Logic Times
Foreign Affairs
Don't Blame the Clinton Administration
Summary: The Path to 9/11 concluding tonight on ABC is riveting, a superb visceral presentation of the root causes of September 11th. Conservatives everywhere are giddy with excitement that a member of the Mainstream Media chose not to whitewash the Clinton Administration’s confused and ineffectual response to terrorism. The actual record of the Clinton Administration – the disaster in Mogadishu, multiple opportunities to kill or capture bin Laden missed, the Gorelick Wall between justice and intelligence – is profoundly worse than portrayed in The Path to 9/11, but the movie nonetheless makes it crystal clear that the Clinton Administration was criminally incompetent in handling terrorism.
But Conservatives need to be cautious in their euphoria; the takeaway from the movie is not that the Clinton Administration was responsible for 9/11, because emphatically they were not. The events, if not the date, of September 11, 2001 were inevitable.
Commentary by Aslan, 9/11/06. Comments (3)
The Civilian Casualty Fable II
Summary: What does Haditha reveal? The casualty distortions detailed above demonstrate the lengths to which anti-war liberals will go to invalidate the humanitarian success of the coalition intervention. They will sample small areas to come up with a big 100,000 number (please ignore that their statistical methods require a range of 8,000 – 194,000), they will classify dead terrorists as civilian casualties, they will compare a minor prison incident to Nazi death camps, they will disregard the hundreds of thousands of civilians that Saddam murdered, and they will happily, eagerly, take the word of the enemy that Marines are slaughtering civilians. Anything to promote opposition to the Iraq War.
But wait a minute. If these anti-war opportunists who have embraced Haditha are correct about the civilian casualty counts, then where are the other Hadithas?
Commentary by Aslan, 6/26/06, 6:10pm. Comments (2)
Summary: Opposition to all war makes no distinction between the combatants. The nation that invades another to steal wealth and kill women and children is no more reprehensible than the nation that sets down its pots and plows and takes up arms to defend those women and children. After all, both are at war, and war, what is it good for, absolutely nothing. What must underpin the logic of anti-war songs is a belief that no one possesses the moral credibility to take up arms, to pass judgment on the actions of another. If nations are or have ever been guilty of aggression or imperialism or less-than-pure geopolitical maneuvering, than no side in a war is right and no side is wrong. Moral relativism writ large.
Commentary by Aslan, 5/28/06, 4:40pm. Comments (6)
Summary: To understand the sacrifice needed in the War on Terror, we must first appreciate that today’s soldier is nothing like the brave men of World War II. Unlike the quickly trained and rudely equipped conscript landing on the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, today’s volunteer is a professional, a model of sophisticated training and technological know-how. In fact, today’s professional soldier is the key to the winning the War on Terror against a 12th century opponent that must scavenge modern technology to compete.
Commentary by Aslan, 4/16/06, 11:52pm. Comments (5)
Summary: As the lead-up to the Iraq War recedes into the past, the relentless assault by media and the political Left has eroded our understanding of why we are in Iraq, retroactively suggesting reasonable options that did not exist. This essay is the first in a series to re-establish why the United States military is in Iraq.
Commentary by Aslan, 3/26/06. Comments (2)
Please read the Editor's Note posted 2/14/06
Summary: A frequent indictment of the Iraq War is that our presence in Iraq is creating more terrorists than we are eliminating. This strikes at the heart of the current Iraq policy that seeks to reduce the threat of terrorism by introducing representative self-government to the Middle East and, as an added bonus, eliminating any terrorists loitering in the neighborhood. If the Iraq policy is increasing the terrorist threat, the policy is failing.
Commentary by Aslan, 2/12/06, 9:22pm. Comments (6)
Summary: September 11, 2001 happened for one reason: America was perceived to lack resolve. At a deeper level, a lack of resolve born of an unwillingness to endure hardship and sacrifice life in defense of closely held beliefs. The determined ideal of Patrick Henry ("Give me liberty or give me death") and Nathan Hale ("I regret that I have but one life to give for my country") was, in the mind of bin Laden and other terror leaders, dead in America and the West, while in the Islamic world the idea of sacrifice flourished, codified in religious doctrine.
But bin Laden made a giant mistake, confusing the weakness and complacency of American culture with weakness of the American military. In an impossible situation with unworkable rules of engagement and limited support, a mere 160 Army Rangers and Delta Force killed 1,000 heavily armed Somali guerrillas and wounded another 3,000 to 4,000 while enduring 19 dead and 73 wounded.
Commentary by Aslan, 12/17/05, 3:46pm. Comments (4)
Summary: Two enemies reeling from strategic defeats, each in their third year battling the United States, employing propaganda in a last ditch effort to convince the public that good things, not bad things, are happening. The only difference is that in 1943, no one in the United States of America echoed the words of Joseph Goebbels or even dignified his New Year’s Eve broadcast with a response. In 2005, not only does Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri hear an echo in the United States, he hears a chorus from the political Left.
Commentary by Aslan, 12/09/05, 11:16pm. Comments (3)
Summary: Common sense reveals there can be only one reason why Al Qaeda, despite its desire to promote the Myth that Iraq is unrelated to the War on Terror, is so fundamentally engaged in the Iraqi insurgency: there would be no insurgency without Al Qaeda; there would only be a free Iraq, a model of successful self-governance in the region and the final nail in the coffin of the idea that the Middle East does not want or cannot handle freedom.
Posted by Aslan, 11/01/05, 10:46pm. Comments (1)
Summary: An organization is moved by the common interest of its members. A herpetology club will do poorly if it includes members who hate snakes. The purported common interest of United Nations members is to secure "justice and liberty and peace" appealing to the "intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind." But, like the snake-haters in the herpetology club, the U.N. counts among its members those who reject these things, who disdain human rights, charity and the rule of law.
Commentary by Aslan, 11/17/05, 11:46pm. Comments (4)
Summary: Soldiers cannot ethically be asked to sacrifice their lives – not their money, their home or their job, but their lives – for those who insist on retaining the lazy luxury of indecision or for those who change their minds with the ebb and flow of the conflict abroad or the political struggles at home.
Commentary by Aslan, 10/17/05, 10:46pm. Comments (7)
Editor's Note: The fiction of 100,000 Iraqi civilian casualties has survived to this day in part because of the tantalizing propaganda value of such a large number. How many lightly informed people have tossed this number at you in debate without even realizing that the Lancet study doesn’t measure casualties at all?
Now the number of 100,000 Iraqi civilians has new relevance, as the Iraqi Survival Count has surpassed the Lancet tally of "excess deaths." While I am not hopeful that the Iraqi Survival Count will enjoy the same exposure in the media as the Lancet death calculation, I do hope that it helps drive home the point that the plight of the average Iraqi civilian has improved since the coalition intervention, and that is just a measure of physical risk. The journey from despair to liberty has value that cannot be measured.
Updated Essay by Aslan, 7/22/06. Comments (17)
Summary: When soldiers agree to place their lives on the line, the citizens whom they represent must agree to place their opposition aside. The soldier's commitment is unconditional and so must be the support of his fellow citizens. Such an agreement is only feasible in a republican form of government where the authority to wage war has been vested in the people’s representatives and any decision to wage war has been arrived at through careful deliberation
Commentary by Aslan, 09/01/05. Comments (3)
Summary: The political Left in this country gets too much credit for being intellectual. The stereotype is familiar: academic, socially responsible, erudite political liberals on one hand opposed by greedy, warmongering, Bible-thumping political conservatives on the other. But the description favored by the Left, the label that coats their irrational views with a sort of Teflon resistance to challenge by brutish conservatives is the term "Intellectual."
It is a label often undeserved.
Commentary by Aslan, 07/04/05. Comments (5)
Summary: The 2000 census projects that there were about 291,000,000 people in the United States the year Abu Ghraib entered onto the national scene, a year that saw 559,000 assaults here on domestic soil (data here and here). In 2004, there were about 2,000,000 federal employees. If we assume that a federal employee is as likely as anyone else to commit a crime, we can conclude that roughly 3840 federal employees committed some form of assault in 2004. Do you recall seeing hundreds of newspaper stories above the fold on violent IRS employees or gangs of post office workers? Of course not, because there is no political advantage is such stories.
Commentary by Aslan, 02/14/05. Comments (3)
Summary: Consider the primary threats facing our uncertain world today: powerful technology (dirty bombs, suitcase nukes, saran gas, anthrax, etc.) in the wrong hands, the hands of a nihilistic few. If we safely assume that technology will continue to fuel the destructive potential of destructive individuals, we have an unsolvable problem:
- Technological progress makes each individual potentially more destructive,
- Mastery of the secrets of genetics and atomic structure will one day make it possible for an individual to unleash a worldwide holocaust (fusion event, massive biological event, etc.),
- There will always be terrorists.
Commentary by Aslan, 1/25/05, 11:45pm. Comments (4)
Summary: Conditional support communicates to our opponent that the United States can be defeated. Support is dependent upon a certain reduced-cost outcome and support will be withdrawn if a certain cost threshold is exceeded.
Commentary by Aslan, 12/29/04. Comments (3)
Summary: Recognizing that concern for Iraqi civilians was bad cover for anti-American sentiments, many liberals have scurried for new cover: concern for American lives, in particular, our soldiers in harm’s way. Not surprisingly, these numbers do not add up, and once again Logic Times does the math.
Commentary by Aslan, 12/16/04. Comments (3)
Summary: The moment of true leadership from a post-9/11 president was after Afghanistan; what would be next? This war requires far more than killing Osama bin Laden; it requires a solution to the problem of fascist Islam, and leadership began in earnest when George W. Bush demonstrated that he is more concerned with your family’s future than his own political future.
Commentary by Aslan. 10/13/04. Comments (1)
Summary: This made-up story makes a critical point in the WMD debate: why are only the wrong questions being asked about WMDs, and, more importantly, why are conservatives conceding the premise that there are no WMDs?
Commentary by Aslan. 10/09/04. Comments (11)
The Brilliance of the Bush Plan
Summary: History clearly demonstrates that democratizing the Middle East will eradicate fascist Islamic terrorism.
Commentary by Aslan. 10/3/2004. Comments (3)