Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:38:36 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss John Batchelor :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/John+Batchelor istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/like-libby-like-zimmerman/49981/ Wed, 7 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST The dangerous elements of the Wilson Plame Affair, or Libbygate, where one American citizen has been found guilty of felonies, are war, intelligence gathering, espionage, presidency, American public, credibility, press, partisanship, and falsehood. Once before in American history, the American people were asked to make a profound decision about war based upon disputable and unverifiable intelligence evidence without any more certainty than was true in 2003 with regard to the Iraq war. And it is... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/presidential-prejudices/48496/ Tue, 13 Feb 2007 00:00:00 EST James A. Farley was the best campaign manager of the 20th century, guiding the election of Franklin Roosevelt twice as New York governor and twice as president, and he now receives visitors at the Gates of Heaven Cemetery in Westchester County, Section 25, Plot 39, Grave 15, on the same tended slope as two other winners, Babe Ruth and Billy Martin. After the John Edwards campaign ran into trouble recently with regard to two of its youthful, official bloggers who posted anti-Catholic bunkum, I... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/fog-of-a-long-war/47848/ Thu, 1 Feb 2007 00:00:00 EST The Iraq civil war now comes to the floor of the Senate as 99 men and women rise to debate resolutions that have no more authority and much less style than does a teddy bear in a car seat. Senators from both sides of the aisle are already making remarks that, from the melodrama of the rhetoric, point to their powerlessness. "This is a ping-pong game with American lives," declares Senator Hagel. "It is a targeted civil war," opines Senator Dodd. "The Congress was never meant to be a rubber... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/hillary-at-the-helm/47249/ Wed, 24 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST On the weekend Senator Clinton took command of the race for the Democratic nomination for president, I returned to the Chappaqua Starbucks at the corner of Greeley and King streets to survey the field from frosty Westchester. The after-church SUV traffic scurried by the lawns sprinkled with snow. The latte drinkers entertained themselves with vanilla and cinnamon. And in the newspaper box facing the bay windows, Mrs. Clinton's bright-eyed face on the front page of the county daily proclaimed... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/hillary-eisenhower/46740/ Tue, 16 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST October 25, 2008. "In this anxious autumn for America, one fact looms above all others," began Hillary Clinton. The audience of supporters stilled at her measured tone. With the polls tied in the pounding contest for the presidency, the Clinton campaign presented this foreign policy speech as the pinnacle of the candidate's pledges. "One tragedy challenges all men dedicated to the work of peace. One word shouts denial to those who foolishly pretend that ours is not a nation at war. "This fact... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/mccains-southern-road-to-victory/46427/ Wed, 10 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST The Palmetto State of South Carolina lives in American history as the battlefield that ignited the revolution of the Confederacy against the Republican Party's president at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, 1861. Now John McCain of Arizona, whose grandfather's patrimony is from the Old South, aims to make the Palmetto State his battlefield to win the Republican Party nomination on his march to the White House in 2008. Mr. McCain's presidential ambition perished at South Carolina on February 19... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/roosevelt-test/46159/ Fri, 5 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST Damp, shadowy, worn Springwood House at Hyde Park on the Hudson is the birthplace of Franklin Roosevelt. It is also the last resting place — in his mother's rose garden — of the most admired president of the 20th century, who was also the last leader of the republic from the Empire State. It is easy to predict that 2007 will bring a river of words that contrast the legacy of Roosevelt with the prospects of New York's four new handsome presidential contenders: Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/in-the-shadow-of-1937/45680/ Tue, 26 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST Not since 1937 have the richest 1% of Americans been so far above the average citizen in assets and earning power as today. More, these one percenters are not coupon-clipping, Palm Beach-squatting heirs. They are wage earners and entrepreneurs, and their prospects just get grander as globalization grows the market capitalization of all enterprises. Further, the one percenters are pulling away not only from everyone in general but also from the richest of the rest. Their income has doubled since... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/americas-next-civil-war/45401/ Tue, 19 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST The most critical election ever held in any democracy was the American presidential election of 1860, when the angry nation broke into warring camps that wrecked the country then and continue to bedevil us now. Because it is early in another presidential cycle that is strikingly similar — an enraged electorate, a looming war for survival, two generations of inferior politicians and their grandiose manipulations, a vain media — it is useful to look at the 2008 field of candidates in light of... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/waiting-for-hillary/44567/ Tue, 5 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST Waiting for Hillary Clinton to announce her candidacy for the Democratic Party nomination for president in 2008 is now a job description for the hottest of the Capitol pundits. One of the most thoughtful, my colleague Chuck Todd, the editor in chief of the National Journal's Hotline, has published a crib sheet for the next two years of Hillary Clinton-watching in which he identifies six weaknesses in Mrs. Clinton's candidacy that can harry her in the nomination contest. I like Mr. Todd's list a... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/mighty-mum/44011/ Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:00:00 EST "We must have an extremely strong diplomatic action to prevent Iran from getting nuclear power, which would be very dangerous for the whole region." Who said this? A French politician. And why is it important? Not just for the clarity of opinion with regard to the threat of the messianic mullahs, but also for the fact that the speaker is the latest dynamic, experienced, media-savvy, iconoclastic female politician to step onto the world stage and take command of a critical electorate... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/to-know-mccain-read-mahan/43444/ Tue, 14 Nov 2006 00:00:00 EST "War, once declared, must be waged offensively, aggressively," wrote the sage of American navalists, Alfred Mahan, in his seminal 1890 book, "The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783." "The enemy must not be fended off, but smitten down." Mahan is important today because our chief architect of Mahanian policy now forms an exploratory committee to begin his campaign for the presidency in 2008. John McCain, son and grandson of admirals, Annapolis graduate, aviator, and war hero, who is... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/autumn-in-chappaqua-with-hillary/43003/ Tue, 7 Nov 2006 00:00:00 EST Sitting in the Starbucks coffee shop at North Greeley and King streets in Chappaqua in the last hours of the 2006 campaign, I am at the center of the happy-go-lucky town that within moments launches Hillary Clinton for the presidency. If she is successful over the next 24 months, it will be these Starbucks consumers who nominate her, these suburban moms and dads who choose her over the maverick John McCain, and these generous, well-educated, demanding, well-traveled, contrarian Democrats and... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/confess-and-apologize-republicans/42785/ Thu, 2 Nov 2006 00:00:00 EST On the eve of the judgment of the American electorate, these last hours before the rout of Bushism and the Republican Party, it is time to plan ahead. We Republicans have been here before; we have taken a whipping at the polls in wartime and found a way to recover the trust of the republic and to reclaim authority. It was 1874, and the legendary President Grant and his Radical Republicans ruled with an iron fist not only over the federal vault but also over the futile, blindfolded occupation of... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/clinton-mccain-irresistable-and-unstoppable/42222/ Wed, 25 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST "He who is not against us is for us," the Gospel of Mark observes. This is as succinct a statement as exists of the stealthy and smart presidential contest already under way between the junior senator from New York and the senior senator from Arizona. Of 300 million Americans, startlingly few don't know who Hillary Clinton and John McCain are, and even fewer are against both of them, which, after Mark, means that we are overwhelmingly for them. As a couple, they are already in royal purple. As... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/cheney-is-moriarty/41658/ Tue, 17 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST Professor James Moriarty of America, the man responsible for shredding the Constitution's checks and balances, waging the illegal war in Iraq, destroying the climate with industrial waste, and plotting the imminent sneak attack on Iranian innocents, is also at the same time a bald-headed, gravelly voiced, serial heart-attack survivor named Dick Cheney, who commands his hired guns from the usefully ill-defined Office of the Vice President. I learned these charges and a deal of the supportive... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/persian-hands/41250/ Tue, 10 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST Why did the North Koreans detonate a nuclear weapon now? Who benefits from a clear defiance of the United Nations Security Council? What possible gain could North Korea's utilitarian despot achieve by humiliating his protector, Beijing, by baiting his enabler, Seoul, and by threatening his adversary, America, in defense of its ally Japan? Answer this question and you can begin to answer the scale of the threat posed by the North Korean test. Answer this question and you begin to see that the... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/anybody-but-mccain/40555/ Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:00:00 EST John McCain of Arizona has won the Anybody-But role for the Republican nomination in 2008. Is this good or bad news for Team McCain? It is a tradition in the Grand Old Party that choosing a nominee, especially to succeed a sitting Republican president, means that the party must perform a romantic opera that requires certain roles to be filled by credible performers. The lead role is that of Anybody But, which the 2008 election has now filled. Equally critical is the role of Who-Can-Stop-Him?... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/theme-of-jihad/39997/ Wed, 20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 EST Pope Benedict XVI, the "Panzer pope," has done the unusual in modern discourse: he has jumped into the war on terror with armored facts from six centuries ago that refute a deal of the appeasement from 21st-century Europeans and their American fellow travelers. You will recall that Pope Benedict recently spoke, auf Deutsch, at Regensburg University, where he once enjoyed a professorship. The speech was dry, mechanical, unappetizing, a predictable German exercise in theology, with much attention... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/explaining-the-j-curve/39812/ Mon, 18 Sep 2006 00:00:00 EST In a contentious new book of globalization agonistes,"The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall," Ian Bremmer makes the cunning argument that the way to topple tyrannies such as Saddam Hussein's in 2003 or Castro's and Kim Jung Il's and President Ahmadinejad's in 2006 is to send the tyrants an invitation to join the World Trade Organization. No more crusades for regicide. Offer your bonds to the bullies: an extreme sort of soft diplomacy. What is the J Curve? It is a clever... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/iran-is-cuba/39450/ Tue, 12 Sep 2006 00:00:00 EST What's wrong with a revolutionary, terror-sponsoring state, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, acquiring nuclear weapons? The Washington case is that nuclear warheads in the hands of a messianic cult led by the race-supremacist Council of Experts at Qom and the Holocaust-denying Ahmadinejad at Teheran means that the world is again on the brink. Can this be verified? The Iranian Revolutionary Guards cannot prove the negative — that they won't use atomic weapons and Washington can't prove the... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/alternative-ending-for-iraq/38466/ Thu, 24 Aug 2006 00:00:00 EST Iraq in 2006 is not Vietnam. However, the voting public's despair of the bloodletting puts the Bush administration in the same brittle shape as was the Johnson administration in the summer of 1966. President Johnson committed America to defeat in Vietnam because he could not imagine a viable exit. "If I send in more men, there'll be killin'," Mr. Johnson complained in January 1965; "If I take out men, there'll be killin'. Anything I do, there'll be killin'." One year later, following a... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/sea-of-assassins/38158/ Fri, 18 Aug 2006 00:00:00 EST The fire in Lebanon may have "ceased" but Israeli defense planners are still anticipating a wider war ahead, provoked byTeheran. In that conflict, the Israel Defense Force knows that it cannot rely on help from America's so-called allies in the region. The government of Lebanon is quisling. Sheik Nasrallah's speech on Lebanese television last week, offering a hollow accommodation, was seamless falsehood. The truth was on the Hezbollah flag over his right shoulder. For the first time, on the... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/prelude-to-war/37560/ Wed, 9 Aug 2006 00:00:00 EST Why is America waiting to be attacked by Iran? Why do we sit on the sidelines while Tehran makes war on our ally Israel in order to provoke America to join the fighting, first against Syria and then against Tehran itself? Why do we listen to the European appeasers as they pretend the Lebanon front is a regional conflict, a national liberation contest, when it is demonstrably the prelude to the wider war — the Spain 1936 to the continental war of 1939? What is the explanation for America's... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/ghostly-shadows/37304/ Fri, 4 Aug 2006 00:00:00 EST How bloody-minded are the tyrants of Tehran? How far will they go in supporting their Hezbollah and Hamas legions against the Jewish State? Will they fight to the death of Lebanon and Gaza, or will they see the grave risk in their imperial overreach, using their uncertain ally Syria (and secret dupe Egypt) as an arms depot, and negotiate an armistice with the U.N. Security Council's proxies, the European legions? The answer is not in the headlines, it's in the drama and history of the Shiites... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/green-light-2006-07-28/36948/ Fri, 28 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EST President Ahmadinejad has returned from his oil-weapon meetings in Central Asia to his bunker in Tehran and has given the green light to Damascus to escalate the Lebanon front by launching long-range missiles into Tel Aviv. Syria and Hezbollah have been told they are to fight on with the certain expectation that Israel will respond to the escalation by bombing Syria's strategic sites and its supply lines into Lebanon. Iran has also told Syria that it expects — hopes — this phase of the campaign... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/foreign/syria-warns-it-will-strike-israel-deeper/36757/ Wed, 26 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EST Secretary Rice's mission to the Middle East has already failed because Syria has issued an ultimatum that augurs a world war soon enough. The Syrian ultimatum is meant to provoke Israel and to pull America directly into the fighting. The ultimatum threatens that the attacks by Hezbollah — trained, supplied and commanded by Iranian Revolutionary Guards — will increase in intensity unless America negotiates directly with Hezbollah, Syria and Iran. The ultimatum demands that America force Israel... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/war-elephant/36692/ Tue, 25 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EST Europe will chastise Jerusalem and beseech Beirut and excoriate Washington and aggrandize Kofi Annan, but it will not fight in Lebanon to support Israel and America in suppressing Hezbollah. Why? Europe is not ignorant or cowardly; rather, Europe is collectively suffering what savants call the double wall of denial, or what is drolly known as the Elephant-in-the-Room syndrome. The elephant is Iran. The double wall is that not only can Europe not talk about Iran as the command and control of... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/partisans-of-the-mahdi/36495/ Fri, 21 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EST Three recent events that span the globe begin to describe the scale of the threat to Israel and America represented by the Iranian war-making-by-proxy in Gaza and Lebanon. First, on Tuesday, July 4, North Korea stunned its East Asian neighbors and rocked the U.N. Security Council by firing not only the Taepodong-2 missile that had been displayed on its launch pad for two weeks but also by launching up to nine more smaller missiles from its rocket brigades' arsenals. Japan was the angriest of... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/irans-war-games/36183/ Tue, 18 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EST American observers have long anticipated the strategic offensive by the Islamic Republic of Iran that began with Iranian proxies in Gaza and Lebanon provoking Israel. The next weeks will see Iran maneuver for the global crisis it wants to create by winter. The confrontation at the United Nations Security Council over Iran's refusal to suspend nuclear fuel cycle processing will be the presenting issue; however, the contest is decades in the making and is best understood as Iran's aim to defeat... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/rational-prejudice-of-iran/36089/ Fri, 14 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EST Iran cannot and will not trust diplomacy to resolve the confrontation with the United Nations Security Council over the suspected violations of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran cannot and will not trust the inducements of European Union envoys, of United Nations dignitaries, of the honest Brokers of the Non-Aligned Nations or Non Govermental Organizations West and East. Iran cannot and will not trust anyone. Iran stands alone, and it will fight alone to the last stone of its three-millennia... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/but-nothing/35658/ Fri, 7 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EST You may conclude from the recent brouhaha that the New YorkTimes's publishing the details of a follow-the-money war plan by the Treasury Department was the worst breach of security since Benedict Arnold sold West Point to the Redcoats. You may also have thought that when Chairman Peter King of the House Homeland Security Committee called a whole newspaper "treasonous," and when the House of Representatives voted 227-183 to suggest that the New York Times was a fellow traveler to Al Qaeda, that... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/jeopardy/35353/ Fri, 30 Jun 2006 00:00:00 EST The intercontinental ballistic missile raised to launch at the North Korean military base of NoDong means that the United States and its allies now live under the jeopardy of a man-made volcano. As with an eruption, there is no certain solution. Does the U.S. ride it out, just as if it were Mt. Merapi in Java, and accept the immeasurable damage to the comity of the region? (Japan mobilizes, Seoul sags, Taipei judges, Bejing growls, Canberra winces.) Or does the United States take advantage of... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/flanders-fields/34912/ Thu, 22 Jun 2006 00:00:00 EST Observing these weeks of passion at the World Cup Championship in the German Republic is both a pleasure and a challenge. The poet reminds us, "What was, is now." When I read the exuberance of the cup wags who assure us that England is doomed, that Germany has cast aside its dogged dullness for a street game, that France is aged and Mexico is fresh and Brazil is magical and Italy is a starlet, I stare the harder and see these same judgments redirected nine decades from the green pitches of... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/pirate-kings/34363/ Tue, 13 Jun 2006 00:00:00 EST Zarqawi died a pirate on the Barbary Shore of our time, hoisted and displayed digitally like a blackguard on the gallows. His death continues a 500-year-old tradition of extortion and retribution between the great Western powers and the ever-enterprising ummah. What does it mean that Zarqawi was a pirate captain in the service of pirate kingdoms? It means that today what we call the war on terror is recognizable as an especially dangerous version of the slave trade and tribute system worked up... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/no-retreat/33952/ Tue, 6 Jun 2006 00:00:00 EST This is my first D-Day anniversary without the hero of my life, my father, who on the morning of June 6, 1944, was on his belly in the surf at Omaha Beach while ranged automatic weapons tore up sand and flesh around him. Against odds, First Lieutenant Calvin R. Batchelor survived and went forward to win what became the first critical victory in the birth of the American empire. Sixty-two years later, as our ships of the line patrol the China Sea and our legions garrison the ummah, reloading for... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/pancho-villa-rides-again/33639/ Wed, 31 May 2006 00:00:00 EST Is Mexico the goat we sacrifice to our dread of worse ahead? When I hear Congress about the threat of the Mexican border to our sovereignty, our justice, our well-being, I wonder what has created this anger toward the least among us. None of the facts of immigration suggests there has been any change in the helter-skelter of coming to America for the last three centuries. What explains these elected defenders of freedom proposing a wall as if Arizona were King Kong's Skull Island, or a round-up... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/we-kitcheners/33476/ Fri, 26 May 2006 00:00:00 EST Recently the United Nations High Commission for Refugees reported a phenomenon in the Sudanese refugees camps that may warn of much worse to come in Africa than the so far unacceptable depredations of two million people during three years of anarchy in the Darfur region. The UNHCR said nearly 5,000 young men had been abducted by press gangs to be forced and beaten into small-arms training for immediate deployment to the front lines to kill and be killed. At first, this appears a futile effort... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/iran-threat-sinister-summer/32878/ Wed, 17 May 2006 00:00:00 EST The United Nations Security Council approaches the sinister summer of 2006 confounded by the nuclear-tipped threat of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its hallucinatory leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Of the five permanent members of the Security Council, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France urge confrontation and sanctions under Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter; the Russians and Chinese urge accommodation without an endgame. Meanwhile, Iran, radiating potency, announces... JOHN BATCHELOR http://www.nysun.com/opinion/ministry-of-fear-part-ii/24529/ Thu, 15 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EST The murder of Lebanese journalist Gibran Tunei by 88 pounds of TNT in Beirut, Lebanon, makes me think that perhaps I was too casually treating with tyrants when I taunted the Syrian regime for bigotry last week while visiting the region. My episode was in Amman, Jordan, and was bluntly suggestive of a fascist era movie, perhaps "Ministry of Fear," where threats are disguised as illogical misunderstandings and lies are delivered as sonorous explanations of state policy. I was turned back from a...