:: Netmarcos' Notes ::

:: Wednesday, October 15, 2003 ::

Fun and games for the Wall Street Jounal's Leisure & Arts staff.
Trigger Happy
Family fun at the machine-gun range.

After the usual safety checks, the upper range opened up--with a vengeance. The fully automatic gunfire was deafening, with a dozen or so heavy machine guns firing at any one time. Every now and then, the din would be punctuated by the sonic-boom-like thud of a .50-caliber sniper rifle.
I listened to this high-caliber cacophony for 10 minutes or so, then went to the lower range, where you could rent lower-caliber machine guns. The range was about 100 yards deep and littered with junked cars, old refrigerators, empty propane cylinders and soft-drink cans. The weapon that immediately caught my eye was the MG42, the workhorse of the Wehrmacht and considered by many to be the finest machine gun ever made. At just 25 pounds, it can fire 1,200 rounds a minute and is lethally accurate up to 1,100 yards. I had to shoot it.
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After signing a release form and forking over $55 for 50 rounds, I hunkered down and took aim. With remarkably little effort, I obliterated the hubcap on a rusting car about 100 yards out. Alas, running through the 50-round belt took all of about four seconds. Before I knew it, the gun owner was smiling and shaking my hand. I was happy but wanted more.

Cool.

:: Mark 9:15 AM [+] :: (0) comments
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Ouch!OpinionJournal - Featured Article

The apparent failure of the U.S. push for another U.N. resolution on Iraq is at least a clarifying moment. A body incapable of agreeing to endorse even post facto reconstruction could certainly never have been expected to enforce its Iraq resolutions in the first place. So much for the argument that a kinder, gentler approach by the Bush Administration would have won U.N. support.
Equally illuminating, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has made it clear that he's now more interested in defeating President Bush than he ever was in toppling Saddam Hussein. Mr. Annan knows that Mr. Bush's policy of anti-terror prevention poses a serious challenge to what he claims is the 'unique legitimacy' of the collection of despots he leads--indeed, to the legitimacy of the unaccountable Secretary General himself.

:: Mark 11:35 AM [+] :: (0) comments
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'I Think We Can Do This'

This is the informed opinion of Washington Democrat Norman Dicks, just back from visiting Iraq, as expressed to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a House hearing last week on the Bush Administration's request for $87 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan. Given most reporting on these subjects of late, his optimism struck us as news.

Go read the whole thing.

:: Mark 3:17 PM [+] :: (0) comments
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The Lebanon Daily Star wants to know if you are Ready for the truth? Iraq is getting better

...there is something disturbing, too, about the way opponents of the war have portrayed events in Iraq. Visceral distrust of Bush and his sidekick, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, has brought with it a disregard both for facts and for the victims of the Iraqi tyrant, Saddam Hussein. Arab commentators have had no shame in urging their Iraqi brothers, exhausted by three major wars and more than a decade of sanctions, to start a new war “of liberation” against their liberators. Western commentators critical of the war have luxuriated in the failures of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) ­ failures that condemn Iraqis to protracted hardship.
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In mid-summer, I spent over a month in Iraq. What I found there did not correspond to what was being reported ­ most crucially, that the liberators were widely perceived as occupiers. That simply wasn’t true. In Baghdad, where US forces had permitted widespread looting (although not as much as reported) and where security and services were virtually nonexistent, attitudes toward the Americans were mixed. But even in Baghdad, even with Saddam and his sons still lurking in the shadows, the sense of relief at the toppling of the regime was palpable.

Very intersting reading indeed.

:: Mark 2:14 PM [+] :: (0) comments
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This is just one of the quotes that Andrew Sullivan uses in his own analysis of David Kay's report on Iraqi WMDs. You won't see this sort of stuff in a NYTimes headline anytime soon.
www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish

There are approximately 130 known Iraqi Ammunition Storage Points (ASP), many of which exceed 50 square miles in size and hold an estimated 600,000 tons of artillery shells, rockets, aviation bombs and other ordinance. Of these 130 ASPs, approximately 120 still remain unexamined. As Iraqi practice was not to mark much of their chemical ordinance and to store it at the same ASPs that held conventional rounds, the size of the required search effort is enormous.

You should read the whole thing...and follow all of the links...and read all of the source material...and tell all of your friends to do the same...and then make up your own mind about the reasons why we chose to take Saddam out of the picture.

:: Mark 1:52 PM [+] :: (0) comments
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This is well worth reading.
Victor Davis Hanson on War on National Review Online
It starts off slowly, but picks up momentum as it goes.

What then are the ultimate aims of terrorists and state killers? What exactly does a crackpot Iranian mullah, a crazed Taliban, the sons of Saddam, or one of bin Laden's executioners really want with us? A sort of alternative existence to the West, upon which they both feed and prey, like some sort of toadstool that, with sufficient rain and neglect, sprouts up amid an otherwise lush green lawn.
Bin Laden (construction money), the Husseins (oil money), or the Taliban (drug revenues) all found ways to buy appurtenances of the good life from the West, even as they imported weapons to kill us, and crafted terrorist strategies to keep us from interfering in their kleptocracies or primordial theocracies, spinning myths all the while about a glorious Dark Age past or a sensuous paradise to come.
Whether terrorists are true Islamic fascists right out of the ninth-century or goofy modernist killers like Saddam, the Assads, or Khadaffis, their methods are the same, and their hatred of the West similar. Both count on an illiterate and impoverished citizenry — that famed Middle East Street whose misery-driven fury can always be deflected by a parade of shiny imported missiles, a blood-curdling lie about the Jews, or a half-educated rant about some American-inspired conspiracy to infect the water or carry off their women.

As Mr. Hanson reaches his conclusion, he invokes the spirit of Thomas Paine when he declares:

...Mr. Bush's hunch is that the tragedy of September changed us all, and his own resoluteness will prove the better hand. In other words, as polls drop and sunshine supporters fold, he senses that America — and with it civilization — will still win, and in a very big way, thus ending for good this awful contest of the last quarter-century.

Just on the off chance that this does not bring the words from the opening paragraph of Paine's imortal "American Crisis I" to mind, I have included them here.

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but "to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER," and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.

:: Mark 11:45 AM [+] :: (0) comments
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It is unusual for me to link to an advertisement, but I will make an exeption for this Crafted With Pride bit on NRO.

:: Mark 9:20 AM [+] :: (0) comments
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Mackubin Thomas Owens discussing Civil Liberties on National Review Online draws a parallel between the Patriot act and some of the measures enacted by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War to deal with civilians who acted in support of the Confederate cause.

Lincoln's comment on the difference between times of emergency and times of peace should serve as a reply to President Bush's critics:

I can no more be persuaded that the Government can constitutionally take no strong measures in time of rebellion, because it can be shown that the same could not lawfully be taken in time of peace, than I can be persuaded that a particular drug is not good medicine for a sick man, because it can be shown not to be good for a well one. Nor am I able to appreciate the danger apprehended by the meeting [of the New York Democrats] that the American people will, by means of military arrest during the Rebellion, lose the right of Public Discussion, the Liberty of Speech and the Press, the Law of Evidence, Trial by Jury, and Habeas Corpus, throughout the indefinite peaceful future, which I trust lies before them, any more than I am able to believe that a man could contract so strong an appetite for emetics during temporary illness as to persist in feeding upon them during the remainder of his healthful life.

The means to preserve the end of republican government are dictated by prudence. According to Aristotle, prudence is concerned with deliberating well about those things that can be other than they are (means). In political affairs, prudence requires the statesman to be able to adapt universal principles to particular circumstances in order to arrive at the means that are best given existing circumstances. For Lincoln, as well as for President Bush, preserving republican liberty required him to choose the means necessary and proper under the circumstances. Aristotle calls prudence the virtue most characteristic of the statesman.
In the war on terrorism, as during the Civil War, we face the perennial tension between vigilance and responsibility.

You should read the whole article.

:: Mark 9:08 AM [+] :: (0) comments
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