Space Exploration: Real Reasons and Acceptable Reasons

 

Michael D. Griffin, Administrator

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Quasar Award Dinner

Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership

19 Jan 2007

Thank you for having me here tonight; I think most of you know that this is one of my favorite places. I’ve been coming to Houston and the Johnson Space Center for over thirty years, and over time I’ve come to know the area and the people quite well. So it is a real treat to be honored by those of you who are here tonight.

I must say that while I appreciate the honor, I think it is misplaced. All I’ve really done is to pick very good people, put them in their jobs, and then try to make sure we’re all going in the same direction. Some of them are people that you know, people like Mike Coats, who has returned to Houston as the JSC Director, or Skip Hatfield, who’s running the Orion project, or Jeff Hanley, our Constellation program manager. These are people that I believe can follow in the footsteps of folks like Glynn Lunney and Chris Kraft. They will become new legends that yet another generation will look up to, as we do to the Apollo generation.

I had a few things I wanted to talk about tonight that don’t have anything to do with this award, and because you’re a captive audience, I’m going to do it.

We have a very interesting conundrum at NASA, and we have been spending a lot of time lately thinking about it. In national polling, NASA as an American institution enjoys a hugely positive approval rating, broadly in the range of 65-75%, an amazing result for a government agency. But when you ask people why, they are not really sure, or at least cannot express it clearly. When you ask people what we do, beyond the broad category of “space”, again they aren’t quite sure. And if you ask them what we’re planning to do, they’re even less sure. But they know that they love NASA. So NASA has what in the marketing discipline would be called very strong brand loyalty, even though people are not familiar in detail with what we do or why they like it.

I have been trying to understand why this is so, because it is important to our agency’s future. If we don’t have public support that is both strong and specific, the things we want to do, and believe to be important, will not survive. There are many competing priorities for public funding, and always will be. So it really is important for us to communicate to the public how we’re spending the fifteen cents per day that the average American contributes to NASA, because there are other places where that money can go.

I’ve reached the point where I am completely convinced that if NASA were to disappear tomorrow, if the American space program were to disappear tomorrow, if we never put up another Hubble, never put another human being in space, people would be profoundly distraught. Americans would feel less than themselves. They would feel that our best days are behind us. They would feel that we have lost something, something that matters. And yet they would not know why.

This is an interesting conclusion, and so I’ve thought about it a good bit, and I’ve come believe that the reason is, we in the space business don’t talk about it in the right way.

If you ask why we’re going back to the Moon and, later, beyond, you can get a variety of answers. The President, quite correctly said that we do it for purposes of scientific discovery, economic benefit and national security. I’ve given speeches on each of those topics, and I think these reasons can be clearly shown to be true. And Presidential Science Advisor Jack Marburger has said that questions about space exploration come down to whether or not we want to bring the solar system within mankind’s sphere of economic influence. I think that is extraordinarily well put.

These reasons have in common the fact that they can be discussed within the circles of public policy making. They can be debated on their merits, on logical principles. They can be justified. They are what I am going to call tonight “Acceptable Reasons.” You can attach whatever importance you want to any of those factors, and some citizens will weight some factors more and some will weight them less, but most of us would agree that they are, indeed, relevant factors.

But who talks like that? Who talks about doing something for purposes of scientific or economic gain or national security other than in policy circles? If anybody asked Lindberg why he crossed the Atlantic – and many did –he never indicated that he personally flew the Atlantic to win the Orteig prize. His backers might have done it in part for that, but Lindberg did it for other reasons.

If you ask Burt Rutan why he designed and built Voyager, and why Dick Rutan and Jeanna Yeager flew it around the world, it wasn’t for any money involved, it was because it was one of the last unconquered feats in aviation. If you ask Burt and his backer Paul Allen why they developed a vehicle to win the X-Prize, it wasn’t for the money. They spent twice as much as they made.

I think we all know why people do some of these things. They are well-captured in many famous phrases. When Sir George Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, he said “Because it is there.” He didn’t say that it was for economic gain.

We know these reasons, and tonight I will call them “Real Reasons”. Real Reasons are intuitive and compelling to all of us, but they’re not immediately logical. They’re exactly the opposite of Acceptable Reasons, which are eminently logical but neither intuitive nor emotionally compelling. The Real Reasons we do things like exploring space involve competitiveness, curiosity and monument building. So let’s talk about them.

First, most of us want to be, both as individuals and as societies, the first, the best, the most, in at least some activity. We want to stand out. This kind of behavior is rooted in our genes. We are today the survivors of people who wanted to outperform others. Without question that can be carried to an unhealthy degree; we’ve all seen more wars than we like. But because this trait can be taken too far doesn’t mean that we can do without it completely. Competitiveness is rooted in the genes of successful people.

As to curiosity, who among us does not know the wonder and mystery and awe and magic of seeing something, even on television, never seen before, an experience brought back to us by a robotic space mission? And how much grander when one of our own, a representative of other human beings, is there to see it for herself? Who doesn’t know that feeling? The urge to know what’s over the next hill is one of the most common feelings we share, whatever our backgrounds.

We like to do what I’ll call monument building. We want to leave something behind for the next generation, or the generations after that, to show them that we were here, to show them what we did with our time here. This is the impulse behind cathedrals and pyramids and many, many other things. We could have done a lot of different things to honor George Washington. But what was done, was that in the early 1800’s people started to work on a 550-foot high obelisk to honor him.

But it is not only George Washington whom the monument honors; it says fully as much about the people who built it. And that’s okay. It is my observation that when we do things for Real Reasons as opposed to Acceptable Reasons, we produce our highest achievements. The people who do things for Real Reasons, and who know it, are also the ones who are the most successful by the standards embodied in Acceptable Reasons.

All of you in the space business know this, whether you realize it or not, because none of us is in this business for the money to be made. But I believe we see it most obviously, in our society, in sports. In my own sport, golf, certain people have over the decades risen to the very top of the game, and stayed there. People like Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, or, today, Tiger Woods. In other sports, people like Wayne Gretzky or Michael Jordan come to mind.

What do these people have in common and what is the lesson for the rest of us? The lesson is that they became legends because they wanted to be the very best at what they do. They wanted to leave something behind them, lasting records in their sport. And they wanted to do it because the challenge was there. Who thinks that any of them played, or kept playing, for the money?

I think that tells us something. When you do things for Real Reasons instead of Acceptable Reasons, you have a chance to obtain Real Success. And so we have a conundrum. The cultural ethos in America today requires us to have Acceptable Reasons for what we do. We must have reasons that pass analytical muster, that offer a favorable cost/benefit ratio, that can be logically defended. We tend to dismiss out of hand reasons that are emotional, or are value-driven in ways that we can’t capture on a spreadsheet. But, Acceptable Reasons alone don’t take us where we really want to go.

In my view, the space business more than most other endeavors suffers from the fact that the most important, the best, and the most basic reasons for doing it are Real Reasons and not Acceptable Reasons. The Acceptable Reasons – economic benefit, scientific discovery, national security – are, in fact, completely correct. But they comprise a derived rationale, and are not the truly compelling reasons. And again, who talks like that, about anything that really matters to them?

Why in today’s culture do we focus so much on requiring Acceptable Reasons? Only a couple of generations ago, it was not so much this way.

One observation I would make is that in the shaping of policy, the kinds of things I’ve cited as Real Reasons are “right-brain” things; they’re intuitive, subjective and difficult to quantify. And they are running around loose in a left-brain world! All of us here tonight got where we are by being analytical and objective and very left-brain oriented. Spaceflight cannot be successfully accomplished without these traits. And so I think we tend not to pay appropriate respect to the deeper parts of human nature which are intuitive and qualitative. This one-sided focus isn’t always to our benefit. In a very important sense, we’re not the right people to make the arguments as to why we should be encouraged to do what we do!

Some of you here tonight must, as I have, read Norman Mailer’s book from 1970, entitled “Of a Fire on the Moon.” Now Mailer was a unique and controversial novelist. I think of him, in the sense that I was just talking about, as quite possibly the ultimate right-brain kind of guy. And he wrote about Apollo in a very, very interesting book, but from a perspective I’ve not seen another writer choose. He didn’t write about the engineering of it, or the operational aspects, or the astronauts who flew the missions, or anything like that. He wrote about what people were feeling, and the power and majesty of the event, and the nature of the people who would engage in such a thing. It’s a compelling story, but it is not like any other book about the space program that you will read. That’s the kind of person, that’s the kind of work, that we need to exemplify the Real Reasons for what we do.

Real Reasons are not amenable to cost/benefit analysis. I’m reminded of the famous quote “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” by the character Lord Darlington in Oscar Wilde’s play “Lady Windermere’s Fan.” It’s one of my favorites. Well, in today’s America it’s smart, it’s popular, it’s clever to be a cynic. And a certain amount of it is appropriate; a healthy skepticism of bold claims is necessary. But too much skepticism causes us to deny a part of what we are.

Real Reasons are old fashioned. How many of us grew up reading Tom Swift, or Jack Armstrong, All American Boy? Or other similar books stories? Not great literature, for sure, but they exemplified many of the values I think we like to see in people: inventiveness, competitiveness, boldness, and a sense of good feeling about what it was to be an American, in very simplistic ways but ones which hit close to home.

To read those books was to understand, even as a child, that achievement is to be valued, and is not something to be set aside. So, how do we talk about our achievers today? Other than in the field of sports, we talk about today’s achievers as “geeks” and “workaholics”. People are advised to lead “balanced lives”. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t led a balanced life. But people who want to accomplish something are not balanced. And they are geeks, and workaholics. I think we owe our country to people who were like that. I don’t know that one could say that folks like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson led balanced lives. Any rational cost/benefit analysis would tell you to stay out of a quarrel with the mother country, and let other people deal with it! Who today would talk about pledging “their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor” to a cause? Today we are uncomfortable with such value discussions, and I think it’s a shame.

Now, I talked earlier about building monuments, and I mentioned the cathedrals and the pyramids. Cathedral builders knew what I am talking about tonight. They knew the awe and the mystery of their God. They built monuments to him, and also to themselves, just as the Washington Monument speaks to the people who built it as well as to the person for whom it was built. But they wanted to build the best cathedrals, and if you study cathedral building from a civil engineering perspective, you can see the evolution of that discipline, and you will be impressed. You should be.

When I arrived here tonight, I was told that this very lectern from which I am speaking is the one from which John Kennedy gave the speech you saw earlier on tonight’s video. Within the space business, Kennedy is probably best remembered for his “Man, Moon, Decade” speech (which, by the way, is also a classic of program management). And it’s a great speech. But the JFK quote about space that I love more than anything in the world, because it evokes exactly the things I’m talking about here tonight, was the one he gave from this lecturn at Rice University in September of 1962, when he said “We choose to go to the Moon, and to do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” I’ll say it again: “not because they are easy, but because they are hard”.

The cathedral builders knew that reason. They were doing something that required a far greater percentage of their gross domestic product than we will ever put into the space business, and they knew it was hard. We know it too. We look back across 600 or 800 years of time, and we are still awed by what they did. What is it that Americans make sure to see when they go to Europe? Who goes to Europe and does not, at some point, see the cathedrals? We are still awed across the centuries by what they accomplished.

To me, the irony is that when we do hard things for the right reasons – for the Real Reasons – we end up actually satisfying all the goals of the Acceptable Reasons. And we can see that, too, in the cathedrals, if we look for it.

What did the cathedral builders get? They didn’t just build cathedrals and then stop there. They began to develop civil engineering, the core discipline for any society if it wishes to have anything more than thatched huts. They learned how to build high walls and to have them stand up straight. They learned how to put a roof across a long span. They learned which materials would work, and which ones would not. And by finding the limits on how high walls could be, how broad roof spans could be, and what materials wouldn’t work, they created the incentive to solve those problems, so that they could build things beyond cathedrals, so that they could, fundamentally, build Western civilization.

They gained societal advantages that were probably even more important than learning how to build walls and roofs. They learned to embrace deferred gratification, not just on an individual level where it is a crucial element of maturity, but on a societal level where it is equally vital. The people who started the cathedrals didn’t live to finish them; such projects required decades. The society as a whole had to be dedicated to the completion of those projects. To be able to do that for cathedrals was to be able to do it in other areas as well. We owe Western civilization as we know it today to that kind of thinking – the ability to have a constancy of purpose across years and decades.

The medieval builders formed guilds, establishing professional trades beyond that of agriculture. Now, agriculture is at the root of human technology. Nothing good happens to human beings without getting beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and agriculture is that first step. But the second step is to be able to build physical works that didn’t previously exist. The organization and systemization of that in Western society today began in medieval Europe, with the cathedral builders. They learned how to organize large projects, a key to modern society. And, probably most important of all, the cathedrals had to be, for decades at a time, a focus of civic accomplishment and energy. A society, a nation, a civilization, needs such foci.

It is my contention that the products of our space program are today’s cathedrals. The space program addresses the Real Reasons why humans do things. It satisfies the desire to compete, but in a safe and productive manner, rather than in a harmful manner. It speaks abundantly to our sense of human curiosity, of wonder and awe at the unknown. Who doesn’t look at a picture of the Crab Nebula, synthesized from visible-light Hubble photographs and Chandra x-ray images, and say “Oh my God?” Who can look at that and not experience a sense of wonder?

Who can watch people assembling the greatest engineering project in the history of mankind – the International Space Station – and not wonder at the ability of people to conceive and to execute that project? And it also addresses our sense of monument building, of leaving something behind for future generations. Not for nothing, thirty-one years after its opening, is the National Air and Space Museum still the most heavily visited museum in Washington DC. And what do people come to see? They come to see early airplanes and Apollo spacecraft.

Of course the space program also addresses the Acceptable Reasons I’ve mentioned. In the end this is imperative. Societies will not succeed in the long run if they place their resources and their efforts in enterprises that, for whatever reason, don’t provide concrete value to that society.

But my point earlier is that if things are done for the Real Reasons that motivate humans, they also serve the Acceptable Reasons. In that sense, in the practical sense, space really is about spin-offs, as many have argued. But it’s not about spin-offs like Teflon and Tang and Velcro as the public is so often told – and which in fact did not come from the space program. And it’s not about spin-offs in the form of better heart monitors or cheaper prices for liquid oxygen for hospitals. Yes, you get those things and many more, and they are real benefits. But that’s not the right level on which to view the matter. The real spin-offs are at a higher level. We need to look at a broader landscape.

What is the economic value to a society of upgrading the precision to which the entire industrial base of that society works? Anyone who wants to put together space artifacts, who wants to bid on a competition for space artifacts, who wants to be a subcontractor or supplier, or who even wants to supply nuts, bolts and screws to the space industry, must work to a higher level of precision than human beings had to do before the space industry came along. And that fact absolutely resonates throughout our entire industrial base. What is the value of that? I can’t calculate it, but I know it’s there.

What is the scientific value of discovering the origins of our universe? Or of discovering that literally 95% of the universe consists of dark energy or dark matter, terms for things that we as yet know nothing about? But they make up 95% of our universe. Is it even conceivable that one day we won’t learn to harness them? As cavemen learned to harness fire, as people two centuries ago learned to harness electricity, we will learn to harness these new things. It was just a few years ago that we discovered them, and we would not have done so without the space program. What is the value of knowledge like that? I cannot begin to guess. A thousand years from now there will be human beings who don’t have to guess; they will know, and they will know we gave this to them.

Let’s think for a moment about national security. What is the value to the United States of being involved in enterprises which lift up human hearts everywhere when we do them? What is the value to the United States of being engaged in such projects, doing the kinds of things that other people want to do with us, as partners? What is the value to the United States of being a leader in such efforts, in projects in which every nation capable of doing so wants to take part? I would submit that the highest possible form of national security, well above having better guns and bombs than everyone else, well above being so strong that no one wants to fight with us, is the security which comes from being a nation which does the kinds of things that make others want to work with us to do them. What security could we ever ask that would be better than that, and what give more of it to us than the space program?

What do you have to do, how do you have to behave, to do space projects? You have to value hard work. You have to live by excellence, or die from the lack of it. You have to understand and practice both leadership and followership, and both are important. You have to build partnerships; leaders need partners and allies, as well as followers. You have to be willing to defer gratification, to spend years doing what we do, and then stand back and see if it works. We learn how to leave a legacy, because we work on things that not all of us will live to see – and we know it. And we learn about accepting the challenge of the unknown, where we might fail, and to do so not without fear or apprehension, but to master it and to control it and to go anyway.

These are lessons that we all need to learn, and they are lessons the space business teaches us. And I would submit that our country is a better place for those who have learned those lessons.

These are the values that the space program brings. This is why it must be supported. And this is why, although we don’t acknowledge it, we don’t admit it and most of us don’t understand it, this is why if we didn’t have a space program, we Americans would feel less than ourselves. We can never allow that to happen.

Thank you.

Turnaround in Baghdad

 

BY NIBRAS KAZIMI
January 25, 2007

There has been a flurry of press reports recently about insurgents battling American and Iraqi security forces on Haifa Street in Baghdad, and around the rural town of Buhruz in Diyala Province. These same insurgents also claimed to have shot down a Black Hawk helicopter near Buhruz. At the same time, the Americans and Iraqis are declaring a major victory as evidenced by the increased number of dead or captured militants, and the uncovering of massive weapons caches. So, what is going on?

What needs to be understood is the central role that Al Qaeda — or more accurately its successor organization, a group called the Islamic State of Iraq — is playing on these fronts and the diminishing role of all the other insurgent groups.

The wider Sunni insurgency — the groups beyond Al Qaeda — is being slowly, and surely, defeated. The average insurgent today feels demoralized, disillusioned, and hunted. Those who have not been captured yet are opting for a quieter life outside of Iraq. Al Qaeda continues to grow for the time being as it cannibalizes the other insurgent groups and absorbs their most radical and hardcore fringes into its fold. The Baathists, who had been critical in spurring the initial insurgency, are becoming less and less relevant, and are drifting without a clear purpose following the hanging of their idol, Saddam Hussein. Rounding out this changing landscape is that Al Qaeda itself is getting a serious beating as the Americans improve in intelligence gathering and partner with more reliable Iraqi forces.

In other words, battling the insurgency now essentially means battling Al Qaeda. This is a major accomplishment.

Last October, my sources began telling me about rumblings among the insurgent strategists suggesting that their murderous endeavor was about to run out of steam. This sense of fatigue began registering among mid-level insurgent commanders in late December, and it has devolved to the rank and file since then. The insurgents have begun to feel that the tide has turned against them.

In many ways, the timing of this turnaround was inadvertent, coming at the height of political and bureaucratic mismanagement in Washington and Baghdad. A number of factors contributed to this turnaround, but most important was sustained, stay-the-course counterinsurgency pressure. At the end of the day, more insurgents were ending up dead or behind bars, which generated among them a sense of despair and a feeling that the insurgency was a dead end.

The Washington-initiated "surge" will speed-up the ongoing process of defeating the insurgency. But one should not consider the surge responsible for the turnaround. The lesson to be learned is to keep killing the killers until they realize their fate.

General David Petraeus, whom President Bush has tasked to quell the insurgency, spent the last year and a half updating the U.S. Army and Marine Corps's field manual for counterinsurgency. There's plenty of fancy theory there, as well as case studies from Iraq. I don't know how much of the new manual is informed by General Petraeus' two notable failures in Iraq: building a brittle edifice of government in Mosul that collapsed at the first challenging puff, and the inadequate training and equipping of the Iraqi army due to corruption and mismanagement.

General Petraeus walked away from those failures unscathed and hence unaccountable. He re-enters the picture with major expectations. Most commentators, especially those who begrudge attributing any success to Mr. Bush, will lionize the general as he takes credit for this turnaround and speeds it up. Let's hope that he has enough sense to allow what works to keep working and to improve on it, rather than trying to put his own stamp on things and test out the theories he's developed.

The best way to use the extra troops would be to protect the Sunni neighborhoods of Baghdad from Shiite death squads. This will give an added incentive for Sunnis to turn against the militants operating in their midst. For most Sunnis, the insurgency has come to be about communal survival, rather than communal revival. They no longer harbor fantasies of recapturing power. They are on the run and are losing the turf war with the Shiites for Baghdad.

Sunni sectarian attacks, usually conducted by jihadists, finally provoked the Shiites to turn to their most brazen militias — the ones who would not heed Ayatollah Sistani's call for pacifism — to conduct painful reprisals against Sunnis, usually while wearing official military fatigues and carrying government issued weapons. The Sunnis came to realize that they were no longer facing ragtag fighters, but rather they were confronting a state with resources and with a monopoly on lethal force. The Sunnis realized that by harboring insurgents they were inviting retaliation that they could do little to defend against.

Sadly, it took many thousands of young Sunnis getting abducted by death squads for the Sunnis to understand that in a full-fledged civil war, they would likely lose badly and be evicted from Baghdad. I believe that the Sunnis and insurgents are now war weary, and that this is a turnaround point in the campaign to stabilize Iraq.

Still, major bombings will continue for many years, for Al Qaeda will remain oblivious to all evidence of the insurgency's eventual defeat. The Baathists, and jihadist groups like Ansar al-Sunna, the Islamic Army of Iraq, and the 1920 Revolution Brigades, may be collapsing due to aimlessness and despair, but Al Qaeda still enjoys the clarity of zealotry and fantasy. Right now, they are arm-twisting other jihadist groups to submit to them and are also taking credit for the large-scale fighting that continues in Iraq.

Al Qaeda will continue the fight long after the Iraqi battlefield becomes inhospitable to their cause, and they will only realize the futility of their endeavor after they are defeated on the wider Middle East battlefield and elsewhere in the world.

As the wider insurgency recedes, the Iraqi state will gain some breathing space to implement the rule of law and dissolve the death squads. A society that sets about rebuilding itself can endure the type of attacks mounted by Al Qaeda, although they are painful.

Counterinsurgency strategists will argue about the precise moment when this turnabout occurred and will try to replicate the victory elsewhere. Pundits will argue about who or what policy was responsible for it, a matter eventually to be settled by historians. Victory has a way of making everyone associated with it golden, and many will claim right of place. Defeat has a way of turning everyone associated with it to ash, and many will disclaim responsibility for it.

Let me state the lesson of this turnabout clearly lest it be obscured amidst the euphoria: Never mind who takes credit, kill or capture more of the killers to ensure victory.

Mr. Kazimi can be reached at nibraska@yahoo.com

A Moon Full of Opportunity

 

Paul D. Spudis
Monday, January 22, 2007

NASA gave six reasons for going back to the Moon when only one was needed

Note this article first appeared online at the Space Review.

The 2nd Space Exploration Conference held December 2006 in Houston outlined several reasons for a human return to the Moon. Remarkably, some complain that the reason for going to the Moon is still unclear. Possibly the sheer scope of the envisioned surface activities diffuses its impact. Almost 200 activities were described for the Moon, grouped under six major "themes" (as the agency calls them), including settlement, global cooperation, science and preparation for Mars. This diffusion is both deliberate and unavoidable.

From the beginning, there was dissention within NASA and the broader space community about the meaning of the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE). Was it a call for a permanent moon base? Was it all about sending humans to Mars? Perhaps it was really a stalking horse to terminate human spaceflight completely. The alt-space community whined about it being another big government boondoggle. The Mars Society whined about the focus on the Moon. The scientific community just whined. Much of this confusion stems from preconceived interpretations about the new policy and has been exacerbated by resulting changes to the status quo. This confusion, nurtured by design or misinformation, must be corrected and the Vision's direction clearly understood.

When NASA's Lunar Architecture Team (LAT) began to collate ideas submitted by the community about what we should do on the Moon, they had to reconcile many disparate thoughts and concepts and weld them into a coherent rationale. This process began with a workshop in April 2006 that drew together a wide spectrum of attendees, all bringing their own backgrounds and agendas to the table. Surprisingly, a great deal of convergence came out of this meeting, with human settlement and preparation for Mars emerging as the primary goals of lunar return.

Refinement and expansion of these two themes and four others (science, economic expansion, international cooperation, and public engagement) took the remainder of 2006, with the results being presented in Houston. In conjunction with the unveiling of six themes, NASA released a list (memorably called the "spreadsheet of death" by a colleague of mine) of 181 specific lunar activities, classified and rated by discipline and theme. It was never intended that all of these activities necessarily be implemented or even attempted by NASA; the intent was to demonstrate the scope and breadth of possible activities enabled by the presence of humans and robots on the Moon. It was necessary to examine all possible tasks and events in order to assess how well the emerging architectural details fit the potential list.

The net effect of this work was captured by Bismarck's memorable phrase: "Law (read: lunar architecture) is like sausage – if you like it, don't watch it being made." The sheer scope of the listed tasks and their collection into six themes led some to the conclusion that we really have no purpose for going back to the Moon and that this effort is an attempt by NASA to retrofit a rationale on a goal that in fact, has none.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The LAT report is simply the result of the agency attempting to satisfy as many of its constituencies as possible within the overall framework provided by the VSE. So then, what was intended as the reason for lunar return by the architects of the Vision for Space Exploration? What, if any, are the objective reasons for a return to the Moon?

For answers, read the Vision policy documents, including both the original speech of President Bush and a strangely neglected (but highly significant) elaboration on it by Presidential Science Advisor John Marburger. The Presidential speech announcing the Vision three years ago is remarkably clear as to our purpose in returning to the Moon. President Bush said:

Beginning no later than 2008, we will send a series of robotic missions to the lunar surface to research and prepare for future human exploration. Using the Crew Exploration Vehicle, we will undertake extended human missions to the Moon as early as 2015, with the goal of living and working there for increasingly extended periods.

Also:

Returning to the Moon is an important step for our space program. Establishing an extended human presence on the Moon could vastly reduce the costs of further space exploration, making possible ever more ambitious missions. … the Moon is home to abundant resources. Its soil contains raw materials that might be harvested and processed into rocket fuel or breathable air. We can use our time on the Moon to develop and test new approaches and technologies and systems that will allow us to function in other, more challenging environments. The Moon is a logical step toward further progress and achievement.

From these statements, it is clear that the mission of going to the Moon is one of development – developing new techniques, procedures, and technologies, all with the aim of making spaceflight easier, routine and more capable.

If this wasn't clear enough, the speech of John Marburger two years later clarified our ultimate objectives:

President Bush's Vision also declares the will to lead in space, but it renders the ultimate goal more explicit. And that goal is even grander. The ultimate goal is not to impress others, or merely to explore our planetary system, but to use accessible space for the benefit of humankind. It is a goal that is not confined to a decade or a century. Nor is it confined to a single nearby destination, or to a fleeting dash to plant a flag. The idea is to begin preparing now for a future in which the material trapped in the Sun's vicinity is available for incorporation into our way of life.

And:

We have known for a long time that a huge gap separates the objects trapped by the gravity of our star, the Sun, and everything else. … Phenomena on our side of the interstellar gap, in what we call the Solar System, are potentially amenable to direct investigation and manipulation through physical contact, and can reasonably be described as falling within humanity's economic sphere of influence. As I see it, questions about the Vision boil down to whether we want to incorporate the Solar System in our economic sphere, or not.

The administration clearly stated that we are going to the Moon to learn how to use what we find in space to create new space-faring capability. The goal isn't simply to return to the Moon or even merely to send humans to Mars, but rather to extend human reach beyond low Earth orbit and ultimately to all possible destinations beyond.

The Vision for Space Exploration is different from any previous space policy. By design it is incremental and cumulative. We make "steady progress" no matter how slowly we may be forced to proceed at any given time by fiscal constraints. Small steps that build upon each other create new capability over time. Our activities will teach us not merely how to survive, but how to thrive off-planet. Such a task includes inhabiting planetary surfaces, doing useful work while we are there, and extracting what we need from the material and energy resources we find. We will use these new skills and techniques to build a space transportation infrastructure that permits routine access to the Moon and all of cislunar space.

The significance of this last point should not be underestimated; access to cislunar space will revolutionize the paradigm of spaceflight. Currently, we build disposable commercial space systems. They have a specific design lifetime, after which they are simply abandoned. Combined with the high cost of getting to low Earth orbit, this makes spaceflight difficult and costly. Hence, space largely has been left as the province of government, except for certain highly capitalized businesses such as global communications.

With the Vision realized, satellites can be serviced, maintained, extended and networked—space systems will be designed for an indefinite lifetime. Given existing launch costs, we cannot do this now. Even lowering such costs by an order of magnitude would still make even robotic servicing of platforms at geosynchronous orbit marginal at best. However, if we build a system that can refuel on the Moon using locally produced materials, we create the capability to routinely go anywhere in cislunar space. Exporting fuel extracted from lunar resources will permit us to go anywhere, anytime, with whatever capabilities we need. This is the beginning of true space-faring capability. Such an environment would unleash imaginations, realize potential and expand technology, science, exploration and commerce.

In short, we are going to the Moon for one clear and understandable reason—to be able to do everything else that we want to do in space. The Moon is our school, laboratory and foundry. The Vision begins by building a highway through the heart of cislunar space, creating a transportation infrastructure for diverse users – scientists, miners, sellers and buyers, and ultimately, settlers.

What is the role of NASA and the federal government in all of this? It is not to industrialize space, but to determine if the industrialization of space is possible. To accomplish such an expansive space vision requires us to understand exactly how difficult these tasks really are. Possible in theory is one thing—practical to implement is something else entirely. NASA must push the technical envelope—to address and answer questions and develop new processes too expensive or too difficult for the private sector to tackle. Learning how to live on another world and extract what you need from it is a challenging task, one suitable for a federal R&D effort.

After understanding the technical difficulties and opening up possibilities, government should step back and let market forces work while still retaining a presence to enforce the law and assure that compelling national strategic interests are served. Thus, while government will never become a resource producer, it is needed to insure that corporations respect property rights and compete fairly in an open market, subject to the same anti-trust and securities regulation as any other modern American business.

So why are some still asking, "Why are we going to the Moon?" Some space constituencies are clearly uncomfortable with the strategic direction outlined above. For many, the idea of a government-funded program, controlled by and operated for the benefit of the academic science community, is the "right" way to run a space program. In the absence of any national Presidential or Congressional leadership, such a science-driven agenda has been ascendant for the last 15 years. During the Apollo era, the marshalling of national resources by the government to carry out space goals on a wartime footing was the dominant mode of operation.

Using what we find in space to enable exploration and to create new capability has never been attempted. The Vision's goal is to extend human commerce beyond low Earth orbit, where the universe becomes accessible to everyone. America's desire to explore and create new wealth has allowed our society to thrive and to prosper. The Vision for Space Exploration extends that opportunity for all humanity into the Solar System and the universe beyond.

Paul D. Spudis is a planetary scientist at the Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel MD. He was a member of the Clementine Science Team in 1994. In 2004, was a member of the President's Commission on the Implementation of U. S. Space Exploration Policy and was presented with the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal for that work. He is the recipient of the 2006 Von Karman Lectureship in Astronautics, awarded by the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics. He is the author or co-author of over 150 scientific papers and four books, including The Once and Future Moon, a book for the general public in the Smithsonian Library of the Solar System series, The Clementine Atlas of the Moon (with Ben Bussey), published in 2005 by Cambridge University Press, and Moonwake: The Lunar Frontier (with Anne Spudis), an adventure novel for young adults about life at a base on the Moon. His web site can be found at http://www.spudislunarresources.com

What You Don't Know About The Federal Minimum Wage

 

By Captain Ed on National Politics

Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats have placed a significant minimum-wage increase at the top of their agenda for the 110th Congress. President Bush has signaled his willingness to approve it, using the increase as a lever for tax relief on small businesses. One would imagine that this show of bipartisanship springs from a national crisis, but George Will explains that the effort will benefit only a few, and not even the few that the politicos assume:

Democrats consider the minimum-wage increase a signature issue. So, consider what it says about them:

Most of the working poor earn more than the minimum wage, and most of the 0.6 percent (479,000 in 2005) of America's wage workers earning the minimum wage are not poor. Only one in five workers earning the federal minimum lives in families with earnings below the poverty line. Sixty percent work part time, and their average household income is well over $40,000. (The average and median household incomes are $63,344 and $46,326, respectively.)

Forty percent of American workers are salaried. Of the 75.6 million paid by the hour, 1.9 million earn the federal minimum or less, and of these, more than half are under 25 and more than a quarter are between ages 16 and 19. Many are students or other part-time workers. Sixty percent of those earning the federal minimum or less work in restaurants and bars and earn tips -- often untaxed, perhaps -- in addition to wages. Two-thirds of those earning the federal minimum today will, a year from now, have been promoted and be earning 10 percent more. Raising the minimum wage predictably makes work more attractive relative to school for some teenagers and raises the dropout rate. Two scholars report that in states that allow people to leave school before 18, a 10 percent increase in the state minimum wage caused teenage school enrollment to drop 2 percent.

Will makes a point which many on both sides have missed, which is that the Bush administration's spending spree makes it politically difficult for them to oppose the increase. After all, Bush signed the pork-filled farm bill in 2002 that benefited the large farmers more than anyone else, and he signed a highway bill in 2005 that notoriously contained over six thousand earmarks. If the government wants to give away money, why not to the poor?

But that's precisely the problem. They aren't giving away money, not from their checkbook, at any rate. They're distorting a market for a short-term political benefit that will do nothing to raise the standard of living for the people they supposedly want to help. Arbitrarily raising the prices of services and goods in a marketplace causes inflation, not an increase in real value. They're forcing consumers of labor to pay more for the same service, from which they will get no increased benefit -- and that means that they will have to pass the costs along to the consumers of their goods and services, all through the distribution chain.

Whose money is getting given away? Yours and mine, and all 479,000 minimum-wage workers, that's who. I can absorb the incremental loss of buying power, but the people at the bottom rungs cannot. If they're lucky, all that will happen is that their buying power will remain the same as it was after a short period of adjustment. More likely, some of their jobs will get eliminated as businesses have to support the cost increase in some other fashion than price hikes.

And it's not even the working poor that gets helped in the increase. The working poor may have started at minimum wage, but they move up as they progress in their jobs. It is an absolute fallacy to argue that minimum-wage workers have not gotten a raise since the last federal increase of the minimum wage; they get raises as they increase their value to their employer, not from Uncle Sam. Anyone who has worked at the minimum wage since 1997 is either switching jobs too often to get a raise or is not very productive. The people making minimum wage are by and large temporary workers and people who make most of their living through tips, the latter comprising three out of every five minimum-wage workers. It's not an accurate reflection of their standard of living.

Will has it right -- the minimum wage should be zero. Unfortunately, the politicians don't get re-elected when they tell Americans that they can't solve their problems, and so we get these splashy systemic solutions to issues that either don't exist at all or only affect a narrow slice of the nation. The rest of us get to pay for it, and the people with the least ability to withstand the economic consequences pay the most for it.

Perhaps we should insist on an increase in the minimum common sense of Washington officials.

War still beats "peace" under Hussein!

From Don Surber

AP played the numbers game this week with reports about how many people have died in Iraq. I always have a problem reducing people to numbers but AP said that 16,273 violent deaths in Iraq in 2006 -- 14,298 of them civilians.
Most of the dead are civilians, which the enemy targets. Prairie Pundit pointed out that is a war crime. Our side prosecutes its soldiers who flaunt this convention.
Gateway Pundit pointed out this disproves once and for all the Lancet study that said 655,000 people had died in the war.
Jules Crittenden pointed out deaths are way down in Iraq: "we're down from an annual average of more than 65,000!"
With 16,273 deaths in 2006, is Iraq still at war? AP called fighting in the Sudan "the world's worst humanitarian crisis" after the U.N. estimated 200,000 people died violently since 2003 -- or twice the carnage of Iraq in the same time period.
Sudan's population is estimated at 6.5 million; Iraq's is four times that.
By the way, the 16,273 violent deaths in 2006 compares favorably to the 600,000 documented deaths under Saddam Hussein. Many more are likely.
Hussein's carnage averaged 70 to 125 civilian deaths every day for the 8,000 days he reigned. His 20,000 civilian deaths a year (on average) were considered "peace" while last year, under war, there were 14,298 civilians deaths

The Latest Trend - "Fashion Mice"

Feel like going for a casual stroll? Is it time to shop for shoes? How about just a quick dash to your favorite StarBucks for a latte?  

Don't forget your

 "Fashion Mouse"

Shown here with "Jon-Jon", her most recent addition to her ever-growing stable of Fashion Mice, the lovely shoe maven, Nicole Moura, strolls along Bleaker Street in downtown Boston searching for just one more Aldo's.

 

Mrs. Moura, god-daughter of Sally "the Rat" Steponovich, is a well-known and frequent sight near the docks in BeanTown, USA.  Not satisfied with the "protection" offered by her godfather, Mrs. Moura prefers her own protect-o-mouse, part of the new line of Fashion Mice.

 

It's been said she usually travels with her favorite Fashion Mouse, "Missy" who was especially bred to sniff out and locate the elusive Aldo's shoe stores.  Unfortunately, "Missy" sprained her left-rear middle toe last week when she failed to negotiate the cobblestone walkway near the 'No-Name" restaurant while pulling her wagon loaded down with her mistresses purchases.

 

 

11 Things You Won't Learn In School

 

Love him or hate him, he sure hits the nail on the head with this! To anyone with kids of any age, here's some advice.

Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.

1. Life is not fair - get used to it!
   
2. The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
   
3. You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
   
4. If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
   
5. Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity.  Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.
   
6. If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
   
7. Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
   
8. Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
   
9. Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.
   
10. Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
    
11. Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.
    If you agree, pass it on.

If you can read this - Thank a teacher!

If you are reading it in English -

Thank a soldier!

Jeff Jarvis (Buzz Machine) Free Speech Segment

The war is over. No, not that war. I mean the war between mainstream media and bloggers.
It never really was a fight – because we are on the same side. We all want the truth:
When bloggers called Dan Rather on errors in 2004, he dismissed them as partisan operatives. But when bloggers recently exposed faked photos from Beirut, Reuters thanked them.
So we are making progress.

Together, professional and amateur journalists can gather and share more news than ever. Bloggers just forced two senators to admit they were secretly blocking a reform bill. And bloggers goaded Dell and Apple into recalling burning batteries. Dell, which once ignored bloggers, now blogs itself.

See, it doesn’t hurt. Bloggers are just people talking. We are your viewers, your voters, your customers, your neighbors.

Now that we, the people, are armed with our own printing presses, old media have nothing to fear and everything to gain – so long as they’re wise enough to trust us.

Trust us to be smart; if you can’t, then what’s the point of democracy?

Listen to us and what we truly care about – and that’s not endless Jon Benet.

And let us share your best reporting: The networks should be fighting to get the most stories watched on YouTube – for those are the stories that are part of our conversation….

Just because newspapers and networks are shrinking, that doesn’t mean journalism must whither. No, we have to expand the definition of news and change the role of the journalist from oracle on the mountaintop to member of our community.

We’re in this together.

O'Reilly's Crystal Ball

Donald Rumsfeld Out After the Votes Are Counted

Thursday , November 09, 2006

By Bill O'Reilly

The secretary of defense was the latest casualty of the Iraq war, which gravely wounded the Republican Party in Tuesday's vote. Let's take a look at it.

Talking Points believes most Americans revere the U.S. military. Most of us feel terrible when Americans are killed or wounded on the battlefield, but the Iraq situation isn't about ideology. Most Americans don't want to cut and run. They understand that would put America in great jeopardy.

But after three and a half years, Americans are still dying every day and many voters believe there's no strategy for victory in Iraq. Thus, Rumsfeld's resignation on Wednesday.

Of course, that came too late to help the Republicans, who find themselves in the minority on Capitol Hill. If visible progress had been made in Iraq, that never would have happened.

So that's where we are. And every poll showed that Americans wanted change in Iraq and that's why the Democrats won.

Now the unintended consequence of the power shift in D.C. is that some Democrats will try to impose a secular-progressive agenda on the country.

First, there will be an attempt to raise taxes — Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel will lead that.

Second, new speaker, Nancy Pelosi, will encourage investigations of the Bush administration, seeking to create a scandal which would help the Democrat presidential nominee in 2008.

But that could backfire on the Democrats as most Americans do not want Mr. Bush attacked. They want to see if the Democrats can do better. They do not want to see their government ripped apart in a time of war.

There is a struggle within the Democratic Party itself. Far-left zealots like Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean are stacked up against moderates like Joseph Lieberman and — dare I say it — Hillary Clinton. Senator Clinton knows she can't win the presidency, which she desperately wants, by throwing in with the far left.

So here's what's going to happen in the next few years: President Bush will not get much done. He will veto any attempt to change his agenda, and Congress will not be able to override those vetoes. So there will be a stalemate and a chess game about the 2008 presidential votes.

Right now, the Democrats are in a good position. The country is giving them a chance to improve Iraq and the basic tone of politics in America. But if the Democrats try to destroy Mr. Bush or impose San Francisco values, the country will turn against them. There's no question in my mind.

And that's the Memo.

What Clinton Didn't Do...

 

What Clinton Didn't Do . . .
. . . .and when he didn't do it.

BY RICHARD MINITER, WSJ Opinion
Wednesday, September 27, 2006 12:01 a.m.
Bill Clinton's outburst on Fox News was something of a public service, launching a debate about the antiterror policies of his administration. This is important because every George W. Bush policy that arouses the ire of Democrats--the Patriot Act, extraordinary rendition, detention without trial, pre-emptive war--is a departure from his predecessor. Where policies overlap--air attacks on infrastructure, secret presidential orders to kill terrorists, intelligence sharing with allies, freezing bank accounts, using police to arrest terror suspects--there is little friction. The question, then, is whether America should return to Mr. Clinton's policies or soldier on with Mr. Bush's.

It is vital that this debate be honest, but so far this has not been the case. Both Mr. Clinton's outrage at Chris Wallace's questioning and the ABC docudrama "The Path to 9/11" are attempts to polarize the nation's memory. While this divisiveness may be good for Mr. Clinton's reputation, it is ultimately unhealthy for the country. What we need, instead, is a cold-eyed look at what works against terrorists and what does not. The policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations ought to be put to the same iron test.

With that in mind, let us examine Mr. Clinton's war on terror. Some 38 days after he was sworn in, al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center. He did not visit the twin towers that year, even though four days after the attack he was just across the Hudson River in New Jersey, talking about job training. He made no attempt to rally the public against terrorism. His only public speech on the bombing was a few paragraphs inserted into a radio address mostly devoted an economic stimulus package. Those stray paragraphs were limited to reassuring the public and thanking the rescuers, the kinds of things governors say after hurricanes. He did not even vow to bring the bombers to justice. Instead, he turned the first terrorist attack on American soil over to the FBI.

In his Fox interview, Mr. Clinton said "no one knew that al Qaeda existed" in October 1993, during the tragic events in Somalia. But his national security adviser, Tony Lake, told me that he first learned of bin Laden "sometime in 1993," when he was thought of as a terror financier. U.S. Army Capt. James Francis Yacone, a black hawk squadron commander in Somalia, later testified that radio intercepts of enemy mortar crews firing at Americans were in Arabic, not Somali, suggesting the work of bin Laden's agents (who spoke Arabic), not warlord Farah Aideed's men (who did not). CIA and DIA reports also placed al Qaeda operatives in Somalia at the time.

By the end of Mr. Clinton's first year, al Qaeda had apparently attacked twice. The attacks would continue for every one of the Clinton years.

• In 1994, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who would later plan the 9/11 attacks) launched "Operation Bojinka" to down 11 U.S. planes simultaneously over the Pacific. A sharp-eyed Filipina police officer foiled the plot. The sole American response: increased law-enforcement cooperation with the Philippines.

• In 1995, al Qaeda detonated a 220-pound car bomb outside the Office of Program Manager in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing five Americans and wounding 60 more. The FBI was sent in.

• In 1996, al Qaeda bombed the barracks of American pilots patrolling the "no-fly zones" over Iraq, killing 19. Again, the FBI responded.

• In 1997, al Qaeda consolidated its position in Afghanistan and bin Laden repeatedly declared war on the U.S. In February, bin Laden told an Arab TV network: "If someone can kill an American soldier, it is better than wasting time on other matters." No response from the Clinton administration.

• In 1998, al Qaeda simultaneously bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224, including 12 U.S. diplomats. Mr. Clinton ordered cruise-missile strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan in response. Here Mr. Clinton's critics are wrong: The president was right to retaliate when America was attacked, irrespective of the Monica Lewinsky case.

Still, "Operation Infinite Reach" was weakened by Clintonian compromise. The State Department feared that Pakistan might spot the American missiles in its air space and misinterpret it as an Indian attack. So Mr. Clinton told Gen. Joe Ralston, vice chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, to notify Pakistan's army minutes before the Tomahawks passed over Pakistan. Given Pakistan's links to jihadis at the time, it is not surprising that bin Laden was tipped off, fleeing some 45 minutes before the missiles arrived.

• In 1999, the Clinton administration disrupted al Qaeda's Millennium plots, a series of bombings stretching from Amman to Los Angeles. This shining success was mostly the work of Richard Clarke, a NSC senior director who forced agencies to work together. But the Millennium approach was shortlived. Over Mr. Clarke's objections, policy reverted to the status quo.

• In January 2000, al Qaeda tried and failed to attack the U.S.S. The Sullivans off Yemen. (Their boat sank before they could reach their target.) But in October 2000, an al Qaeda bomb ripped a hole in the hull of the U.S.S. Cole, killing 17 sailors and wounding another 39.

When Mr. Clarke presented a plan to launch a massive cruise missile strike on al Qaeda and Taliban facilities in Afghanistan, the Clinton cabinet voted against it. After the meeting, a State Department counterterrorism official, Michael Sheehan, sought out Mr. Clarke. Both told me that they were stunned. Mr. Sheehan asked Mr. Clarke: "What's it going to take to get them to hit al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon?"

There is much more to Mr. Clinton's record--how Predator drones, which spotted bin Laden three times in 1999 and 2000, were grounded by bureaucratic infighting; how a petty dispute with an Arizona senator stopped the CIA from hiring more Arabic translators. While it is easy to look back in hindsight and blame Bill Clinton, the full scale and nature of the terrorist threat was not widely appreciated until 9/11. Still: Bill Clinton did not fully grasp that he was at war. Nor did he intuit that war requires overcoming bureaucratic objections and a democracy's natural reluctance to use force. That is a hard lesson. But it is better to learn it from studying the Clinton years than reliving them.

Mr. Miniter, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, is author of "Disinformation: 22 Media Myths that Undermine the War on Terror" (Regnery, 2005).

Copyright © 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 

We Are In Deep Doo-Doo

From Michelle Malkin:

Not a word about the 1,400-year-plus history of Islamic hostility to the West or Islamic imperialism from time immemorial or the Koran-inspired war on infidels--long, long before there was a United States and "pervasive anti-US sentiment."

Remember what I said yesterday?

If our intelligence agencies are laboring under the moonbat illusion that Muslim hatred of the infidel West didn't really start bubbling until the year 2003, we are really in deep, deep doo-doo.

Well, it appears we are, in fact, in deep doo-doo.

----------------------------------------------------------------

...and from Glenn Reynolds:

THE NIE HAS BEEN DECLASSIFIED: Go here for the "Key Judgments."

Bill First comments here. And John Podhoretz has a question for the NYT editors now that we know what the NIE actually says.

It's late but I'll add one more thought: While we should fire the leakers on general principles, we should probably also fire whoever wrote this -- for producing a meaningless document full of empty bureaucratic twaddle. If the jihadists win, they'll have more prestige! And they will probably use the internets! Do tell. Jesus Christ, if this is the quality of intelligence we're getting, no wonder we haven't won yet.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Yep, - we're in deeeeeeeep doo-doo!

"Exterminate All Who Are Not Muslim"

 

From AP source:

The Mujahedeen Shura Council, an umbrella organization of Sunni Arab extremist groups that includes Al Qaeda in Iraq, issued a statement on a Web forum vowing to continue its holy war against the West. The authenticity of the statement could not be independently verified.

The group said Muslims would be victorious and addressed the pope as "the worshipper of the cross" saying "you and the West are doomed as you can see from the defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya and elsewhere. ... We will break up the cross, spill the liquor and impose head tax, then the only thing acceptable is a conversion (to Islam) or (killed by) the sword."

Islam forbids drinking alcohol and requires non-Muslims to pay a head tax to safeguard their lives if conquered by Muslims. They are exempt if they convert to Islam.

Hey CodePINK, why don't you'all get on a plane financed and piloted by John Kerry, and go over to the Middle East, and talk with these guys.  If you all went at the same time, they might listen to you!  I'm sure that once you tell your side, these nice guys will see the light and give the USA a pass.  Teach them about Christianity.

The Pope's Real Threat

By Captain Ed on War on Terror

Many people have written about the controversy over Pope Benedict's recent remarks at the University of Regensburg, where he quoted a medieval emperor about the barbarity of forced religious conversions. In a replay of the Prophet Cartoon madness, Muslims only escalated their rhetoric after the Vatican apologized for any offense the quotation may have given followers of Islam. Despite apologizing Wednesday for quoting Manuel II's words from 1391 (but not for its argument against violence in religion), Muslims burnt effigies of the Roman Catholic leader and staged demonstrations around the world:

Protesters took to the streets in a series of countries with large Muslim populations, including India and Iraq. The ruling party in Turkey likened Pope Benedict XVI to Hitler and Mussolini and accused him of reviving the mentality of the Crusades. In Kashmir, an effigy of the pontiff was burnt.

At Friday prayers in the Iranian capital, Teheran, a leading ayatollah described the Pope as "rude and weak-minded". Pakistan's parliament passed a motion condemning the head of the Roman Catholic Church. Ismail Haniya, the Palestinian prime minister, criticised him hours after a grenade attack on a church in the Gaza Strip. ...

The head of Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Mohammed Mahdi Akef, said the remarks "aroused the anger of the whole Islamic world".

Similar comments were made in other Muslim capitals, raising fears of a repetition of the anger that followed the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper earlier this year.

All this has shown is that Muslims missed the point of the speech, and in fact have endeavored to fulfill Benedict's warnings rather than prove him wrong. If one reads the speech at Regensburg, the entire speech, one understands that the entire point was to reject violence in pursuing religion in any form, be it Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or Bahai. The focal point of the speech was not the recounting of the debate between Manuel II and the unnamed Persian, but rather the rejection of reason and of God that violence brings (emphasis mine):

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practise idolatry.

This is really the crux of the argument, which is that argument, debate, and rhetoric are absolutely essential in forming any kind of philosophy, including religious doctrine. The words of sacred text do not cover all situations in the world, and therefore development of a solid philosophical body of thought is critical to growth and wisdom. That requires the ability to challenge and to criticize without fear of retribution, a difficulty that most faiths struggle to overcome.

Islam, on the other hand, doesn't bother to try. Benedict never says this explicitly, but Islam's demands that all criticism be silenced turns doctrine into dictatorship, which rejects God on a very basic level. A central tenet of most religions is that humans lack the divine perfection to claim knowledge of the totality of the Divine wisdom. Islam practices a form of supremacy that insists on unquestioned obedience or at least silence of all criticism, especially from outsiders, and creates a violent reaction against it when it occurs.

Islam bullies people into silence, and then obedience. We saw this with the Prophet Cartoons, a series of editorial criticisms that pale into insignificance when seen against similar cartoons from the Muslim media regarding Christians and especially Jews. It is precisely this impulse about which Benedict warns can occur in any religion, but modern Muslims show that they are by far the widest purveyors of this impulse.

Unfortunately, the Muslims are not the only people who missed the point. The New York Times editorial board joins Muslims in demanding an apology and an end to criticism of Islam:

There is more than enough religious anger in the world. So it is particularly disturbing that Pope Benedict XVI has insulted Muslims, quoting a 14th-century description of Islam as “evil and inhuman.” ...

Muslim leaders the world over have demanded apologies and threatened to recall their ambassadors from the Vatican, warning that the pope’s words dangerously reinforce a false and biased view of Islam. For many Muslims, holy war — jihad — is a spiritual struggle, and not a call to violence. And they denounce its perversion by extremists, who use jihad to justify murder and terrorism.

The Vatican issued a statement saying that Benedict meant no offense and in fact desired dialogue.

The Times missed the point, too. They aren't satisfied with the explanation offered by the Vatican. They want a "deep and persuasive apology" for Benedict's temerity in criticizing the use of violence and rejection of reason in religion, and specifically using a six-hundred-year-old quote that insulted people who regularly insult everyone else, including other Muslims. The Times counsels surrender to the threats and the violence.

Benedict opposes both. That's the real threat behind the Pope's speech, and don't think the radical Muslims don't understand it.

From CQ: Iraq War Forum: Opening Remarks

 

By Captain Ed on Iraq

As I announced earlier, I will take part in a Macalester College forum on the Iraq War this evening. I'm posting my opening remarks to the forum so that CQ readers who could not attend can read my speech and my arguments. I hope they inspire a healthy and rational debate here in the comments section. I'll let you know if they did the same at the forum.

The War In Iraq

Good evening, and thank you for your hospitality.

A few weeks ago, Grace Kelley e-mailed me asking if I knew anyone in the area that would defend the decision to invade Iraq for tonight’s forum. I think I surprised Grace when I volunteered to do it myself. She had been unable to get anyone to commit to speaking in this forum, and while I do not know the individual circumstances of those she approached before, I do know the heat and vitriol this topic sometimes inspires. I’m certain that some may have felt that this forum might generate too much of both to be useful in any rhetorical sense.

I feel differently. I do not believe that I will change minds here tonight, at least not about the topic at hand. I plan on offering my opinion on the war, honestly and forthrightly, and expect to be challenged on it. To me, the value of this forum comes not in the opportunity to “prove” myself right or to sway people from deeply-held beliefs. The value comes from meeting my fellow citizens and publicly airing our differences in a positive and rational manner so that we can make our choices freely and openly.

For this opportunity, I thank Democracy for America, my fellow panelists, and our moderator. I also thank the audience for their patience and forbearance, and at the least I hope to prove that all of us can disagree publicly without being disagreeable. At the very least, I’m hoping to emulate the scene from the movie “Patton” where George C. Scott says, “I thought I would stand here like this so you could see if I was really as big a son of a bitch as you think I am.”

So let me state some assumptions from which I’ve worked over the years that I have been writing on politics. People who oppose the war in Iraq are not unpatriotic. They are not cowards. The decision to invade Iraq was just that: a policy decision and a strategic wartime decision. It is possible to be on either side of that decision and still be a good American citizen. Vilifying those for disagreeing on this point in either direction does no one any good and only pollutes the political atmosphere.

Obviously, I do believe that invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein was the right decision at the time, and I still believe we are better off for that decision. My support comes from a strategic look at the war on terror and the challenge we faced in fighting it with Saddam still in power.

We have to keep the pressure on the terrorists and radicals in their region in order to keep them from setting the battle to their own advantage. Was Iraq the correct place in which to do this? I believe it was. I say this for these reasons: Saddam continued to make war on the United States during the twelve-year cease fire, and we needed to fight and end that war to have any success in the war on terror. We had tried to engage the entire global community in that effort for twelve years and the community as a whole abdicated their responsibilities.

Saddam Made War on the United States

It’s impossible to overemphasize this. We had 40,000 men and women tied down in and around Iraq at the time of 9/11 enforcing a cease-fire agreement that Saddam Hussein continually violated. His forces fired repeatedly at American and British aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones. They “lit up” our planes with fire control radars on almost a daily basis, in defiance of the agreement that kept us out of Baghdad in 1991. And while it happened years prior, let’s not forget the attempted assassination of George H. W. Bush during Clinton’s first term of office.

Each one of these constituted an act of war.

Our failure to respond in kind not only emboldened Saddam Hussein towards even greater defiance, it sent a message through the region that we would not fight back.

The International Community Failed To Stand Firm

One of the most common criticisms of the decision to go into Iraq is that it was made “unilaterally”. The complaint originates from the failure of the United Nations Security Council to authorize our use of force against Saddam Hussein and to end twelve years of defiance by his regime. We spent twelve years and one month enforcing sanctions against Iraq, a regimen that we later found had been undermined by the same nations that opposed enforcing the sixteen Security Council resolutions that had been issued during that period.

In the weeks before 9/11, nations such as France and Russia were actively petitioning the UN to remove the sanctions against Iraq. Prior to that, they and others had corrupted the UN program designed to allow aid to ordinary Iraqis, instead putting billions of dollars into Saddam’s pockets and reinforcing his grip on power. The international community sent a clear signal that they would do nothing about Saddam’s wars and genocides even when his actions violated a signed cease-fire agreement, and that the only issue that mattered to them was the money they could make on Iraq’s oil.

The Need To Engage The Enemy

The US needs to engage the terrorists in their backyard and not ours. We cannot allow them to construct set-piece attacks as they did throughout the 1990s because we have no completely effective way to defend against them. In a way, this parallels the frustration that Abraham Lincoln felt with his commanders during the Civil War. Too many of them, especially George McLelland, felt that they should hold their fire until the Union had a massive numerical superiority against the Confederacy. This allowed Robert E. Lee to dictate the terms of the war in the first two years, forcing the North to react rather than to define the battle for themselves. In the end, Lincoln picked Ulysses S Grant not just because Grant was a much better general than the rest, but because Grant understood that the Union had to fight Lee to win, and had to fight Lee on his own ground. Grant beat Lee because he used the Union’s superior economic forces and reserves to grind the Confederacy down to defeat.

One of the unfortunate lessons we taught the radical Islamists over the past thirty years has been the lack of fortitude in American resolve. We did nothing while Islamists captured our embassy in Teheran and held dozens of Americans hostage for 444 days. Ronald Reagan retreated from Beirut in 1983 after a Hezbollah attack killed over 200 Marines, and then he negotiated with their Iranian sponsors for the release of hostages in the late 1980s. When the road to Baghdad was wide open in 1991, George H.W. Bush let Saddam stay in power. We retreated from Somalia in 1993 and failed to respond to a series of provocations in that decade, starting with the World Trade Center attack and culminating in the attack on our military – the USS Cole.

We taught the terrorists that we would not fight for our interests and we would retreat when provoked. And Saddam Hussein’s continued defiance reinforced that lesson on a daily basis.

The Results Of The Decision

What have been the results of this decision? The United States has benefited in material ways which has made the nation and the region safer.

1. We deposed a genocidal dictator that had murdered at least 300,000 of his own people, in at least one case using chemical weapons to do so. He had twice gone to war with his neighbors in the past twenty years, invading our trading partner and ally and threatening our oil supply, which forced us to go to war to expel him from Kuwait. With the sanctions regime collapsing and his power more secure than ever, Saddam would have been free to attack American interests around the world as he often threatened to do.

2. Although it had happened a few years earlier, Saddam had attempted to assassinate George H. W. Bush after his term in office, an act of war in itself. Bill Clinton responded with a series of missile strikes while enforcing the sanctions and cease-fire agreements. Had Saddam been freed from his international obligations, he could have tried assassinating American politicians in the future, with potentially greater success. Ending his regime eliminated that possibility.

3. Libya surrendered its nuclear program as a result of the deposing of Saddam. Moammar Gaddafi told Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi that he did not want to end up like Saddam Hussein, and reached agreement with the US and Britain within a month of Saddam’s capture to reveal and destroy its nuclear-weapons infrastructure. In doing so, we discovered that Libya had a more advanced program than previously thought, and also found more evidence of the AQ Khan nuclear-proliferation ring.

4. The presence of 140,000 American troops on Syria’s border had a demonstrable effect after the assassination of Rafik Hariri in 2005. When the Lebanese people demanded the expulsion of Syrian forces from their nation, the Syrians could easily have used their forces to quash the rebellion. Instead, they meekly withdrew without firing a shot, faced down by the US and France in a joint demand for withdrawal.

5. The same presence between Iran and Syria forces both terror-sponsoring nations to take into account our reaction to their actions. It places us in a strategic position to act in our defense or that of our allies if either nation decides to openly attack.

6. Fourteen million Iraqis have embraced the democratic process and elected the first representative democracy in the Arab world. If that democracy can survive, it will have the opportunity to transform the region.

Most of all, we have restored our reputation as a serious nation that will take action to defend itself and to transform the battlefield to our advantage. Terrorists understand that we will act to defend freedom and liberty and to pursue it in the heart of Islamist terrorism. On 9/11, they understandably questioned our resolve to prevail; they can no longer make that mistake. We took the steps necessary to end the long-running war with Iraq that kept Saddam in power and gave us a dangerous image as an impotent power in the region.

Again, I thank you for your time and hospitality. As long as we can meet in these forums and engage in spirited but rational debate, we know that American democracy and freedoms are secure indeed. Terrorists cannot take that away from us; only we can do that to ourselves.

"Please Stay In Your Seats"

 

(Picked up from the WEB)

Last week, while traveling to Chicago on business, I noticed a Marine sergeant traveling with a folded flag, but did not put two and two together.  After we boarded our flight, I turned to the sergeant, who'd been invited to sit in First Class (across from me), and inquired if he was heading home.

No, he responded.

Heading out I asked?

No. I'm escorting a soldier home.

Going to pick him up?

No. He is with me right now. He was killed in Iraq. I'm taking him home to his family.

The realization of what he had been asked to do hit me like a punch to the gut. It was an honor for him. He told me that, although he didn't know the soldier, he had delivered the news of his passing to the soldier's family and felt as if he knew them after many conversations in so few days. I turned back to him, extended my hand, and said, Thank you. Thank you for doing what you do so my family and I can do what we do.

Upon landing in Chicago the pilot stopped short of the gate and made the following announcement over the intercom.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to note that we have had the honor of having Sergeant Steeley of the United States Marine Corps join us on this flight. He is escorting a fallen comrade back home to his family. I ask that you please remain in your seats when we open the forward door to allow Sergeant Steeley to deplane and receive his fellow soldier. We will then turn off the seat belt sign."

Without a sound, all went as requested. I noticed the sergeant saluting the casket as it was brought off the plane, and his action made me realize that I am proud to be an American.

ABC - Altered By Clinton

I'm surprised that I'm mildly surprised that ABC caved. Shouldn't have bee any surprise at all. I'm NOT surprised that other than FOX, I'm hard pressed to find any HEADLINES, let alone the story.

...crap!

PowerLine wonders...

From PowerLine.com

Did the Dems Threaten ABC?

The Democrats have gone nuts over the ABC miniseries, The Path to 9/11. But it's a little hard to see why. Maybe it's because Disney and ABC have been reliably pro-Democrat in the past, so the Dems feel betrayed.

Looking at the big picture, though, it's a little hard to see what the Dems are complaining about. I haven't seen the miniseries, but I take it that it doesn't portray the Clinton administration as having taken very effective action against the growing threat from Islamic terrorists. What I don't understand is how the Democrats think they can rewrite history to challenge that characterization.

There is no doubt about the fact that the terrorist menace grew and became increasingly obvious during the Clinton administration. To note just a few highlights:

* January 25, 1993: Mir Aimal Kansi, a Pakistani, fired an AK-47 into cars waiting at a stoplight in front of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Virginia, killing two CIA employees.

* February 26, 1993: Islamic terrorists try to bring down the World Trade Center with car bombs. They failed to destroy the buildings, but killed 6 and injured over 1000 people.

* March 12, 1993: Car bombings in Mumbai, India leave 257 dead and 1,400 others injured.

* July 18, 1994: Bombing of Jewish Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, kills 86 and wounds 300. The bombing is generally attributed to Hezbollah acting on behalf of Iran.

* July 19, 1994: Alas Chiricanas Flight 00901 is bombed, killing 21. Generally attributed to Hezbollah.

* July 26, 1994: The Israeli Embassy is attacked in London, and a Jewish charity is also car-bombed, wounding 20. The attacks are attributed to Hezbollah.

* December 11, 1994: A bomb explodes on board Philippine Airlines Flight 434, killing a Japanese businessman. It develops that Ramzi Yousef planted the bomb to test it for the larger terrorist attack he is planning.

* December 24, 1994: In a preview of September 11, Air France Flight 8969 is hijacked by Islamic terrorists who planned to crash the plane in Paris.

* January 6, 1995: Operation Bojinka, an Islamist plot to bomb 11 U.S. airliners over the Pacific Ocean, is discovered on a laptop computer in a Manila, Philippines apartment by authorities after a fire occurred in the apartment. Noted terrorists including Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed are involved in the plot.

* June 14-June 19, 1995: The Budyonnovsk hospital hostage crisis, in which 105 civilians and 25 Russian troops were killed following an attack by Chechan Islamists.

* July-October, 1995: Bombings in France by Islamic terrorists led by Khaled Kelkal kill eight and injure more than 100.

* November 13, 1995: Bombing of OPM-SANG building in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia kills 7

* November 19, 1995: Bombing of Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan kills 19.

* January 1996: In Kizlyar, 350 Chechen Islamists took 3,000 hostages in a hospital. The attempt to free them killed 65 civilians and soldiers.

* February 25 - March 4, 1996: A series of four suicide bombings in Israel leave 60 dead and 284 wounded within 10 days.

* June 11, 1996: A bomb explodes on a train traveling on the Serpukhovsko-Timiryazevskaya Line of the Moscow Metro, killing four and unjuring at least 12.

* June 25, 1996: The Khobar Towers bombing, carried out by Hezbollah with Iranian support. Nineteen U.S. servicemen were killed and 372 wounded.

* February 24, 1997: An armed man opens fire on tourists at an observation deck atop the Empire State Building in New York City, United States, killing a Danish national and wounding visitors from several countries. A handwritten note carried by the gunman claims this was a punishment attack against the "enemies of Palestine".

* November 17, 1997: Massacre in Luxor, Egypt, in which Islamist gunmen attack tourists, killing 62 people.

* January 1998: Wandhama Massacre - 24 Kashmiri Pandits are massacred by Pakistan-backed Islamists in the city of Wandhama in Indian-controlled Kashmir.

* February 14, 1998: Bombings by Islamic Jihadi groups at an election rally in the Indian city of Coimbatore kill about 60 people.

* August 7, 1998: Al Qaeda bombs U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya, killing 225 people and injuring more than 4,000.

* August 31 - September 22, 1998: Russian apartment bombings kill about 300 people, leading Russia into Second Chechen War.

* December 1998: Jordanian authorities foil a plot to bomb American and Israeli tourists in Jordan, and arrest 28 suspects as part of the 2000 millennium attack plots.

* December 14, 1998: Ahmed Ressam is arrested on the United States-Canada border in Port Angeles, Washington; he confessed to planning to bomb the Los Angeles International Airport as part of the 2000 millennium attack plots.

* December 24, 1998: Indian Airlines Flight 814 from Kathmandu, Nepal to Delhi, India is hijacked by Islamic terrorists. One passenger is killed and some hostages are released. After negotiations between the Taliban and the Indian government, the last of the remaining hostages on board Flight 814 are released in exchange for release of 4 terrorists.

* January 2000: The last of the 2000 millennium attack plots fails, as the boat meant to bomb USS The Sullivans sinks.

* August 8, 2000: A bomb exploded at an underpass in Pushkin Square in Moscow, killing 11 people and wounding more than 90.

* August 17, 2000: Two bombs exploded in a shopping center in Riga, Latvia, injuring 35 people.

* October 12, 2000: AL Qaeda bombs USS Cole with explosive-laden speedboat, killing 17 US sailors and wounding 40, off the port coast of Aden, Yemen.

Between 1993 and 2000, everyone who was paying any attention knew that the threat from Islamic terrorism was grave and getting worse. The catastrophic losses that occurred on Septimeber 11, 2001, could just as easily have happened in 1993, when the first plot to destroy the World Trade Center was carried off successfully, but the terrorists had miscalculated the effect of their explosives, or in 1995, when the plot to destroy eleven American airplanes in flight was thwarted by counter-intelligence work in the Philippines. What did the Clinton administration do in response to this grave threat? Essentially nothing. Worse, Clinton tried to sweep the problem under the rug, lest it disrupt the surface calm and prosperity for which he was eager to claim credit.

However Path to 9/11 portrays the Clinton administration, it can be no worse than the reality.

Now top Democrats have written a letter to ABC that can reasonably be read as a threat to pull the network's broadcast license if it shows Path to 9/11:

Presenting such deeply flawed and factually inaccurate misinformation to the American public and to children would be a gross miscarriage of your corporate and civic responsibility to the law, to your shareholders, and to the nation.

The Communications Act of 1934 provides your network with a free broadcast license predicated on the fundamental understanding of your principle obligation to act as a trustee of the public airwaves in serving the public interest. Nowhere is this public interest obligation more apparent than in the duty of broadcasters to serve the civic needs of a democracy by promoting an open and accurate discussion of political ideas and events. ***

We urge you, after full consideration of the facts, to uphold your responsibilities as a respected member of American society and as a beneficiary of the free use of the public airwaves to cancel this factually inaccurate and deeply misguided program.

Blue Crab Boulevard calls this letter an "enormous miscalculation." Blog of the Week Riehl World View agrees that the Democrats will pay a political price for their heavy-handedness:

[T]he ramifications of the current move by Dems to pressure ABC are going to have consequences far beyond a docu-drama. Americans don't like people, especially politicians, messing with their TV. And the other big issue facing Republicans in the run up to the coming elections besides Iraq was firing up their base. I say was because the Dems have just saved the Republicans from having to go to the trouble.

The Democrats' shameless maneuvering now going on on behalf of Clinton brings back, not only the animus Republicans have always felt for Clinton, while drawing attention to their general weakness in foreign affairs, it also reminds everyone of the scandal ridden side show that was Democrat Clinton's presidency.

Well, one can always hope. But it's hard to think of an instance of bully-boy tactics by the Democrats causing them any serious problems.

UPDATE: ABC says that it is still making changes in the program, evidently in response to the Democrats' attacks, so we won't know how effective the Democrats' tactics have been until the program airs.