RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://melaniephillips.com/justice-and-evil

By chance, I happened to read William Shawcross’s new book Justice and the Enemy: Nuremberg, 9/11 and the Trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed straight after finally catching up with Deborah Lipstadt’s The Eichmann Trial, which was published last year.

The congruence between these two fine books is striking. Both consider the impact and challenges of trying to administer civilian justice to people accused of crimes whose very nature and scope lie well outside the confines of normal democratic societies. Separated by some five decades, the question of how to confront evil through justice remains problematic – but attitudes have sharply diverged.

Everything about the iconic 1961 trial in Israel of former SS Lieutenant Adolf Eichmann was controversial. In a cloak and dagger operation described by Lipstadt (who also shows how inattentive Israeli officials nearly scuppered the whole thing), Eichmann was captured in Argentina by Israeli agents and spirited away to Jerusalem where he stood trial.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

“Giving up the narrative means giving up the battle and eventually the war. The left’s strength is terminology shifting. That is its ball. When it manages to make its terminology shift go mainstream, then it sinks a ball into the basket and scores a point. It has been scoring a lot of those points since the 1930’s. We haven’t. That is why we may win elections, but we don’t really change things.”

Modern political warfare is a battlefield in which small battles give way to the larger conflict for national rule and succession. In feudal times such conflicts might be settled with a coalition of lords aligned one way or another. In the modern colonial territories between the Atlantic and the Pacific, populated by a fragmented collection of states, races, religions and classes, the coalitions are assembled out of those groups.

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2046/In-Jihad-We-Trust.aspx
The AP reports:
A trend of Afghan treachery that has taken the lives of six American troops over the past week is poisoning a key ingredient in the international coalition’s formula for winding down the decade-long war: trust.
Not just “a” key ingredient. “Trust,” according to former Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, is the “coin of the realm” in Afghanistan. “Lose the people’s trust,” he wrote in early 2009, “and we lose the war.” That was non-sense then and it is non-sense now. It is little wonder, then, that the COIN war the US has led all these year in pursuit of Afghan trust has failed so miserably.
Why? From the archive, February 19, 2009:
The buzzword on Afghanistan is “trust.”

Having routed the Taliban, liberated millions, midwived a (Sharia-supreme) constitution, assisted in elections, propped up a government and routed the Taliban some more, all the United States needs now to win victory in Afghanistan is to win the “trust” of the Afghan people.

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/purim-all-over-again/  Purim All Over AgainBy: Yedidya Atlas  Some 2,000 years ago, the Jewish people in Exile in the vast empire of Persia faced a plot engineered by the king’s chief minister to annihilate the Jews. The salvation of the Jews at that time is commemorated since then by Jews everywhere as the Jewish holiday of […]

THE LATE EZER WEIZMAN, WAR HERO AND PRESIDENT OF ISRAEL DID THAT FOR JIMMY CARTER WHO WENT ON TO LOSE IN A LANDSLIDE…..RSK http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/peres-obama-is-a-great-president-security-ties-are-the-best-we-ve-ever-had-1.416030 Israeli President Shimon Peres on Thursday said that U.S. President Barack Obama is “a great president and a great friend of Israel,” and that security cooperation between the U.S. and Israel […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203753704577255322862397942.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

Nobody could believe North Korea’s luck when its soccer squad scored a goal off mighty Brazil at their 2010 World Cup match-up in South Africa. So we’ll forgive Kim Jong Eun if he feels like the diplomatic equivalent of Robinhood for the point he just won against the Obama Administration.

On Wednesday, North Korea announced that it would stop enriching uranium, suspend its nuclear tests and allow U.N. nuclear inspectors to inspect its nuclear facilities (or at least those it chooses to declare).

“Christmas and Christianity,” Dec. 24, 2004:

“Those who are alarmed by the extent of religious belief in this country have roused themselves to make the so-called wall of separation between church and state both higher and firmer. . . . They would be well advised to let matters alone. We have been a free country even though “In God We Trust” is printed on our dollar bills, even though sessions of Congress begin with a prayer, and even though chaplains paid for by our tax dollars are part of our military forces. Our freedom does not depend on eliminating these acknowledgments of the power of religion; it relies instead on the fact that for many generations we have embraced a secular government operating in a religious culture.That embrace will be weakened, not strengthened, by silly attacks on religiosity, stimulating the spiritual to question the seriousness of people who profess a concern for civil liberties.”

Editor’s note: James Q. Wilson, who died Friday at age 80, was one of America’s most consequential political scientists and a frequent Journal contributor. An editorial appears nearby, and here are some excerpts from his Journal writing over the years:

“A Life in the Public Interest,” Sept. 21, 2009:

The view that we know less than we thought we knew about how to change the human condition came, in time, to be called neoconservatism. Many of the writers [for The Public Interest], myself included, disliked the term because we did not think we were conservative, neo or paleo. (I voted for John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey and worked in the latter’s presidential campaign.) It would have been better if we had been called policy skeptics; that is, people who thought it was hard, though not impossible, to make useful and important changes in public policy.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/292496/it-s-pity-somebody-has-win-andrew-c-mccarthy
It’s a pity that they can’t both lose. But if they have to savage someone, better each other than us.

We have no national interest in overthrowing Assad.

Asked about the Iran-Iraq war that stretched for eight ghastly years after breaking out in 1980, Henry Kissinger is said to have quipped, “It’s a pity they both can’t lose.”

The pity is that we have lost that exquisite wisdom concerning our national interest, despite a two-decade road to hell paved by good intentions — at least compassionate intentions — from Kosovo to Kandahar. If that isn’t clear enough from the latest killings of American soldiers stuck like sitting ducks between the Afghan Taliban and other Afghan Islamists, all doubt is removed by Elliott Abrams, the longtime Republican foreign-policy solon who served as a top National Security Council official during the heady days of the Bush “Freedom Agenda.” “Can there be a group anywhere in the world today more disappointed in United States foreign policy than those fighting the Syrian regime?” Abrams, a distinguished public servant whom I admire, asked this week in a post on the Corner.

Yeah: How about the American people?

Our entanglement in Afghanistan is now reduced to pleading with Taliban decapitators to come to the negotiating table while the Afghan forces our soldiers train and the Afghan civilians our soldiers protect kill our men and women — and while officials of the government we prop up echo their clerics’ exhortations to violent jihad until our infidel forces vacate the country.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/292510/die-die-foreigners-mark-steyn

Say what you like about Afghans, but they’re admirably straightforward. The mobs outside the bases enflamed over the latest Western affront to their exquisitely refined cultural sensitivities couldn’t put it any plainer:

“Die, die, foreigners!”

And foreigners do die. USAF Lieutenant Colonel John Loftis, 44, and Army Major Robert Marchanti II, 48, lost their lives not on some mission out on the far horizon in wild tribal lands in the dead of night but in the offices of the Afghan Interior Ministry. In a “secure room” that required a numerical code to access. Gunned down by an Afghan “intelligence officer.” Who then departed the scene of the crime unimpeded by any of his colleagues.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/03/02/obama_likens_himself_to_gandhi_and_nelson_mandela.html

GEEZ…NEXT HE’LL SOLVE THE MIDDLE EAST BY PARTING THE RED SEA…..RSK

Obama Likens Himself To Gandhi And Nelson Mandela

“The civil rights movement was hard. Winning the vote for women was hard. Making sure that workers had some basic protections was hard,” President Obama said at a fundraiser while talking about how difficult it is to bring about “change” in politics.

“Around the world, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, what they did was hard. It takes time. It takes more than a single term. It takes more than a single president. It takes more than a single individual,” Obama said.

“What it takes is ordinary citizens who keep believe, who are committed to fighting and pushing and inching this country closer and closer to our highest ideals. And I said in 2008, ‘that I am not a perfect man and I will not be a perfect president.’ But I promised you, but I promised you, I promised you back then that I would always tell you what I believe. I would always tell you where I stood,” he also said at a fundraiser in NYC.