4th July Independence Day Message to the US

Even a 1-26 pilot like myself has to have respect for THAT!

Good for you, DB! Airmanship uber L/D!

Happy, well, whatever day to you...sorry I missed the party at Stone
Henge.

Can you winch launch there??? ;-)

-Pete

Welsh Druid wrote:
SNIP

Why ? - are you that poor a pilot that you need more performance to do cross
countries ? Lots of us flew K6's, Dart 17's etc with that sort of
performance and got all our diamonds - and in the UK !

DB

Dear Mr Druid,

Just for the record, I have flown a 210km O/R in a
Slingsby Swallow (much lower performance than even
a PW-5) and many flights over 200km in an Olympia 463
in the UK, but I never quite managed to do a 300km
in the latter. All my attempts at the 300 in it ended
up meeting nice, or sometimes not so nice, farmers!
I eventually did complete my 300 in a Standard Cirrus
and the 500 in a Nimbus 2. I have also since completed
a 500k in the Standard Cirrus.

The problem with the PW-5, in my opinion, is that you
can get much more performance for less cost by buying
a second hand 'Club Class' glider. In the UK, the ability
to glide across large dead patches of spreadout is
paramount. It is also nice to own something that doesn't
look like a baby buggie with little wings attached!

Del Copeland


At 16:30 06 July 2006, Welsh Druid wrote:

'Derek Copeland' wrote
SNIP
.. The performance was about K6E, but with
a greater efficient speed range. I am not sure that
I would be that encouraged to fly either type cross-country,
at least not in UK conditions.
SNIP

Why ? - are you that poor a pilot that you need more
performance to do cross
countries ? Lots of us flew K6's, Dart 17's etc with
that sort of
performance and got all our diamonds - and in the UK
!

DB

June 5, 2006
Endless Summer?
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services

The European countryside is as beautiful as ever. Hotels in the cities
are as packed as they are high-priced. Tourists fill Rome. The same
bustle is evident from Lisbon to Frankfurt. Everywhere European
stewards welcome in millions of sightseers to enjoy the treasures of
Western civilization. Never has life seemed so good.

Despite a public anti-Americanism, individual Europeans extend the old
warmth and friendship to American visitors. Yet beneath the veneer of
the good life, there is also a detectable air of uncertainty in Europe
this summer, one perhaps similar to that of 1914 or the late 1930s.

The unease is apparent in newspapers and conversations on the streets
that echo the view that voters and politicians want nothing to do with
the European Union constitution. Perhaps the general European
discomfort could be summed up best as the following: Why hasn't the
good life turned out the way we wanted it to?

England, France and Germany are upping their retirement ages and/or
planning pension cuts. They have given up the dream that workers in the
future can quit at 55 - or even 65!

The Iranians irk Europe. European governments sold them precision tools
necessary for nuclear reactors. Many Europeans assured Tehran that
dialogue, not rowdy Americans, alone can solve the "misunderstanding"
over nuclear proliferation. But as thanks, Iran's pesky president talks
down to these postmodern Europeans as if they were George Bush.
Meanwhile, Iran presses ahead - hoping to top off with nukes
three-stage rockets that could reach the Vatican, the Eiffel Tower or
the Brandenburg Gate.

Frontline Spain clamors impatiently for the European Union to clamp
down on illegal immigrants streaming across the Mediterranean. The
utopian vision of a continent with porous borders is, for the time
being, on hold - at least as it pertains to Africa.

The Dutch, the French and the Danes are petrified about unassimilated
Muslim radicals in their countries who have killed or threatened the
most liberal of Europeans. Churches are almost empty. Mosques are being
built; Italians wrangle over plans for one of the largest in Italy -
to be plopped amid the vineyards and olive groves of Tuscany.

A majority of polled Germans now believe that the pacifist Europeans
are in a "clash of civilizations" with the Islamic world.

What is going on?

Good intentions that have gone sour.

The enemies of Europe's past - responsible for everything from Verdun
and Dresden to a constant threat of mutually assured destruction -
were identified as nationalism and militarism. Meanwhile, at home,
Europeans cited cutthroat competition and unbridled individualism as
additional contributory causes of the prior strife and unhappiness.

So in response to the errors of the past, Europeans systematically
expanded the welfare state. They welcomed in immigrants. Politicians
slashed defense spending, lowered the retirement age and cut the
workweek. Voters demanded trade barriers to protect the public from the
ravages of globalization. Either to enjoy the good life or to save the
planet, couples forswore children.

But instead of utopia, unintended consequences ensued. Unemployment
soared. Dismal economic growth, shrinking populations and a scarier
world outside their borders followed.

Abroad, even the much-heralded "soft power" of a disarmed Europe could
only bring attention to, not stop, the killing in Darfur. Meanwhile,
China and India are no longer inefficient socialists but breakneck
capitalist competitors. Indeed, they have thrown down the gauntlet to
the Europeans: "Beware! Workers of the world who labor harder, longer
and smarter deserve the greater material rewards!" In this new
heartless global arena, apparently few will abide by the niceties of
the European Union.

Publicly, Europe's frustrations are fobbed off on "crass Americans" -
and particularly George Bush. The Iraq war has poisoned the alliance,
the Europeans insist. They contend that America's greedy consumers warm
the planet, siphon off its oil and trample foreign cultures.

But in private, some Europeans will confess that the problem lies with
Europeans, not us. Some brave soul soon is going to have to inform the
European public: Work much harder and longer for less money; defend the
continent on your own; move out of mama's house and start changing
diapers - and from now on expect far less from the state.

Who knows what the reaction will be to that splash of cold water? In
response, what European populist will soon appear on the streets in
Rome, Berlin or Madrid once again to deceive the public that it was
someone else who caused these disappointments?

We in America should take note of the looming end of this once
seemingly endless summer. We've been there, done that with this beloved
continent all too many times before.

©2006 Tribune Media Services

Derek Copeland wrote:
Q1. Do you honestly think that capturing or killing
Bin Laden would make a scrap of difference? There are
plenty of others ready to take his place?

Q2. Do you have any proof that the Iraq or Afghanistan
Governments had anything to do with 9/11? I can think
of several more likely Middle Eastern countries. As
far as I am concerned the invasion of Iraq was a bit
like kicking the cat after a bad day. I would have
hoped that the US would have at least obeyed the rule
of law as layed down by the UN. If the most powerful
country in the World won't accept the rule of law as
laid down by an International body, why should anyone
else?
June 16, 2006

Betting on Defeat?
It's far from a safe bet.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

Lately, it has become popular to recant on Iraq. When 2,500 Americans
are lost, and when the improvised explosive device monopolizes the war
coverage, it is easy to see why - especially with elections coming up
in November, and presidential primaries not long after.

Pundits now daily equivocate in their understandable exasperation at
the apparent lack of quantifiable progress. The ranks of public
supporters have thinned as final victory seems elusive. It is hard to
find any consistent public advocates of the American effort in Iraq
other than the editors and writers here at National Review, the Wall
Street Journal, Christopher Hitchens, Charles Krauthammer, Mark Steyn,
Norman Podhoretz, and a very few principled others.

But for all the despair, note all the problems for those who have
triangulated throughout this war.

First, those who undergo the opportune conversion often fall prey to
disingenuousness. Take John Kerry's recent repudiation of his earlier
vote for the war in Iraq. To cheers of Democratic activists, he now
laments, "We were misled."

Misled?

Putting aside the question of weapons of mass destruction and the use
of the royal "we," was the senator suggesting that Iraq did not
violate the 1991 armistice accords?

Or that Saddam Hussein did not really gas and murder his own people?

Perhaps he was "misled" into thinking Iraqi agents did not really
plan to murder former President George Bush?

Or postfacto have we learned that Saddam did not really shield
terrorists?

Apparently the Iraqi regime neither violated U.N. accords nor shot at
American planes in the no-fly zones.

Senator Kerry, at least if I remember correctly, voted for the joint
congressional resolution of October 11, 2002, authorizing a war against
Iraq, on the basis of all these and several other causus belli, well
apart from fear of WMDs.

Second, those with a shifting position on the war sometimes cannot keep
up with a war that is shifting itself, where things change hourly. And
when one has no consistent or principled position, the 24-hour
battlefield usually proves a fickle barometer by which to exude
military wisdom.

Even as critics were equating Haditha with My Lai, al-Zarqawi, the al
Qaeda mass murderer in Iraq, was caught and killed. And what was the
reaction of the stunned antiwar pundit or politician? Either we heard
that there was impropriety involved in killing such a demon, or the
former fugitive who was once supposedly proof of our ineptness suddenly
was reinvented as having been irrelevant all along.

The Iraqi army - well over 250,000 strong - is growing, and the
much smaller American force (about 130,000) is shrinking. How do you
call for a deadline for withdrawal when Iraqization was always
predicated on withdrawal only after there was no Iraqi dependence on a
large, static American force?

After lamenting that the Iraqi government is a mess, we now see a tough
prime minister and the selection of his cabinet completed. So it is not
easy to offer somber platitudes of defeat when 400,000 coalition and
Iraqi troops are daily fighting on the center stage of the war against
Islamic terrorism. Someone from Mars might wonder what exactly were the
conditions under which a quarter-million Muslim Arabs in Iraq alone
went to war against Islamic radicalism.

Third, there is a fine line to be drawn between legitimate criticism of
a war that is supposedly not worth American blood and treasure, and
general slander of the United States and its military. Yet much of the
Left's rhetoric was not merely anti-Bush, but in its pessimism
devolved into de facto anti-Americanism.

Senator Durbin compared Guantanamo Bay to the worst excesses of the
Nazis. Senator Kennedy suggested that Abu Ghraib, where thousands
perished under Saddam Hussein, had simply "reopened under new
management: U.S. management." Democratic-party chairman Howard Dean
confidently asserted that the Iraq war was not winnable. John Kerry in
his youth alleged that Americans were like Genghis Khan in their
savagery; in his golden years, he once again insists that we are
"terrorizing" Iraqi civilians. With friends like these, what war
critic needs enemies? Americans can take disapproval that we are not
fighting "smart," but they resent the notion that we are somehow
downright evil.

Fourth, the mainstream media is now discredited on Iraq, and their
drumbeat of doom and gloom is starting to rile more than pleases the
public. Aside from the bias that counts always our losses and rarely
our successes, we are sick and tired of manipulations like the lies
about flushed Korans, forged memos, and the rush to judgment on
Haditha. Most weary Americans want at least a moment to savor the death
of a mass-murdering Zarqawi, without having to lament that he might
have been saved by quicker medical intervention.

Fifth, the historical assessment of Iraq is still undetermined, despite
the pontification of former supporters who think they gain greater
absolution the more vehemently they trash a war they once advocated.

The three-week effort to remove Saddam Hussein was a landmark success.
The subsequent three-year occupation in his place has been messy,
costly, and unpopular. But the result of the third and final stage that
Iraq has evolved into - an existential fight between Iraqi democracy
and al Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalism - is still uncertain. If we
draw the terrorists out, defeat them in the heart of the ancient
caliphate, and win the allegiance of enough democratic Iraqis to crush
the Islamicists, then our military has won a far greater victory than
the removal of Saddam Hussein.

Sixth, note how critics now rarely offer alternative scenarios. All the
old gripes such as the paucity of body armor or thin-skinned humvees
have withered away. The Iraqi elected government is sympathetic and
earnest, so demonizing them ultimately translates into something like
"Cut these guys lose; they weren't worth the effort." Yes, the
American people want out of Iraq, but on terms that preserve the
democracy that we paid so dearly to foster.

Even the one legitimate criticism that we were too slow in turning over
control to the Iraqis, and that the Bremmer interregnum had too high a
public profile, is now largely moot, as Ambassador Khalilzad and Gen.
Casey are in the shadows, giving all the credit to the very public
Iraqis and taking most of the blame for the bad news.

So we are nearing the denouement of the Iraq war, where we wanted to be
all along: in support of a full-fledged and democratically elected
government that will either win or lose its own struggle.

Seventh, the old twin charges - no link between al Qaeda and Saddam,
no WMDs - are also becoming largely irrelevant or proving untrue. It
must have been difficult for Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times, in
their coverage of the death of Zarqawi, to admit that he had been
active in Iraq well before the end of Saddam Hussein, along with a
mishmash of old killers from Abu Nidal to Abdul Rahman Yasin, the Iraqi
American who helped plan the first World Trade Center bombing.

In addition, most abroad were convinced before the war that the CIA was
right in its pre-war assessments. The publication of the Iraqi archives
points to a real, not a phantom and former, WMD capability - in line
with efforts elsewhere in the Islamic world, from Iran to Libya, to
reclaim something akin to the old Soviet deterrent.

The costs in Iraq have been high and the losses tragic. But nothing in
the past three years has convinced me otherwise than that:

1. in a post-September-11 world Saddam had to be removed on ethical and
strategic grounds;

2. the insurgency, though unexpected in its intensity, could be put
down by a U.S. military that would react and evolve more quickly than
the terrorists to changing conditions on the ground;

3. our mistakes, though several and undeniable, are tragically the
stuff of war, and so far have not proved to be irreversible or beyond
what we experienced in any of our past efforts;

4. the maligned secretary of Defense was right about troop levels and
the plan for Iraqization - although demonized for trying to transform
the very nature of the American military in the midst of a war;

5. we are engaged in the great humanitarian effort of the age, as
"one person, one vote" has brought to the perennially downtrodden
Arab Shiites a real chance at equality;

6. the best method of winning this global struggle against fascistic
Islamic terrorism remains fostering in the Middle East a third
democratic alternative between autocracy and theocracy that alone can
deal with the modern world.

Once a democratically elected Iraqi government emerged, and a national
army was trained, the only way we could lose this war was to forfeit it
at home, through the influence of an adroit, loud minority of critics
that for either base or misguided reasons really does wish us to lose.
They really do.

©2006 Victor Davis Hanson

Anyway, you have got yourselves into three unwinnable
wars entirely of your own making, so I suggest that
you elect a President and a Government who are intelligent
enough to negotiate a way out next time.

On your Independence Day (from us), I hope you will
spare a thought for all those suffering in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the victims of 9/11, the Madrid and London
bombings and their families, and our respective soldiers
who have to enforce these unsanctioned policies.

Derek Copeland

Dear Hammermill,

The fact that there are terrorists in a country does
not necessarily signify that its Government is supporting
them. We have suspected terrorists living in the UK
and so does the US and many other countries around
the World.

Saddam Hussain was not a very nice leader, but the
USA supported him as the 'Good Guy' during the Iraq
- Iran war against the more Muslim fundamentalist Iranians
(The Bad Guys?).

Just before the latest invasion of Iraq, the US weapons
inspectors were doing their jobs in that country. Had
Saddam thrown them out again, or been found to be in
significant violation of UN resolutions, then there
would have been some justification for that invasion.
All the US had to do in the meantime was keep some
troops in the area, sitting safe and sound and out
of harms way. I think what must of us in Europe objected
to was that you went in anyway, without any proof of
wrongdoing and without the UN sanctioning the action.
What a civilized country does has to be seen as fair
and reasonable, which this was not.

Now can we please stop this right wing, redneck, American
rhetoric and get back to gliding?

Derek Copeland


At 22:18 10 July 2006, Hammermill wrote:
June 16, 2006

Betting on Defeat?
It's far from a safe bet.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

Lately, it has become popular to recant on Iraq. When
2,500 Americans
are lost, and when the improvised explosive device
monopolizes the war
coverage, it is easy to see why - especially with elections
coming up
in November, and presidential primaries not long after.

Pundits now daily equivocate in their understandable
exasperation at
the apparent lack of quantifiable progress. The ranks
of public
supporters have thinned as final victory seems elusive.
It is hard to
find any consistent public advocates of the American
effort in Iraq
other than the editors and writers here at National
Review, the Wall
Street Journal, Christopher Hitchens, Charles Krauthammer,
Mark Steyn,
Norman Podhoretz, and a very few principled others.

But for all the despair, note all the problems for
those who have
triangulated throughout this war.

First, those who undergo the opportune conversion often
fall prey to
disingenuousness. Take John Kerry's recent repudiation
of his earlier
vote for the war in Iraq. To cheers of Democratic activists,
he now
laments, 'We were misled.'

Misled?

Putting aside the question of weapons of mass destruction
and the use
of the royal 'we,' was the senator suggesting that
Iraq did not
violate the 1991 armistice accords?

Or that Saddam Hussein did not really gas and murder
his own people?

Perhaps he was 'misled' into thinking Iraqi agents
did not really
plan to murder former President George Bush?

Or postfacto have we learned that Saddam did not really
shield
terrorists?

Apparently the Iraqi regime neither violated U.N. accords
nor shot at
American planes in the no-fly zones.

Senator Kerry, at least if I remember correctly, voted
for the joint
congressional resolution of October 11, 2002, authorizing
a war against
Iraq, on the basis of all these and several other causus
belli, well
apart from fear of WMDs.

Second, those with a shifting position on the war sometimes
cannot keep
up with a war that is shifting itself, where things
change hourly. And
when one has no consistent or principled position,
the 24-hour
battlefield usually proves a fickle barometer by which
to exude
military wisdom.

Even as critics were equating Haditha with My Lai,
al-Zarqawi, the al
Qaeda mass murderer in Iraq, was caught and killed.
And what was the
reaction of the stunned antiwar pundit or politician?
Either we heard
that there was impropriety involved in killing such
a demon, or the
former fugitive who was once supposedly proof of our
ineptness suddenly
was reinvented as having been irrelevant all along.

The Iraqi army - well over 250,000 strong - is growing,
and the
much smaller American force (about 130,000) is shrinking.
How do you
call for a deadline for withdrawal when Iraqization
was always
predicated on withdrawal only after there was no Iraqi
dependence on a
large, static American force?

After lamenting that the Iraqi government is a mess,
we now see a tough
prime minister and the selection of his cabinet completed.
So it is not
easy to offer somber platitudes of defeat when 400,000
coalition and
Iraqi troops are daily fighting on the center stage
of the war against
Islamic terrorism. Someone from Mars might wonder what
exactly were the
conditions under which a quarter-million Muslim Arabs
in Iraq alone
went to war against Islamic radicalism.

Third, there is a fine line to be drawn between legitimate
criticism of
a war that is supposedly not worth American blood and
treasure, and
general slander of the United States and its military.
Yet much of the
Left's rhetoric was not merely anti-Bush, but in its
pessimism
devolved into de facto anti-Americanism.

Senator Durbin compared Guantanamo Bay to the worst
excesses of the
Nazis. Senator Kennedy suggested that Abu Ghraib, where
thousands
perished under Saddam Hussein, had simply 'reopened
under new
management: U.S. management.' Democratic-party chairman
Howard Dean
confidently asserted that the Iraq war was not winnable.
John Kerry in
his youth alleged that Americans were like Genghis
Khan in their
savagery; in his golden years, he once again insists
that we are
'terrorizing' Iraqi civilians. With friends like these,
what war
critic needs enemies? Americans can take disapproval
that we are not
fighting 'smart,' but they resent the notion that we
are somehow
downright evil.

Fourth, the mainstream media is now discredited on
Iraq, and their
drumbeat of doom and gloom is starting to rile more
than pleases the
public. Aside from the bias that counts always our
losses and rarely
our successes, we are sick and tired of manipulations
like the lies
about flushed Korans, forged memos, and the rush to
judgment on
Haditha. Most weary Americans want at least a moment
to savor the death
of a mass-murdering Zarqawi, without having to lament
that he might
have been saved by quicker medical intervention.

Fifth, the historical assessment of Iraq is still undetermined,
despite
the pontification of former supporters who think they
gain greater
absolution the more vehemently they trash a war they
once advocated.

The three-week effort to remove Saddam Hussein was
a landmark success.
The subsequent three-year occupation in his place has
been messy,
costly, and unpopular. But the result of the third
and final stage that
Iraq has evolved into - an existential fight between
Iraqi democracy
and al Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalism - is still
uncertain. If we
draw the terrorists out, defeat them in the heart of
the ancient
caliphate, and win the allegiance of enough democratic
Iraqis to crush
the Islamicists, then our military has won a far greater
victory than
the removal of Saddam Hussein.

Sixth, note how critics now rarely offer alternative
scenarios. All the
old gripes such as the paucity of body armor or thin-skinned
humvees
have withered away. The Iraqi elected government is
sympathetic and
earnest, so demonizing them ultimately translates into
something like
'Cut these guys lose; they weren't worth the effort.'
Yes, the
American people want out of Iraq, but on terms that
preserve the
democracy that we paid so dearly to foster.

Even the one legitimate criticism that we were too
slow in turning over
control to the Iraqis, and that the Bremmer interregnum
had too high a
public profile, is now largely moot, as Ambassador
Khalilzad and Gen.
Casey are in the shadows, giving all the credit to
the very public
Iraqis and taking most of the blame for the bad news.

So we are nearing the denouement of the Iraq war, where
we wanted to be
all along: in support of a full-fledged and democratically
elected
government that will either win or lose its own struggle.

Seventh, the old twin charges - no link between al
Qaeda and Saddam,
no WMDs - are also becoming largely irrelevant or proving
untrue. It
must have been difficult for Time, Newsweek, and the
New York Times, in
their coverage of the death of Zarqawi, to admit that
he had been
active in Iraq well before the end of Saddam Hussein,
along with a
mishmash of old killers from Abu Nidal to Abdul Rahman
Yasin, the Iraqi
American who helped plan the first World Trade Center
bombing.

In addition, most abroad were convinced before the
war that the CIA was
right in its pre-war assessments. The publication of
the Iraqi archives
points to a real, not a phantom and former, WMD capability
- in line
with efforts elsewhere in the Islamic world, from Iran
to Libya, to
reclaim something akin to the old Soviet deterrent.

The costs in Iraq have been high and the losses tragic.
But nothing in
the past three years has convinced me otherwise than
that:

1=2E in a post-September-11 world Saddam had to be
removed on ethical and
strategic grounds;

2=2E the insurgency, though unexpected in its intensity,
could be put
down by a U.S. military that would react and evolve
more quickly than
the terrorists to changing conditions on the ground;

3=2E our mistakes, though several and undeniable, are
tragically the
stuff of war, and so far have not proved to be irreversible
or beyond
what we experienced in any of our past efforts;

4=2E the maligned secretary of Defense was right about
troop levels and
the plan for Iraqization - although demonized for trying
to transform
the very nature of the American military in the midst
of a war;

5=2E we are engaged in the great humanitarian effort
of the age, as
'one person, one vote' has brought to the perennially
downtrodden
Arab Shiites a real chance at equality;

6=2E the best method of winning this global struggle
against fascistic
Islamic terrorism remains fostering in the Middle East
a third
democratic alternative between autocracy and theocracy
that alone can
deal with the modern world.

Once a democratically elected Iraqi government emerged,
and a national
army was trained, the only way we could lose this war
was to forfeit it
at home, through the influence of an adroit, loud minority
of critics
that for either base or misguided reasons really does
wish us to lose.
They really do.

=A92006 Victor Davis Hanson

Anyway, you have got yourselves into three unwinnable
wars entirely of your own making, so I suggest that
you elect a President and a Government who are intelligent
enough to negotiate a way out next time.

On your Independence Day (from us), I hope you will
spare a thought for all those suffering in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the victims of 9/11, the Madrid and London
bombings and their families, and our respective soldiers
who have to enforce these unsanctioned policies.
=20
Derek Copeland

Sorry, meant to say 'UN Weapons Inspectors'

Derek C

June 23, 2006
Despair and Hope
The short and long wars against radical Islam
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

In the short-term, the ongoing war with Islamic fascists from
Afghanistan to Iraq , and in peripheral areas from Canada and Manhattan
to Madrid , Bali, and London , seems surreal.

Not to mention frustrating: almost every day the press highlights
another furious outburst from some entertainers or intellectuals who
are just enough on the fringes of American popular culture to warrant
momentary coverage of their lunacy. Neil Young is worried about the
reception of his new album? He hypes George Bush's malignancies. The
Dixie Chicks and Madonna are bothered about being pegged abroad as part
of George Bush's empire? Presto, they call Iraq the real problem. The
dropout Sean Penn can't quite shake his off-screen image of Jeff
Spicoli? He seeks acceptance from the Western Left as a serious critic
of U.S Middle-Eastern policy.

The largest American aid program since the Marshall Plan has become the
receptacle for all the conflicting personal frustrations, unhappiness,
and thwarted idealism of Western elites, a sort of scapegoat or totem
through which the ennui and angst of contemporary sensitive man can be
momentarily excised.

The terrorists in Iraq know this and thus trust that our press corps
will harp on the last minutes, rather than the last four years, of the
wretched life of the mass-murdering al Zarqawi - did he receive
proper medical attention? Was he roughed up by us? Did he die
immediately or suffer?

Indeed, the more our own troops are tortured and exploded, the more our
own media will rush to judgment on Haditha to assure the world, before
an inquiry has even finished, that the U.S. Marine Corps murdered
innocents. The more non-uniformed Islamists behead civilians and
torture innocents, the more international "rights" organizations
will accuse the United States of humanitarian violations in Guantanamo
Bay - at least up until the point of calling for the return of such
killers to their native countries.

In such an asymmetrical war of perceptions, the gruesome death of a
single American does more harm to our cause than does the image of a
martyred Zarqawi in sensual Paradise with his virgins. For Westerners,
death ruins the precious good life; for the topsy-turvy Islamists,
death salvages the bad life.

Our rules of engagement are aimed at winning "hearts and minds."
That precludes the age-old formula for such postwar rebuilding:
reconstruct only after the enemy has been humiliated and defeated. A
Curtis LeMay would have advised leveling Fallujah in April to save the
war; we shrug that doing so would surely lose it. Somewhere the ghost
of a Thucydides or Hobbes or Churchill might adjudicate our debate in
ways that we might not like.

All this the enemy knows and manipulates to its advantage.

The terrorists also understand that their overtly fascistic ideology
- intolerance for other religions, execution of the apostate,
subjugation of women, killing of gays, and theocracy - will never
earn the proper Western revulsion once reserved for a similar
reactionary Nazism, since it butts up against the pillar of
multicultural tolerance; no non-Western people can be any worse than
the present-day West.

Al Qaeda and its followers can't manufacture a machine gun or design
an RPG. No problem - they realize there are enough
petroleum-generated dollars floating around in the region, and enough
eager arms merchants, to get what they need.

Politically, the Islamists accept that the world detests them -
perhaps even the Chinese and Russians. But they also have discovered
that much of the world finds them useful. For the Arab Street , macabre
resistance to the West offers a vicarious sense of pride, especially if
it is cost-free and does not completely forfeit access to Europe or the
United States . Aspiring hegemons like the Chinese, or those in decline
like the Europeans and Russians, enjoy it when America bloodies its
nose, if for no other reason than envy and spite - and the hope that
in the future they are given more consultation, befitting their prior
status.

Oil is their best ally, or so the Islamists trust. The Iranians, even
if shackled, boast that, Samson-like, they can pull down our entire
petroleum temple upon all of us anytime they wish. The terrorists know
that billions will always filter down from autocracies as bribe money
into their coffers. And no gas-hungry American wants his Labor Day
Winnebago parked dry on his pad because some nut let off a bomb in the
Middle East .

But in the longer-term war, the Islamists have real problems. Their
acquisition of weapons is always parasitical and can't quite keep up
with constant Western innovation, whether in the form of drones that
take out terrorists sitting in front of their TVs, or anti-ballistic
missile systems that might nullify Ahmadinejad's nuclear blackmail.

The Islamists are also in a dilemma about escalation. They have a
deep-seated suspicion that another 9/11 might unleash an unpredictable
Western response that would pollute the favorable Middle East waters in
which they swim. Behead a Canadian prime minister; blow up the Eiffel
Tower or the Vatican; take out the Empire State Building - and
Western bombs may be dropped first, beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, and
questions asked later. So for now, jihadists accept that their best
strategy is not to upset too much the multifarious forces that conspire
to restrain Western power.

Even more depressing for the Islamists is that their enemy is not the
American or European West per se, but a far more insidious Westernism,
something that has infected diverse peoples from South Korea and China
to Central America and enclaves in the Middle East like Beirut and
Dubai . Westernization - whether we define that as a C-SPAN televised
gripe session on Palestinian rights at a Western university or
navigating through 7,000 tunes on an iPod or flipping on the CD, air
conditioning, and power seats in a Honda Accord or watching assorted
bare navels on MTV - is insidiously seductive and ultimately
subversive to the patriarchal world of the eighth century.

How do you arrange a marriage, insist on a beheading for adultery,
conduct a proper honor killing of your daughter, or calmly call Jews
"pigs and apes" when the wider Westernizing world broadcast into
your living room, car, and workplace thinks you are some groveling
zombie? Can an Airbus or Compaq be constructed according to the
principles of Sharia? How can you demand amoxicillin as your
birthright, but hate the system of free thinking and rationalism that
created it? Does the Islamist despise equally Chinese internet
pornography; does he issue fatwas against South Korean video games;
does he ostracize Latin American evangelical Protestants, or burn down
Bollywood? In the short-term maybe; in the long-term it is not so easy.

The Middle Easterner is also starting to realize that his once romantic
jihadist has turned even approving bystanders into international
pariahs. You doubt that? Try getting on an international flight with a
Saudi or Egyptian and watch the passengers' reaction; or wear a veil
in Paris or Rome , and see how many smiles you receive. That radical
change in attitudes toward radical Islam and its appeasers, the
jihadist - and those in the Middle East who tolerated him - begot.
How they finally wore down the Western therapeutic mind from Amsterdam
to Copenhagen , I don't know, but somehow they have nearly
accomplished that once impossible feat.

So there is no guarantee that the multiculturalism, utopianism,
cultural relativism, and moral equivalence that infect Western capitals
today will necessarily always predominate, being as they are a
fashionable relish in times of calm and plenty. The more the Islamist
insults his benefactors, the more he gradually tries their patience.

A Cindy Sheehan or Noam Chomsky still resonates with a minority of the
public because he can; thanks to Western capitalism and freedom, both
jet at will around the globe, live comfortably, and count on the
tolerance of the Western bourgeoisie society that they so roundly
condemn. But should the Islamist endanger that comfortable embryo -
as they almost did on 9/11 - then folks like these would be as
quickly forgotten as were Neville Chamberlain and Charles Lindbergh by
1941.

As for Iraq , while the post-Saddam reconstruction may not have started
out as the new ground zero in the war against Islamist terrorism, it
has surely devolved into that, as the Islamists themselves concede. In
the short term, because they understand that the juggernaut of Western
capitalism, freedom, and choice will spell their death knell, the
jihadists have imported and adopted as their own every conventional
Western munition, repackaged every Western self-critique, manipulated
every Western media outlet, and tried to boomerang every Western
liberal virtue and humanitarian protocol back at its creators. And, if
the polls on Iraq are any indication, such a strategy has worked, for a
time, brilliantly.

But these are ultimately not acts of confidence, but of desperation. As
an al Zarqawi knew, the world is evolving; if for the present we can
keep our heads, then for eternity the Islamists will eventually lose
theirs.

©2006 Victor Davis Hanson

I hope you fly better than you think.


"Hammermill" wrote in message
ups.com...
June 23, 2006
Despair and Hope
The short and long wars against radical Islam
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

In the short-term, the ongoing war with Islamic fascists from
Afghanistan to Iraq , and in peripheral areas from Canada and Manhattan
to Madrid , Bali, and London , seems surreal.

Not to mention frustrating: almost every day the press highlights
another furious outburst from some entertainers or intellectuals who
are just enough on the fringes of American popular culture to warrant
momentary coverage of their lunacy. Neil Young is worried about the
reception of his new album? He hypes George Bush's malignancies. The
Dixie Chicks and Madonna are bothered about being pegged abroad as part
of George Bush's empire? Presto, they call Iraq the real problem. The
dropout Sean Penn can't quite shake his off-screen image of Jeff
Spicoli? He seeks acceptance from the Western Left as a serious critic
of U.S Middle-Eastern policy.

The largest American aid program since the Marshall Plan has become the
receptacle for all the conflicting personal frustrations, unhappiness,
and thwarted idealism of Western elites, a sort of scapegoat or totem
through which the ennui and angst of contemporary sensitive man can be
momentarily excised.

The terrorists in Iraq know this and thus trust that our press corps
will harp on the last minutes, rather than the last four years, of the
wretched life of the mass-murdering al Zarqawi - did he receive
proper medical attention? Was he roughed up by us? Did he die
immediately or suffer?

Indeed, the more our own troops are tortured and exploded, the more our
own media will rush to judgment on Haditha to assure the world, before
an inquiry has even finished, that the U.S. Marine Corps murdered
innocents. The more non-uniformed Islamists behead civilians and
torture innocents, the more international "rights" organizations
will accuse the United States of humanitarian violations in Guantanamo
Bay - at least up until the point of calling for the return of such
killers to their native countries.

In such an asymmetrical war of perceptions, the gruesome death of a
single American does more harm to our cause than does the image of a
martyred Zarqawi in sensual Paradise with his virgins. For Westerners,
death ruins the precious good life; for the topsy-turvy Islamists,
death salvages the bad life.

Our rules of engagement are aimed at winning "hearts and minds."
That precludes the age-old formula for such postwar rebuilding:
reconstruct only after the enemy has been humiliated and defeated. A
Curtis LeMay would have advised leveling Fallujah in April to save the
war; we shrug that doing so would surely lose it. Somewhere the ghost
of a Thucydides or Hobbes or Churchill might adjudicate our debate in
ways that we might not like.

All this the enemy knows and manipulates to its advantage.

The terrorists also understand that their overtly fascistic ideology
- intolerance for other religions, execution of the apostate,
subjugation of women, killing of gays, and theocracy - will never
earn the proper Western revulsion once reserved for a similar
reactionary Nazism, since it butts up against the pillar of
multicultural tolerance; no non-Western people can be any worse than
the present-day West.

Al Qaeda and its followers can't manufacture a machine gun or design
an RPG. No problem - they realize there are enough
petroleum-generated dollars floating around in the region, and enough
eager arms merchants, to get what they need.

Politically, the Islamists accept that the world detests them -
perhaps even the Chinese and Russians. But they also have discovered
that much of the world finds them useful. For the Arab Street , macabre
resistance to the West offers a vicarious sense of pride, especially if
it is cost-free and does not completely forfeit access to Europe or the
United States . Aspiring hegemons like the Chinese, or those in decline
like the Europeans and Russians, enjoy it when America bloodies its
nose, if for no other reason than envy and spite - and the hope that
in the future they are given more consultation, befitting their prior
status.

Oil is their best ally, or so the Islamists trust. The Iranians, even
if shackled, boast that, Samson-like, they can pull down our entire
petroleum temple upon all of us anytime they wish. The terrorists know
that billions will always filter down from autocracies as bribe money
into their coffers. And no gas-hungry American wants his Labor Day
Winnebago parked dry on his pad because some nut let off a bomb in the
Middle East .

But in the longer-term war, the Islamists have real problems. Their
acquisition of weapons is always parasitical and can't quite keep up
with constant Western innovation, whether in the form of drones that
take out terrorists sitting in front of their TVs, or anti-ballistic
missile systems that might nullify Ahmadinejad's nuclear blackmail.

The Islamists are also in a dilemma about escalation. They have a
deep-seated suspicion that another 9/11 might unleash an unpredictable
Western response that would pollute the favorable Middle East waters in
which they swim. Behead a Canadian prime minister; blow up the Eiffel
Tower or the Vatican; take out the Empire State Building - and
Western bombs may be dropped first, beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, and
questions asked later. So for now, jihadists accept that their best
strategy is not to upset too much the multifarious forces that conspire
to restrain Western power.

Even more depressing for the Islamists is that their enemy is not the
American or European West per se, but a far more insidious Westernism,
something that has infected diverse peoples from South Korea and China
to Central America and enclaves in the Middle East like Beirut and
Dubai . Westernization - whether we define that as a C-SPAN televised
gripe session on Palestinian rights at a Western university or
navigating through 7,000 tunes on an iPod or flipping on the CD, air
conditioning, and power seats in a Honda Accord or watching assorted
bare navels on MTV - is insidiously seductive and ultimately
subversive to the patriarchal world of the eighth century.

How do you arrange a marriage, insist on a beheading for adultery,
conduct a proper honor killing of your daughter, or calmly call Jews
"pigs and apes" when the wider Westernizing world broadcast into
your living room, car, and workplace thinks you are some groveling
zombie? Can an Airbus or Compaq be constructed according to the
principles of Sharia? How can you demand amoxicillin as your
birthright, but hate the system of free thinking and rationalism that
created it? Does the Islamist despise equally Chinese internet
pornography; does he issue fatwas against South Korean video games;
does he ostracize Latin American evangelical Protestants, or burn down
Bollywood? In the short-term maybe; in the long-term it is not so easy.

The Middle Easterner is also starting to realize that his once romantic
jihadist has turned even approving bystanders into international
pariahs. You doubt that? Try getting on an international flight with a
Saudi or Egyptian and watch the passengers' reaction; or wear a veil
in Paris or Rome , and see how many smiles you receive. That radical
change in attitudes toward radical Islam and its appeasers, the
jihadist - and those in the Middle East who tolerated him - begot.
How they finally wore down the Western therapeutic mind from Amsterdam
to Copenhagen , I don't know, but somehow they have nearly
accomplished that once impossible feat.

So there is no guarantee that the multiculturalism, utopianism,
cultural relativism, and moral equivalence that infect Western capitals
today will necessarily always predominate, being as they are a
fashionable relish in times of calm and plenty. The more the Islamist
insults his benefactors, the more he gradually tries their patience.

A Cindy Sheehan or Noam Chomsky still resonates with a minority of the
public because he can; thanks to Western capitalism and freedom, both
jet at will around the globe, live comfortably, and count on the
tolerance of the Western bourgeoisie society that they so roundly
condemn. But should the Islamist endanger that comfortable embryo -
as they almost did on 9/11 - then folks like these would be as
quickly forgotten as were Neville Chamberlain and Charles Lindbergh by
1941.

As for Iraq , while the post-Saddam reconstruction may not have started
out as the new ground zero in the war against Islamist terrorism, it
has surely devolved into that, as the Islamists themselves concede. In
the short term, because they understand that the juggernaut of Western
capitalism, freedom, and choice will spell their death knell, the
jihadists have imported and adopted as their own every conventional
Western munition, repackaged every Western self-critique, manipulated
every Western media outlet, and tried to boomerang every Western
liberal virtue and humanitarian protocol back at its creators. And, if
the polls on Iraq are any indication, such a strategy has worked, for a
time, brilliantly.

But these are ultimately not acts of confidence, but of desperation. As
an al Zarqawi knew, the world is evolving; if for the present we can
keep our heads, then for eternity the Islamists will eventually lose
theirs.

©2006 Victor Davis Hanson

Would you please proceed with your "intellectual" masturbation in private.

"Hammermill" wrote in message
ups.com...
June 23, 2006
Despair and Hope
The short and long wars against radical Islam
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

In the short-term, the ongoing war with Islamic fascists from
Afghanistan to Iraq , and in peripheral areas from Canada and Manhattan
to Madrid , Bali, and London , seems surreal.

Not to mention frustrating: almost every day the press highlights
another furious outburst from some entertainers or intellectuals who
are just enough on the fringes of American popular culture to warrant
momentary coverage of their lunacy. Neil Young is worried about the
reception of his new album? He hypes George Bush's malignancies. The
Dixie Chicks and Madonna are bothered about being pegged abroad as part
of George Bush's empire? Presto, they call Iraq the real problem. The
dropout Sean Penn can't quite shake his off-screen image of Jeff
Spicoli? He seeks acceptance from the Western Left as a serious critic
of U.S Middle-Eastern policy.

The largest American aid program since the Marshall Plan has become the
receptacle for all the conflicting personal frustrations, unhappiness,
and thwarted idealism of Western elites, a sort of scapegoat or totem
through which the ennui and angst of contemporary sensitive man can be
momentarily excised.

The terrorists in Iraq know this and thus trust that our press corps
will harp on the last minutes, rather than the last four years, of the
wretched life of the mass-murdering al Zarqawi - did he receive
proper medical attention? Was he roughed up by us? Did he die
immediately or suffer?

Indeed, the more our own troops are tortured and exploded, the more our
own media will rush to judgment on Haditha to assure the world, before
an inquiry has even finished, that the U.S. Marine Corps murdered
innocents. The more non-uniformed Islamists behead civilians and
torture innocents, the more international "rights" organizations
will accuse the United States of humanitarian violations in Guantanamo
Bay - at least up until the point of calling for the return of such
killers to their native countries.

In such an asymmetrical war of perceptions, the gruesome death of a
single American does more harm to our cause than does the image of a
martyred Zarqawi in sensual Paradise with his virgins. For Westerners,
death ruins the precious good life; for the topsy-turvy Islamists,
death salvages the bad life.

Our rules of engagement are aimed at winning "hearts and minds."
That precludes the age-old formula for such postwar rebuilding:
reconstruct only after the enemy has been humiliated and defeated. A
Curtis LeMay would have advised leveling Fallujah in April to save the
war; we shrug that doing so would surely lose it. Somewhere the ghost
of a Thucydides or Hobbes or Churchill might adjudicate our debate in
ways that we might not like.

All this the enemy knows and manipulates to its advantage.

The terrorists also understand that their overtly fascistic ideology
- intolerance for other religions, execution of the apostate,
subjugation of women, killing of gays, and theocracy - will never
earn the proper Western revulsion once reserved for a similar
reactionary Nazism, since it butts up against the pillar of
multicultural tolerance; no non-Western people can be any worse than
the present-day West.

Al Qaeda and its followers can't manufacture a machine gun or design
an RPG. No problem - they realize there are enough
petroleum-generated dollars floating around in the region, and enough
eager arms merchants, to get what they need.

Politically, the Islamists accept that the world detests them -
perhaps even the Chinese and Russians. But they also have discovered
that much of the world finds them useful. For the Arab Street , macabre
resistance to the West offers a vicarious sense of pride, especially if
it is cost-free and does not completely forfeit access to Europe or the
United States . Aspiring hegemons like the Chinese, or those in decline
like the Europeans and Russians, enjoy it when America bloodies its
nose, if for no other reason than envy and spite - and the hope that
in the future they are given more consultation, befitting their prior
status.

Oil is their best ally, or so the Islamists trust. The Iranians, even
if shackled, boast that, Samson-like, they can pull down our entire
petroleum temple upon all of us anytime they wish. The terrorists know
that billions will always filter down from autocracies as bribe money
into their coffers. And no gas-hungry American wants his Labor Day
Winnebago parked dry on his pad because some nut let off a bomb in the
Middle East .

But in the longer-term war, the Islamists have real problems. Their
acquisition of weapons is always parasitical and can't quite keep up
with constant Western innovation, whether in the form of drones that
take out terrorists sitting in front of their TVs, or anti-ballistic
missile systems that might nullify Ahmadinejad's nuclear blackmail.

The Islamists are also in a dilemma about escalation. They have a
deep-seated suspicion that another 9/11 might unleash an unpredictable
Western response that would pollute the favorable Middle East waters in
which they swim. Behead a Canadian prime minister; blow up the Eiffel
Tower or the Vatican; take out the Empire State Building - and
Western bombs may be dropped first, beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, and
questions asked later. So for now, jihadists accept that their best
strategy is not to upset too much the multifarious forces that conspire
to restrain Western power.

Even more depressing for the Islamists is that their enemy is not the
American or European West per se, but a far more insidious Westernism,
something that has infected diverse peoples from South Korea and China
to Central America and enclaves in the Middle East like Beirut and
Dubai . Westernization - whether we define that as a C-SPAN televised
gripe session on Palestinian rights at a Western university or
navigating through 7,000 tunes on an iPod or flipping on the CD, air
conditioning, and power seats in a Honda Accord or watching assorted
bare navels on MTV - is insidiously seductive and ultimately
subversive to the patriarchal world of the eighth century.

How do you arrange a marriage, insist on a beheading for adultery,
conduct a proper honor killing of your daughter, or calmly call Jews
"pigs and apes" when the wider Westernizing world broadcast into
your living room, car, and workplace thinks you are some groveling
zombie? Can an Airbus or Compaq be constructed according to the
principles of Sharia? How can you demand amoxicillin as your
birthright, but hate the system of free thinking and rationalism that
created it? Does the Islamist despise equally Chinese internet
pornography; does he issue fatwas against South Korean video games;
does he ostracize Latin American evangelical Protestants, or burn down
Bollywood? In the short-term maybe; in the long-term it is not so easy.

The Middle Easterner is also starting to realize that his once romantic
jihadist has turned even approving bystanders into international
pariahs. You doubt that? Try getting on an international flight with a
Saudi or Egyptian and watch the passengers' reaction; or wear a veil
in Paris or Rome , and see how many smiles you receive. That radical
change in attitudes toward radical Islam and its appeasers, the
jihadist - and those in the Middle East who tolerated him - begot.
How they finally wore down the Western therapeutic mind from Amsterdam
to Copenhagen , I don't know, but somehow they have nearly
accomplished that once impossible feat.

So there is no guarantee that the multiculturalism, utopianism,
cultural relativism, and moral equivalence that infect Western capitals
today will necessarily always predominate, being as they are a
fashionable relish in times of calm and plenty. The more the Islamist
insults his benefactors, the more he gradually tries their patience.

A Cindy Sheehan or Noam Chomsky still resonates with a minority of the
public because he can; thanks to Western capitalism and freedom, both
jet at will around the globe, live comfortably, and count on the
tolerance of the Western bourgeoisie society that they so roundly
condemn. But should the Islamist endanger that comfortable embryo -
as they almost did on 9/11 - then folks like these would be as
quickly forgotten as were Neville Chamberlain and Charles Lindbergh by
1941.

As for Iraq , while the post-Saddam reconstruction may not have started
out as the new ground zero in the war against Islamist terrorism, it
has surely devolved into that, as the Islamists themselves concede. In
the short term, because they understand that the juggernaut of Western
capitalism, freedom, and choice will spell their death knell, the
jihadists have imported and adopted as their own every conventional
Western munition, repackaged every Western self-critique, manipulated
every Western media outlet, and tried to boomerang every Western
liberal virtue and humanitarian protocol back at its creators. And, if
the polls on Iraq are any indication, such a strategy has worked, for a
time, brilliantly.

But these are ultimately not acts of confidence, but of desperation. As
an al Zarqawi knew, the world is evolving; if for the present we can
keep our heads, then for eternity the Islamists will eventually lose
theirs.

©2006 Victor Davis Hanson

Derek Copeland wrote:
Well at least we generally ran the British Empire in
a reasonably civilised manner, although I admit there
were a few blips in India. Most of our former colonies,
with the exception of yourselves, have remained voluntarily
in an organisation called the 'British Commonwealth'
and accept our Queen as nominal Head of State. These
include Canada, Australia, New Zealand and several
of the West Indian islands. I would suggest that these
are amongst the most civilised countries in the World.


The Gents below have only confirmed our view of Americans
as being loud, arrogant and rude! OK, I know most of
you are very nice.
The politics are starting to impinge on my flying,
as UK taxation has been significantly increased by
stealth (standard 'New Labour' tactic) to pay for armies
of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. The cost of
petrol and hence travel has also increased to record
levels. Wasn't one of the objectives of the Iraq War
to stop this happening?

Derek Copeland

WASHINGTON -- In the Australian House of Representatives last month,
opposition member Julia Gillard interrupted a speech by the minister of
health thusly: ``I move that that sniveling grub over there be not
further heard.''

For that, the good woman was ordered removed from the House, if only
for a day. She might have escaped that little time-out if she had
responded to the speaker's demand for an apology with something other
than ``If I have offended grubs, I withdraw unconditionally.''

God, I love Australia. Where else do you have a shadow health minister
with such, er, starch? Of course I'm prejudiced, having married an
Australian, but how not to like a country, in this age of sniveling
grubs worldwide, whose treasurer suggests to any person who ``wants to
live under sharia law'' to try Saudi Arabia and Iran, ``but not
Australia.'' He was elaborating on an earlier suggestion that ``people
who ... don't want to live by Australian values and understand them,
well then they can basically clear off.'' Contrast this with Canada,
historically and culturally Australia's commonwealth twin, where last
year Ontario actually gave serious consideration to allowing its
Muslims to live under sharia law.

Such things don't happen in Australia. This is a place where, when the
remains of a fallen soldier are accidentally switched with those of a
Bosnian, the enraged widow picks up the phone late at night, calls the
prime minister at home in bed and delivers a furious unedited rant --
which he publicly and graciously accepts as fully deserved. Where
Americans today sue, Australians slash and skewer.

For Americans, Australia engenders nostalgia for our own past, which we
gauzily remember as infused with John Wayne plain-spokenness and vigor.
Australia evokes an echo of our own frontier, which is why Australia is
the only place you can unironically still shoot a Western.

It is surely the only place where you hear officials speaking plainly
in defense of action. What other foreign minister but Australia's would
see through ``multilateralism,'' the fetish of every sniveling foreign
policy grub from the Quai d'Orsay to Foggy Bottom, calling it correctly
``a synonym for an ineffective and unfocused policy involving
internationalism of the lowest common denominator''?

And with action comes bravery, from the transcendent courage of the
doomed at Gallipoli to the playful insanity of Australian-rules
football. How can you not like a country whose trademark sport has
Attila-the-Hun rules, short pants and no padding -- a national passion
that makes American football look positively pastoral?

That bravery breeds affection in America for another reason as well.
Australia is the only country that has fought with the United States in
every one of its major conflicts since 1914, the good and the bad, the
winning and the losing.

Why? Because Australia's geographic and historical isolation has bred a
wisdom about the structure of peace -- a wisdom that eludes most other
countries. Australia has no illusions about the ``international
community'' and its feckless institutions. An island of tranquility in
a roiling region, Australia understands that peace and prosperity do
not come with the air we breathe, but are maintained by power -- once
the power of the British Empire, now the power of the United States.

Australia joined the faraway wars of early-20th-century Europe not out
of imperial nostalgia, but out of a deep understanding that its fate
and the fate of liberty were intimately bound with that of the British
Empire as principal underwriter of the international system. Today the
underwriter is America, and Australia understands that an American
retreat or defeat -- a chastening consummation devoutly, if secretly,
wished by many a Western ally -- would be catastrophic for Australia
and for the world.

When Australian ambassadors in Washington express support for the U.S.,
it is heartfelt and unalloyed, never the ``yes, but'' of the other
allies, perfunctory support followed by a list of complaints, slights
and sage finger-wagging. Australia understands America's role and is
sympathetic to its predicament as reluctant hegemon. That understanding
has led it to share foxholes with Americans from Korea to Kabul. They
fought with us at Tet and now in Baghdad. Not every engagement has
ended well. But every one was strenuous, and many quite friendless.
Which is why America has such affection for a country whose prime
minister said after 9/11, ``This is no time to be an 80 percent ally,''
and actually meant it. Charles Krauthammer