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My intention today is to write about Iran, but I'm not sure that is possible. However, explaining why it might be impossible is a good way to write about Iran. Almost all non-official electronic traffic from and within Iran began shutting down in preparation for Thursday, the 31st anniversary of the Iranian revolution. "Opposition protesters clashed with security forces" (in the current media jargon), around Tehran and elsewhere, but almost entirely "off camera." We had reason to believe, going into the anniversary, that the regime was prepared to pour a bloodbath -- to execute the equivalent of a Tiananmen, should...

The extreme delay in getting decisions out of Washington that were urgent many months ago, on how to proceed in Afghanistan, was made sickly comic on Monday when President Barack Obama told a military audience that he would not "rush the solemn decision of sending you into harm's way." Morale had been descending in Afghanistan, from what I could make out, among an under-manned allied force in serious need of reinforcement; casualties rising on uncovered flanks. And then they hear this strange man in Washington, playing Hamlet with himself, dramatizing his own role in what should be a clear-headed and...

Before we go anywhere, with the Nobel Peace Prize, I think something should be said in defence of Neville Chamberlain. Chamberlain has received a bad press, these last 70 years, though famously it was a good press after he signed the Munich agreement 71 years ago with Adolf Hitler, and flew home to England promising, "Peace in our time." Let us grant, the result of his policy of appeasement was not what he intended; and let us allow, that Hitler negotiated in bad faith.........

The American and British top commanders have recently grumbled, or more than grumbled, about indifferent political responses to their requests for more feet and equipment on the ground in Afghanistan. U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal and U.K. Lt.-Gen. Jim Dutton, respectively commander and deputy of the NATO force, made very clear that al-Qaeda and the Taliban cannot be pursued effectively with missile strikes. Both seem to have been called on the carpet for speaking this truth too publicly Yesterday, it appeared that the U.S. defence secretary, Robert Gates -- a holdover from the Bush administration, reappointed to assure U.S. allies and...

The Dow has been tanking again, and new figures show the U.S. economy shedding jobs at an accelerating rate. One might criticize the U.S. government for the first trillion or two of “stimulus” spending, by observing that it hasn’t worked. But that would be too easy. Yes, it was crazy, in the middle of a crisis created by debt, to see how far they could run up debt. It was crazy to shore up nearly worthless assets, in the face of irresistible market forces. At a time when the entire investment system desperately needs to be de-leveraged, it was crazy...

[....]The outrage expressed, today, at the very existence of Sarah Palin, not only by progressive Democrats but by urbane "establishment" Republicans, is in many ways the product of this shift. Increasingly, I find, people on the left simply cannot accept any right-wing view as legitimate. The mere fact it can be so labelled puts it beyond the pale. We often read that the old categories of "left" and "right" have become irrelevant. It is an argument almost invariably propounded by the left. They have been freed, for more than a generation, from anything resembling serious public debate, and have thus...

Sarah Palin celebrated Bastille Day Tuesday with an op-ed against "cap and trade" in the Washington Post. Bless the editors of that newspaper for permitting it. Predictably, even Pavlovianly liberal, as they may be on almost any issue, there is a little streak of "wicked" mischief in them that makes their paper worth reading occasionally. Their op-ed policy is to run real conservatives from time to time -- including Charles Krauthammer, currently the doyen of "no we can't" opposition to the whole agenda of Barack Obama and the Nancy Pelosi Congress.Whereas, other liberal newspapers -- the New York Times...

Now that all the obituaries have been written for the latest mass-uprising in Iran, it is time to revisit that continuing uprising. I was reading just yesterday a glib BBC report on how the mullahs had learned from the mistakes that cost the Shah his power in 1979. He was too lenient with the demonstrators of the day and let things, like mourning at funerals for the slain, get out of hand. The mullahs, we learn, have taken care not to repeat his mistakes, and have muffled the demonstrators through much more effective techniques, that maximize terror while minimizing fatalities....

No sooner had I filed my Saturday column about the abuse of fact and reason in President Barack Obama's Cairo speech, than I found myself reading the draft of another big Obama speech, delivered at the D-Day anniversary. The difference between the two speeches is worth the red flag. They are night and day. When we juxtapose one with the other, we learn something important about the speaker, and also about the foreign policy of his administration. The Cairo speech was full of grand historical statements that were, on a pedestrian factual view, quite ridiculous. Mr Obama declares three times...

I used the S-word in a column last week ("shamanism"), and received from my readers so many puzzled queries that I will now try to explain myself further. I said, alike of the post-Christian, self-styled "middle class" in the West, and of the post-Islamic "middle class" in such a country as Pakistan, that they are animated by "a touching faith, at its roots shamanistic." Both, alike, confuse words with things, and imagine by manipulating words they can manipulate reality. They believe things like public order and safety just happen without human intervention -- that they grow on trees, like money....

It is now spring; the vernal equinox was reached Friday morning. To celebrate, Barack Obama sent a video of himself to Iran. This was one of several end-of-week media performances, as Mr. Obama went back into "campaign mode" after a break of several months. The message of the polls is that he had better start selling his policies harder, because they are showing signs of not going over very well. Moreover, the unpolled elites, including those within the Democratic Party, have started to ask questions aloud about whether their man is competent; and as we know from painful history, such...

Talk about lipstick on a pig: the bailout measure, which began as a modest, $700-billion, three-page oink, reached the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday wearing about 450 pages of lipstick. Its maximum final cost was no longer calculable -- after bipartisan negotiations to add "sweeteners" to the thing, to buy it support from various congressional factions. Americans, and anyone else who happened to be watching (most of the world), got a good taste of what "Congressional oversight" means; to say nothing of the explanation of why, in opinion polls, the U.S. Congress enjoys even less popular esteem than President Bush....

The best, the most pointed and comprehensive opinion on the award of the Order of Canada pin to Henry Morgentaler, in the course of this long grim week, was by Ian Hunter in the National Post: “In old Canada, Morgentaler was prosecuted and sent to jail for performing illegal abortions. But that was in another era and, as far as I'm concerned, another country -- a country as dead as any of the recipients of Morgentaler’s attentions.” I shall say something about that award tomorrow. For today I want to focus on the New Canada -- the one that is...

With that arrogance and boorishness that is characteristic of diplomatic overtures from the Putin administration, the Russian military chief of staff, Yuri Baluyevsky, chose the 39th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to advise Prague this week to "think again" about allowing radar installations for the U.S. missile defence shield to be installed on Czech soil. "We say it will be a big mistake by the Czech government to put this radar site on Czech territory," he said, according to the Reuters report. This is the kind of language that seems to appeal to Vladimir Putin himself -- the...

Like most people, I left high school biology class, where the works of Darwin and Mendel were taught, believing that I had learned the truth about man’s origin and evolutionary development. It was not until I encountered college and graduate school statistics that I realized that life could not possibly have occurred by chance on this planet, but I had a growing family to support and could not spend much time thinking about such grand questions. For all those years I got by with a vague concept that, yes, evolution was the answer, but it was God-directed. Then I stumbled...

So far as I can make out -- I am not writing from Iraq, but I do make a splendid effort to follow the plot there -- the Americans are finally doing what they should have been doing all along. They are taking the battle to the Islamist enemy, or rather, enemies, both Shia and Sunni. They are enlisting the help of tribal lords and other local allies against these enemies, de-emphasizing the grand “Marshall Plan” giveaways, and re-emphasizing small, visible, unbureaucratic improvements on that local scale. They have become less timid about inspections and searches, and thus have taken...

Defeatism leads to defeat David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen Published: Wednesday, July 04, 2007 One really has to wonder about the efficiency of the British National Health Service after seeing how incompetently a group of Islamist doctors carried off their weekend car-bombing and fire-throwing attacks in London and Glasgow. Not one death; not even a successful suicide. We can thank the indiscretion of the British police for the information that the persons since rounded up were mostly doctors and laboratory technicians working for the NHS. "Of Asian origin." Am I jumping to conclusions by guessing that they were all...

The fuse is lit, and so begins the nightmare David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen Published: Wednesday, June 20, 2007 Hamas seizing Gaza is only the beginning of a nightmare. One must look at the whole Middle East to distinguish the bomb from the fuse. What Hamas will do, by consolidating its power in Gaza, and becoming a true "free port" with terrorist infrastructure for the world's Islamist networks, is to perfect that fuse. As George Friedman has argued, it creates new possibilities for drawing Egypt back into direct conflict with Israel. But also, much more. There is an interesting...

The more I think about "global warming", in light of the most recent United Nations report, the more confident I become in averring that it is a fraud, a political stunt, a criminal imposture, that every intelligent journalist should be helping to expose. We need more reporting on the circular assumptions built into the IPCC's ludicrous computer models, on their use of misleading and conveniently changing baseline years, and on the trends within their own trends. (For instance, they have quietly reduced their middle-range prediction of temperature rise in the coming century by more than one-third; their mean sea-level rise...

By the word “Anglosphere” we mean the countries whose primary language is English, and whose legal, political, cultural, and religious traditions are directly descended from Britain and Magna Charta. Specifically: the U.K., the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand -- and there was a time when we might have mentioned South Africa, and the English-speaking elites of India and other parts of the former Empire. United by a language, to begin, but through that language with a common-sense view of the world that is distinguishable from continental Europe’s; the “west of the West”, as it were. Andrew Roberts is a British...

This column will not be about Iraq, directly. I think it is about something more fundamental. You know me: I’m a fundamentalist. My attempts to make sense of the world around me, in which I invite my reader to share, do not restrict themselves to the news as conventionally reported, especially on Sundays. But then, they usually start from there. Consider the following news report: “Congressional Democrats will work with anti-war groups to pursue a ‘slow-bleed’ strategy on Iraq. Instead of voting to abandon Iraq, directly, they'll use their control over budgetary processes to gradually choke off U.S. military resources,...

I admit, I am about to present a paradox, that may take up to a minute to think through. But it will be time well invested. The reason one utters a threat, to another person who is threatening to hurt us, is not, usually, because we want to fight. It is, usually, because we don’t want to fight. We are hoping to persuade this enemy -- who must be an enemy, because he threatened us first -- to back down. We are explaining to him, as succinctly as we can, why it is that he might not want to do...

Only thing truly warming is rhetoric David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen Published: Wednesday, February 07, 2007 For Sunday, I wrote metaphorically about the absurdity of last week's global warming warning from the United Nations ("IPCC/2007," as it will henceforth be known in bureaucratic legend). This was my own warning to my reader, never to take entirely seriously any proclamation that claims to be rocket science, and is endorsed by everyone in sight who has relevant credentials. A look through history will quickly confirm that while a mere majority may sometimes be right, the unanimous agreement of every available expert...

I was rewriting history, while walking along some cold lakeshore the other day. My thought was: if Churchill had only come to power in 1937, Chamberlain would have been installed to replace him in 1940. Had Churchill been in power, and refused to sign Munich, he would have been blamed for the outbreak of war. I can just hear the prattle in an English pub, circa 1950. "He pushed Hitler to it! Had it not been for Churchill, Hitler would have been satisfied with the Sudetenland, and England would never have had to surrender. Everything was Churchill's fault!" Today, everything...

SUNDAY SPECTATOR October 15, 2006 Desolations When I filed this, the United States was still trying to get a limp resolution through the United Nations, condemning North Korea for its claim to have tested a nuclear device, in defiance of all its international agreements. The Americans wanted something like “the full chapter seven” -- which would not merely impose, but enforce a general embargo on all shipments of military equipment to the rogue state, and could lead to a naval blockade to isolate it. Instead, to please not only its enemies such as China, but its nominal allies such as...

When a madman, holding hostages, says his gun is loaded -- it is time for the police to shoot him. No need to establish whether he’s telling the truth. (Or, whatever the equivalent in international relations.)In our analogy the madman is North Korea. I would personalize it to Kim Jong-Il -- “Sun of the 21st Century, Guardian Deity of the Planet, Sun of Socialism, Eternal Sun, and Ever-Victorious General” -- except there is good reason to believe he’s only a semi-retarded dynastic figurehead (like Syria’s Bashir Assad), and the real madmen people his Politburo. The hostages they’re holding are South...

It is alleged, by former Lt. Gen. Mike DeLong, that Donald Rumsfeld once interrupted a briefing of his with the remark: "General, there was no verb in the last sentence." The retired general gave this to CNN as evidence of Mr Rumsfeld's obsession with trivial details. Let me explain the U.S. defence secretary's curious remark. A sentence without a verb has no meaning. It is a waste not only of the speaker's breath, but of his auditor's time. As Harry Truman once said, being stupid "is hardly against the law for a general"; but it is an inconvenience. And the...

The positives of powerful thinking We rely on public intellectuals to rise above academics and journaliststo give issues the analysis they deserve THE WESTERN STANDARD David Warren - September 11, 2006 Rory Leishman should be a major figure in this country. He is a public journalist in the best tradition of Walter Lippmann et al.--learned, penetrating, and yet broad in his interests and accessible in his style. We have George Jonas in Toronto (whom I consider the doyen) and Barry Cooper in Calgary (somewhat encumbered by a professorship, but he can write). Alberta's Ted Byfield is such a character,...

Contrary to generally received opinion, the West is not today under siege from Muslim fanatics because of a resurgence of Islam, but because of the West's own moral and intellectual decline. Even Osama bin Laden knows this. The West invites attack, and the enemy's strategy in attacking is paradoxically to hide his own weakness.If you look at the enemy, even where he has concentrated his best forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Lebanon, you see something unimpressive. Everything that enemy has to fight with, is a by-product of Western industry and invention. The adaptations are sometimes clever, in a psychopathic...

Gabriel Range is a documentary filmmaker, of whom few had heard until this week. His 2003 television production, The Day Britain Stopped, was a pioneering essay in the “fake documentary”, in which imaginary future events are synthesized in fine detail. He has now achieved fame, even before anyone has seen his new essay in that genre, Death of a President. It will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, Sept. 10th, and then show on the British TV channel, More4. The fame, or more properly, infamy, is for his audacity in making a film about the assassination of a U.S. President...

Chestlessness - August 30, 2006 The case of the two Fox News journalists, held hostage in Gaza, is worth dwelling upon. They were released after their captors had made tapes of them dressed as Arabs and announcing they had changed their names and converted to Islam. Lately I have been looking at the large -- at how the West is proving unable to cope with a threat from a fanatical Islamic movement, that it ought to be able to snuff out with fair ease. (See my column last Sunday.) But the large is often most visible in the small. The...

Both sides in this, just the latest of several Middle East wars – always started by Muslims dedicated to the extermination of Israel, are claiming victory, and Condy Rice is trying to put the best face she can on the cease-fire agreement. There is no question in my mind, though, that Israel’s incompetence placed the United States in an untenable position

I’ve touched upon “just war” several times in this space, during the last few weeks. I will continue touching it today. The issue is already an urgent one; its significance can only grow in the foreseeable future, as the encounter between fanatical Islam and the West spreads from mere terror incidents to open guerrilla warfare on various fronts.We see in the Middle East just now, how the conflagration is spreading. Hezbollah enjoyed little support in the Arab world, when it kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, and began firing rockets at an unprecedented rate into northern Israel. The Arabs feared Hezbollah’s aggressive...

George Friedman, the well-informed if often too-clever-by-half mind behind Stratfor, the American intelligence consultants, was told by several of his Israeli contacts to "expect some surprises". So was I by mine. And Mr Friedman has spent this last week admitting that he is, indeed, surprised. For he can make no sense of Israel's battle plan against Hezbollah. Neither can I. It made perfect sense this time last week. It appeared the Israelis were closing all exit routes to Hezbollah, in preparation for a large invasion to wipe them out. The number of troops the Israelis had called up suggested a...

The task set before the Israeli ground forces -- to remove Hezbollah from southern Lebanon, if not from the world, while hurting as few Lebanese as possible -- is huge. I should expect it to begin in the next few days; there are signs it is already beginning as I write. There will be tactical surprises on both sides. Hezbollah has shown itself to be armed with weapons, and entrenched in ways, that Israeli intelligence had not discerned. The scale on which they have (literally) dug into the south Lebanese countryside is impressive. As the Israelis discovered in one special-operations...

Traditionally, at this point in her response to terror attacks, the world diplomatic community persuades Israel to agree a ceasefire, and the terrorists are saved to fight another day. This is what happened in 1982. The Israelis were in a position to annihilate Yasser Arafat's PLO, whom they had surrounded in Beirut. Instead, they agreed to let them escape to Tunisia. The rest is history: recurring again and again. Kofi Annan is trying to do the same thing over: to save Hezbollah (this time) with a ceasefire, by promising Israel that a large force of international "peacekeepers" will take their...

The latest grand Islamist atrocity was directed against the huge city of Mumbai, Tuesday. At least seven big explosions ripped through rush-hour commuter trains, along a string of stations on the principal north-south rail artery -- temporarily disabling the city's principal economic lifeline. It was a reprise of the Islamist attacks on Madrid's rail system, 28 months ago.As we must surely realize from recent arrests around Toronto, New York, Miami, London, Beirut, and elsewhere, the menace is hardly receding. For each Islamist cell police break up, they are dimly aware of several others. In Mumbai, the police anti-terrorist squad...

The Americans went into Afghanistan and Iraq with my blessings, as my reader may recall. I thought both decisions to invade were right, before either had been taken. But I thought this for reasons I never fully explained, that were never quite George Bush’s reasons — more those of Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938). I was, for instance, sceptical about the project of bringing Western-style, bourgeois democracy — and everything needed to support that — to countries where politics by violence had so long prevailed. But if anyone could do it, I thought the Americans could, with their own history of heroic...

Sometimes I am brought up short by the clarity and courage with which someone else -- with more to lose than I have -- states a truth. I am a Catholic Christian, who often dismisses “secular humanists”. But I’m in awe of people like Canada’s Irshad Manji, the “Muslim refusenik”, who had the courage in her book The Trouble with Islam to directly confront the horrors done in Allah’s name -- in, as she put it, “Pick a country, any Muslim country.” Another is Wafa Sultan, an Arab woman practising psychology, now living in the States. A self-professed “disbeliever in...

This will be my 11th consecutive column, directly or indirectly on the “Danish cartoons” issue. The cartoons themselves were a red herring from the start -- a fake issue, trumped up by fanatical Muslims seeking grievances to abet a confrontation, and thereby extract concessions from the West. It is a fire, still being stoked around the world by radical “Islamists”, using shameless lies and misrepresentations. (See my previous columns.)The reason I have written so copiously on this subject -- not the cartoons themselves, but what I have called the “organized apoplexy” in response to them -- is because it is...

On the front of the Arabic index page of the Al-Qassam website, any reader yesterday would have found an animated cartoon. It consists of the Star of David -- the symbol of the Jewish faith -- being obliterated by a mushroom cloud. Al-Qassam speaks for the “militant wing” of Hamas, the party that recently won the Palestinian election, by a landslide. The distinction between Hamas and its militant wing is meaningless. Western reporters habitually make this distinction, and stress that the “non-militant” branches of Hamas run orphanages and distribute welfare. This is like implying that President Bush is not responsible...

It is important for people in the West to realize how the “Danish cartoon apoplexy” was started. Contrary to the impression left by most mainstream media, most of the Muslim world does not read Danish, store Danish flags in their closets, or have sea-mail subscriptions to all the Danish provincial newspapers. Everything they needed to riot was supplied, including a large volume of hateful lies. Riots seldom, perhaps never happen spontaneously, in the Muslim world, or in ours for that matter. You need people committed to setting the bold example -- to pitching the first rock through the first window....

There is a new book by Efraim Karsh, just coming out from Yale, which everyone who feels entitled to an opinion about “the Middle East” may feel compelled to read. The book is entitled, Islamic Imperialism: A History, and supplies just what it promises with comprehensive scholarly footnotes. The topic is so large, that I don’t want to reduce it to a blurb. Some things require a book. And the authority of Prof. Karsh’s previous book, Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923, is sufficient to promote the new one. The author, who heads...

Conservative victory increasingly likely in Canada Sat Jan 14, 2006 1:56 PM ET By Randall Palmer HUNTSVILLE, Ontario, Jan 14 (Reuters) - All indications on Saturday pointed to the Conservatives ousting Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin in Canada's general election on Jan. 23. With a little more than a week to go and polls showing the opposition party enjoying a commanding lead, pundits from all sides were turning against Martin and Conservatives candidates -- once reluctant to sound confident for fear of scaring away voters -- were speaking more openly about victory. For the first time since 1988, the influential...

The decency deficitWhile it has been a subject for exuberant mockery among some liberal Democrats, I was appalled, this week, to learn that Martha-Ann Alito, wife of the U.S. Supreme Court nominee, was driven in tears from his Senate confirmation hearing. She had been listening to senators such as Ted Kennedy accuse her husband of concealing the most ghastly and extraordinary views -- of being a closet racial and misogynist bigot -- on the basis of some ridiculously fluffy guilt-by-association. When a Republican senator was reduced to clarifying that Sam Alito was not a bigot, Mrs Alito could take no...

One of my American friends asked me this question a couple of weeks ago: "Do you think what is happening in France will happen in Canada?" Now, I'm not sure the average Canadian would even know what has happened in France, but take it from me, the Islamic Revolution in Europe has begun. Not that the average Canadian (a class which, of course, excludes Western Standard readers) is without an excuse. For if he listens to CBC, he will be under the impression that the rioting has been by "underprivileged French youths." The fact that they had been chanting "Allahou...

If enterprise and moral rectitude are what defines militarism these days, then we need more of it --------------------------------- I don't think I have to explain to readers of this magazine why a country would want to have military forces. It's one of those things you either get or don't, and as I've noticed from reading The Globe and Mail, if you don't get it, arguments aren't going to help you. The guys who do the fighting do not choose the war. I would have thought this an elementary observation, but it is lost on a large section of the voting...

It took 22 months to drag Saddam Hussein all the way from his hidey hole to an Iraqi court, to stand trial. It took 15 years, counting from his invasion of Kuwait; 17 dating from the gassing of Kurds in the village of Halabja; 25 from his invasion of Iran; 26 since he overthrew his political mentor, Ahmad el-Bakr; 37 since he participated in the bloodshed that brought the secular-socialist Baath Party definitively to power; 46 since an earlier less successful bloodbath; and 49 since he first participated in a scheme of political murder. Here is a man of 68,...

-snip- Today, instead of my usual two cents' worth, the reader gets two single-penny columns. I wanted to subtract from what I said last week, on President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court. In the week since, much dust has settled, and it has become clear that Ms Miers is acceptable to the broad rightwing Republican constituency, and to not a few Democrats. She is despised, chiefly, by the rightwing intellectuals (people like me), who were heartbroken that Mr Bush would pass over the long list of brilliant, strict-constructionist legal scholars that have arisen in response...

The Liberals are betting that voters are just fine with having an unaccomplished terrorist-sympathizer as our head of state ------------------------- "A pretty face, and a nice pair of thighs." This rather vulgar, and refreshingly sexist remark was made to me by a former colleague of hers at Radio-Canada, about our next governor general. (Or, as I prefer to put it, "governess general of our nanny state.") Michaëlle Jean is perhaps the spaciest viceregal selection in the whole history of our Dominion; and no, I haven't forgotten Ed Schreyer, nor Jeanne Sauvé, nor Roméo LeBlanc, nor Adrienne Clarkson. Taking this last...