Yalta The United States has apologized for several of its Second World War actions, most notably the internment of Japanese-Americans. However, George Bush's apology for the 'sellout' at Yalta is bound to rekindle debate over one of the foundational moments of the post-war world. ABC news reports: Second-guessing Franklin D. Roosevelt, President Bush said Saturday the United States played a role in Europe's painful division after World War II a decision that helped cause "one of the greatest wrongs of history" when the Soviet Union imposed its harsh rule across Central and Eastern Europe. ... "Certainly it goes further than any president has gone," historian Alan Brinkley said from the U.S. "This has been a very common view of the far right for many years that Yalta was a betrayal of freedom, that Roosevelt betrayed the hopes of generations." Bush said the Yalta agreement, also signed by Britain's Winston Churchill an...
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Back to the Future Max Boot describes on vision of 21st century US forces: the 19th century British Army. In Foreign Affairs article (hat tip: MIG), Boot argues that while Iraq has shown US forces to be masters at blitzkrieg, they were less than adept at handling guerilla war. To remedy that, he suggests looking to the past. Whether or not the United States is an "empire" today, it is a country with interests to protect and enemies to fight all over the world. There is no finer example of how to do this cheaply and effectively than the British Empire. In 1898, it maintained only 331,000 soldiers and sailors and spent only 2.4 percent of its GDP on defense, considerably less than the 3.9 percent the United States spends today. This puny investment was enough to safeguard an empire that covered 25 percent of the globe. ... The old British Army, he says enjoyed four advantages: a technological edge over their native opponents; an army optimized for colonial fighti...
Egypt Egyptian Special Operations have arrested four leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo. According to the Washington Post : Abdel Moneim Mahmoud, a senior Brotherhood member, said police arrested Essam el-Erian, one of the organization's most senior members, and three other leaders during raids on several homes in Cairo. "They took them to police cars waiting outside surrounded by masked members of the Egyptian special operations forces," Mahmoud said. Police also detained more than 130 Brotherhood members in Cairo and outside the capital, said Abdel-Galil el-Sharnoubi, editor of the group's Web site. ... Although banned since 1954, the Muslim Brotherhood is probably Egypt's largest opposition movement and the government tolerates some of its activities. Fifteen Brotherhood members hold seats in parliament, having been elected as independents. The question is why. Ha'aretz suggests the arrests are not necessarily extraordinary: just...
The Prism of War 2 Bernard Lewis's Freedom and Justice in the Modern Middle East illustrates of how the significance of an event can be overlooked until it is too late. (Hat tip: MIG) He describes in exceptionally lucid prose the consensual roots of classical Islam and concepts which, although a little strange to Western eyes, are the functional equivalents of Liberty and Equality. This older, "libertarian" Islam died by slow degrees, first strangled by Oriental despotism, later by crude attempts at modernization to overtake the West in pursuit of which the Arab world finally imbibed in the worst poisons of Europe. The second stage of political upheaval in the Middle East can be dated with precision. In 1940, the government of France surrendered to Nazi Germany. .. the governors of the French colonies and dependencies were free to decide: they could stay with Vichy ... Vichy was the choice of most ... this meant that Syria-Lebanon was wide open to the Nazis, wh...
The Prism of War Michael Yon's Battle for Mosul (he is an author currently in Iraq) is an account of 25th ID operations in that city. His account begins with the end of the Second Battle of Falluja, in late 2004, when "displaced fighters streamed from their nests in Falluja, scuttled into hiding throughout Iraq, and began spreading the disease of violence. Many landed in Mosul." For a time, they rampaged through the city and at one point infiltrated a suicide bomber into an American base, killing 22. They didn't spare the civilians either, and after killing every policeman they could, started on the firemen. Yon focuses his story on the 1/24 of 25 ID, the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment "Deuce Four". As they hunted down the enemy, the men of the 1/24th were aware the enemy was also seeking them, in particular aiming to ram car bombs, known as VIEDs, into their Stryker armored vehicles, capable of killing everyone aboard. Then Yon describes an incide...
The Western Road A Washingon Post article describes two separate engagements in Iraq in which 24 insurgents were killed. The first involved ground and air attacks which killed a dozen men believed associated with Abu Musab Zarqawi. unidentified U.S. forces traced what were believed to be members of a Zarqawi cell to a tent and a shed in the desert of the remote, largely uncontrolled Qaim district, east of the Syrian border, the U.S. military said. Twelve of the men were killed in firefights and at least one airstrike, the military said. A 6-year-old Iraqi girl was wounded. Not far from Qaim, a US helicopter was damaged by ground fire from unidentified forces engaged in fighting near Husabayah. No Americans were killed. ( Qaim was formerly the site of a uranium yellowcake plant.) The Washington Post says that "the helicopter crew had been monitoring a gun battle between two unidentified groups when the battling sides spotted the helicopter and turned their fire on it...
Notes From All Over David Horowitz and Ben Johnson at Frontpage (hat tip: MIG) ask "who killed Marla Ruzicka?", the activist who was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq. Horowitz doesn't answer the question but suggests that at the time of her death Ruzicka had parted, or was on the way to parting company with the radical Left. In the last year of her short life, she had moved away from the agendas and organizations of extreme left that had originally directed her life path to the war zones in order to establish a path of her own. In her new endeavor she guided partly by her genuine concern for the defenseless victims of the conflict and partly by political forces that continued to exploit those concerns. Unlike Rachel Corrie, who lost her life in Gaza serving a solidarity movement with terrorists and who consequently became a martyr for the anti-American cause, Marla Ruzicka was respected and mourned not only by the left but by supporters of the war who...