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February 21, 2011
Feminizing America’s Fighting Force • Palin’s Neocon Path • The Raid on Truk Lagoon
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Originally intended to be an unpublished letter to friends, The Politician became one of the most provocative books in American history. A timely foreword explains the continuing significance of Welch’s exposé of the forces that propelled Dwight D. Eisenhower into the presidency. (2002ed, 544pp, pb, $6.95) BKP
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Why does the Supreme Court no longer uphold and protect basic principles? By drawing from thousands of primary sources, David Barton answers this question by using the Founding Fathers’ own words. Discover how the Founders’ “original intent” — a balanced and limited fed-eral government — can again become a reality! (2008ed, 552pp, pb, $12.95) BKOI
Author, historian, and economist Robert Higgs refutes many popular myths about the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the postwar national-security state. (2006ed, 286pp, pb, $10.95) BKdWCW
The United Nations has been in existence for more than a half-century, but its origins and objectives remain misunderstood by many Americans. This book is a brief, readable introduction to the United Nations, and to the people who created it and sup-port it. (2003, 127pp, pb, $2.95) BKIUn
This carefully documented study demonstrates that what the American people are being offered with the UN amounts to poison disguised as candy. (2001, 354pp, pb, $2.95) BKUne
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Cover Story
Unitednations
10YourHometown&theUnitednations’agenda21by William F. Jasper — Businesses — and their jobs — are fleeing California at breakneck speed because of costly, even abusive, regulations meant to adhere to UN standards. Is your state next?
CoVeR Design by Joseph W. Kelly
FeatureS
MilitaRY
17Feminizingamerica’sFightingForceby Dave Bohon — The Military Leadership Diversity Commission recommended putting women into combat roles, ignoring an exhaustive study recommending the opposite.
PolitiCs
23Palin’sneoconPathby Jack Kenny — Sarah Palin has been backed from the outset by neoconservatives — not fiscal, constitutional conservatives — and her political stances reflect her affiliations.
BookReView
29theHonestyofCommunistsandothertotalitariansby Thomas R. Eddlem — Communist-style governments rule well over 1.4 billion people, and are seeking growth. This book explains the goals of totalitarians and how they create converts of good people.
HistoRY—PastandPeRsPeCtiVe
34theRaidontruklagoonby Roger D. McGrath — Many younger Americans have gained the impression that America dropped atomic bombs on Japan to avenge Pearl Harbor, but our revenge happened at Truk Lagoon.
tHelastwoRd
44RecallingaManufacturedCrisisby John F. McManus
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29
DepartmentS
5letterstotheeditor
7 insidetrack
9QuickQuotes
33theGoodnessofamerica
40exercisingtheRight
41Correction,Please!
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Vol.27,no.4 February21,2011
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PublisherJohn F. McManus
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Senior EditorWilliam F. Jasper
Associate EditorKurt Williamsen
Web EditorWarren Mass
ContributorsDennis J. Behreandt
Raven Clabough Selwyn Duke
Thomas R. Eddlem Gregory A. Hession, J.D.
Ed Hiserodt William P. Hoar
Jack Kenny R. Cort Kirkwood Patrick Krey, J.D.
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workingoutaworldCurrencyI hate to give the insiders ideas, but if they want a world currency, they will have to do it the old-fashioned way. They need to start with notes that are backed by gold. The cen-tral banks of the world own about 30,000 tons of gold. They could issue notes that are good for one ounce, half ounce, or even down to a gram or fractions of a gram. Then one could cross a border with gold notes and never need to exchange currency.
OweN cAmp
Sent via e-mail
CutearmarksanywayI understand the reasoning behind some Re-publicans saying that stopping earmarks will not cut the budget. But as a voter, I am sick of Congress putting earmarks into a bill that is important and should be passed, to pass an earmark that should not get through. I be-lieve that we the people are tired of hearing about states getting millions of dollars for pet projects off the backs of hard working people of other states. Let’s not forget the “Bridge to Nowhere!” Republicans, we do not trust any of you yet!
eleANOr pATrick
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VeryGood,butnotPerfectWhile I have great regard for the majestic language of the King James Bible, scholar-ship shows there were some translation er-rors made. One of the most notable is the Sixth Commandment, which reads “Thou shalt not kill.” (In the Hebrew and the Roman Catholic Bibles, it is listed as the Fifth Com-mandment.) An accurate translation is “Thou shalt not commit murder.” That is a signifi-cant difference.
The King James Version has misled people to conclude that the command-ment prohibits all killing. Ancient Hebrew law defined murder as unlawfully taking a life — i.e., causing the death of an in-nocent person. There were various degrees of homicide ranging from accidental and unintended cases to the worst form, pre-meditated murder. The penalty prescribed for premeditated murder was capital pun-ishment. (See the entry for “murder” in Harper’s Bible Dictionary.) So opponents
of capital punishment who argue that the Bible prohibits all killing are misinformed, as are conscientious objectors to military service who base their position on the KJV.
It is legitimate to kill the enemy in war. Someone shooting at you is not an in-nocent person, and there is no reason to feel guilty about shooting back in deadly fashion — feeling regret, yes, because life is sacred and nations should be able to settle their dif-ferences without war and killing. In that situ-ation, no commandment has been violated, except, perhaps, Jesus’ command to love one another — which applies to all sides in an armed conflict, of course.
JOhN whiTe
Cheshire, Connecticut
CorporatetaxisterribleCorporate income taxes should be eliminat-ed. I say that because:
1. Almost no one, even those who should know, agrees on how much a large corpora-tion should pay; it is just too complex.
2. The tax and the cost of filing the taxes are all passed on to the customer of the cor-poration without regard for a customer’s ability to pay.
3. This tax is a big brake on the expan-sion of the economy. Many jobs would be created almost overnight if it did not exist. We might get close to full employment of everyone who wants to work.
4. Until other countries followed our lead, our exports would rise.
5. It is nearly impossible to determine how much any individual person has collected from him by the corporations to pay this tax and all associated costs.
6. It costs money for the government to collect taxes, and so we should not have too many different ones.
michAel herTel
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CoRReCtion: In the article entitled “Rallying Against Rights” (February 7 issue), it was stated that Senator Laut-enberg is from New York. He’s from New Jersey.
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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Obama administration leaders defended Egypt’s dictatorship against protesters, right up to the apparent complete collapse of the corrupt 30-year reign of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. As late as January 30, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declined to ask the dictator to step down, telling David Gregory on Meet the Press that “it’s not a question of who retains power. That should not be the issue.... President Mubarak and his government have been an important partner to the United States.”
Astonishingly, Clinton also told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour on This Week: “Right now, we’re monitoring the actions of the Egyptian military, and they are, as I’m sure your contacts are telling you, demonstrating restraint.”
“Restraint”? This is the same Clinton State Department whose
embassy acknowledged in secret WikiLeaks-released cables that police brutality was “routine and pervasive” under the Mubarak regime. A series of highly publicized amateur videos that have escaped the drastic Mubarak press and Internet blackout have dem-onstrated that police and soldiers had been shooting demonstrators for five days before her statement. More than 100 demonstrators had been killed that the West knew about at the time of the inter-view. Camera crews for Western television stations such as CNN and the BBC had been beaten up. And tanks had fired on demon-strators. Clinton also informed Amanpour and Gregory that the United States will not cut the Mubarak regime’s line of foreign aid subsidies, which amount to about $1.5 billion per year over the past 30 years. (Egypt is the second largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid.)
The establishment wing of the Republican Party was also still throwing its support fully behind Mubarak. “I don’t have any criticism of President Obama or Secretary Clinton at this point,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) also told Gregory on Meet the Press January 30.
Mubarak called for a new government and pledged on Febru-ary 1 to step down when his current term ends in September, but it’s not clear at press time whether this will satisfy demonstrators. Nor is it clear what kind of government will emerge from the ashes of the Mubarak regime. The demonstrators include a vari-ety of political interests: enthusiastic but possibly naive college students who chant for “democracy,” Communist Party of Egypt organizers, and a variety of Islamic parties.
obamaBackedegyptiandictator
Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) advocated ending all foreign aid — including even foreign aid to Israel, America’s largest foreign aid recipient over the past 30 years — when he was interviewed on CNN’s The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer on January 26:
Blitzer: What about the $2 billion or $3 billion that goes every year to Israel? Do you want to eliminate that as well?
Paul: Well, I think what you have to do is you have to look. When you send foreign aid, you actually send quite a bit to Israel’s enemies. Islamic nations around Israel get quite a bit of foreign aid, too.
Blitzer: Egypt gets almost the same amount?Paul: Almost the same amount, so really you have to ask
yourself, are we funding an arms race on both sides? I have a lot of sympathy and respect for Israel as a democratic nation, as a, you know, a fountain of peace and a fountain of democ-racy within the Middle East. But at the same time, I don’t [believe in] funding both sides of the arms race, particularly when we have to borrow the money from China to send it to someone else. We just can’t do it anymore. The debt is all consuming and it threatens our well being as a country.
Blitzer: All right, so just to be precise, end all foreign aid including the foreign aid to Israel as well. Is that right?
Paul: Yes.
Democrats reacted against Sen. Paul’s statement. House Ap-propriations Committee Ranking Democrat Nita Lowey issued a press release claiming, “It is shocking that Senator Paul wants our nation to renege on our commitment to a vital ally, which is necessary to assure Israel’s continued qualitative military advan-tage in a dangerous region.”
But does U.S. foreign aid enhance Israel’s military advan-tage when the aid is given not only to Israel but to regimes antagonistic to Israel that collectively receive more foreign aid than Israel does? Or when foreign aid is used as a club to try to influence Israeli policies as well as the policies of other governments? Regarding the latter question, neocon-servative David Frum — a fervent supporter of foreign aid to Israel — candidly admitted that this is the very point of foreign aid on his blog after Senator Paul’s pronouncement: “The point of foreign aid is not economics; it is geopolitics: It is intended to shape a recipient country’s behavior and, quite literally, buy American influence. And it does just that. The last thing we should do then is to eliminate all foreign aid out of a myopic and shortsighted desire to save money and reduce the deficit.”
Eliminating all foreign aid would not only eliminate the greater subsidies to Israel’s enemies, it would free Israel to act in accor-dance with its own national interests.
senatorRandPaul:endallForeignaid
Egyptian anti-government protesters gathered in Tahrir (Liberation) Square watch a screen showing U.S. President Barack Obama live on a TV.
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Inside Track
Idaho is widely considered to be a key state in the state nul-lification effort to stop the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” and the “Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010,” the two-part federal law more commonly known as ObamaCare. Last year the state’s Republican-controlled Legisla-ture passed, and Republican Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter signed, the Health Freedom Act, directing the Idaho Attorney General to sue the federal government over an ObamaCare provision that requires citizens either to purchase health insurance or face a fine — and, possibly, even jail. Idaho joined more than a dozen other states in a joint lawsuit challenging the federal law on con-stitutional grounds that Congress had exceeded its enumerated powers. All told, 27 states have filed lawsuits to prevent imposi-tion of the sweeping federal legislation upon their citizens. The lawsuits, however, may drag on for years, by which time much of the foundation of ObamaCare may be laid, providing the program with a momentum and a large political constituency that will be difficult to overcome.
The nullification effort is aimed at preventing ObamaCare from being initiated in a significant number of states, by hav-ing the state governments utilize the principle of “interposition” — interposing themselves between the federal government’s unconstitutional mandates and the citizens. Idaho’s Gov. Otter spoke strongly against ObamaCare in January in his State of the State address, and specifically mentioned that Idaho is looking at the nullification approach. Idaho is considered by many politi-cal observers to be the state with the most favorable conditions for legislative enactment and signing by a Governor. Since Ot-ter’s speech, nullification moved from the theoretical level to the practical, as Idaho Representatives Vito Barbieri and Judy Boyle, and Senators Monty Pearce, Sheryl Nuxoll, and Steve Vick intro-duced House Bill 59 (H.B. 59) during the last week of January.
Anxious to prevent any nullification effort from gaining a foot-hold, ObamaCare supporters nationwide have been quick to try to stop the Idaho effort. John Miller, a Boise reporter for the Associated Press, has written several negative stories about the nullification proposal that have been given unusually prominent coverage in the national media. Although support for and opposi-tion against ObamaCare have split generally along partisan lines, the Democrats received welcome aid from Idaho’s Republican Attorney General Lawrence Wasden, whose office “blind sided” the nullification sponsors with an opinion strongly opposing their bill. The opinion was broadly circulated through Miller’s Associ-ated Press stories as H.B. 59 was about to be introduced.
The Attorney General’s hostile opinion and the media ker-fuffle caused a temporary delay in moving H.B. 59 forward, but as we write, the measure is scheduled for a hearing before the House State Affairs Committee on February 7. Senator Pearce informs The New AmericAN that he is “guardedly optimistic” that the bill will quickly pass both houses and be signed into law by Governor Otter.
idahonullificationofobamaCaresteamsaheaddespiteMediaattacks
As of January 30, at least one dozen states had introduced bills to nullify the entire ObamaCare law.
The 12 states with their corresponding bill numbers are: Texas (HB297), Montana (SB161), Wyoming (HB0035), Oregon (SB498), Indiana (SB505), Maine (LD58), Nebraska (LB515), Oklahoma (HB1276), Idaho (HB59), New Hampshire (HB26), South Dakota (HB1165), and North Dakota (SB2309).
These 12 bills share similarities of declaring the entire Obama-Care law — which is actually two laws, known officially as the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” and the “Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010” — to be null and void within the respective states since it presumes powers for the federal government not authorized by the U.S. Constitution. Nearly all of the bills contain provisions for criminal penalties for officials, officers, and agents of the federal and state govern-ments who would try to enforce the ObamaCare law within the subject state. These enforcement “teeth” vary from one state bill to another. Under Montana’s S.B. 161, “A violation of subsection
(4) or (5) is a felony and is punishable by a fine of up to $5,000, incarceration in a county jail for up to 1 year, or both.” The Texas bill, HB297, carries similar penalties. New Hampshire, on the other hand, considers violations to be misdemeanors and doesn’t specify either a fine amount or jail sentence.
With congressional repeal of ObamaCare possibly as much as a couple of years away, and state lawsuits and appeals likely to drag on for years, state nullification is the best strategy for im-mediately bogging down ObamaCare implementation in as many states as possible and maintaining momentum for the necessary changes in the 2012 congressional and presidential elections.
It is likely that before the end of 2011, nullification bills will have been introduced in 20 or more states. The “Nullify Now!” national speaker tour, organized by the Tenth Amendment Center and WeRe-fuse, is expected to boost passage in many of these states. The New AmericAN is a national sponsor of the tour, which features, among other speakers, historian Thomas E. Woods, bestselling author of Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century. n
twelvestatesHaveBillstonullifyobamaCareentirely
C.L. “Butch” Otter
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Inside Track
8 THE NEW AMERICAN • FEbRUARy 21, 2011
newHousespeakersayswhatPeoplewanttoHear“Washington has an illness. The illness is spending. The debt is a symp-tom of that illness. The American people want it cured.”At the close of a Republican gathering of House members, Speaker John Boehner promised to lead them in demanding substantial cuts in current spending in order to reduce the projected $1.5 trillion shortfall in the current year’s federal budget.
wisconsinFirmFindsBusinesswithChinaFullofsetbacks“We went over there to be a global player but they have thumbed their nose at the WTO’s policies and procedures. They have become bigger than anybody thought, and nobody wants to slap their wrists.”Manitowoc Company CEO Glen Tellock noted that his firm has exported to China and acquired plants in the country. But, he says, China has imposed import taxes that threaten to force layoffs among his 8,000 U.S. employees.
attackingobamaCareConsideredanattackonabortionRights“These are the folks who came to town saying they’d create jobs and get the economy back on track. This legislation goes far beyond cur-rent law. Given the opportunity to govern, they are once again trying to deny a woman’s access to abortion.”Aiming her remarks at the new GOP House majority, Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) seems more concerned about a possible threat to legal abortion than about the nation’s sick economy.
democraticenthusiasttargetsMassachusettssenatorBrown“Brown is one of a handful of moderate Republicans in the Senate. A moderate Republican is someone, who if you’re drowning 30 feet from shore, throws you a 15-foot line.”Knowing that Senator Scott Brown must stand for reelection in 2012 (having won only the remaining two years of the late Senator Kennedy’s term), veteran consultant for Democratic candidates Dan Payne is wasting no time in launching the party’s attack.
democratCongressmanContradictedPartyBosses,VotednoonobamaCare“It was very difficult for me. But there was never any question what I was going to do. I was not going to support a bill that provided taxpayer funding for abortion.”One of only three House Democrats who voted No on the President’s healthcare bill, Illinois Representative Dan Lipinski believes the pro-life stand that guided his action has made many of his fellow Democrats want him “gone.”
aBetterPlanforeducatingamericanChildren?“President Barack Obama said on NBC September 27 that he would like American children to spend more time in public schools. Here’s a better idea: American children should spend no time in public schools. Americans should begin functionally abolishing govern-ment-run schools and replacing them with a free market in schools.”Writing in The Wanderer, columnist Terence Jeffrey also pointed out that Obama’s children attend the private school of their par-ents’ choice.
UnusualReasonforGettinginvitedtothewhiteHousedinner?“I worked in a Chinese restaurant.”Asked how she came to be one of the invitees to the banquet honor-ing Chinese President Hu Jintao, singer Barbra Streisand avoided mentioning her contributions to Democratic causes and candidates, and gave a humorous response. n
— cOmpiled by JOhN F. mcmANus
Rosa DeLauro
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by William F. Jasper
In March 2010, Nor-Cal Produce, a family-owned produce business in West Sacramento, was fined $32,500
by the California Air Resources Board (ARB, or CARB). The company was not charged with, or even accused of, illegal emissions; like many other businesses, it had merely failed to notice a new regula-tion posted by CARB requiring all semi-trailers, shipping containers, vans, and rail
cars with diesel-powered refrigerators to file a report with the agency. “We had no knowledge of the law,” Nor-Cal’s Chief Financial Officer Todd Achando told CalWatchDog, a news blog that monitors California government. “My operations manager happened to see it mentioned in a trade magazine about a year and a half after the deadline passed.” Because Nor-Cal reported itself to CARB and “coop-erated,” the agency reduced the $200/day fine from $86,600 to $32,500.
Kit Enger and his fellow dune buggy manufacturers also cooperated with CARB, but found it was like dealing with a mob “protection racket.” Enger, president of the Compliant Car Builders Association in Oceanside, California, said association members attended the agency’s “imple-mentation outreach workshop” for OHRV (off-highway recreational vehicles) and worked “diligently with CARB certifica-tion staff to devise a program whereby all industry members could efficiently and ef-
THE NEW AMERICAN • FEbRUARy 21, 201110
United nations
Your Hometown & the United Nations’
Businesses — and their jobs — are fleeing California at breakneck speed because of costly, even abusive, regulations meant to adhere to UN standards. Is your state next?
fectively certify their vehicles and engines.” Despite the increased costs and inconve-nience of complying with CARB’s new regulations, association members thought things were going pretty well — until Jan-uary 2008 when CARB hit them with $3.6 million in penalties for alleged violations. The association’s lawyers worked the fine down to $600,000, but Enger says even that penalty was unconstitutional, amounting to an ex post facto prosecution for engines modified and sold before the new CARB regulations went into effect.
“My lawyers said it would cost more than $600,000 to fight it, so we might as well pay it. It’s like a protection racket — government out of control,” said Enger. When he testified before CARB in Novem-ber 2009, Enger told the board that one of their CARB enforcement officers had told him on two occasions, “If you guys don’t get on with this settlement, it doesn’t mat-ter to us if you go out of business, change your name, move to another state, or die, we will find you and attach your assets.”
Thousands of businesses have already fled the “protection racket” of government in what was once known as the Golden State; thousands more are following, tak-ing with them hundreds of thousands of jobs. The state’s tax and regulatory poli-cies have driven the cost of energy, as well as every other business expense, sky high. Yet, despite facing $25 billion in debt, a huge current budget deficit, and default on its bonds (not to mention sky-high un-employment, over 12 percent), the state’s politicians and bureaucrats continue to chase the productive tax base — and jobs — out of California. Joseph Vranich of Irvine, California, known as “The Busi-ness Relocation Coach,” keeps a running tab on companies leaving the state. His December 6, 2010 blog carries this head-line: “New Record for Calif. Companies Departing or Shifting Work Out: 193 — Nearly Four Times Last Year’s Level.”
The jobs that are leaving or shutting down are not only the manufacturing and resource jobs in companies that greenies love to denigrate as “old, has-been” in-dustries; they include many of the highly touted “green” companies that are now seeking greener pastures elsewhere. One of them is Solyndra, the solar panel maker from Fremont, which announced layoffs of 170 workers in December. Only a few
months earlier Solyndra had hosted a much publicized press conference with Presi-dent Barack Obama and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, both of whom lauded the company as an exemplar of the “green econ-omy” that would provide many thousands of new “green jobs.” Solyndra received a $535 million loan from the Department of Energy to build a new state-of-the-art, robotics-run factory, which it calls Fab 2. In November 2010, Solyndra announced it was mothballing Fab 1 and postponing earlier plans to expand Fab 2, citing weak sales and the weak economy.
Other California “green-tech” firms have closed or are shifting much of their operations out of the state. For example:
• Barefoot Motors, maker of electric ATVs, moved to Oregon.
• Mariah Power, a manufac-turer of small wind turbines, moved to Nevada and Michigan.
• Sonatype, Inc., which ser-vices many high-tech compa-nies, moved to Maryland.
• Adobe Systems, Inc., the software giant, is building its huge new campus in Utah.
Other companies that have jumped ship from California include Fidelity National Finan-cial (moved operations to Flor-
ida); CalPortland Cement (closed its Riv-erside County plant); Buck Knives (moved to Idaho); Multi-Fineline Electronix, Inc. (moved to China); and Thomas Brothers Maps (moved to Illinois and India).
These are only a fraction of the “pri-mary companies” that have made the news; thousands of secondary compa-nies — restaurants, service outlets, retail stores, construction companies, trucking companies, farms, ranches, mom-and-pop businesses — have vanished with no media notice.
And the picture will only get uglier for California, as the state government pushes forward with implementing Assembly Bill 32, or AB 32, formally known as the Glob-al Warming Solutions Act of 2006. Ac-cording to a 2009 study by Dr. Sanjay B.
Despite the increased costs and inconvenience of complying with California Air Resources Board’s new regulations, association members thought things were going pretty well — until January 2008 when CARB hit them with $3.6 million in penalties.
terminatingCalifornia:California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signs the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, imposing the nation’s first cap on greenhouse gas emissions.
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Varshney, dean of the College of Business Administration at California State Univer-sity, Sacramento (CSUS), and Dr. Dennis H. Tootelian, professor of marketing and director of the Center for Small Business at CSUS, the impact of the bill’s cap-and-trade and regulatory features could be hor-rendous. They found:
On average, the annual costs resulting from the implementation of AB 32 to small businesses are likely to result in loss of more than $182.6 billion in gross state output, the equivalent of more than 1.1 million jobs, nearly $76.8 billion in labor income, and nearly $5.8 billion in indirect busi-ness taxes.... Accordingly, the total cost of AB 32 is $49,691 per small business in California.
As would be expected, the Varshney/Tootelian study has drawn heated criti-
cism, especially from academics, activ-ists, and politicians still ardently support-ing the discredited alarmist “consensus” regarding anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming. The critics have pro-duced studies claiming to show that any economic and/or job losses due to AB 32 will be negligible; some even predict pos-itive growth as a result. Of course, many of these critics are the same ones who predicted the massive new “green jobs” that never materialized. Whether or not the Varshney/Tootelian study may have been “defective” in methodology, its pre-dictions appear to be more firmly ground-ed in reality than those of its critics. The exodus of capital, technology, talent, and jobs from California has been accelerat-ing, and as the CARB “racketeers” begin enforcing the draconian measures provid-ed under AB 32, it will almost certainly pick up more speed.
California’s losses will mean more gains for Nevada, Arizona, Texas, and many other states — but perhaps only temporarily. Many of the states and commu-nities that California companies are fleeing to are headed in the same direction as California. If they do not change course, they soon will see the same econom-ic forces driving the erstwhile California refugee businesses on to Mexico, India, China, and the other usual destinations.
iClei,theHiddenUnComponentThere is a hidden component to the saga of California’s ongoing woes that is gradual-ly coming to light, hopefully in time to en-able other states to avert the same calam-ity. That hidden component is becoming more visible as we near 2012, which the United Nations will celebrate as the 20th anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit. Known officially as the United Nations Conference on Environment and Develop-ment (UNCED), the eco-confab in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was unprecedented in size and scope, bringing together some 35,000 government officials, diplomats, NGO activists, and journalists. Rio became the launch pad for a number of huge initiatives that have been gradually gaining force and wreaking havoc on the planet in the inter-vening decades. The five main documents to come out of the UNCED process are:
• The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development
• The Statement of Forest Principles• The United Nations Framework Con-
vention on Climate Change• The United Nations Convention on
Biological Diversity• Agenda 21The Climate Change and Biological Di-
versity conventions were posited as “hard law” treaties that impose binding obliga-tions upon the ratifying parties; the other three are referred to as “soft law” docu-ments, instruments that commit the parties to a path of pursuing later “hard law” com-mitments. President George H.W. Bush signed the Climate Change Convention in 1992 and the U.S. Senate ratified it the same year. However, the 1997 Kyoto Pro-tocol, which was negotiated to implement specific greenhouse gas reductions under the convention, has not been signed or rati-fied by the United States Senate. Although President Obama declared his commitment to securing a new binding Climate Conven-tion, the November 2010 elections have pretty much sunk chances for any Kyoto replacement passing in the Senate.
Realizing the difficulty in getting some national governments — and especially
Solyndra, the solar panel maker from Fremont, announced layoffs of 170 workers in December. Only a few months earlier Solyndra had hosted a much publicized press conference with President Barack Obama and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
spendy“greenjobs”: President Obama and Gov. Schwarzenegger at a promo at the Solyndra, Inc. solar panel plant, which received $535 million in federal funding — and is now laying off workers.
Newscom
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the United States — to go along with a climate-change treaty that would require massive government intrusion into and regulation of all aspects of energy produc-tion and consumption, the UNCED lead-ers launched simultaneous efforts to build political support for ratification by also initiating efforts aimed at winning enact-ment of global-warming legislation at the state and local levels. One of the primary instruments that has been used by the UN and globalist advocates to advance their plans is an NGO known as ICLEI — Local Governments for Sustainability.
“ICLEI was founded in 1990,” its web-site states, “as the ‘International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives,’” and the organization “is an association of over 1200 local government Members who are committed to sustainable devel-opment. Our Members come from 70 different countries and represent more than 569,885,000 people.”
ICLEI-USA boasts of its members: “Their populations range in size from 832 people in Cimarron, New Mexico, to more than 8 million in New York City.” And they “consistently top the rankings of the Green-est Cities,” it adds. “They have led the ef-fort in recent years to envision, accelerate and achieve strong climate protection goals, creating cleaner, healthier, more economi-cally viable communities.”
More than 130 of those ICLEI members are California counties and cities that have led the efforts that now have California mimicking the economic “viability” of Greece and Spain, both of which, by the way, are longtime model supporters and members of ICLEI. Spain, which has been one of the biggest promoters of “green jobs,” has learned the folly of its ways the hard way: It killed more than two existing jobs for every green job created. To make matters worse, many of the green jobs proved to be temporary, vanishing after the subsidized solar panels and wind turbines were constructed. Trodding the same path
are California’s ICLEI cit-ies, among which are vir-tually all the major metro areas — Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco — as well as smaller cities from Al-ameda to Yountville.
ICLEI’s website in-forms us:
The Council was es-tablished when more than 200 local govern-ments from 43 coun-tries convened at our inaugural conference, the World Congress of Local Governments for a Sustainable Fu-ture, at the United Na-tions in New York.
It notes that in 2003 it changed its name to “ICLEI — Local Governments for Sus-tainability,” no doubt to place more em-phasis on the “local” and to diminish con-cerns about its “international” influence and its political and financial ties to the United Nations. As we will show, ICLEI and other UN-affiliated NGOs and govern-ment officials have come under increasing suspicion in recent years from more and more American citizens, and have taken to camouflaging their UN-driven envi-ronmental agendas, even to the point of denying obvious and easily documented connections.
On its web page entitled “ICLEI: Con-necting Leaders,” ICLEI explains some of its networking strategies. They include:
Connect cities and local governments to the United Nations and other in-ternational bodies. ICLEI represents local governments at the United Na-tions (UN) Commission on Sustain-
able Development, the UN Frame-work Convention on Climate Change, and the Conventions on Biodiversity and Combating Desertification and co-operates with the UN Environ-ment Programme and UN-HABITAT.
That seems pretty clear: ICLEI’s mission is to “connect” local government to the UN and its affiliates. It goes on:
Mobilize local governments to help their countries implement multilat-eral environmental agreements such as the Rio conventions through Cities for Climate Protection, Local Action for Biodiversity and other initiatives.
Again, fairly straightforward: Get the locals to lobby and pressure the national government to hop on board the global programs that will transfer more money, authority, and power to the UN. ICLEI continues:
Forge multi-stakeholder partnerships such as Resilient Cities, a global framework on urban resilience and climate adaptation where local gov-ernments, international agencies, development banks, ministries, insti-tutes, and others, collaborate.
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thinkglobally,actlocally:ICLEI organizes local forces to carry out the UN’s global agenda.
isYourCounty/CityGovernmentaMemberofiClei?Has your city, town, or county joined ICLEI — Local Governments for Sustainability? If so, your local tax dollars are being used against you to push for UN-sponsored programs masquerading as local initiatives.
Find out here: http://www.icleiusa.org/about-iclei/members/member-list n
Translation: bribe, entice, seduce, flatter local officials, NGOs, and corporations to join the green lobby.
agenda21’sstealthagendaThe ICLEI web page also states that its Local Agenda 21 Model Communities Programme is “designed to aid local gov-ernments in implementing Chapter 28 of Agenda 21, the global action plan for sustainable development.” Although the Climate Change Convention has domi-nated the media headlines and political landscape for many years, Agenda 21 is even more far-reaching and dangerous. As we approach the 2012 Earth Summit, to be convened once again in Rio, this mas-sive environmental, economic, and social “master plan” for the entire planet is being promoted with new intensity.
However, as we have already mentioned, some of the leading proponents of empow-ering the UN in the name of protecting the global environment counsel their fel-low activists to hide their true intentions. That’s exactly what J. Gary Lawrence, an advisor to President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development and to US AID, advised in a seminar in London, England, entitled, “The Future of Local Agenda 21 in the New Millennium,” sponsored by the United Nations Environment and Devel-opment Forum, UK (UNED-UK). After complimenting his British audience for their success in getting the UK to adopt much of the UN’s Earth Summit program, Lawrence lamented, “Other places have been much slower to adopt LA21 [Local Agenda 21].”
“In some cases,” he noted, “LA21 is seen as an attack on the power of the nation-state.” Which, of course, it most definitely is, as we will show. The former Clinton advisor continued:
Participating in a UN advocated planning process would very likely bring out many of the conspiracy-fixated groups and individuals in our society such as the National Rifle Association, citizen militias and some members of Congress. This segment of our society who fear “one-world government” and a UN invasion of the United States through which our individual free-dom would be stripped away would
actively work to defeat any elected official who joined “the conspiracy” by undertaking LA21. So, we call our processes something else, such as comprehensive planning, growth management or smart growth.
Yes, over the past two decades much of Agenda 21 and the rest of the Earth Sum-mit program have been enacted piecemeal at the state and local levels, but as “Smart Growth Initiatives,” “Resilient Cities,” “Regional Visioning Projects,” “STAR Sustainable Communities,” “Green Jobs,” and “Green Building Codes.” After going through charades labeled as “local vi-sioning,” “community in-put,” and “con-sensus building,” one community after another has found that it has enacted a “local” program that is virtually indis-tinguishable from every other “local” program, whether across the country or across the planet. The more important point, though, is that these initiatives that have been enacted ostensibly to save the environment, invariably destroy economic vitality, erode property rights, undermine liberty and constitutional gov-ernment, impose soviet-style rule through “stakeholder councils,” subvert local con-trol — and usually devastate the natural environment to boot.
But desperate measures are necessary to “save Mother Earth,” and only a com-
prehensive, global plan will do, argue the alarmists. The UN’s Agenda 21 is definitely comprehensive and global — breathtakingly so. Agenda 21 proposes a global regime that will monitor, oversee, and strictly regulate our planet’s oceans, lakes, streams, rivers, aquifers, sea beds, coastlands, wetlands, forests, jungles, grasslands, farmland, deserts, tundra, and mountains. It even has a whole section on regulating and “protecting” the atmo-sphere. It proposes plans for cities, towns, suburbs, villages, and rural areas. It en-visions a global scheme for healthcare, education, nutrition, agriculture, labor, production, and consumption — in short, everything; there is nothing on, in, over, or under the Earth that doesn’t fall within the purview of some part of Agenda 21. Copies of the 1,100-page document were hard to come by for several years after its debut at Rio, but I was able to bring back a “media copy” of the five-pound “trea-sure” from the summit. It is now avail-able online at http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/.
The most accessible version of Agenda 21 to come out following the Rio summit was published under the title AGENDA 21: The Earth Summit Strategy to Save Our Planet (Earthpress, 1993). Edited by envi-ronmental-activist attorney Daniel Sitarz and enthusiastically endorsed by Earth Summit chief Maurice Strong and then-
earthsummitagenda: United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and conference organizers are shown during opening ceremonies of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
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U.S. Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.), the book is instructive for demonstrating the com-pletely alien mindset that holds sway in so many influential political, academic, and media circles. Sitarz’s edition provides a powerful, albeit unintended, indictment of the UN agreement by offering this candid appraisal of the plan’s totalitarian ambi-tion. Incredibly, Sitarz admits with appar-ent approval that:
AGENDA 21 proposes an array of actions which are intended to be implemented by every person on Earth.... It calls for specific changes in the activities of all people....
Effective execution of AGENDA 21 will require a profound reorienta-tion of all human society, unlike any-thing the world has ever experienced — a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective deci-sion-making at every level.
The admission is so staggering as to re-quire recapitulation: “profound reorienta-tion,” “all human society,” “every person on Earth,” “every human action,” “every level,” “demand,” “require.” In short, it is an undisguised call for the total regimenta-tion of all life on the planet.
Nevertheless, editor Sitarz continued his praise for the wondrous text, noting:
There are specific actions which are intended to be undertaken by multi-national corporations and entrepre-neurs, by financial institutions and individual investors, by high-tech companies and indigenous people, by workers and labor unions, by farm-ers and consumers, by students and schools, by governments and legis-lators, by scientists, by women, by children — in short, by every person on Earth.
The tyrannical implications are so stun-ningly transparent that it seems impossi-ble that any nation not overtly communist could endorse it. Yet it was unanimously
endorsed by every nation at the summit, including the United States. Not even Stalin, Hitler, or Mao came close to proposing anything this all-intrusive and all-en-compassing.
But the hubris goes much further still. One of the most sacred totems in the UN’s green theology is “sustain-able development.” The Local Agenda 21 Planning Guide, published in 1996 by ICLEI, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), has been an important manual for teaching ICLEI’s “local” acolytes and accomplic-es the “sustainability” game. It boasts a foreword from former Earth Summit chief Maurice Strong, who currently is president of the council of the UN’s University for Peace. The Guide asks the rhetorical question: “What is Sustainable Development?” It then provides this re-vealing answer:
The realities of life on our planet dictate that continued economic de-velopment as we know it cannot be sustained.... Sustainable develop-
ment, therefore, is a program of ac-tion for local and global economic reform — a program that has yet to be fully defined.
Yes, that is correct; the program that is absolutely essential to our very existence “has yet to be fully defined.” It goes on:
No one fully understands how, or even if, sustainable development can be achieved; however, there is a growing consensus that it must be accomplished at the local level if it is ever to be achieved on a global basis.
There you have it; even though we don’t know what it is, there is a “growing con-sensus” that it “must be accomplished.”
The admission is so staggering as to require recapitulation: “profound reorientation,” “all human society,” “every person on Earth,” “every human action,” “every level,” “demand,” “require.” In short, it is an undisguised call for the total regimentation of all life on the planet.
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earth“saviors”:Maurice Strong (left), chairman of the Earth Council, talks with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the Rio-Plus-Five summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1997. Gorbachev presented a draft of his proposed Earth Charter.
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Much has been written in academic terms about the meaning of sustain-able development and the need to integrate ecological and economic principles into personal and public decision-making....
However, there is no agreed defini-tion of the concept and perhaps there is no need for one.... Thus, sustainable development is an “emerging con-cept” in two ways, first, because it is relatively new and evolves as we learn to grasp its wide implications for all aspects of our lives, and, second, be-cause its meanings emerge and evolve according to local contexts.
In other words, “sustainable development” is a despot’s dream-come-true: an emerg-ing all-purpose, open-ended, “enabling act” granting global central planners carte blanche to claim it means whatever they want it to mean.
thinkGlobally,actlocallyFor the past several decades, environmen-tal activists have embraced the mantra, “Think globally, act locally.” And they have been implementing it with religious fervor — along with bountiful assistance, of course, from the United Nations and a multitude of UN-affiliated institutions, U.S. government agencies, NGOs, and tax-exempt foundations. ICLEI, which has helped initiate UN programs in hun-dreds of U.S. communities, works close-ly with UN agencies such as UNESCO,
UNEP, WHO, UNFCCC, IPCC, IMF, and the World Bank, as well as the U.S. State Department, Department of Energy, EPA, U.S. Agency for International Develop-ment, the Sierra Club, Environmental De-fense Fund, World Wildlife Fund, World Economic Forum, Club of Rome, Rock-efeller Foundation, the European Union, and other similar entities. It also receives millions of dollars of funding from many of these same entities, thus enabling it to organize formidable “local” coalitions that often can overwhelm genuine local grass-roots opposition to UN-spawned programs.
However, the correlation of forces in this ongoing struggle may be turning in favor of freedom — though not a moment too soon. When this reporter returned from the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and began a na-tional tour with my book Global Tyranny, Step by Step … The United Nations and the Emerging New World Order, far too few people were ready for the message. Even sympathetic radio talk-show hosts found it difficult to believe that the UN’s trea-ties on climate change and biodiversity, or Agenda 21, could be as serious a threat to America’s sovereign-ty, prosperity, and freedom as I alleged. Few could appreci-ate how these docu-ments and programs crafted in some far-off United Nations conference could ever
concretely impact them in their state, town, or neighborhood. That has changed dra-matically, as the huge financial costs and oppressive regimentation associated with global-warming legislation, sustainable development programs, and local Agenda 21 projects have skyrocketed.
Tom DeWeese, president of the Ameri-can Policy Center and a leading expert on Agenda 21 and sustainable development, says there “is definitely a major awakening underway.” “These UN stealth programs got by unnoticed and unopposed for many years, but no longer,” he told The New AmericAN. “Patriots in communities all across the country are getting wise to the UN programs and are fighting back. Many of the Tea Party activists have awakened to these issues. Our phones have been liter-ally ringing off the hooks with requests for information and speakers to help in local battles against Agenda 21 and sustainable development. 2011 is going to be a very critical year, and I’m encouraged; our side is going to make some major advances on these battlefronts.”
“The growing awareness of the dangers posed by UN programs such as Agenda 21, sustainable development, and the global-warming treaties, is, fortunately causing many Americans to look more critically at the United Nations itself,” John F. McManus, president of The John Birch Society, told The New AmericAN. “These are tentacles, but the UN is the oc-topus controlling the tentacles. And it is our government that is feeding the UN oc-topus with our tax dollars, which the UN funnels, through a myriad of fronts, into these efforts aimed at destroying our free-doms and empowering the UN as a global government. It’s becoming more obvious each day that The John Birch Society’s half-century campaign to ‘Get US out of the United Nations — and Get the UN out of the US’ — is right on the mark. This should be a major effort of the new 112th Congress.” n
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New AmericAN are available at quantity-discount prices. To place your order, visit www.shopjbs.org or see the card between pages 34-35.
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Failedposterchild: Spanish Prime Minister José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero speaks on “Green Growth” at the Seoul G20 meeting in 2010. Spain’s massive wind and solar subsidies have driven up electricity rates and helped push the country toward bankruptcy.
AP Images
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by Dave Bohon
W ith “don’t ask, don’t tell” scrapped by congressional vote late last year and open homo-
sexuals now free to be all they can be in the armed forces, activists determined to force social change on America’s military have once again turned their efforts toward placing women into combat roles.
On January 14, the Associated Press re-ported that a military advisory commission was putting the final touches on a diversity study that includes a recommendation that the Pentagon scrap the rule that for over 200 years has kept women from serving di-rectly in combat. While the Military Lead-ership Diversity Commission’s 131-page draft report, entitled From Representation to Inclusion: Diversity Leadership for the 21st-Century Military, offers a plethora of recommendations to address the supposed
need for broader diversity in the military, its most widely publicized prescription is encapsulated in a small section (pages 74-77) recommending that women be allowed to serve in combat in order “to create a level playing field for all qualified service members.”
Then and noWPresently women may serve in the prox-imity of combat in support roles, but are prohibited “from being assigned to any unit smaller than a brigade whose primary mission is direct combat on the ground,” reported the Associated Press. The Penta-gon says that currently about 14 percent of the nation’s armed forces are composed of women, and of the 2.2 million service members who have served in Iraq and Af-ghanistan, an estimated 255,000 have been female personnel.
According to Department of Defense
(DOD) statistics, as of early January 2011, a combined total of 134 women service members had been killed in Iraq and Af-ghanistan, compared to 5,700 men. Many of the women killed, as well as the hun-dreds of others who have been wounded and maimed during the nine-year conflict, were the victims of improvised explosive devices (remote-controlled makeshift bombs buried in roadways).
By comparison, according to the Army Times, some 33,000 women were de-ployed during the first Persian Gulf con-flict, and 16 were killed, nearly all medi-cal personnel. An estimated 7,000 women served during the prolonged Vietnam War, and 16 made the ultimate sacrifice.
Among those killed in the early days of the 2003 invasion of Iraq by U.S. forces was Lori Piestewa, a 23-year-old mother of two who was serving as a supply clerk when the convoy she was part of was am-bushed in Nassiriya. Eleven other soldiers were killed in the attack, and several in-jured and captured, among them PFC Jes-sica Lynch, whose dramatic rescue and contrived account of heroics were used to demonstrate how effectively women could fight alongside men. In reality, neither Piestewa nor Lynch had expected or de-sired combat duty, and multiple accounts confirm that Lynch’s wounds were too se-vere to permit her to fight off her captors.
Over the next few years, women per-sonnel were killed or maimed on a semi-regular basis, and the accounts of the sac-rifices they made for their country were often used to buttress the case for using women in combat.
One of those permanently disabled while serving in Iraq was Major Ladda Duckworth, who lost both of her legs when a rocket-propelled grenade explod-ed inside her Black Hawk helicopter. As the military’s diversity commission re-leased their draft report, Duckworth was trotted out to declare how, as quoted by NPR, she would eagerly go back into combat “in a minute for the honor of being able to serve next to some of the greatest folks that I’ve ever been able to serve next to. It’s about the job. Women are doing that right now.”
The Military Leadership Diversity Commission recommended putting women into combat roles, ignoring an exhaustive study recommending the opposite.
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FeminizingAmericA’s Fighting Force
argumenTsWith the enormity of the dramatic change the 31-member Diversity Commission is suggesting in combat troop makeup, it is surprising that its draft report offers noth-ing to counter the exhaustive 1992 study completed by the Commission on the As-signment of Women in the Armed Forces, convened by President George H.W. Bush after the 1990-91 Persian Gulf action. That commission came to the determination by majority vote that women had no place in direct combat on land, in the air, or on sub-marines and amphibious vessels.
Since America’s armed forces have not been involved in any campaign since Viet-nam that included large-scale and protract-ed battlefield involvement with the enemy, there are no relevant instances of women performing effectively in combat situations on the ground, other than a few examples from Iraq and Afghanistan where a minor-ity of female support personnel have found themselves thrust into battle.
Nonetheless, with little to draw from, the commission forged gamely ahead to make its case. For example, ignoring the absurdi-ty of comparing race to gender in the pres-ent debate, the commission report states:
One frequently-cited argument in favor of the current policy is that hav-ing women serving in direct combat will hamper mission effectiveness by hurting unit morale and cohe-sion. Comparable arguments were made with respect to racial integra-tion, but were ultimately never borne out. Similarly, to date, there has been little evidence that the integration of women into previously closed units or occupations has had a negative impact on important mission-related perfor-mance factors, like unit cohesion.
Arguing that the military’s ex-clusion of women in combat roles is out of sync with the realities of present-day war-fare, the commission noted that “some of the military women deployed to Iraq and Afghani-stan have already been engaged in activities that would be con-sidered combat-related, includ-ing being collocated with com-bat units and engaging in direct combat for self-defense.”
Lory Manning of the Women’s Re-search and Education Institute insisted the move to put women in combat is “a logical outcome of what women have been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the Army and Marines have been essentially ducking the policy. They come up with the [term] ‘attaching’ someone to a unit as opposed to ‘assigning,’ but they’ve been doing it for nine years now.”
But Lieutenant Colonel Robert Magin-nis (U.S. Army, retired), a senior fellow for national security with the Family Research Council (FRC), pointed out that like many others anxious to make a case for placing women in combat, Manning has mistaken the counterinsurgent nature of the military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan with the more complex and protracted mechan-
ics of conventional warfare. While some women, in violation of long-established DOD statutes and regulation, have been “attached” (but not assigned) to ground combat units in support roles, Maginnis said he was unaware of women “conduct-ing the tough counter-insurgent ground operations” that male soldiers did, particu-larly in the early days of the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Few women have truly been in ground combat” in Iraq and Afghanistan, Magin-nis told The New AmericAN, and those who were pressed into service did so out of the necessity of the moment, not be-cause they were part of a cohesive team of fighting soldiers. “Being present in hostile engagements or hit by a roadside bomb is dangerous, but not like taking the fight to the enemy,” he explained. “Few women should — or have been asked to — take the fight to the enemy whether he be hiding in rocks outside Afghan villages or inside mosques in Fallujah. That is an entirely different proposition.”
BaTTlefield necessiTiesOf course, all military personnel serving in hostile locales such as Iraq and Afghani-stan can be considered in harm’s way. But the peril in which those serving as combat support find themselves is far different than
“From my own personal experience,” said Colonel Ron Ray, “I can attest to the fact that physical combat, close combat, infantry, artillery, armor combat — all are profoundly more demanding than any sport, and there is no place there for women combatants.”
PFCJessicalynch (pictured being helped from the helicopter) was wounded, and another female support soldier killed, when their supply convoy was attacked in Iraq.
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that faced by the brave men who, as Magin-nis noted, take the battle to the enemy.
In a March 2008 report on women in combat, the Center for Military Readiness (CMR) recalled the launch of America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, when “infantry, armor, artillery, Special Operations Forces, and Marines led the fast-moving ground assault to liberate Baghdad.” Over a year and a half later, in November 2004, “the same troops, fighting door-to-door and street-to-street, cleaned out Fallujah, an enemy stronghold.” Those intense battles, and many others waged by U.S. troops throughout the region, are a true reflection of direct ground combat, which, noted the CMR report, “involves more than the ex-perience of being ‘in harm’s way.’”
Contrary to the arguments of propo-nents of placing women in combat, “the offensive missions of direct ground com-bat units, such as the infantry, have not changed,” noted another report from the CMR, whose president Elaine Donnelly served on the 1992 Commission on the As-signment of Women in the Armed Forces. “Our female soldiers are indisputably brave, but the military cannot disregard differences in physical strength and social complications that would detract from the strength, discipline, and readiness of direct ground combat units. These troops attack the enemy with deliberate offensive action under fire.... No one’s infantryman son should have to die because [a] support soldier nearest him cannot lift and single-handedly carry him from the battlefield if he is severely wounded under fire. Most male soldiers have that physical capability. Female soldiers, no matter how competent and brave, do not.”
Another member of the 1992 commis-sion, Colonel Ron Ray (USMC, retired), a decorated veteran of the Vietnam conflict and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, noted that there is significance behind the term “selective service” used by the mili-tary in choosing who will join America’s armed forces. In theory, if not in practice, only the most select of individuals — physically, mentally, and emotionally — are chosen to serve. “Men and women are profoundly different and those enormous differences have military significance,” Ray told The New AmericAN. “Across the world men and women do not compete to-
gether in sports in the high school, college, Olympic, or professional levels of sport, and it is solely because their physical dif-ferences are substantial.”
What holds true in athletics is of life-and-death importance on the battlefield. As a combat veteran, Ray lived through a brutal 1967-68 combat tour in Vietnam, including the infamous Tet Offensive. “From my own personal experience,” said Ray, “I can attest to the fact that physical combat, close combat, infantry, artillery, armor combat — all are profoundly more demanding than any sport, and there is no place there for women combatants.”
an exhausTive sTudyFollowing the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, as Congress was considering a repeal of the ban on women in combat, Presi-dent George H.W. Bush appointed the 15-member Commission on the Assign-ment of Women in the Armed Forces, which was charged with analyzing all as-pects of women in combat. Following an eight-month study, in which its members pursued the most thorough investigation that has been done on the issue to date, the commission came to the majority conclu-sion that the DOD should continue the ban on the assignment of women to combat-ant aircraft, land combat and special forces units, and most combat ships.
As the CMR noted in a review of that
commission’s study, Congress held no hearings on the commission’s findings, and under the incoming Clinton adminis-tration the DOD began assigning women to combat aircraft in April 1993, which was followed by a repeal of the policy ex-empting women from most combat ships.
While Congress and the Clinton admin-istration (along with the most recent com-mission) chose largely to ignore the com-mission’s report, its findings of nearly 20 years ago remain a vital epistle to present leaders, as they appear ready to welcome women into the historically male role of warrior and defender.
While the evidence arguing convincing-ly against women in combat is wide rang-ing, two factors stood out above the rest in the commission’s findings, as summarized by the CMR in a 2004 report:
Unit Cohesion: The commission heard testimony confirming that the cohesion of a military unit develops where members share common values, conform to group standards of behavior and performance, lose their personal identities, focus on shared goals, and become totally depen-dent upon each other — all for the purpose of meeting critical military objectives. The commission concluded that cohe-sion would suffer in the male-dominated combat sphere with the introduction of women. “Cohesion can be negatively af-fected by the introduction of any element
Col.RonRay(insuit):Placing women in combat would compromise “America’s historic ability to defend her vital national interests in peace and war.”
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that detracts from the need for such key ingredients as mutual confidence, com-monality of experience, and equitable treatment,” noted the CMR summary.
Further factors affecting such cohesion would include the “real or perceived in-ability of women to carry their weight without male assistance,” the interference with male bonding that would come with the presence of the opposite sex, the natu-ral instinct for men to protect women, and the potential for inappropriate relation-ships between male and female soldiers, “particularly when perceived as a way to escape from combat duty.”
One Navy Special Warfare commander testified to the commission, “Even if some women are strong enough to handle the physical demands of combat, the intro-duction of factors such as sexual entangle-ments and jealousies … would make the forward commander’s job more difficult.” According to the CMR report, “Com-manders of Special Operations Forces testified that because of unparalleled physical demands and forced intimacy, even in training, women would degrade the readiness, cohesion, and effectiveness of their units.”
Combat Considerations: “The ground combatant relies heavily on his physical strength and stamina to survive, fight, and win,” noted the CMR summary. “The Commission heard an abundance of ex-pert testimony about the physical differ-ences between men and women,” differ-ences that would disqualify women from serving effectively in combat. Among the disparities: 1) “Women are shorter, have less muscle mass and weigh less than men”; 2) “Female aerobic capac-
ity is approximately 70-75 percent that of males”; 3) women are at twice the risk for injuries to their lower extremities and at nearly five times the risk for stress fractures, according to a 1988 Army study.
The commission found that the experience of other countries offered little reason to believe the United States
could successfully introduce women into combat. For example, noted the CMR summary, “Of 103 women recruited for infantry training after Canada repealed its combat rules in 1989, only one woman succeeded in meeting the physical require-ments necessary to complete the training.”
Further, the commission viewed a re-port from the federal Government Ac-countability Office showing that during Desert Shield/Desert Storm, 18 to 20 per-cent of female soldiers in some Army units were un-deployable. It also saw reports showing that 56 percent of personnel de-ployed in Desert Shield/Desert Storm with mixed-gender units said that some women in their units became pregnant just before being deployed, or even while they were in the Persian Gulf, making these women un-deployable.
“equal opporTuniTy” or miliTary readinessPerhaps the clearest argument against women in combat can be found in the “Alternate Views” section at the end of the commission’s report, which empha-sized that the key issue “in preparing to win and survive in combat is not what is best for the individual, but what is best for the unit and the military as a whole.” While civilian society may rightly forbid discrimination in many types of employ-ment, “the military, in building fighting units, must be able to choose those most able to fight and win in battle. There is good reason for this. In a combat unit serving on land, at sea, or in the air, the inability of any member of the group to perform at levels demanded by the battle-field can present a direct risk to the lives of others and to the accomplishments of the military mission.”
For the majority of those endorsing the move, however, what is best for the na-tion and its fighting forces appears to have taken a back seat to what is best for women wishing to advance their military careers. With combat experience often a prerequi-site for promotion to senior positions in the military, proponents call the move one of fairness. Former Marine Captain Anu Bhagwati, who serves as executive di-
Further, the commission viewed a report from the federal Government Accountability Office showing that during Desert Shield/Desert Storm, 18 to 20 percent of female soldiers in some Army units were un-deployable.
silverstarrecipientspec.MonicaBrown:The nature of the Middle East conflict has increasingly put women soldiers in harm’s way.
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rector of the Service Women’s Action Network, argued that holding them back from active combat positions represents “a huge glass ceiling for service-women. It is archaic, it does not reflect the many sacrifices and contributions that women make in the military, and it ignores the reality of current warfight-ing doctrine.”
Maginnis pointed out that the supposed “glass ceiling” that frustrates some female officers ambitious for pro-motion is necessary because “most high commands require commanding combatants. One should appreciate from per-sonal experience the role be-fore commanding such units.” Since only men serve in ground combat roles, explained Mag-innis, it stands to reason that “only men will eventually com-mand large, ground forces.” He emphasized that command-ing large numbers of fighting men “is not something learned in the classroom, and tough to learn in peacetime.”
The “Alternate Views” section of the 1992 commission report noted that while all service members are free to pursue opportunities for career advancement, “when it comes to combat assignments, the needs of the military must take prec-edence over all other considerations, in-cluding the career prospects of individual service members.”
During testimony the commission found itself barraged with witnesses who insisted that “the military must pay any price and bear any burden to promote equal opportu-nities and career progression for an ambi-tious few” — mainly female officers who consider the common-sense policy confin-ing. “But military policies must be based on actual experience and sound judgment, not doctrinaire notions of sexual equality unsupported by human experience and history,” the “Alternate Views” summary emphasized.
The summary noted that in its intensive, eight-month study, the Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces concluded that assigning women
to combat would: 1) “adversely affect the critical components” of combat readiness, unit cohesion, and military effectiveness; 2) “leave women exposed to the possibil-ity of involuntary assignment to combat and conscription”; and 3) “overturn two centuries of settled law and military pol-icy based on deeply held and commonly shared cultural assumptions defining how men should treat women.”
Most significantly, the exhaustive study confirmed to the majority of commissioners that “the military does not need women in [and] should not assign women to combat.”
falling on deaf earsAs happened when the report was first released in 1992, those important lessons may continue to fall on deaf ears, as those in key positions appear willing to stand passively by while what has been allowed by default slowly becomes twisted into policy.
In a speech last November, Admi-ral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pointed out that over the last several years women service person-nel have experienced their share of battle-
field risks as they have worked in support roles. “I know what the law says, and I know what it requires,” he said. “But I’d be hard pressed to say that any woman who serves in Afghani-stan today, or who served in Iraq over the last few years, did so without facing the risks of their male counterparts.” Mul-len said that in much of present-day warfare “there is no longer a clear delineation between the front lines … and the side-lines.” Speaking of those in uni-form cycling back from service in the Middle East, he declared that “this will be the first gen-eration of veterans where large segments of women returning will have been exposed to some form of combat.”
But Colonel Ray explained that the campaign to insinu-ate women into combat roles began several generations ear-lier in 1950, with the appoint-ment of Anna Rosenberg as Assistant Secretary of Defense
in the Truman administration. Recalled Ray, “Anna Rosenberg was well known as a liberal member of the Roosevelt admin-istration, and after being appointed as the first Assistant Secretary of Defense, she initiated the creation of the Defense Advi-sory Committee on Women in the Services (DACOWITS), which became a feminist activist group in the Pentagon, promoting the move of American women closer and closer to the battlefield.”
According to Ray, the recent recom-mendations of the Military Leadership Diversity Commission represent the lat-est in a protracted bipartisan political campaign to feminize America’s fighting force. “This is really the culmination of a 60-year effort to promote the civilian no-tion of equal opportunity for women,” he said, “so that it predominates over the vital traditional and uncompromising American military standards of combat readiness, exemplary conduct, unit cohesion, and military effectiveness. And the ultimate consequences of this campaign will be the compromising of America’s historic abil-ity to defend her vital national interests in peace and war.” n
BlackHawkpilotladdaduckworth lost both legs in Iraq after the Clinton-era DOD began assigning women to combat aircraft.
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Give the gift of TRUTH
by Jack Kenny
When John McCain announced his choice of Alaska Gover-nor Sarah Palin as his running
mate on August 29, 2008, the only foreign policy experience or expertise the Repub-lican vice presidential candidate could point to was her 20 months as Governor of the only state between Canada and Rus-sia. But the former Governor and poten-tial 2012 presidential candidate has come a long way in the little more than two years since the enormously successful “hockey mom” speech she delivered at the Repub-lican National Convention. In an op-ed piece in USA Today last December 21, Palin sounded like an old foreign policy hand from inside the Washington beltway.
In the article, headlined “Time to Get Tough With Iran,” the leader of the “Mama Grizzlies” warned of the potential danger to Israel, America, and other nations if the Iranian government should develop a nuclear bomb. Existing sanctions are not severe enough, she insisted, since they are not, in her words, capable of “crippling” Iran economically:
Much more can be done, such as banning insurance for shipments to Iran, banning all military sales to Iran, ending all trade credits, ban-ning all financial dealings with Ira-nian banks, limiting Iran’s access to international capital markets and banking services, closing air space and waters to Iran’s national air and
shipping lines, and, especially, end-ing Iran’s ability to import refined petroleum. These would be truly “crippling” sanctions. They would work if implemented.
But just how are these crippling mea-sures, particularly the closing of air space and waters to Iran’s commerce, to be im-plemented? With an air and naval block-ade? Palin didn’t say. But shutting off Iran’s access to refined petroleum would be ruinous to its economy, and interfer-ing with its shipping lanes would rightly be considered an act of war. And while Palin insists U.S. policy should support “the brave people of Iran” who have openly opposed the dictatorship there, she somehow overlooks the fact that it is
asavicepresidentialcandidate,Palin, seen here with husband Todd, shared the spotlight, and the interventionist foreign policy, of presidential nominee John McCain.
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Sarah Palin has been backed from the outset by neoconservatives — not fiscal, constitutional conservatives — and her political stances reflect her affiliations.
Palin’sNeocon Path
the people, not the government, of Iran that would suffer most from the crippling of that nation’s economy. When children, the sick, and the elderly die because they are unable to obtain the food and medi-cine they need, the blame will fall on the U.S. sanctions, not the government in Tehran.
At a time when the United States is still engaged in two Middle East wars and our military is stretched to the break-ing point, why is Palin urging policies that would put us on a path to war with a nation larger and more formidable than either Iraq or Afghanistan? How would that be prudent when the commander of our forces in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, has predicted that a military strike against Iran would likely generate nationalist support for the very regime we would like to topple? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that from the be-ginning of her meteoric rise to national stardom, Sarah Palin has been a project of the neoconservative movement in Washington that continues to promote what George W. Bush described as a “global democratic revolution.” Or as his father put it on the run-up to the first Gulf War 20 years ago, it is a quest for a “new world order.”
summoningsarahMcCain’s choice of Palin has often been described as an 11th-hour gamble, putting the youthful Governor with limited politi-cal experience on the ticket in the hope of attracting young and, especially, female voters. And by all accounts, the Alaska Governor was summoned to McCain’s Arizona home for “vetting” only two days before the nominees stood together on a stage in Dayton, Ohio, where McCain publicly anointed his running mate. But more than a year earlier, Palin came to the attention of some prominent Washington journalists who would play a significant role in promoting her as McCain’s bridge to the party’s conservative base, which has always regarded him as suspect.
In June 2007, when the former Mayor of Wasilla had been Governor for barely six months, a cruise ship chartered by the Weekly Standard pulled into Juneau on an Alaskan cruise, the kind of ocean-going trip the publication sponsors for well-heeled readers who like to vacation with some of the big names of political journalism. As Jane Mayer reported in the October 2008 issue of New Yorker maga-zine, Governor Palin hosted a lunch for a group that included three of the maga-zine’s heavy hitters: William Kristol, the
editor and, at the time, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times; Fred Barnes, executive editor and a talk-show host on the Fox News channel; and Michael Ger-son, a former speech writer for George W. Bush and a Washington Times columnist. Before the day was over the Governor led the group on a “flight-seeing trip,” with Palin and her staff leasing two helicopters at a cost to the state of $4,000. (“The pundits paid for their own aircraft,” Mayer reported.)
By the time they left, the journalists were convinced they had seen a star in the making. And it wasn’t just the congenial Governor and former beauty queen’s good looks and personal charm. She had, after all, taken on some of the powerful in-
terests in her state and had defeated the incumbent Governor of her own party, Frank Murkowski, in a primary in 2006. She went on to win the general election, becoming the state’s youngest (at 42) and first female Governor. At the time the Weekly Standard crew arrived, her ap-proval rating was around 80 percent, giv-ing credence to a column Kristol wrote on his return to Washington about “America’s most popular governor.”
Kristol continued to write and talk about Palin in his magazine and newspaper col-umns and in his frequent appearances on Fox News. By the summer of 2008, Kris-tol was promoting Palin for Vice President so incessantly that Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace finally said, “Can we get off Sarah Palin, please?” It’s worth not-ing, however, that when Kristol wasn’t pushing Palin, he was boosting Senator Joe Lieberman for “veep.” Lieberman, the Democrat-turned-independent from Connecticut, was widely rumored to be McCain’s first choice. But the Connecti-cut Senator is solidly liberal on all but his hawkish military stance, and the choice would have likely inspired a backlash by conservatives.
As luck would have it, 2007 was a good year for Alaskan cruises and a good year
Palinbecamealaska’syoungestand first female Governor when she signed the oath of office in Juneau on December 4, 2006.
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for Sarah Palin. In August, a cruise spon-sored by National Review pulled into Ju-neau, and Palin wound up hosting the likes of editor Rich Lowry, former federal judge and Reagan Supreme Court nominee Rob-ert Bork, and John Bolton, former Ambas-sador to the United Nations. Dick Morris, the former Clinton political advisor who had since migrated over to the Republican side, was also part of the entourage. Mor-ris advised Palin to maintain her image as an outsider — her “outsider cred” — to be successful in politics. Once McCain announced his V.P. choice, Morris was quick to follow up with an admiring col-umn on the Governor in the Washington Post, claiming: “I will always remember taking her aside and telling her that she might one day be tapped to be Vice Presi-dent, given her record and the shortage of female political talent in the Republican Party.” Kristol, meanwhile, hailed the pick as “one of the few transformational choic-es in modern political history.”
But it was not entirely clear at that point just what or who was being transformed and for what purpose. Tim Shipman, in the British newspaper The Telegraph, quoted
an official with the neoconser-vative American Enterprise In-stitute, who said of the Alaska Governor: “She’s bright and she’s a blank page. She’s going places and it’s worth going there with her.” Pat Buchanan, a prominent foe of the neo-conservative movement, said she “has become, overnight, the most priceless political asset the movement has. Look for the neocons to move with all deliberate speed to take her into their camp by pressing upon her advisers and staff, and steering her into the AEI-Weekly Standard-War Party orbit.”
A few short days after her selection, Palin, accompanied by Lieberman, met with the board of directors of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and as-sured them of her “heartfelt support for Is-rael,” a campaign official told NBC News. The AIPAC officials were “pleased that Gov. Palin expressed her deep, personal and lifelong commitment to the safety and security of Israel,” said spokesman Josh Block. Indeed, Palin’s fervor for defend-
ing Israel likely stems from an evangelical Christian belief in the preservation of Israel as a biblical imperative. But it also meshes well with the pro-internationalist policy of neoconservative Republicans, who fre-quently cite the defense of Israel in their rationale for our frequent and extended military interventions in the Middle East. Palin kept a small Israeli flag on display in the Governor’s office in Juneau and ap-peared at last year’s Tea Party convention wearing a pin that depicted U.S. and Israeli flags side by side. Concerning the potential threat to Israel from a nuclear-armed Iran, Palin wrote in her USA Today article:
Some have said the Israelis should undertake military action on their own if they are convinced the Iranian program is approaching the point of no return. But Iran’s nuclear weapons program is not just Israel’s problem; it is the world’s problem. I agree with the former British prime min-ister Tony Blair, who said recently that the West must be willing to use force “if necessary” if that is the only alternative.
wayofthewarriorThe McCain campaign put Palin under the foreign policy tutelage of Randy Scheun-emann and his colleague Stephen Biegun. A McCain advisor and longtime Washing-ton lobbyist, political consultant, and early advocate of war with Iraq, Scheunemann was a consultant to Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott in 1998 and helped draft the Iraqi Liberation Act that made “regime change” in Baghdad official U.S. policy. He was also a key backer of Ahmad Cha-labi, the Iraqi exile who supplied the Cen-tral Intelligence Agency with false infor-mation about Saddam Hussein’s weapons
The people, not the government, of Iran would suffer most from the crippling of that nation’s economy. When children, the sick, and the elderly die because they are unable to obtain the food and medicine they need, the blame will fall on the U.S. sanctions.
PalingreetssallaiMerido,Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, in October 2008. Earlier, she had affirmed her “lifelong commitment to the safety and security of Israel,” said a spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
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of mass destruction. With the approval of the Bush administration, Scheunemann, in late 2002, founded the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy group to whip up pro-war sentiment throughout the country. And as a principal of Orion Strategies, he numbered among his clients the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. As a paid representative of the Georgian government, Scheunemann was lobbying for the inclusion of Georgia in the rapidly expanding NATO alliance, a move vehe-mently opposed by Russia.
When fighting broke out between Rus-sia and Georgia in the summer of 2008, candidate McCain quickly presumed to speak for all Americans when he said in a phone call to Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili, “Today we are all Georgians.” Palin, in her first televised interview after accepting the vice presidential nomina-tion, likewise voiced her support for bring-ing both Georgia and Ukraine into NATO.
“And under the NATO treaty, wouldn’t we then have to go to war if Russia went into Georgia?” asked Charles Gibson of ABC News.
“Perhaps so,” Palin replied “I mean that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you’re going to be expected to be called upon and help.”
Thus did Palin, the political “outsider” and “common sense conservative,” get quickly on board with the foreign policy establishment of both parties, which al-ready had American soldiers conducting military exercises in Russia’s front yard and had given the formerly defensive NATO alliance a global mission that promises to keep the United States and our allies perpetually at war. Since we are already committed to the defense of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Croatia, and Albania, adding Georgia and Ukraine might seem
a natural progression. And with NATO engaged in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, it now appears the entire world is the stage for military inter-vention by the United States and its allies.
A visit to the United Nations soon followed, where Palin was expected to learn about foreign policy and make some impor-
tant connections. She met with Afghani-stan President Hamid Karzai of Afghani-stan, and more importantly, she received, as Newsday put it, “her first foreign pol-icy tutorial from Henry Kissinger.” Her 90-minute session with the powerful Na-tional Security Advisor and Secretary of State in the Nixon administration was “an excellent meeting,” Biegun told the press, covering a wide range of national security issues, but focused mainly on “Russia, Iran and China.”
Scheunemann remains one of the top policy advisors in the Sarah PAC network, along with Kim Daniels, another survivor of the McCain campaign. Others include Pam Pryor, a former senior advisor to the Republican National Committee, and Robert Barnett, a Washington lawyer who negotiated Palin’s book contract. But the “dean” of the group is Fred Malek, an old Nixon hand who was deputy director of the CREEP (Committee to Reelect the President) campaign of 1972. For the na-tion’s most celebrated “outsider,” Palin ap-pears well connected to the GOP’s Wash-ington establishment.
outsider,Maverick,orwhat?On the campaign trail, in her (thus far) two books and op-ed pieces, Palin stresses her “outsider” image and her passion for “common sense conservative solutions.” In the keynote address at the first Tea
Palin’s fervor for defending Israel likely stems from an evangelical Christian belief in the preservation of Israel as a biblical imperative. But it also meshes well with the pro-internationalist policy of neoconservative Republicans.
inherfirsttelevisedinterviewasavicepresidentialcandidate,Palin told ABC’s Charles Gibson that the United States may have to go to war to defend Georgia from Russia.
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Party national convention in Nashville a year ago, she lamented all the borrowing our government is doing to cover a $3.8 trillion budget and how that has made us increasingly beholden to other nations. Common-sense Americans, by contrast, know how to live within our means. “We tighten our belts,” she said. “We cut back on our budgets.... It’s what Todd [her hus-band] and I do when we have to make payroll [or] buy new equipment for our commercial fishing business.”
That common-sense conservatism, with all its belt-tightening imperatives, can vanish rather suddenly, however, when Palin gets on the subject of education, as she did during her vice presidential debate with then-Senator Joe Biden.
“I say, too, with education, America needs to be putting a lot more focus on that and our schools have got to be really ramped up in terms of the funding that they are deserving. Teachers needed to be paid more.... We need flexibility in No Child Left Behind. We need to put more of an emphasis on the profession of teach-ing.... I’m very, very concerned about where we’re going with education and we have got to ramp it up and put more atten-tion in that arena.”
Since annual appropriations for the U.S. Department of Education were “ramped up” from $35.7 billion in 2001 to $137.6 billion in 2009, one might wonder how much “ramping” Palin had in mind. Or how much responsibility she would cede to the federal government over school funding, teachers’ pay, and education stan-dards. Conservatives used to believe those are local and state issues over which the Constitution assigns no role to the federal government.
And while Palin has during the past couple of years been describing Obama’s cap-and-trade program as ruinous for the American economy, she supported cap and trade as McCain’s running mate. Asked by debate moderator Gwen Ifill if she sup-ported “capping carbon emissions,” Palin replied emphatically, “I do. I do.”
Perhaps the Palin of 2008 was simply backing the position of the top of the tick-et, though she was willing to express her differences with McCain on his opposi-tion to drilling for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But there was obviously no difference or dissent on the
ticket concerning the wars in Iraq and Af-ghanistan. Palin fairly gushed over those noble undertakings. In the vice presiden-tial debate, she brought up, only to dis-miss, the killing of civilians by our bomb-ing raids in Afghanistan. “That’s not what we’re doing,” she insisted. “We’re fighting terrorists, and we’re securing democracy, and we’re building schools for children there so that there is opportunity in that country, also.”
It’s possible, of course, to be doing all those things and killing the innocent as well. Every war has its “collateral dam-age,” but the question in Afghanistan is whether we have continued our military presence there beyond its original purpose — the routing of al-Qaeda forces in that country. Building schools, securing de-mocracy, and creating an opportunity so-ciety is no more fitting a role for the U.S. military today than it was when Lyndon Johnson spoke of a Great Society on the Mekong Delta in the 1960s.
For all her pronouncements against big government and her praise for the virtues of belt-tightening, it’s clear Palin will not be the champion of any serious cutting of the Pentagon’s $700 billion budget. In a speech at a “Freedom Fest” gathering in Norfolk, Virginia, last June, Palin took aim at cost-cutting measures being considered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
“Secretary Gates recently spoke about the future of the U.S. Navy. He said we
have to ‘ask whether the nation can re-ally afford a Navy that relies on $3 to $6 billion destroyers, $7 billion submarines, and $11 billion carriers.’ He went on to ask, ‘Do we really need … more strike groups for another 30 years when no other country has more than one?’” Palin said. “Well, my answer is pretty simple: Yes, we can and, yes, we do, because we must.”
Though military spending by the Unit-ed States is nearly equal to that of all the other countries of the world combined, Palin insists we must spend more. While a consensus is growing in Washington that even military spending must be cut to reduce trillion-dollar-a-year deficits, Palin would put $7 billion submarines and $11 billion aircraft carriers off limits to budget cutters.
America, said John Quincy Adams, “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” The price of enforcing a glob-al Pax Americana is high, in dollars as well as lives. Sarah Palin has become the leader of what she calls “Mamma Griz-zlies,” women in the political arena who will fight fiercely in defense of home and family. But perhaps the metaphor is misplaced. The Mamma Grizzly fights to defend her own. The hawk flies abroad in search of prey. n
ameetingwithafghanPresidentHamidkarzai was part of Palin’s crash course on foreign policy.
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“The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”
—Karl Marx
“We won’t have true ‘social justice’ until everyone is equal in everybody’s house.”
—Rev. Al Sharpton
“My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody…and right now everybody’s so pinched that business is bad for everybody and I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”
—Barack Obama
“We can’t expect the American people to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism until they awaken one day to find that theyhave Communism.”
—Nikita Khrushchev
“A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We execute from revolutionary conviction.”
—Ernesto “Che” Guevara
“Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home. Kill your parents…I’m a radical, leftist, small ‘c’ communist.”
—Bill Ayers
“Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy.”
—Mao Tse-Tung
“Two of my favorite philosophers are Mao tse Tung and Mother Teresa—two people I turn to most.”
—Anita Dunn
“The goal of socialism is communism.”—Vladimir Lenin
“And, guess what this liberal will be all about? This liberal will be about socializing…basically taking over and the government running all of your companies.”
—Rep. Maxine Waters, (D-California)
“It takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation [ObamaCare] together to controlthe people.”
—Rep. John Dingell (D-Michigan)
by Thomas R. Eddlem
You Can Still Trust the Communists to Be Communists (Socialists and Progressives Too), by Fred C. Schwarz & David A. Noe-bel, Christian Anti-Communism Crusade: Manitou Springs, Colo., 2010, 370 pages, hardcover. (To order, see facing page.)
This 40th anniversary edition of Dr. Fred Schwarz’s classic anticom-munist book You Can Trust the
Communists … to Be Communists has been updated with several chapters by David Noebel of the Colorado-based Sum-mit Ministries. Noebel makes a competent effort to update this valuable book to an age that has been taught that communism has collapsed since the fall of the Berlin Wall back in 1989.
Governments constituting nearly 1.4 billion people continue to claim the com-munist label, including China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, and others, and many others of the old Soviet bloc have the same old Marxist-Leninist power and organizational structure even though they have adopted new party labels. Noebel’s introduction to the book notes, “In spite of communism’s deadly march through the 20th century, with over 100 million slaughtered and hundreds of millions more left persecuted and impoverished, communism’s promise of a future utopia continues to deceive the intelligent, the wealthy, the powerful and the political.” The allure of Marxism-Leninism con-tinues to hold sway in American aca-demia, as well as some political and cul-tural niches of American society today. Schwarz’s book is a healthy reminder of the reality of how many nations continue to be enslaved despite the fervent wishes
of the majority who seek freedom.While Marxism-Leninism is the brand
name for the most popular form of tyranny of the 20th century, many of the organi-zational techniques used by tyrants and would-be tyrants are common to com-munists and non-communists alike. This is what makes Schwarz’s book a valuable study even in the post-Soviet era.
The original book by Dr. Fred Schwarz — a medical doctor by profession, who died in January 2009 — began with a simple premise: “It is that communists are communists. I intend to show that they are exactly what they say they are; they believe what they say they believe; their objective is the objective they have repeatedly proclaimed to the entire world; their organization is the organization they have described in minute detail; and their moral code is one they have announced without shame.” Schwarz called commu-nists “perfectly understandable and almost mathematically predictable.”
By that statement, he did not mean that people under communist discipline were models of Judeo-Christian honesty, but rather “honest” in an entirely different form: “You can trust an armed bank rob-ber to take the money and try to escape. Similarly, you can trust the communists to act in accordance with the laws of their being.” In short, communist leaders have announced their objectives and tactics in some of their publications, and these objectives and tactics are precisely what communists follow. These tactics can and should be studied by anti-totalitarians and used to defeat would-be tyrants.
Schwarz correctly observed, “Commu-nism should be taught in the schools, but it should be taught with a moral directive. It should not be taught as an alternative eco-
nomic philosophy, but as a system of tyr-anny.” Communism was less an economic philosophy than it was a prescription for political power; the economic “philosophy” (or “ideology”) is merely a practical meth-od of accomplishing the political power grab Communist Party leaders sought. The ideology of Marxism-Leninism is a straight prescription for total and centralized state power, even though Marx and Engels both promised their ideology would lead to a “withering away of the state.”
When the Marxist economic doctrine conflicted with the political doctrine of obtaining centralized state power, the economic doctrine was done away with quickly. Schwarz reminds readers that communism came to power in Russia, China, and other places by economic poli-cies that were sometimes the opposite of pure, theoretical socialism. Schwarz wrote back in 1960, “Classical Marxist econom-ics advocated the collective ownership of land, but the Communists came to power in Russia and China by the reverse policy of the distribution of land, making every-body a little capitalist.”
Communist leaders were not being hypocritical in coming to power by jetti-soning their economic doctrine, Schwarz explains, but rather following their most
Communist-style governments rule well over 1.4 billion people, and are seeking growth. This book explains the goals of totalitarians and how they create converts of good people.
The Honesty of Communists and Other Totalitarians
29Call 1-800-727-TRUE to subscribe today!
Book Review
important directive. “The basic doctrine of Marxism-Leninism is, ‘Come to power.’ The Marxist-Leninist will promise what-ever is necessary in order to achieve that end. Lenin, therefore, promised peace and land. But the gift of land was merely the bait that covered the barbed hook of Com-munist dictatorship.” Marxism-Leninism is nothing more than a form of gangster-ism that couches the seizure of state power in ideological guise.
Schwarz wrote that Lenin and Stalin improved the efficiency of the dictatorial power model from other historical dicta-torships. “Hitler worked on this principle: Tell a lie, make it big; repeat it often, and the majority of the people will believe you. The Communists have further developed this concept. Any lie that advances Com-munist conquest is, by definition, not a lie but the Marxist-Leninist truth.”
Schwarz notes that those attracted to communism and similar ideologies such as socialism and atheism have more often been the rich and privileged rather than the poor and downtrodden. He explains the attraction of some rich people to the ideology this way: “Life needs a purpose. Man is born with a heart to worship God, to reach out for something bigger and beyond himself, to seek some noble vi-sion for which to sacrifice, some purpose for which to live and die. When denial of the existence of God deprives him of his natural fulfillment, Communism pro-vides a substitute. It gives him a sense of purpose and destiny, gives meaning to life, and provides a motive for sacrifice.” And while sincere communist ideologues in history have been few — and non-exis-tent in the state power structure of actual Communist Party-run states — they have often sacrificed fortunes and their very lives for the misguided cause.
In the updated Schwarz book, David Noebel’s chap-ters link Marxism and every other leftist “ism” to the theory of evolution. Athe-istic Marxists undoubtedly adhere to the theory of evo-lution because, in their view, it reduces man to a mere ma-terial being and explains his origins without recognizing the existence of a Creator. (Never mind that no matter
how far back the evolutionist goes to show where we — or the cosmos — came from, he can only theorize that something came from something else that already existed.) However, while many Christians reject evolution as conflicting with the creation of man by God, other Christians do not see a conflict, believing that God could have performed His miracle of creation over a period of time longer than six calendar days. Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton argued in his masterpiece The Everlasting Man that the scientific theory of evolution was a “problem” of no consequence to Christians:
Evolution really is mistaken for ex-planation. It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the impres-sion that they do understand it and everything else; just as many of them live under a sort of illusion that they have read the Origin of Species.... Slowness has really nothing to do with the question. An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves. For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow mir-acle would be just as incredible as a swift one.
Readers who agree with Chesterton will obviously disagree with Noebel’s posi-tion that evolution does conflict with Christianity. But if you do disagree with him on this point, please do not allow
his emphasis on the subject to become a stumbling block to reading fully this very valuable and important book.
In this reviewer’s opinion, the only real weakness in Schwarz’s original book, and in the updated version, is the pessimistic tone and the lack of a clear action plan to reverse the communist and totalitarian advances of the 20th century. Schwarz noted in 1960 that the pace of communist conquest was such that communism had conquered more in 60 years than Chris-tianity had reached in nearly 2,000 years: “Lenin established Bolshevism with sev-enteen supporters in 1903. He conquered Russia with forty thousand in 1917. Today, the party of Lenin has conquered one bil-lion. The population of the world is two and three quarter billion.” It sounds like an ominous pace, but that pace of communist conquest has abated — and even retreated in some places around the globe. This should be heartening to freedom-loving Americans.
Dr. Schwarz’s lack of a comprehen-sive organizational plan explains how he was able to energize thousands of Americans toward anti-communist activ-ism in the 1960s, but never able to get his own organization — Christian Anti-Communism Crusade (CACC) — off the ground in any nationally meaningful way. The John Birch Society became the pri-mary beneficiary of most of Schwarz’s inspiring addresses and conferences in the 1960s, largely because they presented the detailed organizational plan and coor-dinated action agenda the CACC lacked. Thousands of Americans Schwarz had awakened in the 1960s moved over to John Birch Society membership rolls in short order.
But that doesn’t mean Noebel hasn’t improved on Schwarz’s valuable little book. He has. Every American should read this book to armor himself with the knowledge of how totalitarian ideologies organize and take over free countries, even free countries populated by people who want freedom. n
Governments constituting nearly 1.4 billion people continue to claim the communist label, including China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, and others, and many others of the old Soviet bloc have the same old Marxist-Leninist power and organizational structure.
THE NEW AMERICAN • FEbRUARy 21, 201130
Book review
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arizonashooting’sQuietHeroesWhile many fled the horrific scene of the Tucson, Arizona, shooting on January 8, a number of others heroically stayed. While some of those good Samaritans did not live to tell their tales, those brave individu-als are being hailed as heroes nonetheless.
For example, Judge John Roll, who fell victim to killer Jared Loughner on that fateful day, is being celebrated for giv-ing his life to save another’s. According to video footage of the incident, Judge Roll was shot in the back after diving on top of the man next to him. The Montreal Gazette reports, “Richard Kastigar, head of operations at the Pima County sheriff’s department, said that footage showed that after Jared Loughner shot Ronald Barber, an aide of Miss Giffords, Judge Roll al-most simultaneously moved Mr. Barber towards the ground.” The footage reveals Judge Roll moving on top of Mr. Barber in an effort to shield him. Judge Roll was shot in the back in the process.
“I believe the judge is a hero,” Kastigar said. “I think Judge Roll is responsible for directing Mr. Barber out of the line of fire and helped save his life. It’s very clear to me the judge was thinking of his fellow human more than himself.”
Retired army colonel Bill Badger and Tucson resident Patricia Maisch, 61, are two heroes who fortunately survived the January 8 tragedy.
Grazed in the back of his head by a bul-let, Badger saw the gunman standing be-side him as he lay on the ground injured. As he prepared to take action, Patricia Maisch stepped up, took a folding chair, and slammed it into the back of Jared Loughner’s head. Badger then regained his composure and, with the help of two other heroes — Roger Salzgeber and Joseph Zamudio — grabbed Loughner’s wrist to prevent him from firing more shots.
The three men tackled the gunman to the ground. “I had this guy by the throat and the other guy on the other side had his knee right on the back of his neck,” Badger recalled.
As is the case of most heroes, Badger is reluctant to take credit for any heroism,
asserting that anyone in his place would have done the same thing.
While being tackled, Loughner at-tempted to reach into his pocket with his left hand for a fresh magazine of bullets. Fortunately, he dropped the magazine, prompting Maisch to grab it before he could begin shooting again.
“Somebody said, ‘Get the magazine!’ so I got the magazine, and I was able to secure that,” said Maisch. “That’s what needed to be done.”
However, Maisch refuses to take any credit for bringing down Jared Loughner. “You were misinformed,” she told one re-porter. “The credit goes to the men who brought down the gunman.”
Despite their modest assertions, it’s clear that the actions of Badger, Salzge-ber, Zamudio, and Maisch helped to save dozens of lives that day.
While the drama unfolded, a 20-year-old intern proved himself a hero that day as well. Daniel Hernandez, an intern for Giffords, sprang into action immediately following the shooting of his boss, Repre-sentative Gabrielle Giffords.
A University of Arizona student and certified nursing assistant, Hernandez re-portedly used his hands to apply pressure to Giffords’ gunshot wound and elevated her body in order to control some of the bleeding. At the time, Giffords was con-scious and alert.
“She wasn’t speaking, however,” said Hernandez. “This is something that I’ve only done once and I hope I never have to go through again.”
Hernandez, unaware of whether or not the gunfire had ceased, also instructed an-other bystander to take similar measures with Giffords’ injured district director, Ron Barber, the man whose life was saved by Judge Roll.
Prioritizing Giffords’ needs before his own, Barber reportedly instructed Her-nandez, “Make sure you stay with Gabby. Make sure you help Gabby.”
Hernandez stayed with Gabby until the paramedics arrived.
Susan Hileman, who is suffering from a survivor’s guilt of sorts, was shot three times while trying to protect the life of nine-year-old Christina-Taylor Green,
who was fatally shot by Loughner despite Hileman’s best efforts. As she lay on the ground of the asphalt parking lot, Hileman struggled to assist the little girl. The two victims lay side by side on the ground, staring into each other’s eyes. “Don’t you leave me, Christina-Taylor Green. Don’t you die on me,” Hileman told the child.
A bystander discovered Hileman wound-ed on the ground. She immediately put pressure on Hileman’s wounds and, with her mobile phone, contacted Christina-Taylor’s parents and Hileman’s husband.
Hileman is afflicted with guilt over the death of the girl because Hileman was the one who brought the child to the event that day. Christina was reportedly very excited at the prospect of meeting a real-life Con-gresswoman.
As the country mourns the loss of life on that tragic day, letters and e-mails from across the nation continue to pour into Hileman’s home, bearing words of com-fort for the guilt-stricken woman. “People are taking real good care of me. I’ve never been on this receiving end,” says Hileman. “I’m just a regular person. I’m special to my friends and family. I’m just me. But Tucson loves me, and I love Tucson.”
In the days following the January 8 shootings, Americans once again proved themselves to be the charitable people for which they have long earned a reputation.
At this writing, more than $145,000 has been donated to agencies in Tucson, on behalf of the victims. According to the Arizona Daily Star, more than $92,000 has been donated to the Community Food Bank, while an additional $53,000 has been contributed to the American Red Cross.
Chron National reports, “A spokesman for the Community Food Bank of South-ern Arizona says the money is going into a restricted fund. The food bank will wait until Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly, tell them how to use the funds.”
Ben Franklin has been credited as say-ing, “The best thing to give … to all men, charity.” Every day the American people continue to abide by those words, often without seeking credit for their actions.
Their humility and heroism are certain-ly worthy of honor. n
— rAveN clAbOugh
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THE GOODNESS OF AMERICA
by Roger D. McGrath
H aving grown up during the years following World War II, it never fails to surprise me how little
most people who haven’t reached their mid-60s know of that epic conflict, es-pecially the Pacific Theater. During the 1950s, we did not have to be formally taught about World War II — it was a topic in everyone’s home. Every family had a veteran or two or had lost a son. War mov-ies were regular fare at our local theater. The first series I watched on television was the incomparable Victory at Sea. The documentary footage, the music, and the narration — both the script and the deliv-ery by Leonard Graves — penetrated into my heart and soul and have never left. It seemed that a new book on the war came out every week, and newspapers and mag-azines were full of articles about the war.
Because of all this, formal education contributed little to my knowledge of the
war. Better to ask someone in the fam-ily who was there or read a book outside of school than ask a teacher. Most of the things that I had once assumed everyone knew about the war, though, have long ago been forgotten. One of the principal examples is what we called “payback for Pearl Harbor.” Today, people think of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was not the case in WWII and certainly not the way we learned it growing up. Payback for Pearl Harbor was the U.S. Navy’s fa-mous air raid on Truk Lagoon during Feb-ruary 1944.
Truk Atoll lies seven degrees north of the equator in the southwestern Pacific, some 1,000 miles northeast of New Guin-ea and 3,300 miles southwest of Hawaii. Dozens of islands and a great barrier reef make up the atoll, although only seven of the islands are of any size or have any significant population. The larger islands are marked by volcanic peaks, the tallest nearly 1,500 feet above sea level. The bar-
rier reef, roughly triangular in shape and 140 miles around, forms a vast deep-water lagoon of more than 800 square miles. Vis-ibility in the water of the lagoon is 50 feet or more. Abundant rainfall and sunshine, and a year-round average temperature of 81 degrees, leave the islands green and lush. Truk is a Pacific paradise.
A Quick Take on TrukArchaeological evidence suggests that the first people arrived at Truk some 2,000 years ago, sailing outrigger canoes. They found a lagoon teaming with marine life and the fertile larger islands covered with indigenous trees and plants, including breadfruit, coconut, mango, banana, and taro. Although the original inhabitants must have found Truk a paradise, life was not paradisiacal. Warfare among the in-habitants of different islands and between
eten(foreground)anddublonislands as they looked to American pilots flying above the 800 square miles of Truk Lagoon on 17 February 1944. Two hundred Japanese aircraft were at the large airfield pictured on Eten and another 27 on Dublon. Another 140 aircraft were on Moen to the north and Param to the west. More than 50 ships were in the lagoon.
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Many younger Americans have gained the impression that America dropped atomic bombs on Japan to avenge Pearl Harbor, but our revenge happened at Truk Lagoon.
The Raid on Truk Lagoon
different factions on the same island was not unusual. War clubs crushed many a skull. Moreover, human sacrifice and can-nibalism were common practices. Victims were not only enemy warriors captured in battle, but also young maidens offered up to a volcano god.
The first Europeans arrived when the Spanish explorer Alonso de Arellano sailed his ship, San Lucas, into the lagoon in January 1565. Although Spain laid claim to Truk, and the rest of the Caro-line Islands — named for Charles II of Spain — she did not bother to take formal control for more than 300 years. In the meantime, explorers from Portugal, Eng-land, France, the United States, Russia, and Germany also visited the atoll. By the middle of the 19th century, European and American traders, whalers, and mission-aries were visiting Truk. Japanese trad-ers began arriving during the 1890s. One, Mori Koben, married a chief’s daughter, became a successful planter and trader, and amassed a small fortune.
The Spanish-American War saw con-trol of Micronesia, including the Caroline Islands and Truk, pass from Spain to the United States. The United States, how-ever, focused American ambitions on the Philippines and sold Micronesia, except for Guam in the Marianas, to Germany for $4.2 million. German rule was relaxed and benevolent, and short-lived. With the out-break of World War I in 1914, Japan, in a secret pact with Great Britain, seized con-trol of Micronesia. This was formally rec-ognized in 1919 when the newly created League of Nations gave Japan a mandate over that vast stretch of ocean and islands.
Disregarding the restrictions of the mandate, which prohibited fortification or colonization of the islands, Japan wasted no time in settling thousands of Japanese throughout Micronesia. Truk was no ex-ception. Japanese were settled on the prin-cipal islands of the lagoon, taking control of the best agricultural land and key ports, while the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific established its headquarters on Dublon (now called Tonoas). By the mid-1930s, Japanese colonists outnumbered the native people of Truk. This was true throughout Micronesia. By the end of 1941, there were nearly 100,000 Japanese in Micronesia and only some 50,000 Mi-cronesians.
In further violation of the League of Na-tions mandate, Japan closed the Carolines to the outside world during the 1920s and began building airstrips and fortifying key islands, especially Truk’s main islands. By the time the Japanese had finished, Truk had become the “Gibraltar of the Pacific” and would provide Japan with her great-est fleet anchorage outside of the home is-lands. Those who try to minimize Japan’s culpability for the war in the Pacific have a difficult time explaining away Japanese actions in Micronesia during the 1920s and ’30s.
Some have argued that Truk was the real objective of Amelia Earhart in her proposed around-the-world flight in 1937 in her Lockheed Electra. Ac-cording to these theorists, Amelia Earhart and her co-pilot and navigator, Fred Noonan, were on a secret mission for President Frank-lin Roosevelt and the Depart-ment of War to photograph Truk but were shot down by the Japanese and captured. Others say this occurred at
Saipan, which Japan had also stocked with Japanese settlers and heavily fortified. As much as the United States desired intel-ligence concerning Japanese activities in the Pacific, though, there has been no doc-umented evidence unearthed suggesting that Earhart and Noonan were American spies. After taking off from Lae in New Guinea, they did fly in the general vicin-ity of Truk on their way to a refueling stop at Howland Island, but the best evidence indicates that, unable to sight Howland, a tiny speck of land, they ran out of gas and ditched in the sea. Whether they survived the landing and somehow made it to an uninhabited Pacific islet is another area of great speculation.
Japan closed the Carolines to the outside world during the 1920s and began building airstrips and fortifying key islands, especially Truk’s main islands. By the time the Japanese had finished, Truk had become the “Gibraltar of the Pacific.”
GrummanF6FHellcatsfromVF-10, known as Fighting Ten and commanded by William “Killer” Kane, return to Enterprise after the first strike against Truk on the morning of 17 February 1944. Kane and his wingman shot down five Japanese planes during the initial sweep. Altogether, Navy pilots shot down or destroyed on the ground 275 Japanese planes in the February raid on Truk Lagoon.
U.S. navy
35www.TheNewAmerican.com
Gibraltar of the PacificBy the time Japan launched her sneak at-tack on Pearl Harbor, she had four mili-tary airstrips operational, extensive forti-fications, and major naval installations at Truk. In July 1942, Truk became head-quarters for the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Combined Fleet, which included the First, Second, and Third Fleets, and the Sixth Submarine Fleet. On any given day, up-wards of 50 or 60 Japanese vessels, both warships and merchant ships, would be anchored in Truk Lagoon. Some 365 mili-tary aircraft, mostly fighters and bombers, were parked on the airstrips. War materiel was stacked high in dozens of warehouses. Thousands of Japanese troops were sta-tioned on the islands, which were so far inside the surrounding barrier reef that they could be attacked only by air.
Beginning late in August 1942, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet, located his headquarters on board the battleship
Yamato in Truk Lagoon. In February 1943, Yamamoto transferred his headquarters and the flag of the fleet to Yamato’s sister ship, Musashi, also anchored in the lagoon. When Yamamoto was killed in April 1943, his replacement, Admiral Mineichi Koga, continued to use Musashi as the flagship for the fleet. Yamato and Musashi, the two largest and most powerful battleships ever built, led an impressive array of Japanese warships — carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers — based at Truk.
Calling Truk the Gibraltar of the Pa-cific was no exaggeration. It seemed im-pregnable. American sailors spoke of it in awe-struck tones. Intelligent officers tried to get them to pronounce it “trook” (rhymes with spook), which was closer to the native pronunciation, but Navy pilots looked at the name on maps and called it “truck,” and truck it became. Whatever the pronunciation, Truk would be a tough nut to crack.
Assigned to crack that nut was Task Force 58, commanded by Adm. Marc Mitscher. The force included five fleet carriers — Enterprise, Yor-ktown, Essex, Intrepid, and Bunker Hill — and four light carriers. There were also enough battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines to push the total of ships involved to more than 60. However, it would be Navy pilots who would actually hit
Truk. When they got the word of the pro-posed attack, scheduled for mid-February 1944 and aptly code named Operation Hailstone, they were eager but apprehen-sive. “For the previous two years of the war,” said one flyer, “the very thought of approaching Truk seemed fatal.” Another pilot, when informed of the operation, said his “first instinct was to jump overboard.” Nonetheless, Lt. Cmdr. Edward Owen, the commanding officer (CO) of Yorktown’s Air Group 5, remarked that “by D-day I think everyone was a tiger.”
The American pilots had no way of knowing that the Japanese were even more apprehensive. When Japan got word that Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Is-lands had fallen to American forces early in February, she feared that the U.S. Navy was in a position to launch a strike at Truk, a thousand miles to the west. With U.S. air superiority now a reality, Japan ordered the bulk of the Combined Fleet out of Truk Lagoon on 10 February. A dozen cruisers and destroyers remained behind but other cruisers and destroyers and, most importantly, the carriers and battleships, sailed for Palau. The lagoon was still packed with merchant and troop ships, all critical to Japan’s war effort. The airfields and all other ground instal-lations on the islands in the lagoon were put on high alert.
Admiral Mitscher’s Task Force 58 reached the launch point, about 90 miles east of Truk, two hours before dawn on the morning of 17 February. A Navy flier
On any given day, upwards of 50 or 60 Japanese vessels, both warships and merchant ships, would be anchored in Truk Lagoon. Some 365 military aircraft, mostly fighters and bombers, were parked on the airstrips. War materiel was stacked high in dozens of warehouses.
theamericansubmarineTang served on “lifeguard” duty during the second raid on Truk Lagoon and rescued not only pilots and air crewmen of Navy fighters and bombers attacking the Japanese-held atoll, but also the pilot and aircrew from a downed floatplane on a rescue mission from the battleship North Carolina.
U.S. navyU.S. navy
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— Past and PersPectiveHistoryHistory
said it was “clear, cool and beautiful as we launched.” First streaking into the sky were 72 Grumman F6F Hellcats, the Navy’s new fighters, which had first seen action against the Japanese in September 1943 and were a vast improvement over the older Grumman F4F Wildcats. Lead-ing the Hellcats was Lt. Cmdr. William “Killer” Kane of Air Group 10 from En-terprise. California-born and reared, Kane had graduated from Annapolis with the class of ’33. He had a wife and two young children back home. Athletic and power-ful, his nickname had come not from the war in the Pacific but from his football and wrestling days at the Naval Acad-emy. He had been at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked and had survived getting shot down during the campaign for Guadalcanal. He was a thoroughly experienced combat pilot by the time of the Truk raid, and his men had complete confidence in him.
The Attack on TrukAs the first rays of the rising sun reached Truk, Killer Kane and his flight of Hell-cats swept down on the islands of the atoll. Japanese planes already aloft were blown out of the sky by the twos and threes. Kane and his wingman shot down five Zeros in five minutes before turning their attention to strafing planes on the ground.
“As we started to strafe airfields,” said Lt. Cmdr. Owen, “quite a melee developed as the Japs began getting into the air. Ac-tually, there were so many Jap airplanes moving that it was almost confusing to select a target and stay with it until it was shot down, without being lured to another target just taking off, or apparently at-tempting to join up in some kind of forma-tion. After a few minutes it was difficult to find uncluttered airspace. Jap aircraft were burning and falling from every quarter and many were crashing on takeoff as a result of strafing them on the ground. Ground installations were exploding and burning, and all this in the early golden glow of dawn. At times it all looked like it might have been staged for the movies.”
Watching the raid from the ground was Maj. Gregory “Pappy” Boyington. The leading Marine ace had been shot down and captured six weeks earlier while raid-ing Rabaul. Since he was a special prize for the Japanese, he was being transported
to Japan for interrogation and torture. At the exact moment that the plane carrying Boyington touched down to refuel, Kane and his Hellcat pilots began their attack. Boyington and several other American prisoners were hustled off the plane. The first thing Boyington saw was a Hellcat, only a few dozen feet above the ground, screaming over the airfield, and “spraying .50-calibers all through the Nip aircraft standing there in front of us. The piece of transportation we had just crawled out of went up before our eyes in flame and smoke, and so did nearly every other plane we could see around there.”
Boyington and the others raced to a slit trench on the side of the runway and scrambled in, just in time to avoid being blown to bits by an American bomb. Meanwhile, Japanese planes up and down the airstrip were burning furiously, caus-ing their own ammunition to explode. Lead and shrapnel filled the air. During a momentary lull in the attack, a Japa-nese pilot landed his Zero and began run-ning for cover. He stopped suddenly upon seeing a half-dozen Americans in the slit trench. “He was wearing one of those fuzzy helmets with the ear flaps turned up,” said Boyington, “and he looked in
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theskipperofTang, Richard O’Kane, poses with the 22 pilots and air crewmen he rescued during the second raid on Truk Lagoon, saving them from torture and death at the hands of the Japanese. O’Kane not only set the record for rescues during the war, but also led all submariners in the number and tonnage of Japanese ships sunk. His decorations included the Medal of Honor, the Navy Cross (three awards), and the Silver Star (three awards).
AP Images
at us, as surprised as we were, then com-posed himself and said in English: ‘I am a Japanese pilot.’ ”
The whole scene seemed like a surreal comedy to the Americans who could bare-ly contain themselves. The Japanese then repeated himself: “I am a Japanese pilot. You bomb here, you die.” With dramatic flair he patted the gun on his hip. This was finally too much for Boyington, who jabbed Don Boyle, at his side in the trench, and the two of them burst out laughing. Boyington stopped long enough to look up at the Japanese and say: “With all the G** d*** trouble we got, ain’t you the cheerful son of a bitch, though.”
Before the Japanese could draw his sidearm to shoot Boyington, another flight of Hellcats arrived and the enemy
pilot took off running. “The last we saw of him,” said Boy-ington, “his short legs were busy hopping over obstruc-tions, the ear flaps of his fur helmet wobbling up and down so that he gave the appearance of a jack rabbit getting off the highway. His conversation and threats had been rudely interrupted by the death rattle caused by another Navy F6F’s .50 calibers, crackling down
the runway as it came just a matter of a few feet from our pit.”
Wave after wave of American planes — Hellcat fighters, TBF Avenger torpedo bombers, and SBD Dauntless dive bomb-ers — continued to strike Truk through-out the day. The American fighter pilots, flying the Hellcat, proved more than a match for the Japanese fighter pilots and their vaunted Mitsubishi A6M5 Zero. Lt. j.g. Alex Vraciu, who had been the wing-man for America’s first ace of the war and Medal of Honor recipient Butch O’Hare, shot down four enemy planes. He called Truk “the wildest action I participated in, Turkey Shoot included.” Also shooting down four Japanese planes were Lt. Rob-ert Duncan, who had a baby back home in Illinois he had not yet seen, Lt. j.g.
Walt Harman, who looked no older than a high-school kid, and Lt. William Bon-neau, like Kane a California boy from the San Francisco Bay area. Lt. Hamilton Mc-Whorter, who had earlier become the first Hellcat ace, Lt. j.g. Tom McCelland, Lt. Armistead “Chick” Smith, Lt. j.g. Cyrus Chambers, Ens. John “Tubby” Franks, and Lt. j.g. Eugene Valencia got three each. Valencia was especially effusive in his praise for the new Hellcat, saying, “I love this airplane so much that if it could cook I’d marry it.”
By the end of the day, Hellcat fighter pilots had shot 124 Japanese planes out of the sky and destroyed that many again on the ground. Dauntless dive bomber and Avenger torpedo bomber pilots had put dozens of Japanese ships on the bottom. As yet the cruisers and battleships of Task Force 58 had not been in on the action. Then, flying home to Enterprise, aviation radioman 1st class Dave Cawley spotted the Japanese cruiser Katori to the north of Truk Lagoon. She had just been hit by an-other American bomber. “When I sighted the cruiser,” said Cawley, the gunner in Lt. James Ramage’s dive bomber, “she was low in the water and barely moving. Since we were without bombs and ammo, I opened up on guard channel, saying, ‘Any strike leader from 51-Bobcat, there is a damaged Japanese cruiser just to the north of the lagoon. Come sink it.’”
It seemed to pilot Ramage that a reply came on the guard channel almost as soon as Cawley had finished his transmission. “Bobcat leader, this is Bald Eagle [Adm. Mitscher]. Cancel your last. Do not, re-peat, do not, sink that ship. Acknowledge.” Ramage and Cawley were stunned. They reckoned that the crippled cruiser would be easy pickings. As they soon learned, though, Mitscher thought so too but want-ed Katori saved for one of his cruisers or battleships to sink.
During the night, Mitscher sent radar-equipped Avengers to pound Truk. At the
“As we started to strafe airfields,” said Lt. Cmdr. Owen, “quite a melee developed as the Japs began getting into the air. Actually, there were so many Jap airplanes moving that it was almost confusing to select a target and stay with it until it was shot down.”
theJapanesearmyandnavalcommanders at Truk stand at attention on the deck of the cruiser Portland, while the formal articles of surrender are read to them on 2 September 1945. In the front row center is Lt. Gen. Shunzabura Mugikura, flanked by Vice Admiral Chuichi Hara on his right and Rear Admiral Aritaka Aihara on his left.
U.S. navy THE NEW AMERICAN • FEbRUARy 21, 2011
— Past and PersPectiveHistoryHistory
same time, eight of Mitscher’s warships circled the atoll to intercept enemy ships attempting to escape the carnage in the lagoon. With daylight the next morning came more American fighter and bomber sweeps. By noon there were few targets left to hit. Sitting on the bottom of the la-goon were 13 Japanese warships and 32 merchant ships. Another two Japanese warships, a cruiser and a destroyer, were on the ocean floor just outside the entrance to the lagoon. Some 275 Japanese planes had been destroyed. Every Japanese facil-ity on every island in the atoll had been destroyed or heavily damaged. Thousands of Japanese had been killed by American bullets or bombs, or had been swallowed by the sea.
The United States suffered the loss of only 40 men and 25 planes. Eleven of the men killed were not pilots but crewmen on Intrepid, which was hit by a Japanese tor-pedo bomber during the night. The arrival of the torpedo bomber was a surprise and remains something of a mystery. It seems that the plane flew not from Truk but from either Saipan or Rabaul, six or seven hun-dred miles to the west.
The air raid on Truk rendered the Gi-braltar of the Pacific impotent, allowing the United States to safely bypass the once putatively impregnable base on the way to Tokyo. As Hellcat pilot Ed Owen later
said, “Up ’til that time the Truk raid was ‘the greatest show in town,’ and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”
Wrecking the PlaceHowever, the U.S. Navy wasn’t quite done with Truk. When reconnaissance flights during late April 1944 discovered that the Japanese were not only busy rebuilding air and naval installations on the islands in the lagoon but had also moved 100 planes from Rabaul to Truk, a second strike was planned. The second strike began with a fighter sweep early in the morning of 29 April. It went much like the sweep on 17 February, but the Japanese were not able to get near the number of their aircraft into the air this second time. Then came the Daunt-less dive bombers. There were few ships in the lagoon to attack, but plenty of instal-lations on land, including tank farms with their precious supplies of oil and gas. The raids were renewed the next day and contin-ued until the early afternoon when Mitscher decided that there were no longer enough targets left to put pilots at risk in another strike. All the objectives of the mission had been achieved — or, as Lt. James Ramage put it, “We wrecked the place!”
Wrecking Truk did come at a price, though. Intense Japanese anti-aircraft fire brought down 26 of our planes. At the same time, Navy pilots knocked 59 Japa-
nese planes out of the sky and destroyed another 34 on the ground. Navy subma-rines and destroyers did their best to res-cue our downed pilots and crew members. Lieutenant Commander Richard O’Kane, the skipper of the submarine Tang, was one of those who had “lifeguard duty” during the second raid on Truk Lagoon. He was already a legend in the Navy for his courage, derring-do, and leader-ship. For his gallantry in battle during the war, he would be awarded the Medal of Honor, the Navy Cross (three times), and the Silver Star (three times). If you were a downed pilot, fearing capture and fiend-ish torture at the hands of the Japanese, knowing that O’Kane was looking for you offered far more than only the normal glimmer of hope.
O’Kane took Tang through narrow passages, perilously close to reefs and Japanese gun emplacements, and across shallow water to effect the rescue of Navy pilots and airmen. Some were in life rafts, others clinging to wreckage, and a few standing on a sandbar or coral islet. O’Kane picked them up by the ones, the twos, and the threes until he had crammed 22 effusively thankful sailors on board Tang. During World War II, no other Navy vessel came close to O’Kane’s 22 rescues. When Tang reached Pearl Harbor, a re-ception committee, including Fleet Admi-ral Chester Nimitz and Admiral Charles Lockwood, CO of the Pacific submarine fleet, was there to greet O’Kane, his crew, and the rescued pilots. Headlines on the front pages of newspapers and a full page in Life magazine would follow.
Nearly all military installations on Truk were now rubble, and it could be ignored on the final push to Japan. Once a name that sent chills up and down the backs of American sailors and Marines, it again be-came a remote Pacific atoll of no relevance — except for bombing practice. During the fall of 1944 when Brig. Gen. Emmett “Rosie” O’Donnell, commander of the 73rd Bombardment Wing, was preparing his pilots for B-29 raids from the Marianas on Japan, he led them on practice runs to Truk. On 2 September 1945 the Japanese commander and his staff officers at Truk were escorted aboard the heavy cruiser Portland at anchor in the lagoon. With much of the crew watching, the Japanese formally surrendered. n
Maj.Gregory“Pappy”Boyington,the famous leader of the Marine Black Sheep squadron, VMF 214, signals that he shot down one Japanese plane, after landing from a mission on 27 December 1943. One week later he would be shot down in an air battle near Rabaul and captured by the Japanese. While being flown to Japan, he arrived at Truk just as the first Hellcats swept down upon the atoll.
U.S. navy
39www.TheNewAmerican.com
GunControlisUnpopularAfter the recent shooting in Tucson, gun-grabbers have come out of the woodwork clamoring for stricter gun control in open defiance of the Constitution. Almost every major newspaper in the nation featured ei-ther editorials openly calling for more gun control or biased articles depicting a na-tion besieged by violence due to lax gun laws. The Christian Science Monitor was one of the few to feature the political real-ity of such proposals. A January 17 article explained that “the political calculus of gun control has changed dramatically in the past 20 years, resulting in a strongly pro-gun Congress.”
The anti-gun lobby whined about the overwhelming advantage that those in favor of gun rights have. On January 21, U.S. News & World Report ran an article on the monetary influence gun-rights groups wield as compared to their rivals. “Campaign finance and lobbying data shows that gun rights advocates wield far more fiscal power than gun control advocates. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan organi-zation that tracks money in politics, gun rights groups contributed $2.1 million to 21 candidates in the 2010 election cycle; 79 percent of this money went to Republi-can campaigns. Gun control organizations, meanwhile, contributed only $5,300 to seven candidates, all of them Democrats. The same disparity holds for lobbying: eight groups, employing 49 lobbyists, lobbied for gun rights in 2010, spending a total of $3.9 million. Gun rights lobby-ing was led by the National Rifle Associa-tion, with $2 million in lobbying spending. Meanwhile, four groups employing nine lobbyists pushed for gun control in 2010, spending $150,000.”
Those in the media and the anti-gun lobby would love to explain away this dis-parity as the consequence of an evil gun-lobby bogeyman, but John Velleco, director of federal affairs for the gun-rights organi-zation Gun Owners of America, explained that this overwhelming monetary advan-tage is a natural consequence of strong pub-lic support for Second Amendment rights. “This is a very telling point. Why don’t [gun control groups] have the support? Be-
cause the support’s not there for that side.... American people overwhelmingly support, at least at some level, gun rights.”
Gallup polling does show that support for stricter gun laws has drastically de-clined since 1990, from 78 percent then to 44 percent now, whereas support for making existing laws less strict has shot up tremendously, from 19 to 54 percent, over the same period.
FearoftheUnknownYou have to wonder what the goes through the mind of the criminal before he com-mits his planned heinous act. Take the case of two men who tried robbing a Subway restaurant in Charlotte, North Carolina, on January 16. Did they ever think that the em-ployee behind the counter would be armed and end up shooting them both? The local Fox affiliate reported that it all happened very quickly. The two robbers stormed in demanding cash, but the clerk, who had a pistol of his own, simply opened fire. One suspect was killed on the spot while the other fled to a nearby hospital where he was apprehended by the authorities.
BigsavingAn apparent robbery attempt in a grocery store parking lot on December 12 was foiled by a man who regularly carries his .357 magnum in a holster. NewtonCitizen.com reports out of Conyers, Georgia, that the 22-year-old victim had a gun permit for the weapon used in the shooting. Two assailants attacked the man and threatened him with a knife, demanding that he give up his wallet. The man fought back, drew his pistol, and opened fire on the two crim-inals, fatally shooting one in the head. The other robber fled on foot and is still being sought by the police.
Vegas,Baby!The CBS affiliate in North Las Vegas reported on January 18 that a “suspect thought he picked an easy target to rob, but the 57-year-old victim had a gun of his own.” The incident occurred in a Walmart parking lot when the robber physically
attacked the victim and demanded his “wallet, watch, jewelry, anything of any value.” The victim responded by pulling his lawful pistol and fired it at his attacker. The terrified robber ran from the shots and drove away.
North Las Vegas Police Officer Chrissie Coon explained to the news that if “a citi-zen is physically attacked and is in fear of his life, he has the right to defend himself.”
theRemedyforschoolshootings?The Washington Post reported on Janu-ary 21 that Nebraska State Senator Mark Christensen has introduced a bill in the state legislature that would enable each Nebraska school district to set a policy that would allow a two-thirds majority vote of the school board permitting public school teachers and school administrators who are lawfully armed to carry their weapons onto school premises. The law would also cover colleges and universities in the state. Christensen told the news that if “you have a kid come in to shoot a teacher … or other kids, it’s best to have somebody that can take care of the situation.”
MlkandGunsA January 19 entry on the Reason Blog touched on the little known fact that Mar-tin Luther King, Jr. was a gun owner who kept numerous firearms for self-defense. He even applied for a permit to carry a concealed weapon. A journalist who once visited King’s home almost accidentally sat on a loaded gun, and an advisor to King described the man’s home as “an arsenal.” As Reason points out, this was not unusual because many civil rights activists kept guns for self-defense. The post concluded with a quote from John R. Salter, an organizer of the sit-ins against segregated lunch counters in Missis-sippi, who always traveled armed while working as a civil rights organizer in the South. “I’m alive today because of the Second Amendment and the natural right to keep and bear arms.” n
— pATrick krey
“... the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” EXERCISING THE RIGHT
THE NEW AMERICAN • FEbRUARy 21, 201140
HuGetsRed-carpettreatmentatwhiteHouseiTem: “Chinese leader Hu Jintao,” re-ported the Associated Press on January 16, “is being feted in Washington this week with a lavish state banquet at the White House and other pomp usually re-served for close friends and allies — all intended to improve the tone of relations between a risen, more assertive and pros-perous China and the U.S. superpower in a tenuous economic recovery.”
And there’s that matter of face. As the AP put it: “For the protocol-obsessed Chinese leadership, a highlight of the visit will be Wednesday’s state banquet — an honor denied Hu on his last trip to the White House in 2006. President George W. Bush thought state banquets should be reserved for allies and like-minded powers and instead gave Hu a lunch. Even worse, a member of Falun Gong, the spiritual movement banned by China, disrupted Hu and Bush’s joint appearance.”iTem: Hu used a lunch address with U.S. business leaders to “underscore the theme he has sought to establish for his state visit” — namely that both countries and the world “can benefit from enhanced U.S.-China co-operation, but it must be cooperation based on mutual respect,” reported the Christian Science Monitor for January 20. “Just in case it was unclear to anyone what Mr. Hu meant, he spelled it out with two examples. The US, he said, must recognize that Tai-wan and Tibet are ‘issues that concern China’s territorial integrity and China’s core interests.’”iTem: Writing in the Huffington Post on January 20 was the chairman pro tem of the Chicago China Economic Develop-ment Center. Said William Spence: “Chi-nese President Hu Jintao is coming to Chi-cago this week. As Mayor [Richard] Daley said, the visit is ‘a very, very, very, very, big deal.’ Here’s why. China’s 1.4 billion people are participating in the greatest economic surge in the history of mankind.”correcTioN: It’s one thing to stretch the truth, it’s another to mutilate it. Growth statistics can be stage-managed to tell all sorts of stories when the base of compari-son is so low — for instance, China’s ap-
proximate $240 per capita GDP in 1978.To be sure, China’s gross product is
much higher these days than it used to be, though even by generally accepted figures its per capita GDP is one-tenth that of the United States. Yet, an estimated 700-800 million Chinese still are only just making the equivalent of around $2,400 per annum for what amounts to slave labor in a police state.
Bulgaria’s current per capita GDP is higher than China’s, as is Angola’s. Yes, the figures that Beijing releases do show growth, but the following nations — not generally considered economic powerhous-es — were among those with faster GDP growth last year: Ghana, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Uzbekistan (see “The World in 2011,” The Economist). Few are filled with enthu-siasm over the Uzbek economic miracle.
In many ways, the relative boom in com-munist China has been fueled by what more accurately might be described as fascist tactics. Beijing has been harvesting foreign technology and investment for its state-directed enterprises, exploiting its captive workers, and then exporting the goods produced around the globe — even as its international trade practices have included dumping, massive subsidies, tariffs, and widespread copyright infringements.
Yet, we have elected politicians, of-
ficials, and self-anointed intelligentsia in this country seemingly in awe of China. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) called Hu a “dictator,” not as an insult but seemingly in praise; as Reid gushed on national television: “He can do a lot of things through the form of govern-ment they have.” Yep. Or, as one apologist said while extolling Stalin: You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.
One of the Times’ top writers, Thomas Friedman, allowed mildly in 2009 that “one-party autocracy” in China “certainly has its drawbacks.” However, he baldly insisted, “when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.”
This of the regime built and sustained on the bones of more than 60 million Chinese, which is just one horrific aspect of the human cost of communism in that country.
The associated visit of the Chinese dicta-tor to Chicago was not a matter of happen-stance. Columnist Ben Shapiro explains:
Hu is visiting Chicago because he is likely meeting with Obama’s cam-paign, which is located in Chicago. David Axelrod is already back in the Second City prepping Obama’s cam-paign. Bill Daley’s home base is in
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Yellow Sea and South China Sea — mat-ters of no small consequence for interna-tional trade. Most recently, in what was widely interpreted as a snub to the visit-ing U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, China test-flew a new fifth-generation fighter plane — with more than a pass-ing resemblance to the U.S. Joint Strike Fighter and another U.S. proposed design, the FB-22A — while the Secretary was in China in an effort ostensibly designed to improve military relations.
Experts in this country as well as in the Balkans speculate that the Chinese have been able to detect and reverse-engineer stealth technology for their new J-20 air-craft from a U.S. F-117 Nighthawk that was downed in 1999 during bombing of Serbia in the Kosovo war.
Over the last few years, as columnist Gordon Chang summarized for National Review Online, “a strengthened Beijing has supplied small arms to the insurgents in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan, transferred materials and equipment to Iran for its nuclear-weapons program, helped North Korea deliver missiles to Pakistan and Iran, supplied arms for use in Darfur, lasered American satellites to blind them, supported the biggest nuclear black-market ring in history, conducted a global campaign of industrial espionage, and launched innumerable cyberattacks against the Pentagon and American civil-ian targets.”
What does Washington get for its good-
will? Well, Beijing griped when the Unit-ed States finally sold some long-awaited weapons to the free Chinese on Taiwan who sit under the guns of the mainland, even though (because Beijing objected) the United States withheld F-16s that Tai-wan has long sought to buy. When North Korea torpedoed a South Korean ship last March, killing 46, Beijing refused even to accept the findings of an international commission against its ally. Then when the North shelled a South Korean island in November in another act of war, China didn’t even deign to criticize Pyongyang.
China, in seeming solidarity with the AP reporter above, even expresses offense over protestors who note the treatment of Falun Gong, who routinely are kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, and/or killed.
There was no such “disruption” dur-ing the latest swanky celebration for Hu — though a few spoilsports did note that the 2009 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize was hosting a state dinner for the man who has placed the 2010 Peace Prize winner under house arrest. Liu Xiaobo, this year’s Nobel recipient, thinks modest reforms are in order in Communist China. That makes him a criminal.
Obama’s dinner partner Hu was person-ally behind a 1989 crackdown in Tibet. China scholar Jonathan Mirsky recalled in one British publication how Hu de-clared martial law in Lhasa and “Chinese security officers, under orders from Party Secretary Hu, opened fire for three days,
Chicago. Rahm Emanuel, a chief ar-chitect of Obama’s original victory, is running for mayor in Chicago.
During the 2008 election cycle, foreign money flooded into Obama’s campaign coffers from countries, including Thailand, France, Austria, Germany, Brazil, Hong Kong, Swe-den, Uganda, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
Historically, we also know that Democratic presidents seeking to raise money for re-election have not been shy about reaching out to the Chinese. In 1996, the Democratic National Committee, desperate to recover from a shocking midterm defeat, worked with Chinese agents to funnel money into U.S. elections. In return, President Clinton declassi-fied millions of pages of secret mili-tary technology, allowing China to dramatically accelerate its weapons capabilities.
Does all this kowtowing, to include the U.S. President’s literal bowing to the Chi-nese leader, even buy goodwill or good behavior? Hardly. Whether it is in matters economic or military, Beijing is becoming more assertive — which is the diplomatic term for bullying.
The Chinese, as pointed out by economist Larry Kudlow, are “stealing our technol-ogy, violating all sorts of patent-protection laws, hacking into Google, and infringing on intellectual-property rights. In fact, 80 percent of Chinese software is reportedly pirated from American companies.”
Beijing’s new requirement, he writes, “for joint ventures with the U.S. — where China gets 51 percent, and our companies only 49 percent — looks like another at-tempt to snake our technology. Chinese local-content prescriptions prevent our firms from doing business with China’s state and local governments. The China curb on rare-earth materials, important both for U.S. technology and defense se-curity, is yet another free-trade violation.”
China’s ambitions in East Asia and the Western Pacific are becoming more obvi-ous, including outrageous claims in the
Copyrightcopycats:China blatantly steals U.S. technology without repercussions, likely because we are so reliant on their funding our debt. Unsurprisingly, China’s new “stealth aircraft” bears a strong resemblance to the U.S. joint strike aircraft.
New
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THE NEW AMERICAN • FEbRUARy 21, 201142
killing somewhere between 100 and 700 Tibetans.”
The human-rights record in China re-mains abysmal. As pointed out in a recent report by Human Rights Watch, Beijing has tightened restrictions on the media, in-cluding the Internet; placed more controls on lawyers, human-rights defenders, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs); expanded restraints on Uighurs and Tibet-ans; and carried out even more enforced disappearances and arbitrary detentions — which include keeping abductees in secret facilities known as “black jails.”
Some during Hu’s visit did publicly decry the record of China and the kindly treatment rendered him by the Obama ad-ministration. Representative Chris Smith (R-N.J.), for example, was among those to do so. The Congressman focused on the evils of the government’s so-called one-child policy. In the words of the U.S.-Chi-na Commission, this system is “marked by pervasive propaganda, mandatory moni-toring of women[’s] reproductive cycles, mandatory contraception, mandatory birth permits, coercive fine[s] for failure to comply, and … forced sterilization and abortion.”
In practice, this is nothing short of grue-some. Smith recalled that in late 2009 he had chaired a hearing of the Lantos Human Rights Commission, hearing testimony
from a woman called Wujian, a victim of forced abortion. Her account and those of others appear in a report of the House of Representatives (“An Evaluation of 30 Years of the One-Child Policy in China”).
As the woman testified, she had been abducted from a cabin where she was hiding from the population police. The testimony, brutal though it is, deserves ex-tended quotation.
About one hour later, the van stopped in the hospital. As soon as I was [dragged] out of the van, I saw hun-dreds of pregnant moms there, all of them just like pigs in the slaughter-house.
Immediately I was put into a spe-cial room without any preliminary medical examination. One nurse did Oxytocin injection intravenously. Then I was put into a room with sev-eral other moms. The room was full of moms who had just gone through a forced abortion. Some moms were crying. Some moms were mourning. Some moms were screaming, and one mom was rolling on the floor in unbearable pain....
Then I kept saying to her [the abor-tionist], “How could you become a killer by killing people every day?”...
She told me that there was nothing
serious about this whole thing for her. She did this all year.... Finally she put the big, long needle into the head of my baby in my womb.
At the moment, it was the end of the world for me, and I felt even time had stopped.
The testimony of Wujian — her real name was withheld for her protection — went on:
Since it did not come out as expect-ed, they decided to cut my baby into pieces in my womb with scissors and then suck it out with a special ma-chine. I did not have any time to think as this most horrifying surgery began by force. I could hear the sound of the scissors cutting the body of my baby in the womb....
Eventually, the journey in hell, the surgery, was finished, and one nurse showed me part of a bloody foot with her tweezers.
Through my tears, the picture of the bloody foot was engraved into my eyes and into my heart, and so clearly I could see the five small bloody toes. Immediately the baby was thrown into a trashcan. The one-child policy and forced abortion policy have killed millions of innocent lives in China.
Such is the nature of the regime for which a red carpet is rolled out at the White House.
China’s oppression is all too real and its aggressiveness, economically and geopo-litically, is growing. The head of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mul-len, has expressed concern about its new high-tech weaponry, and observed: “Many of these capabilities seem to be focused very specifically on the United States.”
While America is China’s largest trad-ing partner, China is using its debt leverage over the United States to its own benefit. It is a sad day indeed when an apparent key foreign-policy goal in Washington is to honor bloody-handed tyrants so they will continue to underwrite even more U.S. deficit spending. n
— williAm p. hOAr
Giversandtakers: China funneled large amounts of money into Bill Clinton’s presidential run in return for Clinton declassifying many U.S. secrets. When Chinese President Hu Jintao visited in January, he visited Democrats in Chicago.
AP
Imag
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www.TheNewAmerican.com 43
President Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, uttered the
increasingly famous dictum: “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” In other words, a wise leader should take ad-vantage of any dire situation to promote his agenda. The crisis known as 9/11 brought us the Patriot Act, something waiting for an event to “jus-tify” its numerous attacks on liberty. The Pearl Harbor cri-sis gave President Roosevelt justification to send our na-tion into World War II, some-thing he had been itching to do for many months.
But what if no crisis occurs? What happens when one’s agen-da calls for some new government program and there’s no crisis to spur its creation? The answer: Create one, even lie and sup-press facts to make it seem real. A manufactured crisis occurred in 1957 — the Soviet launch of Sputnik. President Obama’s mention of it during his January 25 State of the Union address jogged the memory. He stated:
Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we would beat them to the moon. The science wasn’t even there yet. NASA didn’t exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn’t just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs.
Because of Sputnik, the American people were jolted into be-lieving that the Soviets were ahead of us in science and mili-tary capability. Talk about a crisis! Worldwide, our nation was immediately considered second-rate. We were told there was a desperate need for a crash program to regain superiority over the USSR. A crash program ensued and its results, as predict-ed immediately by John Birch Society founder Robert Welch, included higher taxes, more government spending, expanded growth of the federal government, and the start of federal aid to and control over education.
But there’s more to the story.General James Gavin had retired from the U.S. Army by 1966.
He had been the military commander of our nation’s infant space program based in Huntsville, Alabama. In a December 1, 1966 speech delivered to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, he said that the team of American scientists he led “had the capability of orbiting a satellite” more than a year
before Sputnik. He told of making “several entreaties to the Department of Defense seeking authority” to launch one but was “given a written order forbidding me to do so.” Gavin also noted that the Soviet plan to orbit a satellite was known well before they launched Sputnik. But his re-peated requests to his superi-ors to allow the United States to be first in accomplishing the feat “were received with skepticism if not ridicule.”
We don’t know whether President Obama and his speech writers know that the Sputnik incident was a creat-
ed crisis. In his State of the Union address, however, he mentioned that the 1957 event prompted the federal government into “invest-ing in better research and education.” Consider what happened just in education, where there is no constitutional authorization for federal involvement. The Sputnik crisis started the federal gov-ernment shoveling taxpayer funds into education. The stated goal was to improve education, but the obviously intended result saw the federal government gain control over the nation’s schools.
Here we are more than half a century later and the best that can be said about the federal government’s role in education is that it is a colossal failure. Surveys consistently report that U.S. students are performing poorly. Reading proficiency is so abys-mal that remedial instruction is given to many college entrants, math and science test results place U.S. students well below counterparts from other nations, and much of the instruction about our nation’s history given at every level is either incom-plete or downright false.
As far back as 1983, the federally funded National Commis-sion on Excellence in Education published findings in a report entitled “A Nation At Risk.” It stated that the U.S. education system was producing “a tide of mediocrity” in subject after subject. The report’s conclusion stated, “If an unfriendly for-eign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
If the federal government and its long list of busy-work re-quirements were removed from education, and the people in the cities and towns across the nation again exercised their rightful influence over the schools they pay for, this horrifying situation would be reversed in short order. The Department of Education, the eventual result of a manufactured crisis, should be abolished. And whenever our leaders claim a need for more power because of some new crisis, skepticism should rule the day. n
Recalling a Manufactured Crisis
44 THE NEW AMERICAN • FEbRUARy 21, 2011
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Tragic Response to a TragedyIn the wake of the Arizona shooting, media pundits declared war on the First and Second Amendments and those who defend them. (February 7, 2011, 48pp) TNA110207
112th Congress: Who Will Adhere to the Constitution? The new Congress opens with the Republicans’ Pledge to America to uphold the Constitution (which promises unconstitu-tional actions), the reading of the Constitution aloud in Congress, and a number of freshman Congressmen elected by Tea Partiers. Will the Constitution get more than lip service? (January 24 , 2011, 48pp) TNA110124
Agenda 21Even as companies flee California’s onerous regulatory environment, which adhere’s to the UN’s environmental dictates, other cities, counties, and states are following California’s lead. But we need not bring California’s troubles home. (February 21, 2011, 48pp) TNA110221
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The great global-warming CrackupThe zeal to implement an international cap-and-trade scheme may have dramatically suffered, with new revelations dispelling global-warming scares almost daily, but regional cap-and-trades plans are picking up momentum behind the scenes. (January 10, 2011, 48pp) TNA110110
Standards & Similarities“Hate” is not too strong a word to describe the feelings that many Democrats have for George W. Bush and Republicans have for Barack Obama, but the policies of the two Presidents are remarkably similar. (December 6, 2010, 48pp) TNA101206
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