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First Pravda, now Salon. The Right Hook prints a fair bit of yesterday’s column verbatim: Other conservatives are more troubled by Bush’s war policies. Vox Day, a self-described “Christian libertarian” and syndicated columnist, declares on right-wing Web tabloid World Net Daily: “Our matchless soldiers have won the war” in Iraq, but “cannot win the peace.” Day makes clear he’s a fervent supporter of the military, but argues that the Bush administration’s exercise of U.S. military power in Iraq and elsewhere is irresponsible and dangerous:

“The policy of Pax Americana enforced by our troops stationed around the world is not only a failure, it is leading to the corruption of the American military … “A military machine is a delicate creature, designed to do one thing very well — destroy the opposition. It is a well-known fact of military history that fighting troops and garrison troops are two very different things, and attempting to turn the former into the latter significantly impedes their ability to perform their primary mission.

“Consider that the U.S. military accomplished its mission in Iraq — taking Baghdad and destroying the Hussein regime — with the loss of 106 soldiers in battle and accidents. Since then, the occupation has cost another 437 American lives lost to combat, accidents and suicide. Consider also that the wars for Kuwait and Afghanistan cost 247 and 76 combat deaths, respectively.”

But in the Middle East, says Day, the U.S. has in fact failed to complete the mission:

“The beheading of the Hussein regime sent a powerful message to America’s enemies. The subsequent elimination of the Saudi and Iranian regimes would have cost fewer American lives and been an even more powerful demonstration of American might, perhaps strong enough to bring a generation of peace. But instead, America has chosen to play Israel’s futile game of one step forward, one step back, allowing its enemies to regroup in safe havens, then come back and attack troops who are pinned down like sitting ducks. This is an old game, dating back to the Korean police action, and it has never played out well, demonstrated most clearly by the continuing threat posed by North Korea …

“Stationing troops in 144 of the 191 U.N. member states around the world has not brought peace. History proves that no utopian vision, however sweeping, will ever bring a permanent peace. Let us then abandon visions of a global Pax Americana, bring our soldiers home, and only send them forth when war is necessary and declared. And when the war is won and the enemy is destroyed, bring the troops home again immediately. They deserve no less.”

They got the right-wing part correct, although I’m hardly a conservative. I’m not surprised that the Left would attempt to use me against Bush – their philosophy has always been “by any means necessary”. But then, intellectual consistency has never been a part of their game, either. Consider how they’re actually turning to states rights as a means of trying to support government redefinition of marriage. I find it interesting that their hunger for power exceeds their desire to support proactive Wilsonian foreign involvement.

Thanks to Evangelical Outpost for bringing this to my attention.

Pity the poor cultural conservative. George Delano, to his credit despite his obvious discomfort, is being forced to unveil one desperate last attempt to turn back the forces of social dissolution. It won’t work, of course, because granting the state the power to approve is granting the state the power to destroy and redefine. It is only a matter of time. Consider that traditional marriage, as a church-granted sacrament, survived without much trouble for almost two thousand years of the Church. And in less than one tenth that time, perhaps one-twentieth – I have not yet determined precisely when the state began to supplant the church by granting state licenses – the institution is in complete disarray and is on the edge of being defined out of existence altogether. Once again, government proves to be sheer poison, destroying everything it touches.

Conservativism through strong government, indeed, through any government, is doomed to failure. This is why de Tocqueville made his comment about America having to be good in order to be great. The quality must come from within the people, not be imposed from without. One cannot make a people moral via government fiat, regardless of how one defines morality. The Soviets have learned this, the Arab countries living under Sharia know this on some level, and America is on the verge of discovering this. Many of the negative moral developments have been brought about with the help of government intervention, not all, to be sure, but turning to one of the instruments of social dissolution in order to prevent it is markedly unlikely to prove successful.

I do not oppose the goals of the Federal Marriage Amendment, I simply regard it as a last-ditch stop gap effort that will probably fail. Exactly how it will fail I do not know, but the chances of its success are low. If social conservatives truly wish to preserve the institution of marriage, they would do far better to remove marriage and all its aspects from the purview of government control.

There’s a link on the left. Click on it. Read and learn: Theodore Butler, the silver analyst for Investment Rarities, reports that he may have detected the abandonment of the outrageous volume of short positions in the manipulation of the silver market, which he thinks may mean that the game is drawing to a close. He is livid that the total short position in silver is three times bigger than the known bullion inventories. It does seem really, really weird: it seems that the insane amount of shorts, three times world inventories, would be an irresistible target for short a squeeze play!

He notes that the COMEX “struggled to deliver a stinking 5 million ounces of real silver that the Central Fund of Canada bought some 7 weeks ago.” Hew hints that maybe this abandonment of adding more short positions, and liquidating some short positions, may have something to do with the Gold Anti-Trust Action group vowing to pursue the rigged silver market as a way of exposing the rigged gold market, and a lot of pressure being brought on Eliot Spitzer to look into this rigged silver market. The upshot is that, if it plays out as Mr. Butler envisions, silver is set to explode to the upside.

Gee, and here I thought that rocketing up 43 percent in less than two months counted as exploding to the upside already. Yes, Virginia, there is inflation, no matter what the jokers doing their voodoo on the CPI tell you. My health insurance went up. Gasoline prices are up. Gold and silver are up. The CPI is more fictional than anything Tolkien ever wrote.

Burt Prelusky points out: The fact that we’re not a theocracy does not make their case [that America is not a Christian nation], no matter how loudly they may insist on it. When we say that Turkey, for instance, is an Islamic nation and that India is Hindu and that Italy is Catholic, although none of them is a theocratic state, how can we deny that America, whose population is overwhelmingly Christian – and is only 2 percent Jewish – is Christian?!

I think there’s room to argue this, in that many people who consider themselves Christian on the basis of the fact that their parents attended a Lutheran church or whatever are actually not Christians by the Biblical definition of a Christian as one who has been baptized and believes with his heart and confesses with his tongue that Jesus Christ is Lord. But Prelusky is correct; many countries that are blithely considered to have a religious affiliation are every bit as secular as the United States. It’s a good point, and I’m rather surprised that I never considered this sooner.

How does this square with the Constitutional fact that all rights and powers not expressly given to the federal government are reserved to the states? I don’t recall seeing federal approval of state-published web sites being listed among the enumerated federal powers. This isn’t a freedom of speech issue, it’s much more important and central than that.

Maybe if Minnesota doesn’t take down its web site about prescription drugs as per the FDA’s demands, the federal government can invade, take it down forcibly, and tell the historians to record that they did it to end drug abuse.

The arid feline writes: I’ve decided it is time to change parties. Yes, that’s right! And Vox Day can proudly claim credit for my epiphany. Vox has been advocating principles over practical reality for some time now. He has even taken to referring to the president as George Delano (as in Franklin Delano Roosevelt) over his moderate and statist postions on some issues.

Tha Kat is down with tha Voxsta again! Sounds good so far… whoops, spoke a little too soon.

Never mind the fact that I don’t live in a country with proportional representation. Never mind that in this democratic republic, third, fourth or fifth parties stand zip, zero, nada chance of holding any office above that of “dog catcher” (I LIKE that office, by the way). I don’t care, because principles are all that matters. In fact I intend to tailor my platform so narrowly that I am the only one that it will appeal to. Yessiree! I intend to stand on PRINCIPLE above all else. I shall proudly bear the title of “Principled Loser”.

Well, if you believe that winning is the only thing, that the end justifies the means and that holding power is the ultimate goal, it’s hard to argue with that logic. I’m just curious how this distinguishes one from Lombardi, Lenin, Mao, Bismarck and countless others who have preached the same message.

How great is that?! Since there is zero chance of my party ever holding office, I can mount my lofty perch and pontificate on the moral shortcomings of all those who duke it out in the trenches in the real world of politics. I can look down my nose and “TSK!” disapprovingly as cold calculations are made for the benefit of political advantage. Never will I be held accountable for the failures of my party’s administration, because my party will never find itself in that position. I’m immune in my lofty Ivory Tower from all accountability.

Looking past the occasional shortcoming and honest difference of opinion are one thing. But to attempt to justify support for a man whose Republicanism is almost entirely devoid of republicanism, who egregiously forswears his oath of office in almost every speech he gives and who governs in a manner nearly indistinguishable from Lyndon Baines Johnson, is a curious form of pragmatism indeed.

Almost every significant social change unrelated to economics and technologyy has begun with the actions of a single principled loser. I’d rather be called a loser than sacrifice my principles – I’ve seen far more men regret the latter than I’ve ever seen regret their failure to do so. However, please also note that I have no objection being used as a scratching post upon which the Cat sharpens his claws. If one’s beliefs cannot withstand the testing of one’s friends, they are not worth holding.

As for the notion that nothing can change in a two-party system, well, tell it to the Whigs.

EB writes: Vox I think you are making the Isolationist mistake. As much as Woodrow Wilson’s notions of Global Order were misguided so is the polar opposite idea of total foreign isolation. WWII and the rise of Hitler are perfect examples of how ignoring the problems of the world generally comes back to haunt us. If we leave Iraq and Afghanistan now the worst the islamofacist world has to offer will seize power. Instead of millions of allies we will have created millions of fanatical enemies. On top of that we will be making the same mistake Clinton did in Somolia.

If we were seriously concerned about ending future problems, we’d be invading France, Holland and Denmark. Islamic domination there will cause far more problems than where it has been established for 1300 years. Secondly, to conflate Iraq with Somalia is such an exaggeration as to border on complete intellectual dishonesty. Cutting and running after doing nothing but feeding a few people is hardly the same thing as pulling out after completely decapitating an entire regime after militarily conquering the whole country. Col. Qaddafi did not start quaking in his boots after Somalia, he did after Iraq. The message, such as it is, has been sent. It is the continuing occupation and not what should have been a victorious withdrawal that risks diluting it.

Furthermore, to suggest that Hitler wouldn’t have risen to power if the US had been more involved in Germany reveals an almost complete ignorance of the post-WWI situation. The problem in Germany was not a dearth of international involvement; Hitler’s rise fed off an understandable hatred of the crushing French-led international economic abuse of Germany that followed the war.

The equation of postwar Iraq with post-WWII Germany is just a terrible analogy.

1. Troops were initially stationed in Germany to provide basic police and border missions and after 1948, to prevent the Soviets from overrunning Western Europe. The force was formed in 1946 and known as the US Constabulary.

2. The foreign jihadists waging war against the Iraqi occupation don’t equate very well to the Nazi Kameraden of the Werewolf die-hards. Many of them weren’t in Iraq before or during the war and never had any loyalty to the now-deposed Baathist regime.

3. Iraq is only part of the Arab-Islamic world that opposes the US. It’s as if we conquered Bavaria and tried to declare game over in WWII by occupying it, except that this would be an exaggeration. Iraq, unlike Bavaria, was not the richest, most powerful or most influential part of the Arab-Islamic world, nor the territory from which violent Islamic expansion began.

4. Our troops are not, for the most part, actively involved in hunting down and eliminating the opposition in Iraq. Try talking to the actual soldiers instead of basing your opinons on what you think the troops there are doing. They spend far more time watching, tracking and defending and providing Constabulary-type services.

RK writes: Now you’re indulging in the utopian fantasy of peace . . . never in the known history of civilization has there been global “peace,” and it isn’t going to start now. The problem with bringing all the troops home now, or at any other time, is that there is no other country or coalition of countries independent of the US both able and willing to step up and enforce a “mitigation of violence.” To imagine that we can “win the peace” in some kind of more or less stable and permanent way is utopian indeed, and I see no evidence that anyone in the Bush administration thinks so. Indeed, the President has warned repeatedly that the war against Islamic fundamentalism will be a long one, that may last decades or generations.

All I said was that soldiers couldn’t win the postwar peace, mostly because a) the “war”, such as it is, isn’t even close to being over and b) there is no such thing as peace, only brief respites between wars. This email reveals a strange lack of reading comprehension and presumes an assumption that is in direct opposition to my actual postulates. I actually wrote: “Stationing troops in 144 of the 191 U.N. member states around the world has not brought peace. History proves that no utopian vision, however sweeping, will ever bring a permanent peace.” Bringing them home won’t bring permanent peace either, but it will prevent the corruption of our military into a global police force less effective than the LAPD in South Central.

But if the US withdraws from it, it is a virtual certainty that the Jihadi movement will dominate much of the world, parts of it quickly, parts of it more slowly . . . is that a risk we want to take? There is no cheap, simple, easy, definitive solution to this war with the Jihadis, just as there is no cheap, simple, easy, definitive solution to the never-ending battle between civility and barbarity. War, not peace, is the natural and definitive condition of mankind. Episodes of relative peace are, in the long view of things, the aberrations. In the present conflict, there are two options: (a) the US coalition ultimately restrains, defeats, or diminishes the Jihaid movement to the point that it is no longer a threat to global or regional stability, or (b) the US abandons the fight, and the Jihadis win.

How can one seriously consider the conquest of a secular state with loose and minor ties to the Jihadi movement a serious restraint on it when the primary advocates, philosophers and funders of the movement are being ignored, even hailed as allies. I submit that the US is still, even now, not engaged in this particular conflict and the nature of the postwar Iraqi occupation demonstrates that those who thought that Iraq and Afghanistan were the first step in it were incorrect to believe so.

The star was a typo, sorry about that. I haven’t had direct access to the administration site since WND was hacked and I didn’t even see the article until this morning, so I didn’t know there was a problem and even if I had there wasn’t anything I could do about it anyhow. I am no relation to Omar Bradley.