely of our own making. Quoting J.R. Dunn again:

As we have seen, this is no natural turn of events. There is nothing inevitable or unavoidable about it. It is entirely synthetic, the byproduct of an effort by our intellectual elite to serve an ideology now long dead. Our belief in ourselves as a nation, in our role and mission on the international stage, has been undermined for fifty years and more. There is not a level of society, from day laborer to corporate CEO, who has not been touched by this dogma. Not a single institution (with the professional military perhaps excepted) has been unaffected.

Now it has become a well-oiled machine, the victorious champion of many a campaign. The terrorists expect CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, Time, Newsweek, New York Times, Washington Post, and virtually all other major dailies to grossly exaggerate the problems in Iraq while completely overlooking positive developments. They expect Democrats to criticize the President when some operation goes awry. They expect Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy and the like to take every opportunity to castigate the president when terrorist bombs start going off. In fact, they rely on it. They plan on it. This political equation is the guiding principle behind all their actions.

This strategy must be defeated. It is a strategy that will be used again and again until we have no more places to retreat. It is a strategy that will ultimately bring our enemies finally, irrevocably to our shores, and with it will come the anarchy, mass murder, torture and collapse we have thus far largely avoided. It will signal the end of the world as we know it. For our grand experiment, the only stable counterbalance in an increasingly unstable world, is the last hope for all others, friend and foe alike.

In order to defeat this strategy, we must acknowledge and confront the enemy here at home. Knowingly or otherwise, the president’s critics are aiding and abetting the terrorists by hammering away at our national resolve to see this action through. They are aiding and abetting the terrorists by belittling the hard work and blood sacrifices of our men in uniform.

But they support the troops, really they do.

No they don’t!

They are the voice of a movement that has sought to destroy this country from within ever since their first odious agents crawled out from under some Bolshevik rock in the early part of the twentieth century. Today the Democrat party is the repository of that dogma and Hillary Rodham Clinton its personification. You must be convinced by now that these people are serious.

They are sowing doubt, once again, into the minds of those on active duty, who now have to confront the possibility, as happened in Vietnam, of making all those sacrifices in vain. Families who lost sons in Vietnam and everywhere else also have to confront that bitter pain again as once more, their elected leaders miserably let them down.

It’s bad enough when those in uniform die for a good cause. But now families of those currently in Iraq have to confront the thought that their sons and daughters too might die for nothing.

One former Army intelligence officer recently told me that “we never have won and cannot win a guerilla war.” This statement has to be the most idiotic statement I have recently heard and it has had an awful lot of competition. If we can never win why do we even fight? Why do we even bother with a military? Iraq is a nation of 26 million people. If we cannot win there, where can we win? If any enemy who adopts this strategy can win everywhere and always, why don’t we just get it over with and appoint Osama Bin Laden (or his running mate, Hillary) President for Life?

We must recognize the enemy for what it is and move forward in spite of it. This is what George W. Bush is attempting to do with his troop “surge.” Is it enough? With this gallery of traitors occupying Congress I am not optimistic. We nonetheless would be wise to recognize an ages-old problem that has confronted open societies throughout history. To quote Cicero:

A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. … He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.

Our entire nation is down with this virus. Radical surgery appears to be the only recourse. During the Civil War, Lincoln imposed martial law and ruled by decree. Will that be necessary here? Or will those members of our political class not already given to our enemies finally step up to the plate and pass legislation that effectively deals with agents of influence, agitators, and other subversives? The danger from these people is just as real as any battlefield. More so, for it threatens the very survival of our nation. And as our nation goes, so goes the world.

God save us.

Freelance writer Jim Simpson is a former White House staff economist and budget analyst (1987-1993). His writings have been published in the Washington Times, FrontPage Magazine, DefenseWatch, Soldier of Fortune and others. You may read more of his articles on his blog, Truth and Consequences.

By Jim Simpson

I have skirted around the following subject for years, either because I was focused on some small subset of it, or because I did not feel the message would be accepted. I no longer care. We are teetering at the abyss, and bold action is required if we are to save ourselves. It is way past time for a reality check, so here it is, late, but better late than never:

1. We all know that Ahmadinejad, Bin Laden and other terror leaders past and present would never strap on a suicide belt themselves, although they encourage others to. So maybe they’re not quite as committed to Allah as they would have us believe.
2. We know that suicide belts and other media-focused tactics used by Muslim terrorists are nothing new. Anyone familiar with the Vietnam conflict, for example, knows of the suicide bomber, targeting of civilians, kidnapping, torture, dismemberment and mass murder. These are standard Soviet tactics in use for decades.
3. We know that the Soviets have been arming and training “Jihadists” since the 1950s and probably before.
4. We know that the PLO was a creation of the Soviet KGB and that communists invented the “Palestinian” cause as an excuse to prosecute their war against the West with surrogates by attacking its critical regional representative, Israel.
5. We know that many key members of al Qaeda are professional, Soviet-trained Baluchi terrorists, not Muslims. How could a supposed purist like Osama Bin Laden allow such infidels to assume leadership positions in his ardently Muslim al Qaeda?
6. We know that Russia actively supports Iran, Syria and the Ba’athist dominated resistance in Iraq, i.e. Muslim and non-Muslim alike. (For those of you who wonder what I mean by non-Muslim here, Syria’s and Iraq’s Ba’athists are non-Muslim communist atheists, prayer rugs notwithstanding!)
7. We know that in 1991, the Soviet Union “spontaneously” collapsed and that its leaders, who remain in power to this day, suddenly, independently, at precisely the same moment, inexplicably transformed into… Democrats!
8. We know through public statements made in 1991 by Soviet representatives on U.S. television that this event was, in the Soviets’ own words, a “deny your enemy an enemy” tactic, taken directly from the pages of Sun Tzu’s Art of War – the inspiration of most Soviet military doctrine. Gorbachev himself used these exact words, in a seminar held at the Heritage Foundation a few years ago.

In short, the Soviet Union never fell. It transformed its appearance dramatically, but only superficially, in a shrewd strategic move that tricked Western policy makers into unilateral disarmament. Democrats rejoiced at the excuse this “victory” provided to gut our military, while Republicans rejoiced at being able to take credit for “winning” the Cold War. Both parties rejoiced about spending the elusive “peace dividend” and dismissed shouts of warning from those few analysts willing to make them. We declared ourselves the winner and went home, neither party daring to risk even a cursory examination of the circumstances surrounding this surprise event, for fear of what the blatantly obvious must force them to confront.

Policy makers seem to live in a never-never land of fanciful imagination that willfully ignores the continued march of communism across the globe, with countries falling under its spell at, if anything, an increased rate. Communism is dead, but Venezuela and Bolivia recently fell to communist regimes. Looks like ole Danny Boy Ortega may be making a comeback in Nicaragua too. Communism died, but Columbia has a vibrant communist insurgency, as does Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand and many other countries. Communist China refuses to go away, as do Cuba and North Korea, where rumors of those regimes’ impending demise have been, as usual, greatly exaggerated.

After the “fall” of communism, communists consolidated their control of Angola when we declared ourselves the “victors” and abandoned Jonas Savimbi’s anticommunist guerillas in the field, only to see them utterly wiped out shortly thereafter. The same communist Angolan government remains in power today. Rashid Dostum, a key leader of Afghanistan’s “Northern Alliance” is, and always has been, Russia’s man in Afghanistan. He was left there in charge of the Soviet-backed Afghan Army after the Soviets went home and continued to wreak havoc until the Taliban chased him out. In yet another demonstration of our interminable brilliance, American policy makers allowed him to become Deputy Defense Minister in the new Karzai government, guaranteeing a behind-the-scenes Soviet Communist role in Afghanistan’s future.

In short, since the so-called “fall” of the Soviet Union, communist movements have, if anything, blossomed. And nowhere is the resilient strength of the communist movement more apparent than here at home, where communist inspired ideas and spokespeople dominate the media, educational establishments, churches, civic organizations and politics. It’s high time we recognized that these people are our enemies!

With Islamic Jihad, the Soviet Union found the ideal vehicle to continue its war with the West, while continuing to uphold the myth of their demise. A large population of ignorant, unemployed, discouraged, disenfranchised, naïve Muslim youths has provided fertile ground for recruitment into what can only be described as the consummate false flag operation. Jihadists believe they are fighting to create a worldwide Muslim Caliphate, because they are recruited by Hezbollah, Hamas, al Qaeda and other recognized Muslim terror groups. But in fact they are doing the dirty work of the Soviets, just as countless surrogates have in the past.

It is no coincidence that North Korea chooses this time to provoke the West with nuclear tests, while Iran flouts world demands to halt nuclear research and Muslim terrorists everywhere threaten the West. These provocations are a deception we have bought, guaranteeing that when the time arrives, our eyes will be riveted on the wrong enemy. And I feel that time is approaching fast. The Soviets are moving to reassert themselves on the world stage. We cannot hope to win if we don’t even know who the enemy is. We must recognize this, now!

Do we have a fighting chance? I am not optimistic in any circumstances, but of one thing I am certain. Our chances will drop to virtually zero if in next week’s Midterm elections, we choose Democrats to run Congress. While Republican leaders have not been everything we would like, they do remain responsive, and many are at least aware that we are under threat. Also, Republican philosophy is by nature more open to new ideas.

By contrast, the Democrats are forcefully determined to impose their Socialist agenda on us. This agenda has shown itself to be an unqualified failure despite fifty years and countless trillions of taxpayer dollars worth of effort—ample time and resources for it to prove otherwise. Furthermore, many of these same people are working—covertly and some not so covertly—to bring about the very communist victory the Soviets have sought since 1917. Calling them the “Treason Party” as Ann Coulter has, is scarcely an exaggeration.

We may no longer be able to strangle the Bolshevik baby in its crib, as Winston Churchill so colorfully recommended long ago, but we can at least temporarily forestall its metastasized descendants in the Democrat party from wreaking more havoc than they already have. Vote Republican this November 7th!

Editor’s note: Freelance writer Jim Simpson is a former White House staff economist and budget analyst (1987-1993). His writings have been published in the Washington Times, FrontPage Magazine, DefenseWatch online newsletter, Soldier of Fortune magazine, Military magazine and others. You may read this and other articles by Mr. Simpson on his blog Truth and Consequences.

Most politicians seem to welcome China’s involvement in the effort to reign in North Korea’s nuclear program. After all, they are the big presence in that part of the world, diplomats reason. But that is just why we should be cautious. Here’s a very interesting article from the Orange County Register, written yesterday by California Assemblyman Chuck DeVore. (Assemblyman DeVore, R-Irvine, served as a Special Assistant for Foreign Affairs in the Reagan-era Pentagon. He is also a lieutenant colonel in the Army National Guard with training in North Korean organization, tactics and equipment.)

China’s reasons to take out Kim Jong Il
A reunified Korea could easily come under Beijing’s influence
By CHUCK DEVORE | Wednesday, October 18, 2006

The discussion over what to do about North Korea’s nuclear test detonation needs to be expanded to place Kim Jong Il’s Democratic People’s Republic of Korea into the context of the region and of history. Whether or not America, Japan and South Korea ought to embargo or blockade North Korea for its hostile actions pales in significance relative to what China believes its interests in the region happen to be.

China will determine North Korea’s fate – and it may act sooner and in a more forceful fashion than anyone outside Beijing would even remotely consider as being possible today.

While the former Soviet Union ultimately acquiesced to the reunification of Germany, China may force the reunification of Korea because it is in its best interests to do so. There are five compelling reasons for China to act decisively on the Korean question….

We urge you to read the rest of this important and compelling article. It predicts a reunified Korea under the influence of China, with the U.S. troops stationed in South Korea forced out, and Taiwan as the next domino in line to fall. It will take a very clever U.S. foreign policy to navigate these treacherous waters.