hughbiquitous

I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, 7 December 1941

September 11 for me was a wake-up call. Do you know what I think? A lot of the world woke up for a short time and then turned over and went back to sleep again.

Tony Blair, 26 July 2005

Charles Krauthammer identifies the high cost of taking on Iran, including this assessment of the diplomatic liabilities:

There will be massive criticism of America from around the world. Much of it is to be discounted. The Muslim street will come out again for a few days, having replenished its supply of flammable American flags most recently exhausted during the cartoon riots. Their governments will express solidarity with a fellow Muslim state, but this will be entirely hypocritical. The Arabs are terrified about the rise of a nuclear Iran and would privately rejoice in its defanging.

The Europeans will be less hypocritical because their visceral anti-Americanism trumps rational calculation. We will have done them an enormous favor by sparing them the threat of Iranian nukes, but they will vilify us nonetheless.

These are the costs. There is no denying them. However, equally undeniable is the cost of doing nothing.

He goes on to spell out the cost of doing nothing, and it’s far worse than watching Old Glory ignite on the streets of the Middle East…

HT: John Lee

The Atlanta Braves’ run of fourteen straight division titles came to an end yesterday. The last time the Braves did not win their division was 1990 — almost half my life ago. Consider this: at the close of the 1990 baseball season, Operation Desert Storm was still a few months away.

The class and character of the teams Bobby Cox and John Schuerholz assembled year after year after year is simply without comparison.

Meanwhile, I’m a lifelong New York Yankees fan. My club is enjoying a similarly enduring run of success, and for a couple of years (1998-1999), the Yankees fielded a bunch of guys you just had to respect both on and off the field. Having said that, I can’t help but think that the character of the 1991-2005 Braves teams were more consistently excellent and admirable than the best any team has ever put forward in all of professional sports.

I hope to see another dynasty with such character rise to success soon.

The old [national security] systems cannot be allowed to continue to fail without consequence. …The leaders of the new national security and homeland security organizations should be asked what they need to win this emerging World War III, and then the budget should be developed. We need a war budget, but we currently have an OMB-driven, pseudo-war budget. The goal of victory, ultimately, will lead to a dramatically larger budget, which will lead to a serious national debate. We can win this argument, but we first have to make it.

—Newt Gingrich, Bush and Lincoln

HT: John Lee

Last month Newt Gingrich proposed that we are seeing the opening salvos of World War III. Now The Wall Street Journal notes that Iran’s leadership is… well… scary. (more…)