…and badly needed, courtesy of the Belmont Club.

Victor Davis Hanson has a great piece on what we need to know, and to do, to win in Iraq. It’s given me some needed optimism in this conflict.

He’s absolutely right that the main problem here is that our enemies have mastered the art of asymmetrical warfare. They know us better than we know ourselves. So while they are utterly incapable of facing us on the battlefield, they can exploit our moral uncertainty, our short attention spans, our distaste for unpleasantness- in short, all the side effects of our wealth and power. The weaknesses that our enemies exploit are luxuries that only the very wealthy and powerful can afford. They are also the byproducts of the national character that made us great in the first place. America is great because America is good, but that creates weaknesses that our enemies use against us.

It’s a paradox- if we were barbarians like them, they’d all be dead dead dead. If we were as warmongering and as power-hungry as they claim, then shortly after 9/11 we would have opened up the silos and nuked every Muslim country that didn’t have oil, and unleashed the bombers and then the marines on every country that did have oil or anything else we needed. The Middle East would be an oil-pumping station for cheap gas for American SUV’s, with any surviving locals being allowed to live only for cheap labor for us. But the paradox part of it is that if we were barbarians like them, we wouldn’t be as insanely rich and powerful as we are. Perhaps it’s just God’s way of checking the power of nations. Only nations that have some understanding of order and decency ever get really powerful in the first place. And as they get powerful, they get soft and decadent, and lose their power as a result.

What does that mean in the future? That America’s on the way down, the victim of its own success? Or that this vacillating, ADD-afllicted, 24-hour-news cycle addicted public, and hypocritical attacks on our treatment of prisoners and civilians from ARABS of all people, who celebrated on 9/11 and stab their own daughters to death for the crime of being raped, is just part of the price we have to pay for being who we are?

It’s really hard sometimes to see which part of the historical play we’re in right now. Gulliver, being stabbed at by Lilliputians? Or King Lear, the tragic character, destroyed by the vanity and blindness that was the result of his own success?

The Dunker Journal speculates about why, after the UMC ruling reaffirming that homosexuality is antiscriptural, don’t the gays just pull out of all of their various denominations and form their own church?

The answer, I believe, is that they are not interested in just being tolerated, but they are interested in subverting all organizations that are opposed to their lifestyle. I really don’t think they’re going to rest until all remnant of hostility to their beliefs are destroyed. Otherwise, why join a denomination that you know is hostile to your beliefs? I wouldn’t join the Mormons and then try to subvert their views. I join churches that are compatible with my beliefs, and promote my beliefs from within that organization. This is what any honest believer in some system of belief does. Joining another organization with the intention of subverting that organization is the behavior of a dishonest man, but this is what the gays are doing.

… read this to remember who we’re up against.

The Palestinians celebrated at the news of the mother and her four little girls being shot in the head at close range.

From Lileks, on Ted Rall, the cartoonist who penned the anti-Pat Tillman cartoon getting all the heat lately:

…lots of speculation about whether he’ll be dropped from the syndicate, lose readership, meet up with an angry Tillman relative. But sometimes just being yourself is punishment enough.

Den Beste has put words to the frustration I’ve been feeling over the last few days. Why can’t we seem to get a handle on this Fallujah situation? It doesn’t seem all that difficult. Of course, I’m sitting here in my comfortable chair, and I’m sure it’s a very different world over there. And I’m willing to cut them a lot of slack doing a very difficult job. But it does seem, like Den Beste says, that we’re just being way too nice. This is a war. Fallujah was the heart of Saddam’s support. We’re not likely to win any hearts and minds there. They need to be put down, and hard.

The other thing that is increasingly frustrating me is what appears to me to be the resolve of the American people to see this thing through. I don’t have a lot of evidence here, but it seems like the media’s becoming successful in turning the minds of people against this war, and against the resolve to win. I hope that’s not the case. The only way this becomes Vietnam is if the people lose heart. That’s the only reason Vietnam became Vietnam. We lost Vietnam because they were in it for life and we weren’t. They were willing to lose everything to win and we weren’t. It’s the same in Iraq. Our enemies there- the Baathist holdouts, the terrorists, the Iranian-sponsored Shiites- they’ve got nothing to lose. They’ll fight to the end. We need to remember why we went there, why we went to war, and remember what we’ve got to lose if we fail. We have to get in this to win, or we will certainly lose.

It certainly seems like Bush is in it to win. But it seems like there’s a lot of folks around him who aren’t. Maybe it’s time for a purge.

A new sermon is up. I have a new digital recorder, which so far works well, and makes nicer recordings than what I had before. So the quality of the new sermon is better than has been the case. If you listen to it, let me know what you think. The sermon is on Acts 4, and addresses the true purpose of prayer. Link’s on the sidebar.

Here’s the best summary I’ve seen about the Oil-for-Food scandal. I had been following it, but until I read this I didn’t realize how far back the problem went. It will shed a good deal of light on why the UN didn’t enforce its resolutions against Iraq- $2 BILLION dollars paid directly to the UN Secretariat in commissions, the group that was supposed to make sure that the program wasn’t used fraudulently. That’s just the above-the-table money, too, not the bribes and kickbacks that we’re still trying to figure out.

I am so sick of previews that give away the whole movie! We saw the preview to Spiderman 2 the other night, and pretty much the only thing the movie didn’t tell us was how the last battle turns out, and we already know that anyway. It’s infuriating! Why do movies do this?

The preview shows us the romantic conflict (and how it’s resolved), the inner turmoil (and how that gets resolved too), who the bad guy is (and how he became the bad guy), what he does (and the effect that has on all the other principles), and how the final showdown is set up (and we know how that turns out). The only reason to go to the movie now is for the popcorn.

Hollywood Homicide is an action / comedy about a couple of cops in Hollywood. It’s a pretty run of the mill action movie for the most part. A murder at a hip-hop club leads the detectives to delve into the shady side of the record business. One of the detectives is being investigated for corruption and another is having an identity crisis about being a cop. One is old, one is young. One’s a pro, one’s just a rookie. One’s a ladies’ man, the other’s an old fuddy-duddy. All pretty routine, and in fact there’s kind of a self-conscious effort to poke fun at the buddy-cop genre.

What makes it a little unusual is that both of the cops are involved in different side activities. Harrison Ford’s character is trying to sell real estate on the side to pay for his many divorces and bad investments, and Josh Hartnett is teaching yoga and getting into acting- he claims to broaden his horizons, but it’s mostly for the girls. There’s a running gag through the movie about cell phones- they both have them constantly and they’re constantly ringing.

This is a short review, because there’s not much to say really about this movie. It’s fun and enjoyable. Watch out for a sex scene and some language- it earns its PG-13, but it’s not too bad. I feel this movie already fading into the sunset- there’s not a lot to hold the viewer’s attention, but I enjoyed it while it was on. 2 1/2 out of 5.

Rent the DVD free from Netflix!