Politics Blog

Don Rumsfeld on the Iraq naysayers: “Never have so many been so wrong about so much.”

Lots of speculation today (but no real news) about 2004 Senate races in South Dakota, South Carolina and Florida. My full 2004 Senate analysis is here.

Gregg Easterbrook notes the overwhelming superiority of US military hardware, while Christian Lowe notes the overwhelming superiority of US military command and control.

One consequence of this overwhelming US superiority in conventional warfare is that other countries seem to have stopped competing:

The runaway advantage has been called by some excessive, yet it yields a positive benefit. Annual global military spending, stated in current dollars, peaked in 1985, at $1.3 trillion, and has been declining since, to $840 billion in 2002. That’s a drop of almost half a trillion dollars in the amount the world spent each year on arms. Other nations accept that the arms race is over.

“Peace Through Strength” is not as silly as liberals make it out to be.

Another scoop from the Daily Telegraph. The French government colluded with Iraqi intelligence to undermine a humanrights group’s conference in Paris. Another document shows that Saddam sent his thanks to Jacques Chirac for trying to lift sanctions in 1998. Here’s the Telegraph editorial on all this chicanery.

Democrats are still “fighting the last war.” They haven’t gotten over the 2000 elections yet. Here’s presidential candidate Bob Graham of Florida today on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you think President Bush won the 2000 campaign fair and square?

GRAHAM: No. I think there were so many errors made in my state, and maybe elsewhere, that could have shifted just one state from his column to Al Gore’s column and Al Gore would have won. Florida was just one particular place. What distressed me most was that the US Supreme Court suddenly became situational federalists.

More proof that Democrats loathe the president and will end up paying for it. Hatred for political opponents is a useful emotion in a grass-roots activist, but not in a politician. It clouds one’s judgement and causes one to make ill-considered decisions.

As I’ve mentioned, Lieutenant-General Michael “Buzz” Moseley ran the air war over Iraq agressively and very successfully. The Washington Post now has details on the air war that we couldn’t see on TV.

Ye Newe York Times reports on postwar difficulties following victory at Yorktown.

The Saddam-Osama connection! How come the Daily Telegraph keeps finding these scoops in Iraqi documents? Shouldn’t someone from US intelligence be getting to these documents first? All the Telegraph reporter had to do was sweet-talk his way past some 3rd ID soldiers guarding the Mukhabarat building.

(Via InstaPundit) With the seeds of US-backed democracy being planted in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, the unpopular mullahcracy in Iran is very worried, says Le Monde:

Iranian officials are worried. Worried of the American presence next to their doors, on the East as well as to the West, worried of the invasion of Iraq “with so little popular resistance", worried of the fast fall of the Baghdad regime, worried of the sidelining of the UN, worried of the total disillusion of the Iranian people that, since the beginning of the Iraqi crisis, has resulted in a fierce pro-Americanism of the population… but, especially, worried of the vox populi, that asks for “a change of the regime with the help of the American marines", the daily “Le Monde” wrote.

They darn well should be worried. Iranian dissidents are only going to get even louder. They’ve planned a massive general strike on July 9 that just might be the final nail in the coffin of the Iranian regime.

Now that the focus is shifting from Iraq to North Korea, you’ll often hear in the press about statements made by North Korean spokesmen. I prefer to go straight to the source and read the official North Korean news agency’s web site (click on the Past News link on the web site for previous updates.)

You can see the revised version of the “reprocessing” statement (changed from “We are successfully reprocessing more than 8,000 spent fuel rods” to “We are successfully going forward to reprocess work more than 8,000 spent fuel rods") here.

Personally, I think diplomacy has no chance of working against this regime. Much more than Saddam, Kim Jong Il and his evil minions live in an alternate universe created by incessant propaganda. They really think they’re heroes. They genuinely believe they can indefinitely threaten the world and starve their people in the name of “socialism.”

We’re going to have to bomb the bastards, kill Kim Jong Il, liberate the country, and let the South Koreans feed the 20 million starving people of North Korea.