Free Republic

Raymond J. Learsy has written a book memorable in the special sense that nightmares can be memorable, but also useful. If the nightmare is that you died of an overdose of drugs, and the memory of it causes you when in command to draw back from the marginal dose, then the nightmare has served a purpose. Raymond Learsy writes (his book is called "Over a Barrel: Breaking the Middle East Oil Cartel") about what could happen if we continue to go as we are going. The price of gasoline as I write is 60 percent higher than it was a...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version August 05, 2005, 2:20 p.m. The Role of Casualties War, by the numbers. On Monday, seven U.S. soldiers were killed. On Wednesday, 18. On Thursday, an army general acting as spokesman for our high command in Iraq announced that the volume of suicide bombers was actually decreasing. He did not dwell on the coincidence — that suicide bombers were decreasing as American deaths increased. Is General Alston looking forward to the day when he can report that there were no suicide bombers that week? Only Americans, killed by insurgents who...

We like to think that the stem-cell controversy will, some time before mankind's end, give us definitions we can act thoughtfully upon. We need not only verbal definitions but moral perspectives. These are thought to be static, but are not. Probably Harry Truman would not today drop a nuclear bomb on Pyongyang, though doing so might have got him a runaway reelection the next day. Matthew Scully, in his book, Dominion, has reopened the moral question of animal (mis)treatment. Ever the descendants of the Vikings, Scandinavian explorers are pressing new definitions of acceptable voluntary death. In the matter of the...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version July 15, 2005, 12:01 p.m. A Next Step? Dealing with the terrorist threat after 7/7. The Italian government seemed to be defining moderation when it resolved on Wednesday to bear down on terrorists, but only in a conventional tempo. The alternative was to take drastic means to ring in the proposed changes. These would permit police to hold suspects in detention not for twelve hours, but for 24. The measure would also permit the security detachment to archive e-mail communications for unspecified periods of time. The authority of government to...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version June 10, 2005, 2:37 p.m. Dems, Behind Closed Doors What are they saying about Dr. Dean? Howard Dean is great and redolent spice on the political scene. He has been rebuked by senior figures in his own party for his string of recent remarks in which he likened Republicans to poisonous snakes, never mind that he quickly added that he was not opposed to all poisonous snakes. Exactly what those senior Democrats said to Dr. Dean at their closed-door lunch has not been divulged, but we can imagine the scene...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version June 03, 2005, 1:16 p.m. Foul Felt Now he wants some money for it. Mark Felt has made it clear that he wants to cash in on this whole Watergate business, and why indeed not? It was thought for some thirty years that Deep Throat did as he did to preserve the honor of his country. Perhaps that was the precipitating motive of Mark Felt. But to agree on that point requires that you agree that getting Richard Nixon out of the White House was the supreme national concern, in...

Bushspeak in Europe It was a great weekend for major-power politics. The debate was quickly framed as follows: Did President Bush, by his remarks, contribute to the stability of democracy, or did he enhance the prospects of destabilization in Russia? That criticism is serious and attracts immediate concern. A reductionist formulation of the criticism would remind us that territorial Russia stretches across eleven time zones and that however bedraggled the Russian military is at this point, Russia is still the second largest nuclear power in the world — by some reckonings, the premier nuclear power, since the old, wicked USSR...

It is time to ponder the strategic impact of the casualty figures. Those that are relevant to this analysis are widely familiar. The U.S. has lost approximately 1,500 dead in military action and 10,000 wounded, and we continue to lose, dead, about 50 soldiers every month. The Iraqis (using loose counts) die and are wounded at about ten times the U.S. rate. Moreover, the Iraqi deaths have increased substantially since the national election in January. We know philosophically that all deaths should be counted equally, since we are all God’s children. But it isn’t surprising that U.S. concern should focus...

Robert Novak, the columnist and primary exegete of U.S. political thought, began a column last month as follows: Sen. Trent Lott looked like a supporter of Rudy Giuliani’s presidential ambition when the former New York mayor visited Lott’s home state of Mississippi recently. But in private, he warned Giuliani about roadblocks in his presidential path. Lott, who likes and admires Giuliani, told him that the New Yorker’s support for abortion, homosexual rights, and gay marriage are heavy burdens for a Republican to carry nationally. Giuliani protested that he never supported same-sex marriage, only civil unions. Lott advised that in Mississippi,...

Bolton in Chafee’s hands. What is a sophisticated position on the United Nations? As the old saw goes, I’m glad you asked that question. I say that having served in the U.N. as a Public Member of the U.S. delegation, and written a book on the U.N. One feels the special pangs of John Bolton right now, up for ambassador to the U.N. Poor John, he was once derisory at the U.N.’s expense, using very amusing language to bounce off the bureaucratic density of the organization. His barb was to the effect that if you lopped off the top ten...

Very much in the news are attempts, glancing and full-fledged, to trim the extravagances of the First Amendment. Sometimes freedom-mongering betrays itself, causing the observer to assume comfortably that a sober integration of free speech in the House of Rights is more or less on its way. But the fight needs pursuit. The season's headliner was Harvard President Larry Summers. What he said was that he fancied that not as many women as men get on with science and engineering, perhaps because there is a genetic indisposition there, women to science. Knoweth not the fury of liberal faculties, the man...

Esquire apology heartens Buckley For William F. Buckley Jr. - who waged, with Gore Vidal, one of the last century's more famous literary feuds - victory is sweeter the second time around. Yesterday, 79-year-old Buckley was crowing over Esquire magazine's abjectly apologetic "Open Letter" in the February issue, saying the mag "greatly regrets" including an old Vidal polemic, "A Distasteful Encounter With William F. Buckley Jr.," in a recent anthology. When the Vidal essay was originally printed in 1969 - after the two debaters exchanged televised insults during the raucous 1968 Democratic convention - Buckley successfully sued the magazine for...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version March 18, 2005, 1:24 p.m. Human ButcheryWhat to do? The week gone by has been incessant in its reminders of human depravity, the collectivization of which was a specialty of the century gone by. There were singular acts of cruelty in old Russia, and indeed in Bismarck’s Germany, but it required the resources of modern states to transform these into the Gulag of Stalin and the death camps of Hitler. A recent book tells of the infatuation of the author, as a six-year-old, with “Uncle...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version March 04, 2005, 1:22 p.m. Galbraith Up CloseHis life, his politics, his economics. Professor John Kenneth Galbraith leans back on his chaise longue and answers the question about the book: “I think it’s fine. I couldn’t have done it better if I had written it myself.” The reference is to John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics, by Richard Parker. “Did you read it?” “Yes.” “The whole thing? I bet you didn’t.” But his visitor had read it all, 800 pages, pronouncing it...

Tony Venenum (we’ll call him), 26, reasons that he has always taken risks in life. He was raised by a single parent and made his way in a neighborhood where toughness was a requirement for survival. He discovered, in his teens, that he had solace in male companionship, and before he was 20, had been seduced, and had lived then with Guido, an older man. Both had jobs in establishments that required conformist behavior — Tony even wore a jacket and tie to work, but then Guido took sick and the diagnosis was AIDS. But the retrovirus inhibitor kept him...

At church on Sunday the congregation was asked to pray for the recovery of the Pope. I have abstained from doing so. I hope that he will not recover. The seizure brought on by his dramatic trip to the hospital a week ago suggests the international sense of his indispensability. Pope John Paul is a graphic figure in the lives of Catholics and many non-Catholics. He is of course a towering theological figure who has presided over the development of Catholic thought and practice for the 26 years of his papacy. He is a major historical figure, who began as...

The seizure brought on by his dramatic trip to the hospital a week ago suggests the international sense of his indispensability. Pope John Paul (news - web sites) is a graphic figure in the lives of Catholics and many non-Catholics. He is, of course, a towering theological figure who has presided over the development of Catholic thought and practice for the 26 years of his papacy. He is a major historical figure, who began as a Catholic seminarian in a Poland subservient first to a Nazi overlord (they hanged him in Nuremberg), then to a communist overlord (nothing happened to...

THE WASHINGTON TIMES A wild thought passes through my mind, which is that maybe Benon Sevan is in fact innocent. Innocent of receiving money directly from his buddy Fakhry Abdelnour, the Egyptian whose company (AMEP — African Middle East Petroleum) wanted some Iraqi chits to permit oil purchases. Benon Sevan was certainly not innocent of using his influence in behalf of his friends and of failing to blow any whistles when suspect contractors were designated to oversee the oil-for-food program, a cover-up for easing the life and enhancing the fortunes of Saddam Hussein. Click to learn more... The U.N. had...

Shut Up, al-Jazeera The network should be put out of business. A while back, the television-radio network al-Jazeera considered offering $10,000 to anyone who could prove that the network had broadcast footage of an actual beheading by the insurgents. Although many in the region served by al-Jazeera remain adamant that such footage had been aired, al-Jazeera insisted that it had never shown the act itself. An ingenuous observer wondered why the suggested award was a mere $10,000. Inasmuch as the network knew that it was innocent of such a broadcast, why not offer a million dollars? What do you have...

Some years ago my guest on "Firing Line" was Gen. Vernon Walters. He was a phenomenon who had had phenomenal experiences, among them interpreting for four different presidents in four different languages, and serving briefly as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites). He remarked, in passing, that no democratic government had ever initiated aggression against another nation. I was stunned by this statement, and as the exchange proceeded, attempted to run my skeptical memory over it. Surely it could not be so? But so -- it is. And that revelation by Gen. Walters orients us properly...