Exactly
by tristero
Voters are exasperated with the Democrats, not because they think Congressional leaders are too liberal, but because they don’t see Congress doing anything to stop the war.
"what digby sez..."
Exactly
by tristero
Voters are exasperated with the Democrats, not because they think Congressional leaders are too liberal, but because they don’t see Congress doing anything to stop the war.
ADVISE and Consent
by digby
When the Democrats in congress wonder why we civil libertarians get so testy about allowing the Bush administration unfettered power to spy on its own citizens, this is why. When they aren’t gaming the system or plotting dirty tricks, they are screwing everything up so badly that innocent people inevitably get caught up in matters over which they have no control:
The Homeland Security Department scrapped an ambitious anti-terrorism data-mining tool after investigators found it was tested with information about real people without required privacy safeguards.
The department has spent $42 million since 2003 developing the software tool known as ADVISE, the Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement program, at the Lawrence Livermore and Pacific Northwest national laboratories. It was intended for wide use by DHS components, including immigration, customs, border protection, biological defense and its intelligence office.
Pilot tests of the program were quietly suspended in March after Congress’ Government Accountability Office warned that “the ADVISE tool could misidentify or erroneously associate an individual with undesirable activity such as fraud, crime or terrorism.”
Since then, Homeland Security’s inspector general and the DHS privacy office discovered that tests used live data about real people rather than made-up data for one to two years without meeting privacy requirements. The inspector general also said ADVISE was poorly planned, time-consuming for analysts to use and lacked adequate justifications.
DHS spokesman Russ Knocke told The Associated Press on Wednesday the project was being dropped.
[…]
The GAO said in March that DHS should notify the public about how an individual’s personal information would be verified, used and protected before ADVISE was implemented on live data.
I wonder if anyone’s going to ask why they used real people’s information instead of making them up as they were required to do? And what’s been done with the data?
Seriously, even if you were to grant that these people are filled with integrity and would never use such information for nefarious purposes, how can anyone trust them not to make the kinds of mistakes that can ruin innocent people’s lives? It’s true that much of the necessity for civil liberties springs from a very healthy mistrust of government authority, but that’s not the only reason. Nobody’s perfect and the stakes are much to high to allow any police agencies to operate in secret and without any kind of check on their power — they screw up.
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by digby
He added, “I’ve never run a race where I thought I wouldn’t win. I thought we were gonna hold the House and the Senate in ’06. I thought we’d lose nine or ten seats, and I thought we’d be one or two up in the Senate.”
Bush had held that view, almost manic in its optimism, all the way up to election day, in defiance of all available polling data. At the very mention of such data, his face began to curdle. “I understand you can’t let polls tell you what to think,” he declared
Huh? So they aren’t even useful to tell you what the public is thinking? (This piece, by Sidney Blumenthal says it all.) He believes that you can’t let evidence inform you. He really is faith based. Je suis la vérité.
“I understand you can’t let polls tell you what to think,” he declared—one of his most frequently expressed sentiments, but now he went further: “And part of being a leader is: people watch you. I walk in that hall, I say to those commanders—well, guess what would happen if I walk in and say, ‘Well, maybe it’s not worth it.’ When I’m out in the public”—and now he was fully animated, yanked out of his slouch and his eyes clenched like little blue fists—”I fully understand that the enemy watches me, the Iraqis are watching me, the troops watch me, and the people watch me.
Yes and they are watching a man so far out of his depth that it’s frightening the hell out of everybody. Apparently, he also “thinks” that his job requires him to stubbornly cling to every decision that’s made no matter what, because “everybody in the world is watching” and they might sense weakness if he even asks for another opinion. He’s a mental midget.
I do realize that I loathe Bush on a visceral level and always have, so I can’t say that my impressions of him as person are particularly objective. He is a personality type I can’t stand — his privileged, macho arrogance and nasty, sophomoric social game of primitive dominance are about the least appealing characteristics I can think of in a man. Even if he weren’t a complete idiot, which he is, he’d still be an asshole.
But I’ve always wondered if the (dwindling) Bush cult really believed what they were saying when they said this man was brilliant and brave or if they were just caught up in the moment. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. But whenever I read these “intimate” portraits of him, I’m always struck by the fact that he comes off even worse than I, who already loathe him, expect him to. These are ostensibly fair observers who were chosen by him and who were granted access because they weren’t hostile. Yet, the portrait they paint is of a shockingly stupid, shallow conceited man who may even be delusional. What do you suppose someone who wasn’t friendly would write?
(And needless to say, all these recent portraits show a man who is unrecognizable as the hero of Bob Woodward’s “Bush At War.” That hasn’t yet been adequately explained by him or anyone else.)
And, by the way, Barbara Bush raised a spoiled, disgusting pig:
George W. Bush slipped a piece of cheese into his mouth. “Let’s order first.” He took a quick glance at the day’s menu prepared for him and his guest, saw nothing on it he cared for, and announced to the steward, “I’ll have a hot dog. Low fat hot dog.”
[…]
His hot dog arrived. Bush ate rapidly, with a sort of voracious disinterest. He was a man who required comfort and routine. Food, for him, was fuel and familiarity. It was not a thing to reflect on.
“The job of the president,” he continued, through an ample wad of bread and sausage, “is to think strategically so that you can accomplish big objectives. As opposed to playing mini-ball. You can’t play mini-ball with the influence we have and expect there to be peace. You’ve gotta think, think BIG. The Iranian issue,” he said as bread crumbs tumbled out of his mouth and onto his chin,
That moment with Tony Blair and the dinner roll wasn’t unusual. That’s how he always eats. Ugh.
Update: His comments certainly don’t do anything to calm the Iran talk, do they? It’s clear he’ll do it if Uncle Dick decides it’s time to go. I think the only thing stopping them is the military. (And that’s what Seymour Hersh has been reporting for almost two years.) The thought actually occurred to me today that maybe the generals are bogging the military down in Iraq on purpose. In this administration anything is possible.
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“We Don’t Do Body Counts”
by digby
When General Tommy Franks uttered those words back in 2003, I don’t think this is what people thought he meant by it:
The U.S. military’s claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends.
Reductions in violence form the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s claim that its war strategy is working. In congressional testimony Monday, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is expected to cite a 75 percent decrease in sectarian attacks. According to senior U.S. military officials in Baghdad, overall attacks in Iraq were down to 960 a week in August, compared with 1,700 a week in June, and civilian casualties had fallen 17 percent between December 2006 and last month. Unofficial Iraqi figures show a similar decrease.
Others who have looked at the full range of U.S. government statistics on violence, however, accuse the military of cherry-picking positive indicators and caution that the numbers — most of which are classified — are often confusing and contradictory. “Let’s just say that there are several different sources within the administration on violence, and those sources do not agree,” Comptroller General David Walker told Congress on Tuesday in releasing a new Government Accountability Office report on Iraq.
Senior U.S. officers in Baghdad disputed the accuracy and conclusions of the largely negative GAO report, which they said had adopted a flawed counting methodology used by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Many of those conclusions were also reflected in last month’s pessimistic National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq.
The intelligence community has its own problems with military calculations. Intelligence analysts computing aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the NIE puzzled over how the military designated attacks as combat, sectarian or criminal, according to one senior intelligence official in Washington. “If a bullet went through the back of the head, it’s sectarian,” the official said. “If it went through the front, it’s criminal.”
There was a lot of chatter a couple of weeks ago about Bush’s Vietnam analogy, but I think one of things that never quite made it into the discussion was the single most obvious comparison: cooking the books. In Vietnam the vaunted “body count” was inflated because they needed a way of showing “progress” in the middle of a civil war which the US was basically prolonging for its own reasons and in Iraq they are are underreporting the body count for essentially the same purpose. It’s possible they even think they are observing “lessons learned” by lying in the opposite fashion — they’re that thick.
This report from A Man Called Petraeus will be a little bit more sophisticated and blatantly political than the old five o’clock follies, but there’s not much difference in intent. And surprisingly, there is a good deal of contradictory information coming from other government sources. But when you get down to it, it’s quite clear, as it was then, that the administration and the military are lying to the people about a “war” they can see with their own eyes and know in their own hearts isn’t worth fighting. I can hardly believe we are doing it again in my lifetime.
I am a baby boomer and I’m not especially ashamed of it. We had a good time and we improved the world, we really did, in some substantial and important ways. (If you youngsters had known just how repressive and disgusting it was before we came along and wrecked the place, you’d thank us.) Having said that, I can only be grateful that we will not be running things for very much longer. My generation is intent upon fighting the same battles over and over and over again, amongst ourselves mostly, although we’ve dragged the next generation into our nonsense too. Perhaps those coming up behind will be a little bit wiser and actually learn some lessons from our experience. As a group, we certainly haven’t been able to.
Here’s a word of wisdom for the kids: When it comes to wars, no mulligans. It’s just not a good idea.
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It Also Helps If You Wear Socks To A Job Interview
by tristero
A pearl of wisdom from the folks who thought Mitzi Gaynor was the hottest music act of 1964:
Most conservatives are starting to realize that learning to navigate the modern world of the Internet is not only necessary, but also a great return on investment,’
Loose Nukes Followup
by tristero
If blogging has any genuinely innovative quality about it, it’s surely its ability to, on occasion at least, rapidly deepen one’s understanding of an issue by attracting commentary and links from intelligent, informed people. In some 42 posts to my discussion of Larry Johnson’s alarm about the loose nukes, a large collection of links were offered by readers to help make sense of what happpened.
Andrew Foland, a physics professor runs a blog, Nuclear Mangos, that is motivated by “the incredible amount of lies & hyperbole on the Iran situation of early 2006. The blog title is to remind you constantly of the quality of minds in charge of our nuclear security today.” He called our attention to this post of his:
Myself, I lean to the explanation that this was in fact a simple but terrible screw-up. There are surely already plenty of American nuclear weapons on board subs and carriers in the Middle East, and even if some new ones were needed, there are plenty of ways to get them there without flying them loaded on B-52’s across the country, and subsequently having the news leaked. I honestly believe they have the operational capability to carry out the real thing in secret. (I can’t totally dismiss the idea that this was meant as a message, though usually sending such messages do not involve imposing radiation risk on civilian areas of the United States.)
Josh Marshall takes much the same view, based on his inquiries (perhaps even to Andrew Foland and his colleagues).
Professor Foland also links to this post from Strategic Security Blog by Hans M. Kristensen which addresses a disturbing trend (in comments):
The really important implication is beyond the immediate: The United States is in the beginning of a transition to a deep integration of nuclear and conventional capabilities. The Navy has already proposed, and the Air Force is about to propose, replacing some nuclear warheads on long-range ballistic missiles with conventional warheads. From outside the weapons will look the same.
The long-range bombers are already highly dual-capable and U.S. B-52s have been used repeatedly to launch conventional Air Launched Cruise Missiles against high-value targets. The Minot bomber was on its way to Barksdale, but it could hypothetically have been on its way to Iraq or – in a potential future conflict – North Korea, Iran or China with nuclear cruise missiles.
If the B-52 incident tells us that the military’s command and control system cannot ensure with 100% certainty which weapons are nuclear and which ones are not, imagine the implications of the wrong weapon being used in a crisis or war. “Sorry Mr. President, we thought it was conventional.”
I don’t have time to comment on these links, but they also attracted my attention as ones that improve our understanding of this extremely bizarre and dangerous event. Enjoy (if that is the right word) and thanks, all, for taking the trouble to comment.
Total WonKerr: How’d Those Nukes Get There?
ArmsControlWonk: US Bomber Accidentally Transports Nukes
james_nicoll: B-52 carried nuclear armed cruise missiles by mistake
One final thought: Perhaps it really was a mistake. If so, it was a mistake in keeping with the mistake of not paying attention to the incoming info about bin Laden in Summer ’01, the mistake of not preparing for Katrina, and so on. The notion that this is “mere” incompetence does not reassure me in the slightest. “Ooops” gets no one off the hook. Heads should roll over this.
Wanna bet it happens, esp. if loyal Bushies were the fuckups?
The Truth Dribbles Out
by tristero
On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.
Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.
Not even Claude Rains could pretend to be surprised by any of this, but that is no reason to get cynical. Everyone with half a brain – or less – knew Nixon was lying through his teeth long before the “smoking gun” was found. It wasn’t the damning evidence on that tape so much as the gathering momentum of the country’s disgust with the First Crook. Ditto with Blumenthal’s article.
Is it the final straw? Probably not. But it is impossible for anyone anymore to pretend that Bush wasn’t lying about the infamous 16 words. As for Bush lying to himself…it won’t wash. He knew. By the time Tenet briefed Bush about Sabri, two things prevented Bush from behaving like a sane human being. First, he was in too deep. By September ’02, Bush had geared up the country for war – the vote in Congress to come, the UN and the inspections, they were just meaningless diversions. The die was cast and nothing would stop Bush from going to war, let alone something as trivial as contradictory and credible intelligence that there wasn’t even the shadow of a casus belli.
Second, by 2002, Bush’s psychopathic personality was at its most floridly deranged. Riding incredibly high opinion polls, convinced God was speaking to him, having gotten away with stupendous lies and irresponsible behavior throughout his entire career, Bush was incapable of anything but lying when he dismissed the report from Tenet. But simply because he was at the height of mania, don’t make the mistake of thinking he didn’t know where the truth lay. Oh, he knew, all right.
But the truth, George W. Bush knows, can be magically nullified through the exercise of sufficient power. That – and only that – is his mad delusion, a delusion nurtured by his toxic upbringing where his family shielded him from the consequences of his failures and incompetence. It is a delusion that has led to the pointless suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of people. But as deluded as he was, and is, he knew Sabri was telling the truth. And that is why Bush made sure no one found out about it until long afterwards
Bush Like Big Bang Bang
by tristero
Barksdale Air Force Base is being used as a jumping off point for Middle East operations. Gee, why would we want cruise missile nukes at Barksdale Air Force Base. Can’t imagine we would need to use them in Iraq. Why would we want to preposition nuclear weapons at a base conducting Middle East operations? His final point was to observe that someone on the inside obviously leaked the info that the planes were carrying nukes. A B-52 landing at Barksdale is a non-event. A B-52 landing with nukes. That is something else.
Now maybe there is an innocent explanation for this? I can’t think of one.
Innocent? No. Childish? Yes.
Imo, Bush, et al are just aching to be the first to drop the Big One since Truman. You think they’ll let a pipsqueak Korean get there first? Or India/Pakistan? Hell, no!
Oh, come on, tristero. That’s just bizarre paranoia. Surely, you’re not implying that Bush’s is so anxious to drop The Bomb that his administration is simply scouring the world to find an excuse, are you? Not even Bush – hell, not even Cheney! – are that insanely immature.
Oh yes, they are and that’s exactly what I’m saying. And I’ve been saying it for quite a while now. If you think he isn’t that childishly insane, you haven’t seriously attended to Bush’s (and his cronies’) numerous examples of seriously infantile and irresponsible behavior and statements. Hey, remember when Bush called the Afghanistan war a “crusade?” Or “Bring ’em on!” Or “joking” that it would be a helluva lot easier to rule if the US was a dictatorship and Bush was the dictator? Or the strutting codpiece?
But let’s not argue about this. You think Bush is too much of a grown-up not to lust for the big bang-bang, I disagree, but I won’t argue. Because there’s something more important afoot. And that is finding a good reason for the transportation of nuclear weapons to a military base conducting Middle East operations.
[UPDATE: Good to know Bush is on top of this:
he incident was so serious that President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were quickly informed and Gates has asked for daily briefings on the Air Force probe.
The only questions is this: Are they investigating the “mistake” or the leak?]
Did The Escalation Work?
by tristero
UPDATED
No, of course not. But the Bush administration, with the collusion of the msm, is doing its level best to create the impression that maybe We Don’t Really Know. The strategy worked when Bush got us into this mess. Hey, y’never can tell!
Here’s Katie Couric:
Many more Iraqis have joined the Iraqi Security Forces in the overwhelmingly Sunni Anbar province. Despite mutual distrust, stemming from the power shift after Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government fell, Sunnis and Shiites are working together in the ISF to fight al Qaeda in Iraq.
While Hussein was in power, Sunnis were in positions of authority over the Shiites, and now are fearful that the majority of Shiites will seek revenge. Iraqi Shiites fear a return of Sunni power in Iraq.
However, Sunnis in Anbar continue to join the ISF.
“The spike in police has really been significant,” Couric said. “The incidents in Iraq have gone down dramatically.”
Security and stability have improved in Iraq, but basic services remain in disrepair.
Sounds good, dunnit? Hands across the Great Islamic Divide – banding together to fight a common enemy. And it’s working, Katie Couric says so.
Well, maybe not. The Independent Commission on Security Forces in Iraq:
Iraq’s Interior Ministry is regarded as “dysfunctional” and sectarian” and the National Police should be “disbanded and reorganized,” according to an independent report obtained by CNN.
The report, authored by the Independent Commission on Security Forces in Iraq, fires stinging criticism at Iraqi security forces but also includes promising words for the country’s military…
The Interior Ministry and the National Police force it operates have long been regarded by observers as being infiltrated by sectarian Shiite militias.
“Such fundamental flaws present a serious obstacle to achieving the levels of readiness, capability, and effectiveness in police and border security forces that are essential for internal security and stability in Iraq.”
“Sectarianism in its units undermines its ability to provide security; the force is not viable in its current form. The National Police should be disbanded and reorganized…”
The report says the Iraqi Police Service “is incapable today of providing security at a level sufficient to protect Iraqi neighborhoods from insurgents and sectarian violence.”
But what accounts for such profoundly discrepant conclusions? It’s obvious, or should be:
The Pentagon said Wednesday it does not agree with the report’s recommendation that the Iraqi National Police be disbanded.
Get it? Couric, of course, wouldn’t be able to move anywhere in Iraq without the active participation of US armed forces. A newcomer to Iraq, Couric and crew simply were shown what they wanted her to see.
Need some convincing? Then see, for example, Lara Logan’s report from Basra. Logan, of course, has spent a good deal of time in Iraq, and needn’t depend upon US Army escorts to do her job:
British troops were handing over their base at Basra Palace the very next morning to the Iraqi Army’s 10th Division and withdrawing to a British air base on the outskirts of the city.
While on the way to see the local governor, Logan reports that their lives were in the hands of his uncle and personal security force – the only men Gov. Mohammed al-Waili trusts in a city that’s become a battleground for rival militias that have infiltrated the police force and tried repeatedly to kill him.
“Those policemen outside the front of your building, do you trust them” asked Logan.
“Not all of them,” al-Waili replied. [Emphasis added]
Even in this short excerpt, the complexity of the situation is apparent. No simplistic conflation of “the enemy” into Al Qaeda. The vertigo-inducing situation includes withdrawing British troops, an Iraqi governor – aka, warlord – with a private army and a police force infiltrated by “rival militias.” Note the plural.
Let’s face it. The only incontrovertibly genuine outcome of Bush’s escalation is that additional people have died or been mutilated at rates near the highest since Bush’s invasion. Iraqis and Americans alike. (And by the way, not even Bill “The Gambler” Bennett would bet much on the Iraqi army’s increasing effectivenesss.)
Short version: It’s more chaotic in Iraq than you can possibly imagine. It’s a civil war, not between two sides, but dozens. It is far beyond the control of the American forces there, let alone the Maliki I-use-the-term-loosely government. And that things look marginally – and temporarily- better where Couric was permitted to venture merely highlights the deterioration elsewhere.
[Update: Juan Cole on Anbar province, where Couric reported progress.]
Serious Madmen
by digby
Glenn Greenwald takes Michael Ledeen downtown today in a thoroughly satisfying fashion. Despite the fact that he is an embarrassment on virtually every level, and almost certifiably nuts, he is considered “serious” by people like Fred Hiatt, who Glenn quotes today:
We’re not part of that [bomb Iran]camp, though we consider its members saner than many of the statements of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Right-o. Ahmadinejad is a holocaust denier and desires the destruction of Israel. Insane for sure.
What do you suppose he would call this?
March 10, 2003
A Theory
What if there’s method to the Franco-German madness?
Assume, for a moment, that the French and the Germans aren’t thwarting us out of pique, but by design, long-term design. Then look at the world again, and see if there’s evidence of such a design.
Like everyone else, the French and the Germans saw that the defeat of the Soviet Empire projected the United States into the rare, almost unique position of a global hyperpower, a country so strong in every measurable element that no other nation could possibly resist its will. The “new Europe” had been designed to carve out a limited autonomy for the old continent, a balance-point between the Americans and the Soviets. But once the Soviets were gone, and the Red Army melted down, the European Union was reduced to a combination theme park and free-trade zone. Some foolish American professors and doltish politicians might say — and even believe — that henceforth “power” would be defined in economic terms, and that military power would no longer count. But cynical Europeans know better.
They dreaded the establishment of an American empire, and they sought for a way to bring it down.
If you were the French president or the German chancellor, you might well have done the same.
How could it be done? No military operation could possibly defeat the United States, and no direct economic challenge could hope to succeed. That left politics and culture. And here there was a chance to turn America’s vaunted openness at home and toleration abroad against the United States. So the French and the Germans struck a deal with radical Islam and with radical Arabs: You go after the United States, and we’ll do everything we can to protect you, and we will do everything we can to weaken the Americans.
The Franco-German strategy was based on using Arab and Islamic extremism and terrorism as the weapon of choice, and the United Nations as the straitjacket for blocking a decisive response from the United States.
This required considerable skill, and total cynicism, both of which were in abundant supply in Paris and Berlin. Chancellor Shroeder gained reelection by warning of American warmongering, even though, as usual, America had been attacked first. And both Shroeder and Chirac went to great lengths to support Islamic institutions in their countries, even when — as in the French case — it was in open violation of the national constitution.
[…]
It sounds fanciful, to be sure. But the smartest people I know have been thoroughly astonished at recent French and German behavior. This theory may help understand what’s going on. I now believe that I was wrong to forecast that the French would join the war against Iraq at the last minute, having gained every possible economic advantage in the meantime. I think Chirac will oppose us before, during, and after the war, because he has cast his lot with radical Islam and with the Arab extremists. He isn’t doing it just for the money — although I have no doubt that France is being richly rewarded for defending Saddam against the civilized countries of the world — but for higher stakes. He’s fighting to end the feared American domination before it takes stable shape.
If this is correct, we will have to pursue the war against terror far beyond the boundaries of the Middle East, into the heart of Western Europe. And there, as in the Middle East, our greatest weapons are political: the demonstrated desire for freedom of the peoples of the countries that oppose us.
No, that isn’t the ranting of some lunatic on late night radio. That’s our friend Ledeen, the “Freedom Scholar” at the American Enterprise Institute, writing in the pages of the flagship conservative magazine The National Review.
He’s one of the serious people who are now advocating that we must bomb Iran immediately, a “crowd” which Hiatt doesn’t consider himself a part of but which he nonetheless doesn’t see as insane. Yet this crowd listens to “Iran expert” Michael Ledeen, who as Glenn points out, speaks no Persian and has never set foot in the country. But then why should he? He believes that France and Germany (and God knows who else) are involved in a massive conspiracy with Iran, Iraq and al Qaeda to destroy the United States.
I don’t know about you, but that sounds just as insane as anything Ahmadinejad ever said and much more dangerous. We actually do have nuclear weapons. Lots of ’em.
And, by the way, don’t think this is just one guy’s paranoid fantasy. This notion of taking the GWOT into the heart of Europe is quite fashionable in right wing circles. Here’s Mark Steyn making the argument from another angle, with one of the right’s premiere journalists:
PAUL GIGOT, FOX HOST: “America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It” forecasts a dark future in which the nations of Old Europe fall to Islam fundamentalism. And the United States remains the last Western democracy.
Earlier, I spoke to the author, columnist Mark Steyn.
GIGOT: In your book, you write that much of what we loosely call the “Western World will not survive the 21st Century. And much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many, if not most, European countries”, end quote. That sounds like a doomsday scenario.
MARK STEYN, COLUMNIST AND AUTHOR OF “AMERICA ALONE”: It is. I tried to be cheerful. But it is hard to be cheerful about apocalyptic-type stuff. And this is what it is.
Basically, 17 European countries have what demographers call lowest-load fertility, from which no society ever recovered. That means they are basically not having enough babies.
And the way Europe is set up, they have these unsustainable social programs and welfare. And they imported the babies that they didn’t have. They imported them essentially from the North Africa and the Middle East.
So we’re seeing one of the fastest population transformations in history, whereby an aging ethnic European population is being replaced by a Muslim population. And the Muslims understand that, in fact, Europe, as they see it, is the colony now.
This pithy remark brings it all together:
You can understand why the Quai d’Orsay is relaxed about Iran becoming the second Muslim nuclear power. As things stand, France is on course to be the third. You heard it here first.
As far as I can tell, these guys are picking them off one by one. First it was Iraq. Now Iran. And as soon as we’re done with them, we’re going to invade France. What could go wrong?
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