Keith Devens .com

Warmongering for today

LGF reports that the NSA has caught Iraqi officials on tape talking about how they've been able to deceive inspectors. See MSNBC: Caught on Tape:

The Bush administration is preparing to release supersensitive electronic intercepts obtained by the National Security Agency that officials say prove that Iraq has repeatedly lied to United Nations inspectors, plotted among themselves about how to conceal weapons material and even appeared to boast afterward at their success in doing so, NEWSWEEK has learned.

THE DECISION TO allow Secretary of State Colin Powell to use the electronic intercepts in his speech next Wednesday to the U.N. was described by U.S. intelligence officials as extraordinary. Electronic intercepts by the NSA are considered the most jealously guarded of all U.S. intelligence secrets and government officials are normally loath to even refer to their existence for fear of tipping off targets and drying up invaluable sources of information.

But in this case, officials said, the intercepts are so damning and dramatic that officials say their release outweighs the potential harm -- especially given the increased likelihood that the United States will shortly be launching an invasion of Iraq anyway.

"Hold onto your hat. We've got it," said one U.S. intelligence official familiar with the evidence gathered by the NSA.

Officials at the CIA, the State Department, the National Security Council and Vice President Cheney's office were said to be "working shoulder to shoulder reviewing raw data" to determine precisely how much information can be declassified for use in Powell's report to the U.N. scheduled for next week.

The White House has been regularly receiving the NSA transcripts ever since the inspectors returned to Iraq late last year. ... One official who had dinner with Powell recently said the secretary remarked how "we have a stronger case than many people realize."

I've known all along that we have way more information than we've been able to share. I just hope that it's really "ok" for them to be releasing all this info... though the article makes a good point:

One argument for releasing the intercepts, officials said, is that the normal reasons against doing so -- tipping off the Iraqis to phone lines or cell phones that were being monitored -- may not matter if the U.S. military is about to invade anyway.

Via LGF, The Washington Post: U.N., R.I.P. by Charles Krauthammer:

My son long ago introduced me to the joys of the Onion, the hilarious Web site that features such parodies of the news as "Clinton Deploys Vowels to Bosnia; Cities of Sjlbvdnzv, Grzny to be First Recipients." So when, on the night of the State of the Union address, my son handed me an Internet printout headlined "Iraq to Chair U.N. Disarmament Conference," I was sure he'd been dipping again into the Onion.

"It's better than that, Dad," he said. "It's off CNN."

I should have known. You can't parody the United Nations. It inhabits -- no, it has constructed -- a universe so Orwellian that, yes, Iraq is going to chair the May 12-June 27 session of the United Nations' single most important disarmament negotiating forum.

Iran will co-chair.

I'm really glad he brings this up:

Defenders of the United Nations will write this off as a simple accident, pointing out that the chairmanship rotates alphabetically under the U.N. absurdity that grants all member states equal moral standing. Fine. How, then, do U.N. defenders explain the recent elevation of Libya to the chairmanship of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights?

I was going to quote more, but I just realized I'm quoting way too much of it. Just read it, it's good.

From Right Wing News:

Here are a few quotes from one of FDR's "fireside chats" about the Nazis and their indiscriminate submarine warfare that I think are VERY applicable to the war on terrorism we find ourselves enmeshed in today...

Here's the full text of the fireside chat via the comment on A Small Victory.

Update, I have to quote some of it:

It would be unworthy of a great Nation to exaggerate an isolated incident, or to become inflamed by some one act of violence. But it would be inexcusable folly to minimize such incidents in the face of evidence which makes it clear that the incident is not isolated, but is part of a general plan.

... when you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him.

It is clear to all Americans that the time has come when the Americas themselves must now be defended. A continuation of attacks in our own waters, or in waters that could be used for further and greater attacks on us, will inevitably weaken our American ability to repel Hitlerism.

Do not let us be Hairsplitters Let us not ask ourselves whether the Americas should begin to defend themselves after the first attack, or the fifth attack, or the tenth attack, or the twentieth attack.

The time for active defense is now.

Do not let us split hairs. Let us not say: "We will only defend ourselves if the torpedo succeeds in getting home, or if the crew and the passengers are drowned."

This is the time for prevention of attack.

Via LGF, The Boston Globe: After Iraq: killing all the terror regimes, by Jeff Jacoby:

... this is about more than Iraq. We are in a war against terrorism - more accurately, against radical Islamist terrorists and their state sponsors. Saddam's regime is one of those sponsors, and its downfall will mark an important milestone on the road to victory. But there are other sponsors, and they, too, must be replaced.

As it did in the Cold War and the war against Hitler, the United States is fighting not just a military enemy but an ideological one. Moscow commanded armies of soldiers and armies of true believers. Communism was both a seductive economic creed and a doctrine of totalitarian control. Islamism - radical, violent Islam - offers the terror masters and their legions much the same thing. Though outwardly a religious movement, it is as totalitarian as communism was and no less bent on conquest.

Awesome article.

Finally (I have yet to read this whole article, but it looks good so far), check out So Long to All That by Richard Hanson at the National Review Online (via LGF)

They should note instead that in the aftermath of major wars, the world is rarely put back together quite the same. When Rome entered the Punic Wars it was an agrarian republic; it finished as an imperial Mediterranean power. Waterloo reordered Europe for a century, and the defeat of Germany and Japan ushered in the 50-year long protocols of the Cold War, in which enemies became friends and friends then enemies. Who could sort out the shifting Sparta-Athens-Thebes relationships following the Peloponnesian War?

It is not just that winners dictate and losers comply, but that even among allies, war and its aftermath often tear away the thin scabs of unity and expose long-festering wounds of real cultural, political, historical, and geographical difference. So it is with this present war against the terrorists and their sponsors, which when it is finally over will leave our world a very different place.

By the way, I just bought A History of Warfare by John Keegan. Looking forward to reading it.

Ok, one more, again via LGF: Check out this glossary of anti-war idiotarian terms:

"allies":

Nations that we either defeated or liberated six decades ago, and then paid to rebuild half a century ago, and continued to pay for their defense through the Cold War, who now feel that they are thereby entitled to obstruct or dictate our foreign policy, which is driven by our own self defense, in the furtherance of the business interests of their corrupt governments and the brutal dictators that they cynically coddle.