Aug 19, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From the World Trade Center II Design:
Within this site plan, the Yamasaki Twin Towers return, with several enhancements and modifications over the originals. The Twin Towers of the New Millennium would differ from their predecessors... [Hat Tip: J. Swanik]
The safety features include a double exterior skin for each tower, and six well-fireproofed stairwells.
Writes Nicole Gelinas, in "World Trade sellouts," New York Post, May 18, 2004:
Osama bin Laden gave the order to destroy the World Trade Center - but Gov. Pataki & Co. are paying for the funeral. New York's leaders refuse to heal our city's mutilated skyline. In Washington, the horror of 9/11 was met with resolve: The feds rebuilt the Pentagon within a year. In New York, horror was met by bureaucratic flaccidity.
...The governor has chosen architect Daniel Libeskind to erect a "Freedom" Tower that will be a half-hollowed monument to cowardice. The top floors of the Freedom Tower are designed for bin Laden. They'll be empty. The tower is to be built with just 70 occupied stories - 40 floors shy of each of the destroyed Twin Towers. Pataki wants to break ground on the Freedom Tower on the Fourth of July - but all the fireworks in the world won't mask the fact that the Freedom Tower is no World Trade Center.
It is shocking - almost inconceivable - that we haven't snatched back from our enemies what belongs to us. Americans always understood the Twin Towers. They were us: stark capitalism, power and beauty without explanation or apology.
Recommended Reading:
Reflecting America: World Trade Center Memorial Should Celebrate America's Producers
The people who worked at the World Trade Center (WTC) were all productive people: they were there to do a job and earn money. They died on September 11 because they symbolized that productivity, not just to millions around the world who aspire to live like Americans, but also to the terrorists who despise all that America stands for.
Rebuilding the WTC: Anything Less Is Suicide
All of Manhattan is sacred ground--not because people died there, but because its bridges and skyscrapers are monuments to human life. They are monuments to the human aspiration to build and to create. This is what was attacked on September 11: our wealth, our success, the global reach of our commerce and culture. The best way to commemorate those achievements is through a new skyscraper, bigger, better, and more beautiful than the ones we have lost.
Rebuilding the WTC: The Greatest Tribute Possible
Those who wish to rebuild the WTC face an uphill battle against those who are opposed to using the site for commerce and against those who have called for the site to become a memorial park.Aug 18, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Washington, D.C.—Seven years into the Afghanistan war, America faces resurgent Taliban and Islamist forces carrying out more daring and increasingly deadly attacks on U.S. troops. Suicide bombings, once rare, are a commonplace in Afghanistan. According to news reports, the number of roadside bombs has been climbing (from 1,931 in 2006 to 2,615 last year). More Americans died in Afghanistan this year, so far, than did in the first three years of the war, combined.
Appearing before Congress, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reported, with signal understatement, that he’s “not convinced we’re winning in Afghanistan.”
Why has this war—once thought of as the right war—gone so wrong?
U.S. military and intelligence officials have pointed to the tribal belt along the Afghan-Pakistan border as a source of the problem. The region is a safe haven for Islamists, where they train, plot and launch attacks on Western forces in Afghanistan (and on targets in the West). Many officials suspect Pakistan’s intelligence service, ISI, of colluding with the Islamists and allowing them sanctuary, and complain that Pakistan’s government—a supposed U.S. ally—has failed to do enough to root out the Islamists. The remedy now being pushed in Washington involves sending U.S. Special Operations forces on raids in the tribal areas (as recently happened) and deploying several thousand more troops in Afghanistan.
But while there’s reason to believe Islamists enjoy the support of Pakistan’s intelligence services and military, this is far from the fundamental reason why, despite a U.S. war against them, the Islamists are resurgent in Afghanistan. This nightmare is yet another result of Washington’s broader “compassionate” war.
From the beginning, our military was ordered to pursue Taliban fighters only if it simultaneously showed “compassion” to the Afghans. The U.S. military dropped bombs—but instead of ruthlessly pounding key targets, it was ordered gingerly to avoid hitting holy shrines and mosques (known to be Taliban hideouts) and to shower the country with food packages. And even more so today, according to a report by the New York Times, “vast numbers of public, religious and historic sites make up a computer database of no-strike zones” while Air Force lawyers vet all air strikes. The U.S. deployed ground forces—but instead of focusing exclusively on capturing or killing the enemy, they were also diverted to “reconstruction” projects for the sake of the Afghan population.
The Bush administration allowed the enablers of bin Laden to flee and find a welcome home in Pakistan’s tribal region, where they regrouped. Washington then passed off to Pakistan the dirty work of rooting them out. Given that Pakistan had helped create and put the Taliban in power, it should be no surprise that the Islamists there have grown stronger. (They feel themselves so safe that they hold press conferences and give interviews by cell phone.)
The half-hearted war in Afghanistan failed to smash the Taliban and al Qaeda. Instead of defeating them, Washington’s timid war scattered the Islamist forces and left them with the moral fortitude to regroup and launch a brazen comeback. What we need is a war policy that proudly places America’s interests as its exclusive moral concern and ruthlessly destroys our enemies.Aug 17, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
From the BBC: Taiwan-China row reaches Olympics.Taiwan's government says it has been told to remove adverts for the island from hundreds of airport baggage carts and buses in Athens. A spokesman said he suspected the order was a result of China lobbying the Athens organising committee. [...]
Under pressure from China, Taiwan participates in the Olympics under the name of Chinese Taipei, and its national flag and anthem cannot be used when its athletes win medals.[Emphasis added]
What a gross injustice. And apparently it's all sanctioned by the Olympic authorities.
CNN has more: China pushes for Taiwan poster ban."Communist China's pressure on us is constant," Lin [Chia-lung, head of the Government Information Office,] told a news conference.
Aug 16, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
From The Australian today: Sadr told: drop your guns and join us.IRAQ'S national conference, charged with charting a course to democracy, yesterday urged rebel Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to disband his Mehdi Army militia and join the mainstream political process. The conference voted to send a delegation to meet Sadr in the besieged holy city of Najaf as Iraq's hostage crisis worsened with the kidnapping of an American journalist.
Participants approved a proposal by a Sadr relative, Baghdad Shi'ite cleric Sheikh Hussein al-Sadr, who said: "There are inviolable conditions in civilised countries ... there is no place for armed militias. ... We must work together to convince Moqtada Sadr and the dear brothers in the Mehdi Army to transform (the militia) into a political party, whatever its leaning."
From a weekend AP report (via LGF):[Iraq's chief negotiator, Mouwaffaq] Al-Rubaie said he had proposed that al-Sadr's militia be disbanded and become a political movement.
And from a report last week:But as [Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi] demanded that al-Sadr disarm his militia, Allawi left maneuvering room for the cleric himself. He repeated a longstanding invitation to al-Sadr to take part in elections due by the end of January.
It's bad enough that al-Sadr -- an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist -- is being treated as a reasonable being, but to offer him political power? Our soldiers are not supposed to be getting killed for al-Sadr's appeasement. This is the danger that came from quickly handing over sovereignty to the Iraqis. The handover did not appease al-Sadr and his thugs, who still consider us "occupiers" and the interim Iraqi government "U.S. puppets."
Worse still, we no longer have ultimate authority to pursue our security interests in Iraq. We have to ask permission of the Iraqis. Maybe they will let us; maybe they won't. It should never have been left up to them to decide, as evidence by how al-Sadr is now being treated (though it must be noted that Bush also pursued an appeasing tack in April). A glimmer of hope that the Iraqis will allow (!) us to take out al-Sadr appeared in the first article:Sporadic fighting continued in Najaf last night as US-led forces prepared for another offensive on the city. "A major assault by forces will be launched quickly to bring the Najaf fight to an end," Iraqi Interior Ministry spokesman Sabah Kadhim said.
Then again, we've heard that before.
In today's TIA Daily, Robert Tracinski commented on the broader issue, "Democracy vs. Liberty in Iraq":Recent events in Iraq show the folly of promoting "democracy" -- in the form of unlimited mob rule -- as the ideal political system for Iraq. At a conference gathered to decide on election rules, a mob of al-Sadr's sympathizers have demanded an end to military action against the Mahdi Army and seem to have succeeded in forcing yet another delay of Sadr's long-overdue demise. This kind of "democracy" will only serve to deliver Iraq to a new variant of tyranny: al-Sadr's Iranian-backed theocracy.
Aug 16, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Back in July, the New York Sun ran an op-ed describing the perverse effects of the Section 8 housing voucher program, invented by Republicans as a 'market-based' alternative to public housing projects.
Howard Husock's op-ed on the disaster of Section 8 housing should make The New York Sun rethink its stand on school vouchers ['A Better Housing Reform,' Opinion, July 22, 2004]. In both cases, the misguided focus on 'competition' obscures the essential issue: Seeking unearned benefits via government coercion destroys the production of those benefits, whether done 'competitively' or not.
If we must have publicly funded competition with the public school system, let it be through charter schools.
Vouchers would only serve to co-opt and corrupt the private schools, eliminating the last remnant of freedom in education. With those schools no longer providing a contrast,a constant reproach, and a means of escape, the system's stranglehold on the intellect would be complete.
It would be one big, inescapable, government-funded system of health maintenance organizations for the mind.Aug 15, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
From FoxNews: Saudi Royal Family Faces TroublesBehind a façade of control, the ruling family of Saudi Arabia is in tough shape and teetering on the brink of collapse, a victim of its own corruption and a violent Islamic insurgency at its door, some U.S. experts warn.
"It is a pretty fragile royal family, it's pretty corrupt and it's sitting on some pretty weak legs," S. Enders Winbush, director of the Center for Future Security Strategies with the Hudson Institute, told FOXNews.com. [...]
[Author Stephen] Schwartz said he does not buy into the theory that the government's fall is imminent, but he does call the situation there "a crisis." He said a large middle class is repressed by the strictest of religious law, which bars women from an education and gives them no rights; men are whipped publicly if they don't get to daily prayers on time and people accused of crimes are beheaded in the public square.
