Mass Graves Day

The MSM failed to note Iraq’s Mass Graves Day last Wednesday – it commemorates the dead on the anniversary of the day in 2003 US forces found the first mass grave.

Thanks to Gateway Pundit for this.

Since then, over 300,000 bodies have been recovered, and allowing for those buried in small numbers in out-of-the way places, the actual number murdered by Saddam and his Baath party over a 20 year period must be at least 500,000.

That’s 25,000 a year, 70 a day.

It’s odd BBC lefties object to the coalition removing this mass murderer – here’s what they reported in 2003:

US-led investigators have located nine trenches in Hatra containing hundreds of bodies believed to be Kurds killed during the repression of the 1980s.

The skeletons of unborn babies and toddlers clutching toys are being unearthed, the investigators said.

Next time you see another quagmire story in the news, check if 70 innocents died that day. And the next. And forever, without end.

The Precious Few

Good Men and Women are precious. They make history – politicians such as Churchill, Reagan and Thatcher, and the many engineers and scientists who built our prosperous societies. It’s as well they exist, since many men and women are scoundrels.

John Bolton is a Good Man – intelligent, honest, loyal, and brave. The reason the BBC foolishly went after him was his statement of the well-known truth that the State Department and Foreign Office are run by scoundrels:

”There have been a number of occasions when the Foreign Office was not carrying through on Prime Minister Blair’s policies just as often happens in the United States where the State Department is not loyal to the President’s policies,”…

“I was told on a number of occasions by British staffers that their ambassadors were not following instructions from London.”…

“I think this is a real problem, both in terms of democratic theory and institutional compliance with democratic mandates in Washington and London.”

But scoundrels only prosper under weak leaders, and the US Secretary of State and Brit Foreign Secretary are both weak – why else would they be selling weapons to Pakistan, and attempting to bounce Israel into a “land for peace” deal less than a year after the concept was proved fraudulent?

Their presence in such senior positions reveal failures by George Bush and Tony Blair to follow the first principle of good management – promote the competent and fire the incompetent.

I admire both men for being right on our existential struggle. But with the exceptions of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Brown, their teams have been third rate, including “slam dunk” Tenet, and Blair’s three Home Secretaries who allowed terrorists to roam the UK while spending billions controlling the law-abiding.

Of course sometimes there’s no choice but to hire the incompetent – talent is rare. But the greatest sins of the President and Prime Minister have been to to betray their few Good Men and Women.

Politics is a rough game, and casualties are inevitable; but to be credible, a leader must defend the Good, otherwise the scoundrels close in.

One of Blair’s first acts as Prime Minister was to ask a very clever man to “think the unthinkable” about reforming the Brit welfare state. He did, and ruffled the feathers of the welfare clients. So Blair fired him, ensuring a continuation of Brit social collapse.

George Bush fired Rumsfeld and replaced him with a nonentity, he didn’t support Bolton, and he’s just cut Wolfowitz adrift.

None of this matters in the grand scheme of things – there are plenty of lucrative positions open to Good Men, and as Bolton has shown, they can still do good.

And now America’s financial institutions know the World Bank to be corrupt, the US will dump it one or two couple of Congresses out.

But meantime, the scoundrels thrive and leave a trail of death and destruction.

And that’s a great shame.

Mr. President: Don’t Arm Pakistan!

Supporting the Pakistani dictatorship is justifiable as a tactical measure. But providing it with advanced weapons is foolish – they will pass to terrorists and Chinese dictators.

We opposed this deal a while back, but State ignored us and compounded its error:

The U.S. is allowing the sale of eighteen Sniper XR targeting pods to Pakistan, to equip some of the 30 F-16D fighters Pakistan has just bought…Pakistan is also getting 500 JDAMs with its new F-16Ds…

The latest generation of these pods contain…video quality night vision infrared radar…and high resolution TV cameras that enable pilots flying at 20,000 feet to clearly make out what is going on down there. The pods also contain laser designators for laser guided bombs, and laser range finders that enable pilots to get coordinates for JDAM (GPS guided) bombs…

Pakistan apparently plans to use these pods for counter-terrorism missions, where a few F-16s could provide emergency assistance for widely dispersed troops out hunting tribal rebels and terrorists.

However, Pakistan is unstable and may morph any day from a somewhat pro-Western dictatorship into an Islamic one – here’s what’s happening on their frontier with Afghanistan (my ellipsis):

On Monday a joint Afghan-American delegation flew across the border for talks with Pakistani officers aimed at producing a ceasefire. The meeting was held in a…tribal area of Pakistan. Yet after the negotiations concluded the delegation was fired upon. An American soldier was killed and four others wounded.

Though Nato and Pakistan, keen to play down the incident, say the attack was the work of a single rogue member of a Pakistani militia, two Afghan delegates present as part of the delegation who were separately interviewed by The Times, Governor Rahmatullah Rahman and Colonel Shamsur, say they were fired on by up to a dozen uniformed Pakistani militiamen.

And so:

Scores of heavily armed Afghan troops and fighters from special border police units – determined, professional and evidently spoiling for a fight – gathered around their senior officers for orders…

…the enemy was not the Taleban, nor…al-Qaeda fighters. Instead, in the remote border district of ’Ali Kheyl in eastern Afghanistan, Afghan security forces have found themselves pitted against an older and bigger enemy: Pakistan.

Remember, another “rogue” Pakistani gave the Iranians their nuke program, and the terrorists stalking the UK – including the 7/7 murderers – trained in Pakistani Madrassahs.

So those F-16Ds with Sniper XRs are quite likely to end up dropping JDAMs on coalition and Afghani troops.

And even if the current dictator does survive, and even if he keeps his planes under total control, these weapons will be worthless if his army continues to fail to pursue the Pakistani-based Taliban.

And there’s one final reason to spike the deal:

We must also not forget that, when Pakistan got their first F-16s in the 1980s, they sold one to China.

Taiwan has F-16Ds (which are vastly in advance of the 1980 models), so handing one to China makes it that much easier for its dictators to conquer a democratic US ally.

State is out of control, so the president needs to shake off his torpor and stop this disastrous transfer.