zenpundit.com

SEEING REASON ON THE SECOND AMENDMENT:

Fromm Reason magazine:

“A Mistake a Free People Get to Make Only Once”

Last week the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to rehear a case in which a three-judge panel decided that the word “people” in the Second Amendment does not mean, well, actual individuals. But six judges from the circuit have written a blistering dissent to their brethrens unwillingness to reconsider the case. An excerpt from a Washington Times account:

A barbed postscript by Judge Alex Kozinski, writing alone, said history would be vastly different had American slaves or Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto been able to arm themselves.

“The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed — where the government refuses to stand for re-election and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees,” wrote Judge Kozinski, a native of Romania appointed by President Reagan.

“However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once,” he wrote.

JUST LIKE STALIN

From the UPI:

“BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 13 (UPI) — Iraqis have uncovered what is thought to be one of the largest mass graves found since the end of Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a report published Tuesday.

The grave was unearthed was found in the small village of al-Mahawil, located near the city of Hilla, about 56 miles south of Baghdad. “

SAUDI ARABIA’S SHAKY LEGITIMACY

The terror bombing-firefight-guerilla operation in Saudi Arabia said several things about the War on Terror and our ” good friends ” the Saudis.

The good news is that the US-led, high pressure tactics on the Islamist network has drastically reduced their field of operations. Where once al Qaida plotted in London and ran safe houses in Germany and controlled a de facto state in Afghanistan the Islamofascists are now reduced to moving covertly either through failed states like Somalia or states-in-denial like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The regimes in Riyadh and Islamabad grabbed a tiger by the tail decades ago when they tried to bolster their internal support by indulging religious maniacs in their fantastical mythologizing.

It may surprise many of you but Saudi legitimacy was based upon the right of conquest, not religious piety when Abdul Aziz bin Saud created Saudi Arabia by defeating the Hashemites of Mecca ( who now rule Jordan) and the Rashidi clan and coming to diplomatic terms with the other British client states on the Arabian peninsula. King Abdul Aziz was a ” macho ” Arab figure who liked his concubines and was relatively easy-going in his practice of Islam. Aziz was not a xenophobe either, having befriended for decades a British expatriate St. John Philby, a Nazi sympathizer ( and father of Communist spymaster Kim Philby). Alcohol was sold in the Kingdom into the 1960’s. All the nonsense about the ” holy soil ” of Saudi Arabia is pure invention of Islamist fanatics like bin Laden, the only holy soil in Islam is in Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem and the Shiite shrines.

Saudi Arabia ran into a legitimacy crisis after the death of Abdul Aziz who’s mastery was undisputed because his martial prowesss and personal reputation had justified his monarchy. The Saudis were confronted with the decidedly non-monarchical popularity of Arab nationalism personified by Nasser and the Syrian-Iraqi Baath parties. After a near disaster with the erratic King Saud, the family dynasty cemented its hold on power through King Faisal, widely respected by his subjects for his sincere religious piety. It was Faisal himself who was determined to counter the spread of Pan-Arabism ideology by fostering radical Islamism and anti-Zionism, a policy that meshed well with the dynasty’s traditional close alliance and association with the Wahabi ulema. Faisal’s brothers Fahd and Abdullah, do not command similar religious respect and when criticized for Westernization and love of luxury, they have appeased the religious radicals by buying them off with subsidies for their schools and ever stricter interpretation of the Sharia in Saudi courts. The network of Islamists in Saudi Arabia have grown in power to the point where the house of Saud is effectively sharing power or at least ruling while sitting on a powder keg with Islamist imams always ready to strike a match and engage in political blackmail.

The Saudis need a covert push from Washington to save their own regime because they are so paralyzed by fear as to be worse than useless to the United States as an ally. If they do not act they will be overthrown anyway within months or just a few years and the US would have to intervene to secure the oil fields in order tokeep them out of the hands of a revolutionary Islamist regime.

THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION

Calls for pressure to be put on Iran

EMPIREWATCH

The debate on America as an empire is heating up again. In an article here, two Brookings scholars weigh in, calling for a United States contained by its allies in multilateral structures similar to those built during the Truman- Eisenhower years of the Cold War.

The United States is not an empire. What we have here is a debate over whether American values, particularly the conservative interpretation that favors free markets, individualism and limited government – is a good thing for the world. People who have a bias toward collectivism, statism, social democracy and fear change and modernity will line up to create measures to retard America’s freedom of action because the further Bush can push the world order in favor of market rules, the less sustainable the collectivist-social democratic model is in practice both economically and politically.