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Time up for this 5 regimes?

Mark Steyn has a lenghty piece in the The Spectator where he talks about five regimes that must be dealth with before we win the War on Terrorism. Here is an excerpt:

George W. Bush is right. Tony Blair is ‘plenty independent’; he is no poodle. Or, if he is, he’s succeeded in dragging his master through some pretty sticky bits of dog poop. Many of the present difficulties — including the Saddamite restoration movement on the streets of London last week — derive at least in part from the influence of the junior partner.

One or two readers may recall that a year and a half ago I was arguing that the invasion of Iraq needed to take place in the summer of 2002, before the first anniversary of 9/11. Unfortunately, President Bush listened to Mr Blair and not to me, and Mr Blair wanted to go ‘the extra mile’ with the UN, the French, the Guinean foreign minister and the rest of the gang. The extra mile took an extra six or eight months, and at the end of it America went to war with exactly the same allies as she would have done in June 2002. The only difference was that the interminable diplomatic dance emboldened M. Chirac and the other obstructionists, and permitted a relatively small anti-war fringe to blossom into a worldwide mass ‘peace’ movement. It certainly didn’t do anything for the war’s ‘legitimacy’ in the eyes of the world: indeed, insofar as every passing month severed the Iraqi action from the dynamic of 9/11, it diminished it. Taking a year to amass overwhelming force on the borders of Iraq may have made the war shorter and simpler, but it also made the postwar period messier and costlier. With the world’s biggest army twiddling its thumbs in Kuwait for months on end, the regime had time to move stuff around, hide it, ship it over the border to Syria, and allow interested parties to mull over tactics for a post-liberation insurgency.

So, as far as timing’s concerned, I think I was right, and Tony and Colin Powell and the other ‘voices of moderation’ were wrong. . . .

The five countries, he explains, are

terrorism’s most brazen patron (Syria), its ideological inspiration (the prototype Islamic Republic of Iran), its principal paymaster (Saudi Arabia), a critical source of manpower (Sudan) and its most potentially dangerous weapons supplier (North Korea).

Iraq's March Against Terrorism...

Hundreds of pro-coalition demonstrators chanting "yes to Iraq, no to terrorism" marched through Baghdad yesterday amid a huge security operation mounted by American and Iraqi forces. Led by the relatives of two policemen killed in twin suicide bombings last Saturday and protected by two U.S. helicopters and scores of heavily armed Iraqi policemen, the marchers rallied in Firdus Square, where a large bronze statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled by Iraqis and U.S. Marines on April 9 after the fall of Baghdad in the U.S.-led invasion. The march came one day after the surprise visit by President Bush to U.S. forces.

Click here for the full story.

Given cultural and linguistic barriers and with many sources having partisan agendas of their own, it's pretty difficult to know if there is any truth to this story. I would have rather read that thousands rather than hundreds of Iraqi's were marching.

However the following Iraqi blogs do offer positive spins to the story:

- Iraq The Model: I was there

- Healing Iraq: Yesterday's anti-Terrorism demonstrations in Baghdad

New form of Anti-Semitism

The time frame for this resurgence of judeophobia corresponds with the intensification of international links that took place in the 1990s. “People are losing their compass,” observes Dan Dinar, a historian at Hebrew University. “A worldwide stock market, a new form of money, no borders. Concepts like country, nationality, everything is in doubt. They are looking for the ones who are guilty for this new situation and they find the Jews.” The backlash against globalization unites all elements of the political spectrum through a common cause, and in doing so it sometimes fosters a common enemy—what French Jewish leader Roger Cukierman calls an anti-Semitic “brown-green-red alliance” among ultra-nationalists, the populist green movement, and communism’s fellow travelers. The new anti-Semitism is unique because it seamlessly stitches together the various forms of old anti-Semitism: The far right’s conception of the Jew (a fifth column, loyal only to itself, undermining economic sovereignty and national culture), the far left’s conception of the Jew (capitalists and usurers, controlling the international economic system), and the “blood libel” Jew (murderers and modern-day colonial oppressors).

Click here for the full text. It's a must read piece from the Foreign Policy magazine.

"The Bush Betrayal..."

David Boaz, the executive vice president of the Cato Institute, had an op-ed in Sunday's Washington Post entitled: The Bush Betrayal

In 2000 George W. Bush campaigned across the country telling voters: "My opponent trusts government. I trust you."

Little wonder that some of his supporters are now wondering which candidate won that election.

Federal spending has increased by 23.7 percent since Bush took office. Education has been further federalized in the No Child Left Behind Act. Bush pulled out all the stops to get Republicans in Congress to create the biggest new entitlement program -- prescription drug coverage under Medicare -- in 40 years.

He pushed an energy bill that my colleague Jerry Taylor described as "three parts corporate welfare and one part cynical politics . . . a smorgasbord of handouts and subsidies for virtually every energy lobby in Washington."

It's a far cry from the less-government, "leave us alone" conservatism of Ronald Reagan.

Conservatives used to believe that the U.S. Constitution set up a government of strictly limited powers. It was supposed to protect us from foreign threats and deliver the mail, leaving other matters to the states or to the private sector -- individuals, families, churches, charities and businesses.

That's what lots of voters assumed they would get with Bush. In his first presidential debate with Al Gore, Bush contrasted his own vision of tax reduction with that of his opponent, who would "increase the size of government dramatically." Gore, Bush declared, would "empower Washington," but "my passion and my vision is to empower Americans to be able to make decisions for themselves in their own lives."

Bush was tapping into popular sentiment.

In fact, you could say that what most voters wanted in 2000 was neither Bush nor Gore but smaller government. A Los Angeles Times poll in September 2000 found that Americans preferred "smaller government with fewer services" to "larger government with many services" by 59 to 26 percent.

But that's not what voters got. . . .