Friday, December 07, 2007

A Dangerous World Needs Politicians With Principles and Courage

Dan Henninger has a lucid and important article ¨Still a Dangerous Place¨ in the Wall Street Journal that is a must read for all Americans planning to vote for our next President. Regardless of the "National Intelligence Estimate" and whether you believe what it says or not the reality is that we have politicians who are not guided by a set of principles aimed at protecting our country. They are all pragmatists and in part of my brain I almost think that there are those politicians that really hate America and what she stands for historically and that some even are just plain power-lusters.

As Mr. Henninger alludes to in his article, we in the West live in a hostile world whose goal is our annhialation. No amount of diplomacy and pretending can erase that fact. What we need are politicians who love their life so much that they are willing to make the hard and maybe unpopular decisions that will save us from our destroyers. This is essentially a war to defend reason in a world full of mystical unreason -a war of good versus bad, the individual versus the state.

If we as Americans hold anything dear it must be love of our country and our freedoms and consequently we must resolve to fight for it. For this we need politicians who are honest and can think in principles. This is not the time for diplomacy with maniacal religious martyrs from the 11th century.

"The most disturbing thing about the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran wasn't the news itself, but how the episode displayed the wild and manic swings that now characterize American politics. A regular watcher of our politics could be forgiven for feeling that one isn't watching a serious country but a place that conducts its internal affairs like a Saturday morning cartoon show. Thunk! Boooinng!...

"With or without the NIE's opinion of Iran's nuclear program, that world is still a dangerous place."

Henninger next lists all of the military buildup that has happened since 2003 the year that Iran supposedly stopped it´s nuke program:

*2006 Iran performs test flights of the Shabab-2 and Shabab-3 ballistic missiles

*This week the a 1,200 mile missle was built and in September a 1,100 mile'ange Ghadr-1 missile.

*North Korea in July 2006 tested the long-range Taepodong-2, a nuclear payload-capable ballistic missile. North Korea has exported its missile technology to Iran and Pakistan. And of course Hezbollah, in the same month North Korea was testing the Taepodong-2, fired thousands of Katyusha rockets at Israel, re-establishing the operational viability of short-range bombardment.

*China is developing three strategic, long-range missiles --

*In January, after much effort to do so, China successfully used a kinetic-kill vehicle launched from a ballistic missile to destroy a satellite orbiting at 500 miles altitude.

*Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, indeed virtually all the nations of the Middle East are seeking nuclear-power capability.

"One would like more on this than we're getting from the candidates in both parties. But the Democrats especially have tied themselves to the word "diplomacy," giving the impression that the U.S. can literally talk its way out of any bad outcomes that Iran, Syria, North Korea or free-agent terrorists have planned for us.

"Put it this way: Would they, like Israel, have bombed that factory in Syria without pre-discussing it with Bashar Assad or Kim Jong-Il? No candidate's answer to that will make everyone happy. But the more than 100 million Americans who'll vote next year need a better idea than they've got of how the next president plans to deal with the world. Not the cartoon world, but the real world." (READ)

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