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Iranian Troops Enter Iraq | Bogus Swingers Bust | East Europeans Respond to France
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This article leaves two unanswered questions:

1. Are they in the Kurdish part of Northern Iran?

2. Are they there to interfere with American military operations?

Iranian-backed Iraqi opposition forces have crossed into northern Iraq from Iran with the aim of securing the frontier in the event of war, according to senior Iranian officials.

The forces, numbering up to 5,000 troops, with some heavy equipment, are nominally under the command of Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, a prominent Iraqi Shia Muslim opposition leader who has been based in Iran since 1980 and lives in Tehran.

This is reminiscent of the notorious “toga party” bust when Pulaski County Sherif Tommy Robinson broke up a swingers’ party in Little Rock with TV cameras in tow. It may have helped his political career, but I believe that the outcome was similar to this.

One suspects that the underwriter of the Broward Sheriff's Office false arrest insurance is going to get hit with major claims, raising the question of why the costs of publicity-seeking phony arrests shouldn’t be borne by the officials making the decisions.

Four years after masked sheriff's deputies exposed Broward County's salacious swinging subculture to a national audience, the men and women in the clubs are suing the raiders of the private clubs.

''They were subject to numerous newspaper articles. They were subject to notoriety that they didn't bring to themselves,'' said Daniel Aaronson, part of a legal team representing two couples arrested in the raids. “They believe they were wrongly arrested and their lives were put in disarray for no reason.”

Lawyers have filed a total of five lawsuits, on behalf of 10 people, against the Broward Sheriff's Office or individual deputies involved in raiding two swingers’ clubs in January and February of 1999. The consenting adults want money for the humiliation they suffered. Three of the suits were filed within the past five weeks and all but one is in federal court.

The men and women are among 55 club patrons and employees arrested on lewdness charges by masked deputies carrying automatic weapons. None was found guilty of a crime and most of those arrested had their cases dropped by prosecutors.

Eastern Europe responds to French “leadership.”

Eastern European countries reacted with fury and dismay yesterday after being summarily ordered by France to hold their tongues on Iraq and toe the Franco-German line of resistance to the US.

The former communist countries due to join the EU next year, or hoping to do so soon, endorsed an emergency summit declaration from Brussels on Monday giving Saddam Hussein a "final opportunity" to comply with UN demands.

But outrage at remarks by President Jacques Chirac late on Monday, attacking as “infantile” and “reckless” EU candidates’ support for the US, echoed across the continent.

Another colateral casualty in the war on drugs.

SAN ANTONIO -- A teenage girl, shot and killed by federal drug agents, was a victim of excessive force from law officers who were investigating her father, relatives and friends say.

Ashley Villarreal, 14, died on Tuesday evening after family members requested that she be taken off life support at Wilford Hall Medical Center.

A friend challenged Drug Enforcement Administration officials' account of how agents on Sunday had shot the daughter of Joey Angel Villarreal, a three-time convicted drug offender who turned himself in and was charged with cocaine trafficking a day after the shooting.

Ashley Villarreal had been hospitalized in critical condition since being shot once in the back of the head.

One wonders if the police use television cameras in their cars to record what actually happened.

LOS ANGELES — Police officers answering a family dispute call Tuesday night shot and killed a man they said was armed with a gun, prompting an angry neighborhood crowd to begin throwing things at them, including an ironing board.

Officers in riot gear quickly sealed off several blocks of the South Los Angeles neighborhood, and the confrontation was brought under control within a few minutes, said police Capt. Fabian Lizarraga.

Girls under 18 could be banned from having breast implant surgery following a vote by Euro MPs.

Tough new regulations on cosmetic surgery have been backed by the European Parliament and could come into force by the end of next year. They would ban women under 18 from undergoing cosmetic surgery such as breast enhancement, amid concerns that teenagers are having the operations while still going through puberty.

Just what’s going on here? West Point cadets who rape women should be expelled and turned over to the police. Unfortunately, this could be radical feminism run wild.

DENVER (AP) - When five female Air Force Academy cadets reported that they had been raped by classmates, they sought some support from the military. Instead, they were treated as if they were either crazy or promiscuous, says a former Air Force captain and founder of a group that tracks sexual assaults in the military.

The women say they were reprimanded for reporting the attack, and four have left the academy. Now, the military has ordered a review of how the academy handles sexual assault allegations.

If they can ban Confederate flag T-shirts in the name of keeping order they can ban other T-shirts as well.

DEARBORN, Mich. (AP) - School officials ordered a 16-year-old student to either take off a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “International Terrorist” and a picture of President Bush or go home, saying they worried it would inflame passions at the school where a majority of students are Arab-American.

The student, Bretton Barber, chose to go home. He said he wore the shirt Monday to express his anti-war position and for a class assignment in which he wrote a compare-contrast essay on Bush and Iraq President Saddam Hussein.

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After the Vietnam War Joan Baez was one of the few Leftists who criticized the subsequent crimes of the Communists. Apparently she’s been cowed into submission.

It’s a sad commentary on our time that people who read propaganda are considered to be “important journalists.”

Huh? Rolling Stone and The Village Voice were pulling for the Communist Victory in Indochina. The contemporary alterrnatives mentioned here want America to win the war on terrorism.

The French poet Paul Valéry once observed that intellectuals, when they run out of serious things to say, end up by flashing their genitals to get attention. With the coming launch of her new antiwar music video, one could argue that Madonna has reversed the process. As Dennis Miller said about her in a recent interview with Phil Donahue, “After you've shown every orifice from every angle, you might have to make a political statement to get people reinterested in you.”

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Consider the recent photo of Joan Baez and Martin Sheen in the New York Times. They are smiling so euphorically at a San Francisco rally that they might be at the opening night of the second coming. “Mobilizing a Theater of Protest. Again,” read the headline. A more jaundiced paper like the Onion might have subtitled it, “Hollywood Dreams of Sixties Sequel. Thanks, Saddam.”

The fact is, this is a different time. The homeland was attacked. The draft is gone. Saddam is, manifestly, a monster growing in size. Yet you'd never know it from the simple antiwar certainties of so many big-name entertainers--from Sean Penn on his Baghdad pilgrimage to Spike Lee (“the German and French governments should be commended”) and Edward Norton (“I almost forgot what it's like to be proud of our government”), both at the Berlin Film Festival.

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In truth, the media monolith that fed the country incessant celebrity pap instead of news for a decade or more was already exhausted before 9/11, as the public turned increasingly to such alternative sources as the Drudge Report and Rush Limbaugh. The celebrity era was already dying, but “important” journalists such as Dan Rather who bemoaned its prevalence wanted to go back to hard news as they'd known it, with outdated political biases, and most people didn't want that either.

Our entertainer-activists would do well to study the 1960s, but not in the way they think. Today's mistrust of politically predictable media--this time of the liberal mainstream--once again has been leading people to seek alternative news sources. But the Rolling Stone and Village Voice of our time are conservative talk shows and Web sites. The anti-media media are again all the rage--this time in the form of best-selling books by Anne Coulter, Bernard Goldberg and others who deplore the liberal bias of most television news, who tell the public that there is more to reality than they are allowed to see.

And just as the 1960s marginalized an aging galaxy of patriotic entertainers from Bob Hope to John Wayne and put the Dylans and Lennons in their place, a similar sea change is threatening to sweep away performers of our own time whose political default setting is stuck in the Vietnam era. The ’60s passed and left them passé. They still don't know it, but their audience does.

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Communist Peace Movements | Pax Communisum | Curtains for Peaceniks?
 Decline of WASPs | Hollywood Hates Conservatives | 

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Nevertheless, America is not united in this commitment. For some months, a fake “peace movement” has sent its ragtag regiments into the streets to oppose our President and the effort he is waging.

It is often said there is nothing new under the sun, and as we watch the robotic Reds march by it is important to know who has organized these putrid parades.

The main entity involved in filling our streets with treasonous propaganda is a nasty little cult that calls itself the Workers World Party (WWP), controllers of a front group known as International ANSWER. WWP isn’t a party organized by the workers of the world. Rather, it is an embryo of the Communist secret police that its members and cult leaders would like to impose on the workers of America, and then of the world.

Front groups are old news in the history of Communism. They first emerged in the 1920s when Soviet agents adopted the practice of hiding their agenda behind liberal slogans. In fact, this represented a break with Leninist practice; when the Bolsheviks spoke of “useful idiots” they referred to liberals who knew what the revolutionaries intended, but who could be drawn into their orbit nonetheless. Stalinism perfected the practice of recruiting duped people who believed they were supporting “peace,” “feeding the hungry,” and “human rights,” when they marched to advance the war aims of the USSR, planned famines, and the Gulag.

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The organizers of these marches are serving the enemy’s agendas, and no American, regardless of his or her views on the impending conflict in Iraq, should find a place in their ratty ranks. As you watch them parade, ask them who pays them? Indeed, if you have time, why not produce and put up a sign, asking, WHO PAYS FOR THESE MARCHES? SADDAM OR KIM JONG-IL?

More on the Communist roots of the so-called “anti-war” movement.

From January 19-21, representatives of 16 Communist parties met in Argentina for the Second International Seminar of Communist Parties. Delegates from Spain, Portugal, Cuba, France, Italy, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Greece and six other countries voted to express their resolve to prevent a new “imperialist United States war against Iraq.” An “imperialist United States war against Iraq” is a phrase that is familiar to anyone who has listened to any of the peace protests during the past several months.

Steyn’s belief that those who are in touch with reality will prevail is impeached by the triumph of the Vietnam Era “anti-war” movement.

The new Universal Theory, to which 99% of Saturday's speakers and placards enthusiastically subscribed, is that, whatever the problem, American imperialist cowboy aggression is to blame. In fact, it's not so different from the old Universal Theory, in that the international Zionist conspiracy is assumed to be behind the scenes controlling the cowboys: Bush is a “puppet of Jewry,” just like Churchill was -- notwithstanding the fact that America’s Jews voted overwhelmingly for Gore. But, if you believe that the first non-imperialist great power in modern history is the source of all the world's woes, then logic is irrelevant. “It's all about oil?” Yes, for the French, whose stake in Iraqi oil is far more of a determining factor than America's ever has been or will be. “America created Saddam?” No, not really, the French and Germans and Russians have sold him far more stuff, and Paris built him that reactor which would have made him a nuclear power by now, if the Israelis hadn't destroyed it in the Eighties.

This was the “Eastern” establishment.

Slick was joined at the hip to the Arkansas establishment when he was governor.

One of the great mysteries of modern American history is why the old White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) establishment abdicated its traditional rule in the late 1960’s. This was one of the key events that caused the 60’s to get out of hand. Nobody living in the politically-correct atmosphere of today can be unaware of this establishment’s faults, but as conservatives we can’t help being aware of its virtues, either.

Despite the nonsense said about it by the Left, it was the most enlightened ruling class in the world in its day. America in its final heyday, the 1950’s, had less economic inequality by standard measures than it has today and was a far more contented and morally confident society. This was an elite that sent its own sons, like George Bush Sr., to fight its wars, not somebody else’s. And many of its faults were being remedied at the time it died, anyway – it was still alive and kicking when the 1964-5 civil rights bills, which were opposed by the South, not the establishment as such, were passed.

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Bill Clinton’s crowd were, as David Brooks has accurately diagnosed, essentially bobos (bourgeois bohemians) and their ridiculous anti-establishment counter-culture posturing made clear that they refused to admit that they were the establishment.  Except, of course, when the time came to exercise power; hypocrisy came as naturally to them as it does to all liberals.  They thus lacked the crucial sense of responsibility for the nation that is at the core of any decent ruling class. 

Apocalypse Now is a highly subjective film that depicts the Vietnam War from a socialist perspective. This is obvious in the opening scene that depicts Martin Sheen’s self-loathing. The truth is that American officers were self-confident, since they didn’t believe Leftist propaganda.

The whole concept of viewing the Vietnam War in terms of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is absurd, and indicates a the socialist belief that America is an “empire.”

Feinberg errs in saying American troops never lost any engagement, since platoon-sized units did get beat. S.L.A. Marshall’s “Death of a Platoon” comes to mind. He should have said “major engagements.”

Like the Imperialist Japanese troops, the soldiers in the Vietnamese Communist forces were trained to be “vicious, demonic beasts.”

In the overrated and drug-induced film, Apocalypse Now , Martin Sheen, portraying the war-fried, alcoholic Captain Willard, shoots a woman dead. The young woman has already been wounded while trying to save her puppy from the confused, murderous Americans, who have just killed her family and friends. At the conclusion of this much-lauded classic, Sheen chops the gargantuan Colonel Kurtz (played by the overrated and drug-induced Marlon Brando) to pieces. Of course, Apocalypse was an anti-war movie that attempted to endear us all to the madness of Vietnam, or at least the madness of Vietnam as told by a lot of people who were high. The true madness of Vietnam, however, was not in the jungle -- the soldiers over there were doing their job and doing it well. We did not lose a single engagement in Vietnam, not one. After the Tet Offensive, the war was won. The North attacked the South and we beat Ho’s children back. Yet the dragging-on of the war continued and countless American lives and minds were lost because politicians, aided by the anti-war movement (which was really the anti-draft-movement, which was really a front for the Communist Party) did not want to be in Vietnam.

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Yippies have been replaced with a newer, more refined, often-but-not-always-washed version of the anti-war protester. Susan Sarandon, U2, Mike Farrell, Sean Penn, and the rest of the Hollywood One Hundred, are filling the void left by the bearded, tie-dyed crazies of yesteryear. They float around on college campuses, convincing students that if they agree with war, they are wrong, barbaric, and basically illiterate and dumb -- that they are not cool or hip. As if having your face stepped on by a bully were hip.

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Hollywood believed that it was its duty to show that America was the bad guy in Vietnam, and that Communism was okay because it was just another way of thinking. They ignored the millions of deaths, at the hands of the Communists, that followed our departure from that country and Laos and Cambodia. Just about every movie produced, concerning the Vietnam war, portrayed America as evil and the North Vietnamese as victims of imperialism. John Wayne’s Green Berets stood out as the only pro-American, Vietnam war movie, until Mel Gibson’s We Were Soldiers just last year. The Deer Hunter certainly had patriotic elements and treated the Vietcong for what they were: vicious, demonic beasts.

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 Berkely Promotes Gay Trysts | “Anti-war” Types Immature | Give tyranny a chance!

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Homosexuality is now a “progressive” cause.

Just how dangerously out of control has the campus social environment become? A recent report by student journalists Seth R. Norman and Ashley Rudmann of the California Patriot (www.calpatriot.org), the conservative journal at the University of California-Berkeley, provides some hair-raising answers.

According to Norman and Rudmann, anonymous gay sex seekers are using a university-sponsored Web site to locate partners for high-risk trysts in Berkeley campus bathrooms. Partitions between the stalls have been vandalized with so-called “glory holes” that are used “to peer into the stall next door to see if it is occupied by a man interested in sex. If it is, the student will cross into the stall and engage with him sexually, usually without any mutual acquaintance.”

Watching war protests around the world punctuated by vandalism and ’60s rhetoric that sounded off-key and out of context, I was grateful for grown-ups in higher places.

It is a tough time to be grown-up. To have moral courage, to swim against a tide of tantrum-throwing dissidents who can’t quite put a finger on what’s bothering them, but it's bad, whatever it is. Real bad. American stuff. Big bad meanies. Where are the weapons? Where's bin Laden? What’s Saddam got to do with it?

The Vietnam Era “anti-war” demonstrators gave the crimes of the Vietnamese Communists a chance.

PARIS Last weekend, across Europe and America, somewhere between 1 million and 2 million people marched against a war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. All protests against war are ultimately ethical in nature, and Saturday's placard-wavers did not break with tradition: “Give Peace a Chance,” “Make Tea, Not War,” “Bush and Blair -- the Real War Criminals.” These are statements of sentiment, not power politics, and the sentiment is, or is meant to be, a moral one.

Of course, not all the marchers can be counted as 99.9 percent pure moralists. Some -- perhaps many -- marched out of simple reactionary hatred: for the United States, for its power, for its paramount position in a hated world order. London's paleosocialist mayor, “Red Ken” Livingstone, a speaker at that city's massive demo, comes to mind. His enlightened argument against war consisted chiefly of calling George W. Bush “a lackey of the oil industry,” “a coward” and “this creature.”

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The people who believe what Chirac at least professes to believe are, at least as concerns Iraq, as wrong as it is possible to be. Theirs is not the position of profound morality but one that stands in profound opposition to morality.

The situation with Iraq may be considered in three primary contexts, and in each, the true moral case is for war.

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To march against the war is not to give peace a chance. It is to give tyranny a chance. It is to give the Iraqi nuke a chance. It is to give the next terrorist mass murder a chance. It is to march for the furtherance of evil instead of the vanquishing of evil.

TOKYO — North Korea threatened today to abandon the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War if the United States launches sanctions to punish the country for trying to develop nuclear weapons.

The threat came a day after The New York Times reported that the Bush administration is developing plans for sanctions against Pyongyang that would include halting its weapons shipments and cutting off the flow of money from Koreans living in Japan. Such money is crucial to North Korea and helps keep its economy afloat.

Since there was never a peace agreement, the Korean War never ended in a legal sense. North Korea now wants to resume hostilities rather than honor the agreement with us to forego developing nuclear weapons. The problem is that since North Korea broke its last agreement with us we can’t trust it to keep another.

One reason for North Korea’s current belligerence may be that it is trying to create a diversion in support of Iraq.

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