Rumsfeld and reality
Long-term readers of mine know that I have no membership card in the Donald Rumsfeld fan club. I am not "anti" Rumsfeld, I just think history will judge his second tour as SecDef as mediocre, once his overbearing personality is out of the way and his administration's actual accomplishments can be evaluated.

Now retired four-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey weighs in.

In my judgment, the manner in which we intervened, and ended the regime, has been a major source of our subsequent problems. It's not enough to achieve victory--which we did; you've got to achieve a situation in which your adversary recognizes that he's been defeated, and that violent resistance is futile--which we didn't. We went in with a small force that, while unstoppable militarily, was incapable of the sort of "takedown" of an entrenched opposition that our troops now face. We should have front-loaded our military power and withdrawn forces as things got better; instead, we went in light, and augmented power after the regime's fall.

It seems as if we tried to conduct the whole war as an "economy of force" effort. Economy of force is a principle of war; what it means is that the main effort must be resourced as fully as possible even if it means making the secondary efforts do without.

Despite staff work from the Army that showed at least 300,000 troops would be required to do the job right, Rumsfeld - and it was no one else - sliced that figure by more than a third. Then the Turks denied the 4th Infantry Division access to Iraq from the north. Parachuting in the 173d Airborne Brigade was a poor substitute.

McCaffrey’s point seems valid to me: when Iraqi forces melted away, we did not have sufficient boots on the ground to take control. Heck, we didn’t have enough troops there even to appear to be in control. So there was a period of literal anarchy. Both the Iraqi military and the Iraqi nation, the people, were beaten, but neither felt beaten, because we didn’t overwhelm them with an awe-inspiring presence.

But, says McCaffrey, "the heart of the problem"

... is that the U.S. military forces in Iraq are being forced into a drawdown situation. "Iraqification" doesn't address the question of the much broader U.S. Army manpower shortages, and it concerns me that Mr. Rumsfeld himself has said that he fails to see evidence that a shortfall exists. "Iraqification" may prove to be an alibi for broader inaction. Mr. Rumsfeld has so dominated the national security process with the force of his personality that his views on manpower are not being sufficiently challenged in Congress. [italics added]

Indeed. Oh, and before someone protests that McCaffrey is a "Clinton general" like Wesley Clark, he's not. He did not serve as Clinton's drug czar until after he retired as a four-star. He is also the general who was dissed by a young Clinton White House staffer early in Clinton's first term. I also realize he is a controversial figure because of the destruction of Iraqi army forces by his division in a decidedly one-way battle several days after the end of the 100-hour offensive in 1991. Even so, the points here seem quite valid to me.

by Donald Sensing, 11/30/2003 05:57:00 PM. Permalink |

Military plans and the way they are used
Here's a hilarious look at the military and its plans by Brit blogger Free Market Fairy Tales, and to prove I I have a sense of humor, I'll cite his bit about my own branch, the artillery:

Makes very detailed plans with numbers, timings and smoke. Talks a lot about HE, smoke and Last Safe Moments. Everyone recognises last safe moment was passed as soon as Gunners allowed anywhere near plan. Despite plan, all guns keep firing until ammo runs out. Commanders lucky enough not to have Artillery support feel safe enough to get on with battle and win. Remainder hide under map table until firing ceases, then call for ambulances. After firing, Gunner officers check all guns are still pointing roughly in direction of enemy. Random shots rearwards are put down as encouragement to Logs chain to bring up more ammo.

Now, that's not really so. As for you Signal Corps types,

J6 reps with J6 plan appear everywhere but stay strangely silent during any meaningful discussion. If questioned, J6 rep sucks teeth and says "Bandwidth" before sinking back into silence.

Quite so, quite so.

by Donald Sensing, 11/30/2003 05:26:00 PM. Permalink |

Student for War (?)
Yes, there is such an organization:

Students for War is working to build support across America for military action against the murderous regime of North Korea’s Kim Jong Il.

Well, SFWs, let me offer you four letters of advice: R.O.T.C. I mean, you all are members, yes? (hat tip: Instapundit)

by Donald Sensing, 11/30/2003 04:52:00 PM. Permalink |

Bad idea
I've said before that enemy fighters in Iraq cannot go toe-to-toe with US forces and live to tell the tale. Today CNN reports,

U.S. troops fought off two simultaneous attacks on military convoys Sunday in northern Iraq, killing 46 attackers, wounding 18 and capturing eight others, military officials said.

This fight will be a big boost for the morale of American troops and will likely convince a fair number of wavering Iraqis which side to decide on. HT: Bill Hobbs

Update: Iraqi residents of the area say that the number killed was much lower, only eight or nine (link).

Many residents said Saddam loyalists attacked the Americans, but that when U.S. forces began firing at random, many civilians got their guns and joined the fight. Many said residents were bitter about recent U.S. raids in the night.

"Why do they arrest people when they're in their homes?" asked Athir Abdul Salam, a 19-year-old student. "They come at night to arrest people. So what do they expect those people to do?"

"Civilians shot back at the Americans," said 30-year-old Ali Hassan, who was wounded by shrapnel in the battle. "They claim we are terrorists. So OK, we are terrorists. What do they expect when they drive among us?"

Many residents said the Americans opened fire at random when they came under attack, and targeted civilian installations. Six destroyed vehicles sat in front of the hospital, where witnesses said U.S. tanks shelled people dropping off the injured. A kindergarten was damaged, apparently by tank shells. No children were hurt.

Remember the old adage, "first reports are always wrong." But these reports need to be taken with copious quantities of salt, too. Also, I am wary of getting back into the "body count" business; releasing such a precise figure of enemy dead makes me more skeptical, not less, that the number is accurate.

by Donald Sensing, 11/30/2003 04:34:00 PM. Permalink |

Peace on earth, good will to all? Nope.
Not where parking spaces at shopping malls are concerned.

by Donald Sensing, 11/29/2003 10:46:00 PM. Permalink |

Transnational democracy?
Nope, ain't gonna happen, according to Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus, as reported by Austin Bay:

Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus last week blistered a fossilized but politically potent cohort of Europeans when he observed that too many people on the Continent inhabit a "dream world of welfare, long vacations, guaranteed high pensions and cradle-to-grave social security." The dreamers, Klaus added, have yet to realize "they are not moving toward some sort of nirvana."

Klaus, interviewed by the always trenchant Arnaud de Borchgrave, was specifically addressing the EU's failure (for the ninth straight year) to certify its budget. The extensive problems led Klaus to suggest "democratic accountability" can't exist "in anything bigger than a nation state." That's a smart guy's slap at the glazed brains who believe the Brussels government will morph into a superpower utopia of eternal peace and easy prosperity.

Every paragraph is a treasure. Read the whole thing.

by Donald Sensing, 11/29/2003 06:19:00 PM. Permalink |

The F-14 experience
Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated took a ride in an F-14 with pilot "Biff" King and managed to live to tell the tale:

Biff said I passed out. Twice. I was coated in sweat. At one point, as we were coming in upside down in a banked curve on a mock bombing target and the G's were flattening me like a tortilla and I was in and out of consciousness, I realized I was the first person in history to throw down.

I used to know cool. Cool was Elway throwing a touchdown pass, or Norman making a five-iron bite. But now I really know cool. Cool is guys like Biff, men with cast-iron stomachs and freon nerves. I wouldn't go up there again for Derek Jeter's black book, but I'm glad Biff does every day, and for less a year than a rookie reliever makes in a home stand.

Yes, but the rookie reliever has a dull, boring and not very challenging job compared to Biff - or for that matter the newest infantry private in the Army.

I recall the fighter pilots I worked with in Korea one winter when the 2d Infantry Division Artillery commander decided a few lieutenants needed to be trained as air forward air controllers. It sounds redundant, but it's not; AFACs control tactical airstrikes while flying, FACs do it while on the ground. While we were at it, we'd be trained as aerial artillery observers, too.

So we used a small helicopter, an OH-58 that was an earlier and less sophisticated version of this one. (This was in 1977, the technological dark ages compared to now.) Choppers fly low and slow, so pilots learn to use "terrain masking" to hide from the enemy, who has all sorts of nasty things he can hit a helicopter with, like missiles, guns and for that matter, rocks.

So while calling in an artillery strike, the pilot hovered about five feet off the ground, 30 feet behind a descending ridgeline. When the fire direction center notified us that the shells' impact was 10 second away, the pilot flew the chopper sideways until I could barely see the impact area over the ridge. The shells hit and the pilot slithered sideways again to hide the aircraft.

The fighter pilot in the back seat was almost beside himself. It was the first time he had ever flown sideways and he was almost ecstatic. And he said that flying around trees was a trip, too.

I think that helicopter pilots have more fun flying than any other pilots, but as every war shows, it's very dangerous.

by Donald Sensing, 11/29/2003 09:23:00 AM. Permalink |

President Bush and soldiers' funerals
We don't need a Mourner in Chief

Yes, around every silver lining there is a cloud. In the NYT's article about the Dem candidates' reactions to the president's trip to Baghdad, we read,

The trip came at a time of rising criticism of the president for not attending the funerals of the returning war dead. It also came in the same week that Mr. Bush met with families of 26 soldiers killed in Iraq, and thus appeared to be a concerted effort by the White House to deal with a political problem.

I cannot think of any reason that the president of the United States is somehow obligated to attend the funeral of a soldier killed in action. I cannot help but think that the opposition promoting the idea wants to spin his attendance (if it was ever made) into an implied admission of error and contrition. And why do I suspect that the opposition would find a way to "prep" bereaved family members about what they might want to tell reporters afterward?

Can you imagine what the other side, including no few media, would say about Bush's funeral attendance? "Bush seeks family's forgiveness," etc. etc. I sure don't recall Bill Clinton attending the funeral of any troops killed in his administration.

But the criticism also betrays something about the other side that begs attention: at bottom, everything is therapy, related to a cult of victimization and the burgeoning cult of barely surviving. Americans are not tough people who triumph over adversity and loss, but are merely those who somehow manage to endure, especially if they can be offered a prominent shoulder to cry on. Therefore, the president should be the Therapist in Chief, not the Commander in Chief. Gestures, symbols, the bitten lip, feeling the pain - these things are what the opposition (mis)takes for substance.

But I do not want a therapist for president. I don't want the president to feel my pain; I want him to take care of business. God forbid my son should fall in the line of duty after he enters active duty in the Marines next summer, but if the president shows up at the funeral, my greeting to him will be, "Who's minding the store?"

This observation also strikes me as pretty accurate:

Okey dokey. GWB flew into Baghdad shortly after a bunch of French-fried would-be mass murderers tried to shoot down what they thought was an American military plane using Soviet SAMs.

Think they might have taken a shot or two at Air Force One if they'd known? Do you think that "chicken hawk" GWB put himself in harm's way?

Do you think that any of the lefty chickenbloggers now howling at the moon about publicity stunts would have dared as much without clogging every soiled-panty cleaning emporium from here to Baghdad?

I think that one things that bothers the opposition more than most anything else is that Bush is a personally gutsy man. He is, well, manly, in the old sense of the word. It is doing that drives him, not appearing. It is results that matter to him, not process. And they don't know quite what to make of it.

Update: I see that John Cole has a summary of presidents' attendance at funerals since LBJ's adnministration (absent Ford, for some reason). It's quite rare - Johnson attended exactly two; one of them was the funeral of Maj. Gen Keith L. Ware, whom I happen to know was the only division commander killed in Vietnam. As I indicated, Clinton attended zero funerals, but he did attend a memorial service for the sailors killed in the terrorist attack on USS Cole.

by Donald Sensing, 11/28/2003 02:36:00 PM. Permalink |

Intermittent, if at all
That's probably the best way to describe my posting for the long weekend. I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

by Donald Sensing, 11/28/2003 11:53:00 AM. Permalink |

Linkagery
Via Joe Katzman’s email a posting about un-Bible studies, where the answers are not important, nor even sought. What matters are the questions. Sounds very rabbinic, and that’s a good thing.

Joe also advised me of how to deal with your left-wing friends.

A religion professor succinctly discusses the key issues regarding homosexuality and the Bible.

Michael McNeil has a lot more to say about the cause of the Crusades, and it’s worth the read.

Criminy, for the last time (okay, probably not) American soldiers and US Marines are not the same thing!

Rumsfeld’s management style - just another fad? The reviews are far from uniformly favorable.

Maybe one reason "they hate us" is that we are achievers and they aren’t. HT: Richard Heddleson, who also wonders whether this guy (names sounds familiar) is gunning for the Nobel Peace Prize.

by Donald Sensing, 11/26/2003 10:11:00 PM. Permalink |

Patience, please
I am just now reading email dated Nov. 17. Yes, this is pathetic, I know. Mea culpa.

by Donald Sensing, 11/26/2003 09:05:00 PM. Permalink |

Negotiating with Iraq
John F. Culliman, former foreign policy advisor to the US Catholic bishops, writes about the political side of Iraqi autonomy at NRO. He notes the ...

. . . unbecoming glee with which [Iraq's] handpicked Iraqi political leaders celebrated the one-sided November 15 deal struck between the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council (IGC).

Under this agreement, the U.S. will surrender its present rights as occupying power under international law to a fully sovereign Iraqi provisional government on July 1, 2004. Just one implication of this accelerated transfer of power is the need to agree beforehand on the terms under which U.S. forces will remain in Iraq as "invited guests.'" ...

Bear in mind that in political negotiations, everything's ultimately related to everything else; and nothing's properly settled until everything's settled. That's the approach the U.S. needs to take, bolstered by the leverage that $20 billion in reconstruction funds provides. There's no lack of leverage; what's needed is proper application and proper focus on vital U.S. interests — not a piecemeal approach to outstanding issues.

I am reminded of Will Rogers observation that America never lost a war or won a conference. RTWT.

by Donald Sensing, 11/26/2003 05:31:00 PM. Permalink |

God of Jesus, god of Mohammed
Whilst driving yesterday it happened to be the time of day when the local radio talk show, The Phil Valentine Show, came on the air. The first item on Phil’s agenda was a statement by President Bush:

In a Thursday news conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair in London, the president was asked about his views on the subject. "I do say that freedom is the Almighty's gift to every person," the president responded. "I also condition it by saying freedom is not America's gift to the world. It's much greater than that, of course. And I believe we worship the same God."

There followed some musings by Phil and his show’s sidekick, Johnny B., about how we should all get along and aren’t we all trying to get to the same place and can’t we stop arguing over religion, etc. etc. etc.

So I called in. Phil gave me a respectful and reasonably lengthy hearing of several minutes on the air. Below is an expanded version of what I said about the question, "Are Allah and the God worshiped by Christians and Jews the same God?"

First, there is no way to argue that the God of Christians and the God of the Jews are not the same. Jesus was a Jew and he described God in Jewish terms. His religious offense in the minds of the Jewish High Council was not that he worshiped a false God, but that he claimed co-identity with the one God they all worshiped. Jesus cited the Hebrew and Jewish prophets to buttress his own case. Jesus read the Jewish Scriptures in synagogue and insisted that he did not intend to overturn "even an iota or a jot" of the Jewish law, all of which was concerned with God and the relationship of the people with God, and with one another in God’s name.

Judaism and Christianity have some things in common with Islam. Both Judaism-Christianity and Islam insist that there is one deity, and only one. (I won’t address the Muslim misunderstanding of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity here.) Both sides - Judaism-Christianity on the one and Islam on the other - understand the deity as the source of the moral order of human life. Both sides understand that their knowledge about the deity comes not from themselves, but from the deity through revelation.

Those things being so, the question is not, Is there a God? The question is: what kind of God is there? What is God’s essential nature and character, as God has chosen to reveal to us?

What I told Phil was that the overall concepts of deity between Judaism-Christianity and Islam are so divergent that both cannot be simultaneously true. I referred to comedian Jack Handy’s shtick that trees and dogs are just alike. They both have bark, after all. Of course, one is a small, furry, warm-blooded, mobile animal. The other is a large, leafy, coarse-surfaced, woody, motionless plant. But they really the same.

But if someone described his pet dog to you using terms such as leafy, woody, motionless and such, at some point you’d insist that he wasn’t talking about a dog at all. And no matter how stoutly he insisted he was, you would say no.

So it is with the way Islam presents Allah and the way Judaism-Christianity present YHWH/God. At some point, for those who study the subject, the light dawns that although both recognize there is only one deity, we are not talking about the same deity. If we alike insist, though, that there is still only one deity, then either Judaism-Christianity or Islam are false, even though there are occasional points of agreement.

The Islamic point of view

Islam insists that it is the primeval religion of humankind. Islam includes within its ranks such familiar figures to Jews and Christians as Abraham, Jacob and Jesus. But here is a critical point: Islam insists that Abraham, for example, was not a proto-Jewish patriarch, but a Muslim. Jesus was not the Son of God or the Jewish Messiah, he was a Muslim. Example: Submission.org explains,

The Quran, informs us that Jesus was a human messenger of God whose sole mission was to deliver God's message; he never possessed any power, and is now dead (4:171, 5:75, 117).

Obviously, Christian beliefs about Jesus - and what God was doing with and to Jesus - cannot be true if the Quran is true.

Islam claims that Allah revealed himself to the Jews and Christians in much the same way Allah revealed himself to Mohammed. But the record of revelation became corrupted and error-filled by human design or negligence. Hence neither the Jewish Scriptures nor the Christian New Testament are trustworthy revelations of Allah. Only the Quran is uncorrupted. It holds the literal and very words of Allah and is totally error-free. Islam for Today puts it this way:

In Muslim eyes, Mohammed completes a succession of prophets, including Abraham, Moses and Jesus, each of whom refined and restated the message of God.

The Koran therefore corroborates, updates and expands the Old and New Testaments.

Muslims insist that to become a Muslim means abandoning all prior religious beliefs - with no change of mind allowed, for the Quran decrees death for apostate Muslims. A person who affirms the Sonship of Jesus, for example, cannot continue to do so while claiming Muslim identity.

Contra-distinctions

Yet for Christians, the identity of Christ is obviously of central importance. If one believes, as I do, that one’s eternal destiny is at stake in answering Jesus’ question, "Who do you say I am?" then the decision to affirm or deny that "in Jesus dwelled the godhead bodily" (Col. 2:9) and that Jesus was raised from the dead become utterly crucial. Pilate’s question to Jesus, "What is truth?" remains. C. S. Lewis wrote:

"One of the great difficulties is to keep before the audience's mind the question of Truth. They always think you are recommending Christianity not because it is true but because it is good. And in the discussion they will at every moment try to escape the issue 'True or False' into stuff about the Spanish Inquisition, or France, or Poland - or anything whatever. You have to keep forcing them back, to the real point. Only thus will you be able to undermine...their belief that a certain amount of 'religion' is desirable but one mustn't carry it too far. One must keep on pointing out that Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important."

Central to both Judaism and Christianity is the concept of covenant. A covenant is the voluntary acceptance by a people to accept God and make God their only God, following God’s precepts and commandments. Covenants are not contracts and cannot be revoked, only abandoned. Both testaments teach that sinful human beings habitually abandon their commitment to covenants, but that God is always faithful to them, even in - or especially in - the presence of human sin.

In Judaism the foremost covenant is the Covenant at Sinai, which forms the heart of the Law of Moses. In Christianity the covenant is the New Covenant prophesied by the Jewish prophet Jeremiah and fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ (Christians also affirm Jesus himself was prophesied by Isaiah and other prophets).

In both Judaism and Christianity, the heart of the covenants is willing love (i.e., Deut. 7:12; John 3:16). In fact, "love is the fulfillment of the law" (Rom. 13:10). Absent love, the religious life is empty and indeed, noisome (1 Cor. 13:1). God acts to redeem the people from their human frailty, inability, inherent evil and victimization and sin because the very essence of God is that "God is love." Christianity teaches explicitly that out of love God became embodied as Jesus, teaching, healing, suffering, dying, resurrected, in order to prove that the promises God had made through and to the Jews were true promises.

Jewish religious figures of Jesus day, including Jesus, agreed that the foremost commandment of the Jewish law was love:

One of the [Jewish] scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked Jesus, "Which commandment is the first of all?"

Jesus answered, "The first is, 'Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.'

The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these."

Then the scribe said to him, "You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that 'he is one, and besides him there is no other'; and 'to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,' and 'to love one's neighbor as oneself,' --this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices." (Mark 12:28-33)

Love marks the key distinction between the Allah of Islam and the God of Moses and Jesus. For in Islam, Allah does not demand love, but submission. Judaism and Christianity teach that one submits to the authority of God out of gratitude for the redeeming works God has already done and in trust that God will continue to redeem. Obedience springs from love. Submission is the result, not the cause, of the saving acts that God has already accomplished.

This is a critical point:

In Islam, Allah does no saving acts except to accept human submission.

In Christianity, submission follows salvation; true also in Judaism, in which the children of Israel decided to accept the Lord's precepts and commandments after they had been delivered from bondage in Egypt.

In Islam, salvation follows submission; salvation is a reward for human works. (It was explained that way to me by a Muslim university professor). But in Christianity, salvation is a pre-existing fact springing from the love-impelled work of God, to which all persons are invited to share by grace through faith, followed by good works done in thankfulness and trust.

Love is attributed to Allah in the Quran, but not frequently. The anonymous writer of the no-longer-active blog, Secular Islam, listed just eight verses which mentions the love of Allah (there are hundreds of such verses in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures). But in every verse listed, Allah’s love is conditional on human submission. Both Judaism and Christianity, on the other hand, understand that God’s love precedes, not follows, human devotion back to God or obedience to God. In Islam Allah’s love is reactive while in Judaism-Christianity God’s love is proactive, to the point where Jesus even taught to love your enemies and do good to those who harm you. But this teaching is antithetical to Islam.

The Muslim writer of the site makes a case for the distinction excellently:

Allah seems more distant in Islam than in Judaism and Christianity; there is more of an emphasis on His might and His power, His inapproachability, the fact that He has no need of His creation and says, "I have only created Jinns and men, that they may serve Me." (51:56) Note the word serve, not love. In Islam one submits to Allah; in Judaism (repeated in Christianity) the Shema says, "And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might," a concept totally lacking in Islamic prayers. Men and women are slaves of Allah in Islam; in Christianity they are children of God. Children are a source of love and worry for their parents; slaves exist merely to serve. ... Islam means submission; this does not leave much in the way of personal interaction. Allah orders, you obey. No debating or bargaining, like when Abraham got God down from fifty to ten righteous people to save Sodom and Gomorrah from destruction. Moses speaks directly with God; Allah communicates with Muhammad via the angel Gabriel, since "it is not fitting for a man that Allah should speak to him except by inspiration, or from behind a veil, or by the sending of a messenger to reveal, with Allah's permission, what Allah wills: for He is Most High, Most Wise." (42:51)

And certainly in Islam the idea that God would find it fitting to be born of woman and live as a human being, suffering all the indignities that Jesus suffered, even death on a cross - that entire notion is strongly rejected in Islam. Continuing:

The Qur'an mentions that Allah is closer to man than his jugular vein (50:16), and Allah is constantly referred to as the Most Merciful and All Forgiving, but I have to say that I don't feel much warmth in the relationship. Allah is usually angry with man for constantly disobeying Him and constantly mentions how those who disobey and disbelieve will burn in Hell (quite graphically, too.) ...

The heavy emphasis on rewards and punishments in the Qur'an and on fearing Allah and what He will do to you if you don't repent and submit to His will doesn't leave much room for really loving Him. The legalistic nature of Islam and the intricacies, even the often anal nit-picking of shari'ah, only serve to strengthen this idea of Allah as demanding slave-master, quick to punish. ...

There is just nothing similar to the writings of the Hebrew prophets of the Bible in Islamic literature, whether Qur'an, hadiths, or sirah (lives of Muhammad). These demonstrate a very close and affectionate relationship between Israel and its God, God the loving, often chastising parent who nevertheless mourned over His people and promised them redemption. There is nothing like Isaiah's, "When Israel was a child I loved him; out of Egypt I called my son," or "Come now, let us reason together," (which would suggest a level of closeness and intimacy with God that would never be permitted in Islam--Allah would never condescend to reason with His slaves). Instead Allah of the Qur'an simply literally blows away those who refuse His message and goes on to the next people.

Never could a Muslim proclaim in Islamic faith, as Martin Luther did in Christian faith, "Love God and do what you want." No such freedom is permitted in Islam. But in Christianity (and I think, Judaism, too) freedom is central to the religious life: "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free," said Jesus.

So, is the Allah of Islam and the God of Judaism-Christianity the same God? We agree that there is one deity, but what we each claim to have received in true revelation from the deity about himself diverges at utterly crucial points, so divergent and so crucial that both cannot be true. One picture is false, a portrait of a deity who in fact does not exist. I am not interested here in being "tolerant" and "accepting," I am intensely concerned with being correct. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord of Abraham, Jacob and Jesus, and reject that Allah exists at all.

Please understand I am certainly not renouncing the political right of Muslims to worship whom they wish to; freedom of worship is a fundamental human right which I enjoy and would not deny to others. I strive to be entirely tolerant and accepting of their socio-politicalright, but I reject their religious claims as having equal merit with those of historic Christianity. "Here stand, I can do no other."

Update: I now discover that Bill Hobbs and Michael Williams have addressed this topic - Bill before the president's remark and Michael after.

by Donald Sensing, 11/26/2003 04:16:00 PM. Permalink |

Enemy video
The video from which I grabbed this frame is said to show the launching of an anti-aircraft missile on 22 November at a KLM DHL aircraft, which was struck, caught fire, and managed to land at Baghdad airport. KLM and other civilian lines have since ceased operations in Iraq.



There is no way to identify what the missile type is, but my SWAG is that it is an old SA-7 "Grail" or type-successor. They do not have a powerful warhead and it's not surprising that it failed to down the airliner rather than damage it. But even so, this is serious business. The terrorists have adapted to the fact that they can't go toe-to-toe with our troops and are clearly turning to civilian targets.

by Donald Sensing, 11/25/2003 11:31:00 PM. Permalink |

Cleaning up server space
I have deleted old photos and Mpegs from my server, so if you happen to peruse my archives and the shots don't show or the movies won't play, that's why. I needed the server space back.

by Donald Sensing, 11/25/2003 11:25:00 PM. Permalink |

Is this the mark of the Beast?
Dean Esmay wants to know. He quotes Revelation 13:16-18:

Also it [the Beast] causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom: let him who has understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number, its number is six hundred and sixty-six.

What Dean links to is a story about RFIDs - Radio Frequency ID.

Applied Digital Solutions of Palm Beach, Fla., is hoping that Americans can be persuaded to implant RFID chips under their skin to identify themselves when going to a cash machine or in place of using a credit card. The surgical procedure, which is performed with local anesthetic, embeds a 12-by-2.1mm RFID tag in the flesh of a human arm.

Or the forehead, one assumes. But wait, isn't there a small problem with subdermal ID tag embedding?

RFID tags raise unique security concerns. First, because they broadcast their ID number, a thief could rig up his or her own device to intercept and then rebroadcast the signal to an automatic teller machine. Second, sufficiently dedicated thieves may try to slice the tags out of their victims.

"Give me your wallet, your watch and your arm. Then I'll scalp you just to be sure."

"We do hear concerns about this from a privacy point of view," Cossolotto said. "Obviously, the company wants to do all it can to protect privacy. If you don't want it anymore...you can go to a doctor and have it removed. It's not something I would recommend people do at home. I call it an opt-out feature."

Yeah, I guess, except that to "opt out" you have to go to a surgeon. Include me out from the git-go. Man, I long for the day when bar codes and credit cards were proclaimed to be the mark of the Beast. What's next?

Update: This was inevitable (by email):

The literal translation of the number 666 from Revelation 13:16-18 is clearly misleading. Arabic numerals were invented 1000 years after Revelation was written. The obvious construction is that it referred to the Roman number DCLXIV (666), and thus the beast is the Roman Empire.

Well, you got to second base on this, so it's a good hit. The question is why would 666 refer to the Roman empire? I think that the best commentary on Revelation (and please note the name of the book is singular, not plural) was by Paul Ramsey, back in the early 1960s, I think.

Having no modern numeric system, the ancients used letters to represent numbers, hence Roman numerals. Ramsey explained that if you write the Hebrew/Aramaic letters standing for 666, you wind up with the words, "Neron Caesar," without the vowels. Remember, written Hebrew didn't use vowels until about 1,000 years ago.

Ramsey wrote that Nero (ruled 54-68) was such a cruel emperor, and one who instigated Christian persecutions, that even after he died there was fear among both Romans and Christians that he would return somehow.

But wait, there's more: The New testament was written in Koine Greek. The Koine word used meaning "Latin speaker" was "Lateinos." In Greek-letter numerics, guess what those letters add up to?

And there are a number of other letter-numeric constructions that add to 666 in Latin, Greek and Hebrew.

My short take: Revelation is teaching that the oppressive powers of the world cannot win against the saving power of Christ.


by Donald Sensing, 11/25/2003 11:16:00 PM. Permalink |

Congrats to Austin Bay!
I guess this is congratulations day here at OHC central. Austin Bay emailed me to let me know that his Middle East novel, The Wrong Side of Brightness, is selling more briskly than he expected, for which he says the blogosphere takes some credit.

Austin is a nationally-syndicated columnist for the Creative syndicate, a Reserve colonel and an all-round good guy. His email made me think about the novel I wrote in 1988-89, when I was still on active duty. My working title was, "The Stiletto Study," Stiletto being a code name for a staff study done by the Soviets of employment of biological weapons in the Afghan War.

The Stiletto Study was a Cold War spy thriller. I began mulling the idea of writing a novel in 1986 when I was matriculating at the Defense Information School, then located at Ft Ben Harrison, Ind. I figured for a first effort, it would be best to keep it simple: bad guys, good guys, both want the same thing badly, yielding dramatic conflict.

Alfred Hitchcock fans will recognize this plot as the basic "MacGuffin" plot that Hitch used so effectively in his movies. In a book-length interview by the late French director Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock explained the MacGuffin thus (paraphrased):

The MacGuffin is the source of the conflict; it is what everyone wants. What it is does not matter. It serves only to bring about the dramatic conflict. Once the conflict is resolved, what happens to the MacGuffin is unimportant.

Q: Why do you call it a MacGuffin?

Well, there were two Scotsmen sharing a compartment on a train. One had a large, wrapped box, tied up with twine, on his lap. The other Scotsman became curious and asked, "Hoot mon, MacGregor, what ha’ ye in yon bonnie box?"

"Why, MacTavish, within this box be a MacGuffin."

"Wha’ be a MacGuffin, Macregor?"

"A MacGuffin is a device for capturing the lions roaming the Scottish highlands."

"Aye, MacGregor, there nae be any lions roaming the Scottish highlands."

MacGregor is silent for a moment, then says, "Aye. Well, then this canna’ be a MacGuffin."

I didn’t write anything for a couple of years. In 1988 I began writing. After I completed 85 pages, the author of the novel that became the movie Sniper came to Ft Bragg after the studio optioned the book. I don't recall the name of either the novel or the writer, unfortunately. (The rumor that the novel/movie are about a legendary Marine sniper in Vietnam named Gunny Hathcock is not true. The novel was semi-autobiographical; the author was an Army sniper in Vietnam.)

But Hollywood was through making Vietnam movies in 1988, so they told the author to rewrite it for the present day - 1988, at the time. He taught creative writing at a college at Mars Hill, SC (probably Mars Hill College) and came to Ft Bragg to get "re-greened."

When we first talked on the phone, I told him I had written 85 pages of a novel. He agreed to read it so I mailed the pages to him.

Of the 85 pages, I wound up throwing out 60 of them after hearing his critique. What he basically said was that I wrote extremely well, but didn't know how to tell a story. I had 85 pages of very well executed vignettes, he said, but no story. (Sort of like the movie Master and Commander, har har!)

He gave me the name of his agent at William Morris Agency. I finished the novel at 105,000 words and mailed it to the agent. I got back a polite rejection - but it was two pages long and included a detailed critique, so I figure I was pretty close.

Alas, the Army had sent me to Central America by the time I got the letter, and I never did pursue reworking the manuscript. I still have it, though, and still think it's a thundering good read.

The plot is that a breakaway Soviet military intelligence (GRU) unit wants smuggles a bioweapon (a hyper-vectored plague) to an Iranian terrorist group who will employ it in America. But a GRU general who is unsuccessfully recruited into the plot steals the bioweapon container. He takes it to Salzburg, one step ahead of the bad guys, where he hides it before he is killed.

He utters his dying, last words to an American Army officer who is on leave in Salzburg with her husband, also an officer. But the words don't make sense: "D**n rough, man. Ich habe f ür Lenin gesundigt ."

What do the words mean, and do they reveal his secret? How? Where is the container hidden? No one knows, including the reader. The race is on.

The bio-container is, of course, the MacGuffin. The parties at play who want it are the DIA, the "good" GRU officers, the bad ones, and the terrorists, none of whom are friendly to one another. Stuck in the middle are the two US Army captains.

It was a lot of fun to write, and I sometimes want to write another novel, and maybe someday will.

by Donald Sensing, 11/25/2003 10:53:00 PM. Permalink |

Retailers need temp help!
The local NBC affiliate is just now broadcasting a story that dozens of mall retailers have "help wanted" ads hanging out. Most pay better than minimuim wage, and come with benefits.

I blame the ... well, you know.

by Donald Sensing, 11/25/2003 10:06:00 PM. Permalink |

Cold brewing works!
Gary Utter commented on my latest post about home roasting coffee to recommend cold brewing coffee overnight rather than using a hot-water drip brewer.

It had never occurred to me to mix the grounds and tap water and let them sit for 9-12 hours to make coffee, even though I have made rice that way (the first time was by accident, but it works fine).

It worked fine last night. More later, back to work.

Update: I knew that filtering the cofee slurry would be a challenge. I used eight ounces by weight of cofee grounds and 4½ ounces of water, all in a large glass pitcher. This morning I spooned the wet grounds from the pitcher and pressed them to squeeze the coffee out. When I had got all the grounds out that way that I could, I placed two paper filters in the basket of my Bunn coffeemaker, set the basket over another pitcher, then slowly added the remaining slurry. It filtered out pretty well.

I then boiled three cups of water, added a cup of cold-brewed concentrate, and had hot coffee. It did seem pretty smooth. I used old, store-bought Columbia organic coffee. Next time I'll use my own fresh roasted coffee and let you know how it turns out.

by Donald Sensing, 11/25/2003 01:08:00 PM. Permalink |

Congrats to N. Z. Bear!
He is the brain behind Truth Laid Bear, noted for its famous Blogosphere Ecosystem, among other things. He posts today,

Well, my handy little SiteMeter counter tells me that sometime on the overnight last night, The Truth Laid Bear received its 500,000th visitor. ...

TTLB officially opened its doors on May 16, 2002, with this post. Five-hundred and sixty days later, over five hundred thousand visitors have passed on through; an all-time average of just under nine hundred every day.

Which is something of a coincidence because this site, active since Jan. 1 of this year, last night passed the 700,000 SiteMeter mark. That figure includes the 71,627 who visited OHC when I hosted it on Blogspot. I began hosting it on Cornerhost.com on New Year's Day this year.

Even earlier, I hand-made a blog I called Gunner20's Blog Carnival, which was my initial foray into blogging; its first post was March 14, 2002. I had about 15,000 hits there before moving to Blogspot in May 2002.

I actually stopped blogging for awhile because I got discouraged that no one seemed to be reading (Hence, the name "One Hand Clapping" when I restarted - I decided that writing helped me understand things better even if no one else. See this post.) But today my average daily readership is more than 3,100 unique visitors, yielding almost 4,200 page views. To put things in perspective, OHC is ranked 80th on the Ecosystem, out of 5,361 blogs ranked. My traffic ranking is 29th place.

So I encourage all you new and presently low-traffic bloggers to stick with it. Remember that by the time you view the traffic rankings' 12th-place blog, the daily traffic is down to four figures. Blogs are niche writing, but there are so many blogs covering so many niches that they are becoming central information portals for the Internet cognoscenti.

So again, congrats to NZ Bear, and many thanks to the thousands of you who drop by!

by Donald Sensing, 11/25/2003 12:54:00 PM. Permalink |

"Locked in oldthink?" Think again
Over at SSDB, Kevin Connors posts, in its entirety,

Another Pundit Locked In Oldthink

Donald Sensing believes Al Qaeda’s primary war is against other Muslims.

No, Donald. It is not primary; it is concurrent. This is a battle of archaic thought against contemporary thought. In the contemporary camp, Islamics, Christians, and Jews, as well as Hindus, Shintoists, Buddhists, etc. are all living together in more-or-less happy unison. The Islamofascists stand against us all equally.

Sensing's arguement would wash if the greater world could divorce itself from the Islamic. But such is not the case.

"Concurrent" in the sense of "simultaneous," yes, I agree. It certainly isn’t clear how "concurrent" and "primary" are antonyms, though. Kevin seems not to understand that the principal objective of the Islamists was explicitly stated many times by Osama bin Laden. I have written a number of posts on the topic, relying on bin Laden’s own words and those of other al Qaeda figures as much as possible. Here is a digest of my earlier essays for Kevin (and others) to peruse, because it’s obvious that he’s not familiar enough with my work on the subject to offer constructive critiques rather than snide sniffles:

Osama bin Laden’s strategic plan - he ain’t got one. I herein explain the difference between having strategic goals and a strategic plan to achieve them. Al Qaeda has the former but not the latter.

This post is pretty much my "basic post" on the subject, there are several others.

I posted a summary, of sorts, on Nov. 15. This post was partly in response to the always-collegial Steven Den Beste to reply to his post about my essay above.

Based on bin Laden’s interviews and other al Qaeda writings, which I cite throughout my work, it is clear, I wrote, that what the Islamists want is this:

All Americans, both military and civilians, out of Saudi Arabia, the land of Mecca and Medina, then out of all Arab lands. This goal is clearly number one, he has said so.

The House of Saud to be stripped of power and the country ruled according to sharia, pure Islamic law. In other words, Saudi Arabia is to become a Taliban-like country.

Islamic law to be established in all the other Gulf states.

The Islamic caliphate to be re-established, meaning one unified religious-political ruler over the Muslim lands.

When I wrote that the Islamists’ primary war is against other Muslims, in was pointing out the near-self-evident fact that while al Qaeda and its loose network of allies are fighting America and Britain, they seek to conquer and control first the Arab Gulf countries, then other Muslim countries.

Neither bin Laden nor other figures among the Islamists have explained a vision beyond establishing a caliphate over the Muslim lands. It’s no brilliant analysis to point out that al Qaeda ultimately wants the whole world to be Islamic (as they define Islam). Every Muslim wants the world converted to Islam.

Specifically, al Qaeda’s war against Islam is against two particular elements of Muslim countries. First are the governments who are insufficiently Islamic, which is to say, all of them, including (or especially) Saudi Arabia’s royal family.

Saudi Arabia is Osama bin Laden’s special concern because it is the land of the two most sacred places in Islam, Mecca and Medina. Osama bin Laden has made it clear that he believes that the American presence in Saudi Arabia is a conquest of the Muslim holy land, and that the Saudi royals are American puppets. As long as the Americans control Saudi Arabia, in his view, Islamic purity cannot be established in "the land of the two holy places," as he sometimes called Saudi Arabia.

Hence, Osama bin Laden has said that America is the "main enemy," but not "main" as in "primary." He means main as in "most powerful." Absent Americans in Saudi Arabia, he thinks that the royal family would fall quickly to an Islamic revolution of the Saudi ummah, the masses, whom Osama bin Laden believes are religiously sympathetic to him. That is, Osama bin Laden believes that the people want to live in a radical Islamist society.

But not all. With non-Islamic governments as one target, bin Laden also targets westernized Muslims. In fact, he does not consider them true Muslims at all, but apostates and heretics. Hence, they may be killed without regret. That is what happened in Istanbul with the attacks against the UK’s consulate and the British bank office. Most victims were Turkish Muslims, but they were democratized Muslims and therefore, from al Qaeda’s perspective, not true Muslims at all.

Bin Laden has emphasized over and over that he wants Western non-Muslims and all their accouterments out of Saudi Arabia first, then the other Gulf states, then all the Muslim lands. The expulsion of the West is an intermediate but essential objective en route to establishing the primary objective, the caliphate.

And that is why al Qaeda’s primary struggle and combat is other Muslims, not the West: the fight against the West is an intermediate step toward gaining regime change in the Gulf states, followed by regime changes in other Muslim countries.

Kevin wrote, "Sensing's arguement [sic] would wash if the greater world could divorce itself from the Islamic." Well, that’s not what the "greater world" is trying to do, and not what I said we are trying to do.

But it can be reasonably concluded that the Islamists want to divorce themselves from the greater world - think Taliban Afghanistan, whose rulers impoverished the country in every sense of the word to build their Islamist dream society.

At the heart of radical Islamism is a ruthless purity code that does not make room for dilution or adulteration by impure persons, institutions or systems of commerce. The Taliban blew up ancient Buddhist statues because they were impure. As I wrote last September ,

Yussuf al-Ayyeri, one of Osama bin Laden's closest associates since the early 1990s, was one of the terrorists killed by Saudi security forces in Riyadh last June. He wrote a book recently published by al Qaeda entitled, The Future of Iraq and The Arabian Peninsula After The Fall of Baghdad. In it Ayyeri wrote, as Amir Taheri summarizes,

"It is not the American war machine that should be of the utmost concern to Muslims. What threatens the future of Islam, in fact its very survival, is American democracy." . . .

Al-Ayyeri then shows how various forms of unbelief attacked the world of Islam in the past century or so, to be defeated in one way or another.

The first form of unbelief to attack was "modernism" (hidatha), which led to the caliphate's destruction and the emergence in the lands of Islam of states based on ethnic identities and territorial dimensions rather than religious faith. . . .

What Al-Ayyeri sees now is a "clean battlefield" in which Islam faces a new form of unbelief. This, he labels "secularist democracy." This threat is "far more dangerous to Islam" than all its predecessors combined. The reasons, he explains in a whole chapter, must be sought in democracy's "seductive capacities."

This form of "unbelief" persuades the people that they are in charge of their destiny and that, using their collective reasoning, they can shape policies and pass laws as they see fit. . . .

the Islamists are radical, all right - radically violent, radically ruthless, but also radically insular. They are afraid, literally afraid, of whole sets of Western concepts: popular sovereignty, scientific materialism, human rights (especially for women), electoral government, separation of religion and politics, the list goes on.

As long as the West, especially America, contaminates Saudi Arabia and other Arab-Muslim countries by our presence there and by our ideas and culture, Islamists cannot achieve their fundamental goals, no matter how many of us they kill. But simply expelling us, even if that could be done, does not win them their goal of a new caliphate. That is why their primary fight is against other Muslims, because it is they, not we, the Islamists want to conquer and dominate.

by Donald Sensing, 11/24/2003 08:58:00 PM. Permalink |

Pow! Right in the kisser!
Austin Bay reflects upon the London demonstrators:

The leftish teeth-gnashers will never get it. The figment utopias they tout can't be challenged by difficult facts. The green-cheese moons they detect orbit their own weightless imaginations, and the gravity of down-to-Earth decision, particularly when it comes to defending liberty, exerts little pull.

What he said.

by Donald Sensing, 11/24/2003 01:00:00 PM. Permalink |

Al Qaeda's biggest problem: Cash
Jim Dunnigan writes,

But cash will be what will eventually kill al Qaeda. It's members, often young men, change as they get older. Access to unguarded cash has already corrupted some members of al Qaeda, and this will continue. In Afghanistan, Islamic radicalism is being harnessed to work with drug gangs, just as Marxist rebels in South America have become drug cartels. Radical organizations traditionally turn into gangsters. Remember, the Mafia started out as nationalist rebels centuries ago, and the Irish Republican Army now spends more time dealing drugs than fighting the British.

Al Qaeda will eventually morph into a Mullah led Mafia, but it will be a bloody and drawn out process.

Even Islamist murderers can get sticky fingers when handling money, it seems.

by Donald Sensing, 11/24/2003 12:57:00 PM. Permalink |

More coffee notes
I explained before why I started roasting my own coffee beans at home and why I chose the Zach and Dani's roasting machine to do it.

This is just a few follow-up notes, as more than a few of you gentle readers emailed to say you were intrigued and might take up home roasting yourself.

1. Roast to your own taste, using roasting guides only as starting points. I had mentioned that I have grown fond of Kenyan AA beans. One guide I read said to roast them light (in color) to light-medium. Another guide said to roast them dark. I've done both and for me dark is better. But it's just a matter of taste.

2. A good friend kindly gave me an early Christmas present - a Bodum coffee press. Presses have a reputation as the purist's way to make coffee. Unlike paper filter methods, presses do not remove the flavorful oils from the coffee. Sizes come from single-cup to several cups. This was a great present! I have discovered that presses offer almost the same convenience as (shudder) instant coffee, but all the flavor of drip coffee, and then some. It's definitely become my method of choice to make just a cup or two.

3. If not using a press, the coffee-making machine is critical. There are two primary considerations. First is that it heat the water to the correct temperature, about 195 degrees. Second is that it make the coffee very quickly; what that does is speedily saturate the grounds to bring out the fullness of the flavor.

When I started roasting, I was using an extremely slow Mr. Coffee coffeemaker. So I researched other makers of all brands. Based on product descriptions and user reviews, it finally seemed clear that the only choice was a Bunn home brewer. It's very fast - 10 cups in three minutes (I timed it) and right on for temp. With such fast brewing, I do not need the autostart feature common on home brewers. Bunn is, of course, the most widely used restaurant brewer.

It costs about twice as much as a high-end brewer of another brand, but the Bunn has a stainless steel reservoir tank and copper tubing. Users said they last for many years, a big factor for me since I got tired of having to replace broken coffeemakers every couple of years.

When I use the coffee press, I use the Bunn without coffee to get the hot water; it's quicker than boiling water in a tea kettle on the stove. Actually, I use the Bunn to supply hot water when I need it for any number of reasons. So there's my progress report to date.

. . . . . .

by Donald Sensing, 11/23/2003 09:52:00 PM. Permalink |

The UK Guardian-Observer gets it, too
Andrew Rawnsley writes about the latest two al Qaeda bombings in Istanbul:

The carnage in Turkey illustrates again that this is as much a civil war within the Islamic world as it is an assault on the West.

Civil war within the Islamic world? Sounds familiar. Rawnsley continues,

If the intention was also to devastate George Bush's state visit to Britain, it didn't have quite that result. The bombings of the British consulate in Istanbul and HSBC bank actually had the effect of rescuing the Bush visit from vapidity. The atrocities suddenly and violently invested the Bush-Blair alliance with a renewed seriousness of resolve and purpose.

Yes, just when Bush and Blair needed a way to re-emphasize the nature of the threat and the need to be tenacious against it, al Qaeda provides it.

by Donald Sensing, 11/23/2003 05:00:00 PM. Permalink |

I am very grateful!
To all you fine readers who have made this site rank 29th in daily traffic, among all blogs ranked by the TTLB Blogosphere Ecosystem. That's the highest OHC has ever ranked, and I do appreciate it. (Rankings change daily.)

by Donald Sensing, 11/23/2003 01:20:00 PM. Permalink |

We need to get to the bottom of this!
As Bill Hobbs sometimes says, I blame this on the Bush tax cuts.

by Donald Sensing, 11/23/2003 01:15:00 PM. Permalink |

Some good questions . . .
... are asked about WorldNet Daily by Kevin Drum.

by Donald Sensing, 11/23/2003 01:11:00 PM. Permalink |

The outrageous 9th Circuit ruling against Glock
Law.com reports that the federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that Glock firearms and other gun makers, "... can be held liable for letting weapons fall into the hands of criminals ... ." The plaintiffs of the case concerned alleged, and the court found,

... that Glock Inc. and others, makers and the dealer of several weapons used to injure five and kill one, negligently flooded the market, fostering shady secondary markets where crooks could easily obtain a gun.

Observes Darren Kaplan,

So who did Glock "deliberately and recklessly" market their handgun to? It was the notorious illegal handgun purchaser known as the Cosmopolis Police Department in Washington State. After the Cosmopolis Police decided the Glock handgun was too small, the Cosmopolis Police sold it through a former reserve officer who owned a gun store to a man who claimed to be a gun collector. It was then sold twice at a gun show in Spokane, Wash. -- very near Hayden Lake, Idaho, the base of a neo-Nazi group to which Buford Furrow belonged.

Furrow used the gun to shoot his victims, including one who died. UCLA law Prof. Eugene Volokh says the case is a clear one of judicial overreach. Not only that, says Volokh, "According to the 9th Circuit, Glock has to dictate to the police how to handle [gun sales], because they would know better than the police how to prevent crime," a glaringly stupid proposition.

But here is the money part of the court's twisted thinking: Glock produced "... more firearms than the legitimate market demands ... ." What the court is holding is that it, not a business or the market itself, can define what the "legitimate market" for firearms is. The court is saying that a manufacturer can finely calibrate its rate of production so that only "legitimate" customers by the product. This is simply lunacy. It requires Glock deliberately to avoid growth of its business.

There are certainly huge number of "legitimate" customers in the total handgun market than Glock now sells to. There are literally millions of men and women who can lawfully own Glock pistols but don't. So why can't Glock make millions to sell to them? Because the 9th Circuit says it can't. Why? Because if even just one of those pistols falls into "non-legitimate" hands, no matter how many lawful hands it passes through first. Note that the Glock pistol in question passed through five hands after it left Glock - and according to the court, Glock is supposed to be able to control this kind of activity by limiting its production.

Note why the Cosmopolis police department got rid of the gun: it was the wrong size. They didn't look up one day and exclaim, "Dang! Where did all these Glocks come from? How'd we get so many? Quick, men, get them to the black market!" "Over-production" had nothing to do with it. The department made the wrong purchasing choice. How can Glock possibly be responsible for that?

Bottom line: the 9th Circuit Court simply wanted to strike a blow against firearms and contorted itself out of any rational thought processes to make it so.

by Donald Sensing, 11/22/2003 10:31:00 PM. Permalink |

Setting the record straight
Writes history Prof. Thomas F. Madden, on what impelled Europe to mount the Crusades,

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickl