Remembering, nine years later. It’s hard to imagine this president doing that.
17 thoughts on “The Bullhorn”
Dude, for me it’s impossible to imagine this president doing that.
Maybe if he brought his teleprompter …
“Maybe if he brought his teleprompter …”
Would that then be a bull-prompter? Hmm…kind of fitting on several levels…
Thanks, Rand. I’ve been lurking and reading for a while but had to say “thanks” for this… still chokes me up. Hope we never forget…
This loser in the WH now doesn’t know his a** from a bullhorn.
Not at all a Bush fan, but that was, for me, his greatest moment. Had Obama been president, he would have just gone on to remind everyong–in between “uh’s”–of his historic election.
I was vaguely reminded of the differences this morning, listetning to NPR news. They led off with a report that an American woman hiking in the northern mountains of Iraq, who (she and her family says) strayed accidentally across the border into Iran, and who was subsequently held prisoner by the Iranian government for one year on accusations of “spying,” was released after $500,000 of “bail” was paid on her behalf. President Obama was quoted as saying he was “relieved” that she was home again, and “hoped” that the Iranians would “show compassion” and release her companion, who is still being held. (Guess not enough ransom “bail” was offered yet.)
The very next story had Obama’s speech to schoolchildren in Philadelphia, and sound bites are played in which he sternly warns the (presumably inner-city Philadelphila) children to take command of their fate, not screw around and waste their lives, let no one else define them, rise above their surroundings, et cetera.
The contrast with GWB is just amazing. Bush was compassionate and loyal to Americans, and an aggressive unpredictably dangerous cowboy to enemies of Americans. Obama is just the reverse. I’m pretty cynical and cool about politicians in general, but this morning’s performance by our Pussy In Chief just disgusted me. He’s going to pray that the Iranians show compassion? While he hectors kids to stand tall? What a hypocritical bully.
What a hypocritical bully.
I’ve known lots of bullies in my time, and I have tended to conclude that all bullies are hypocrites and, given a chance, all hypocrites would be bullies.
If an US citizen goes hiking on the border with Iran they are either a candidate recipient for a Darwin Award or a spy. Iran being one of those countries in the pariah state list and all.
If we are talking about Kurdistan that is one of the most disputed areas of the world. Not exactly the best place to go for a pleasant walk.
God, they were idiots and fools. They were well-known Berkeley “peace” activitsts, and were in Iraq and various places in the Middle East to investigate and expose US “human rights abuses” and to act in “solidarity” with the usual suspects. They went to an apparently famous and beautiful location in the mountains of Kurdistan that is popular with hikers both Iraqi and international. (There are also some eyewitnesses who claim they were seized by Iranian border guards inside Iraq, for what that’s worth.)
But so what? They may be the dumbest and most ungrateful worthless excuses for Americans we’ve got, but they are still Americans, and that ought to (and during GWB’s Presidency did) mean something: that mistreating and abusing them exposes you to some serious bad juju. I like that.
That they would be spies for the Bush Administration, given their loud history, is utterly laughable. Only a mullah thoroughly insulated from modern history could swallow that.
I’ve heard that a conservative is a liberal who was mugged by reality. It’ll be interesting to hear if those “peace activists” (Darwin Award candidates) have experienced any changes in their world-view as a result of their experiences, or if they still blame America for all the world’s problems.
You would be surprised at how much people can ignore reality in order to keep to their own preconceived views. Assuming they are bona fide peaceniks.
Yes it is the job of a leader to be concerned about his group. If this was Ronald Regan he would probably say something about how Iran is the Evil Empire and that US citizens are untouchable. People would get more polarized into us vs them getting a nice group morale boost and these US citizens would likely be condemned to death after a mock trial in Iran. US morale would be boosted. The way Obama did it one of them was saved at the cost of something of which the US had in abundance (paper dollars). But that is one of the things with leadership of which Obama seems to have little experience. Life is not a series of isolated events. As a result of this gesture Iran will grow more confident and bolder against the US. They will start probing deeper into the Iran-Iraq border.
Other options to solve this situation would be to do backroom dealing with Iran where the US citizens would ‘magically’ be freed, for more money and less US prestige loss provided it did not backfire, there would be some sort of prisoner swap, or nothing would be done at all. That is how the game was usually played during the Cold War.
Obama seems, to me, a pretty naive politician. At least so far. But then again so was W.
Obama thinks if he talks enough anyone will eventually listen. But the world does not work that way. Especially if the audience is not interested in what you are talking about.
For all the things Reagan said he only declared a ground war on an insignificant country. He spent a lot on defense, but people often forget it is much cheaper to pay for people and equipment which is not being used, than an actual war. Let alone two. On the other side of the planet. That was W’s mistake.
The issue with brinkmanship as it was done during the Cold War is that if you keep doing it for too long, with too many players, you will very likely end up with WWIII instead of a mere regional conflict.
It is dangerous to play such games when there are as many players as today. Russia, China, India, Pakistan, are all nuclear weapon states as well.
The US should presently be focusing on fixing its own economy. Not on military adventures in backward regions of Asia.
In my opinion the long term stability of Afghanistan cannot be achieved without the involvement of the regional powers neighboring it and a more credible government. Iraq is more easily defensible but the moral motive for being in Iraq does not exist, nor did exist prior to this invasion.
Contrary to what I read in the PNAC report back before W was first elected the Middle East seems to be increasingly irrelevant in terms of strategic supplies. As their oil reserves run out the world is switching to other suppliers, or tar sands. Even the economic motive for being in Iraq is strained.
Yeah, I’m very familiar with the logic, God. Heard it all through my youth in the 70s and 80s. But you know what? So far as the facts of what actually happened in the Cold War can tell us, the Cold Warriors and MADmen and brinksmanshipmen were all right, and all the realpolitik “the world is not so simple” OMG WWIII is just around the corner “Fail Safe” worry warts were wrong. MacArthur was right, Truman was wrong. Eisenhower was right, Kennedy before Bay of Pigs was wrong, and afterward was right. And so on. The real world apparently is pretty simple, and if you want peace and to have your citizens treated right, you do pretty much simply have to make primitive cowboy existential threats. Diplomacy and detente are worthless, unless the soft words are backed up by the big stick.
I’m well aware that the 20th century is only one run through the scenarios, and you can easily — and I expect will — argue that it all turned out the way it did by pure luck, and if we ran through the century again it might turn out nuclear winter and mankind’s extinction. We rolled the dice, and it came up natural 7. You can easily argue that was pure chance. But…mmmm…the point here is that there’s no obvious was to distinguish between a thesis of pure luck and the original thesis, that they were right, and no matter how many times we ran the scenario, it would turn out the same way.
In my youth I agreed more with the luck thesis, but now much less so. I tend to think it really is just about as simple as the “unsophisticated” “warmongers” thought it was. I think if GWB had been President, the Iranians would have hesitated to pull this kind of stunt, precisely because they couldn’t be entirely sure — after seeing Saddam’s castles punctured by JDAMs — that that crazy cowboy Bush wouldn’t do the same thing in Tehran, “world opinion” be damned. And, really, who could have stopped him? Not any number of unctous editorials in the Times nor stern resolutions in the Security Council. And it may just be that the mullahs value their own precious skins enough, and that pure animal fear plays a nontrivial role in the decisions of high politicians.
Also, God, if you can’t find a moral argument for the reduction of the Saddam Hussein regime in the plight of the Marsh Arabs, the slaughter of the Kurds by “Chemical” Ali, the haboring of the Achille Lauro murderer, or the people fed into leaf shredders, I wonder where you find the moral argument for the Second World War? After all, it wasn’t Americans who went up the smokestack at Birkenau.
The US should presently be focusing on fixing its own economy. Not on military adventures in backward regions of Asia.
The problem with the economy is that the governance of the country is in the hands of ideological leftists who are utterly uninterested in creating wealth and passionately interested in looting and redistributing it. This is, I hope, a temporary, aberrant situation that will begin to be redressed, in a substantive way, on Nov. 2.
The conflict in Afghanistan is not a “military adventure” – despite most of our nominal NATO co-belligerents having seemingly adopted an “adventure tourism” model for their own limited participation – but simply one heavily garrisoned front in a global war. Iraq was another such theater of operations, but in the same war. To regard Iraq and Afghanistan as separate wars is roughly as doofy as regarding the separate U.S. campaigns against Germany and Japan as separate wars instead of distinct theaters of operation in the single conflict we correctly identify as World War II.
The global war this time is not exclusively against nation states, though Iraq was one such and Iran is another with which we will have to deal before this war is over. There are others potentially on this list as well. The war is also not against terrorism, Islam or even Islamism, per se. Rather, the war is against an irredentist, uncompromising, tribal barbarian primitivism that – correctly – understands that its time is rapidly coming to a close and is unwilling to pass into history without a last, desperate, fight to the death.
As it happens, Islam is along for the ride because it happens to be – to an extent greater than any other – the religion of the worlds remaining tribal barbarian societies. Having been invented by a tribal barbarian and having tribal barbarism “baked into” its DNA, Islam is well suited to this pre-eminent role. It certainly provides the ideological base of assumed superiority, entitlement to rule and pretense of universality that a world rising of tribal barbarians requires as an organizing framework, but we should understand that tribal barbarism is driving this conflict. Islam, to the extent it consists of anything other than tribal barbarian pieties, is simply along for the ride.
This is not a perfect description of the conflict, of course. There is at least one erstwhile-and-would-be-again empire in the mix – Iran. If future events continue their recent trajectory, Turkey may well enter this mix in similar fashion. Islam is the imperfect bridge between the imperial Persians and Turks and the tribal barbarian remainder of the Middle East.
The great unfinished project of humanity is to complete the extirpation of tribal barbarism from the planet in favor of civilization. This project has been ongoing for millenia, but has picked up particular speed over the past century or two and is probably within a century of effective completion – provided we can keep the various Huns confined to their shrinking native ranges in the meantime.
We, then, are not involved in a war analogous to World Wars I or II or even to the Cold War, but something much more akin to the Indian Wars of the U.S. 19th Century and some of the British Colonial wars of the same period. The events of Sept. 11, 2001 should be seen not as analogous to Pearl Harbor so much as to the fate of Custer and the 7th Cavalry at Little Big Horn or of the British Army at Isandlwhana – determined tribal barbarians are capable of causing considerable slaughter when they are underestimated and succeed in achieving tactical surprise. In the long run, though, they haven’t the capability to prevail unless the civilization under assault voluntarily quits the field. It will be the job of the U.S., in the main, to stay this course over the coming decades until modern societies have been established in all of the numerous failed states of the world. It won’t be easy and it won’t be cheap, but it will also not be avoidable.
Godzilla uses the term “Evil Empire,” a favorite of bien-pesants (sorry; don’t know how to italicize here). They always use it disparagingly as if Regan was an idiot to call the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” although it was clearly (a) an empire, and (b) evil. One wonders what Godzilla would have called it. Something not as accurate, no doubt.
You mean bien-pensant, Bil.
Also, well said, Dick & Carl.
Simplicity is very much underrated. Reagan coming into office was the end of the Carter hostage crisis. It was almost miraculous.
We are fighting ideology and have been losing. We need a simple eye.
We win, they lose. Unconditional surrender must be the goal.
This war is being fought by children in school and we’ve been losing for generations (surrender has been allowing the teaching of lies.) Talking heads are fighting this war and losing it for us (our heroes have been lame, ineffective and subject to ridicule with rare exception.) We focus on Afghanistan, Iraq, or Iran (battles in a much larger war) and lose sight of the war all around us.
If we win in November, that’s one punch landed in a fifteen round fight.
Keep it simple. Cut down the size and power of government which isn’t going to happen in one session or even many. Hold fast everywhere else until we are ready for the next fight. Then accept nothing but unconditional surrender in every case.
Our trouble with Afghanistan is Pakistan. If we fix Pakistan, Afghanistan is fixed as well. We make our support of Pakistan contingent on specific results on the border. No results? No support. India is our natural ally.
Iran is a simple problem. The people of Iran want freedom. Kill the leaders that repress them and they will have it. This is a spy operation.
We are in a war of a million fronts. We need to pick one, win and move on. Win unconditionally. This is a forest fire with an unlimited supply of fuel. We could completely lose control, beyond our ability to fight, and then the game is over. America may still have the same name, but America will no longer exist. We the people will be we the serfs.
Dude, for me it’s impossible to imagine this president doing that.
Maybe if he brought his teleprompter …
“Maybe if he brought his teleprompter …”
Would that then be a bull-prompter? Hmm…kind of fitting on several levels…
Thanks, Rand. I’ve been lurking and reading for a while but had to say “thanks” for this… still chokes me up. Hope we never forget…
This loser in the WH now doesn’t know his a** from a bullhorn.
Not at all a Bush fan, but that was, for me, his greatest moment. Had Obama been president, he would have just gone on to remind everyong–in between “uh’s”–of his historic election.
I was vaguely reminded of the differences this morning, listetning to NPR news. They led off with a report that an American woman hiking in the northern mountains of Iraq, who (she and her family says) strayed accidentally across the border into Iran, and who was subsequently held prisoner by the Iranian government for one year on accusations of “spying,” was released after $500,000 of “bail” was paid on her behalf. President Obama was quoted as saying he was “relieved” that she was home again, and “hoped” that the Iranians would “show compassion” and release her companion, who is still being held. (Guess not enough
ransom“bail” was offered yet.)The very next story had Obama’s speech to schoolchildren in Philadelphia, and sound bites are played in which he sternly warns the (presumably inner-city Philadelphila) children to take command of their fate, not screw around and waste their lives, let no one else define them, rise above their surroundings, et cetera.
The contrast with GWB is just amazing. Bush was compassionate and loyal to Americans, and an aggressive unpredictably dangerous cowboy to enemies of Americans. Obama is just the reverse. I’m pretty cynical and cool about politicians in general, but this morning’s performance by our Pussy In Chief just disgusted me. He’s going to pray that the Iranians show compassion? While he hectors kids to stand tall? What a hypocritical bully.
I’ve known lots of bullies in my time, and I have tended to conclude that all bullies are hypocrites and, given a chance, all hypocrites would be bullies.
If an US citizen goes hiking on the border with Iran they are either a candidate recipient for a Darwin Award or a spy. Iran being one of those countries in the pariah state list and all.
If we are talking about Kurdistan that is one of the most disputed areas of the world. Not exactly the best place to go for a pleasant walk.
God, they were idiots and fools. They were well-known Berkeley “peace” activitsts, and were in Iraq and various places in the Middle East to investigate and expose US “human rights abuses” and to act in “solidarity” with the usual suspects. They went to an apparently famous and beautiful location in the mountains of Kurdistan that is popular with hikers both Iraqi and international. (There are also some eyewitnesses who claim they were seized by Iranian border guards inside Iraq, for what that’s worth.)
But so what? They may be the dumbest and most ungrateful worthless excuses for Americans we’ve got, but they are still Americans, and that ought to (and during GWB’s Presidency did) mean something: that mistreating and abusing them exposes you to some serious bad juju. I like that.
That they would be spies for the Bush Administration, given their loud history, is utterly laughable. Only a mullah thoroughly insulated from modern history could swallow that.
I’ve heard that a conservative is a liberal who was mugged by reality. It’ll be interesting to hear if those “peace activists” (Darwin Award candidates) have experienced any changes in their world-view as a result of their experiences, or if they still blame America for all the world’s problems.
You would be surprised at how much people can ignore reality in order to keep to their own preconceived views. Assuming they are bona fide peaceniks.
Yes it is the job of a leader to be concerned about his group. If this was Ronald Regan he would probably say something about how Iran is the Evil Empire and that US citizens are untouchable. People would get more polarized into us vs them getting a nice group morale boost and these US citizens would likely be condemned to death after a mock trial in Iran. US morale would be boosted. The way Obama did it one of them was saved at the cost of something of which the US had in abundance (paper dollars). But that is one of the things with leadership of which Obama seems to have little experience. Life is not a series of isolated events. As a result of this gesture Iran will grow more confident and bolder against the US. They will start probing deeper into the Iran-Iraq border.
Other options to solve this situation would be to do backroom dealing with Iran where the US citizens would ‘magically’ be freed, for more money and less US prestige loss provided it did not backfire, there would be some sort of prisoner swap, or nothing would be done at all. That is how the game was usually played during the Cold War.
Obama seems, to me, a pretty naive politician. At least so far. But then again so was W.
Obama thinks if he talks enough anyone will eventually listen. But the world does not work that way. Especially if the audience is not interested in what you are talking about.
For all the things Reagan said he only declared a ground war on an insignificant country. He spent a lot on defense, but people often forget it is much cheaper to pay for people and equipment which is not being used, than an actual war. Let alone two. On the other side of the planet. That was W’s mistake.
The issue with brinkmanship as it was done during the Cold War is that if you keep doing it for too long, with too many players, you will very likely end up with WWIII instead of a mere regional conflict.
It is dangerous to play such games when there are as many players as today. Russia, China, India, Pakistan, are all nuclear weapon states as well.
The US should presently be focusing on fixing its own economy. Not on military adventures in backward regions of Asia.
In my opinion the long term stability of Afghanistan cannot be achieved without the involvement of the regional powers neighboring it and a more credible government. Iraq is more easily defensible but the moral motive for being in Iraq does not exist, nor did exist prior to this invasion.
Contrary to what I read in the PNAC report back before W was first elected the Middle East seems to be increasingly irrelevant in terms of strategic supplies. As their oil reserves run out the world is switching to other suppliers, or tar sands. Even the economic motive for being in Iraq is strained.
Yeah, I’m very familiar with the logic, God. Heard it all through my youth in the 70s and 80s. But you know what? So far as the facts of what actually happened in the Cold War can tell us, the Cold Warriors and MADmen and brinksmanshipmen were all right, and all the realpolitik “the world is not so simple” OMG WWIII is just around the corner “Fail Safe” worry warts were wrong. MacArthur was right, Truman was wrong. Eisenhower was right, Kennedy before Bay of Pigs was wrong, and afterward was right. And so on. The real world apparently is pretty simple, and if you want peace and to have your citizens treated right, you do pretty much simply have to make primitive cowboy existential threats. Diplomacy and detente are worthless, unless the soft words are backed up by the big stick.
I’m well aware that the 20th century is only one run through the scenarios, and you can easily — and I expect will — argue that it all turned out the way it did by pure luck, and if we ran through the century again it might turn out nuclear winter and mankind’s extinction. We rolled the dice, and it came up natural 7. You can easily argue that was pure chance. But…mmmm…the point here is that there’s no obvious was to distinguish between a thesis of pure luck and the original thesis, that they were right, and no matter how many times we ran the scenario, it would turn out the same way.
In my youth I agreed more with the luck thesis, but now much less so. I tend to think it really is just about as simple as the “unsophisticated” “warmongers” thought it was. I think if GWB had been President, the Iranians would have hesitated to pull this kind of stunt, precisely because they couldn’t be entirely sure — after seeing Saddam’s castles punctured by JDAMs — that that crazy cowboy Bush wouldn’t do the same thing in Tehran, “world opinion” be damned. And, really, who could have stopped him? Not any number of unctous editorials in the Times nor stern resolutions in the Security Council. And it may just be that the mullahs value their own precious skins enough, and that pure animal fear plays a nontrivial role in the decisions of high politicians.
Also, God, if you can’t find a moral argument for the reduction of the Saddam Hussein regime in the plight of the Marsh Arabs, the slaughter of the Kurds by “Chemical” Ali, the haboring of the Achille Lauro murderer, or the people fed into leaf shredders, I wonder where you find the moral argument for the Second World War? After all, it wasn’t Americans who went up the smokestack at Birkenau.
The US should presently be focusing on fixing its own economy. Not on military adventures in backward regions of Asia.
The problem with the economy is that the governance of the country is in the hands of ideological leftists who are utterly uninterested in creating wealth and passionately interested in looting and redistributing it. This is, I hope, a temporary, aberrant situation that will begin to be redressed, in a substantive way, on Nov. 2.
The conflict in Afghanistan is not a “military adventure” – despite most of our nominal NATO co-belligerents having seemingly adopted an “adventure tourism” model for their own limited participation – but simply one heavily garrisoned front in a global war. Iraq was another such theater of operations, but in the same war. To regard Iraq and Afghanistan as separate wars is roughly as doofy as regarding the separate U.S. campaigns against Germany and Japan as separate wars instead of distinct theaters of operation in the single conflict we correctly identify as World War II.
The global war this time is not exclusively against nation states, though Iraq was one such and Iran is another with which we will have to deal before this war is over. There are others potentially on this list as well. The war is also not against terrorism, Islam or even Islamism, per se. Rather, the war is against an irredentist, uncompromising, tribal barbarian primitivism that – correctly – understands that its time is rapidly coming to a close and is unwilling to pass into history without a last, desperate, fight to the death.
As it happens, Islam is along for the ride because it happens to be – to an extent greater than any other – the religion of the worlds remaining tribal barbarian societies. Having been invented by a tribal barbarian and having tribal barbarism “baked into” its DNA, Islam is well suited to this pre-eminent role. It certainly provides the ideological base of assumed superiority, entitlement to rule and pretense of universality that a world rising of tribal barbarians requires as an organizing framework, but we should understand that tribal barbarism is driving this conflict. Islam, to the extent it consists of anything other than tribal barbarian pieties, is simply along for the ride.
This is not a perfect description of the conflict, of course. There is at least one erstwhile-and-would-be-again empire in the mix – Iran. If future events continue their recent trajectory, Turkey may well enter this mix in similar fashion. Islam is the imperfect bridge between the imperial Persians and Turks and the tribal barbarian remainder of the Middle East.
The great unfinished project of humanity is to complete the extirpation of tribal barbarism from the planet in favor of civilization. This project has been ongoing for millenia, but has picked up particular speed over the past century or two and is probably within a century of effective completion – provided we can keep the various Huns confined to their shrinking native ranges in the meantime.
We, then, are not involved in a war analogous to World Wars I or II or even to the Cold War, but something much more akin to the Indian Wars of the U.S. 19th Century and some of the British Colonial wars of the same period. The events of Sept. 11, 2001 should be seen not as analogous to Pearl Harbor so much as to the fate of Custer and the 7th Cavalry at Little Big Horn or of the British Army at Isandlwhana – determined tribal barbarians are capable of causing considerable slaughter when they are underestimated and succeed in achieving tactical surprise. In the long run, though, they haven’t the capability to prevail unless the civilization under assault voluntarily quits the field. It will be the job of the U.S., in the main, to stay this course over the coming decades until modern societies have been established in all of the numerous failed states of the world. It won’t be easy and it won’t be cheap, but it will also not be avoidable.
Godzilla uses the term “Evil Empire,” a favorite of bien-pesants (sorry; don’t know how to italicize here). They always use it disparagingly as if Regan was an idiot to call the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” although it was clearly (a) an empire, and (b) evil. One wonders what Godzilla would have called it. Something not as accurate, no doubt.
You mean bien-pensant, Bil.
Also, well said, Dick & Carl.
Simplicity is very much underrated. Reagan coming into office was the end of the Carter hostage crisis. It was almost miraculous.
We are fighting ideology and have been losing. We need a simple eye.
We win, they lose. Unconditional surrender must be the goal.
This war is being fought by children in school and we’ve been losing for generations (surrender has been allowing the teaching of lies.) Talking heads are fighting this war and losing it for us (our heroes have been lame, ineffective and subject to ridicule with rare exception.) We focus on Afghanistan, Iraq, or Iran (battles in a much larger war) and lose sight of the war all around us.
If we win in November, that’s one punch landed in a fifteen round fight.
Keep it simple. Cut down the size and power of government which isn’t going to happen in one session or even many. Hold fast everywhere else until we are ready for the next fight. Then accept nothing but unconditional surrender in every case.
Our trouble with Afghanistan is Pakistan. If we fix Pakistan, Afghanistan is fixed as well. We make our support of Pakistan contingent on specific results on the border. No results? No support. India is our natural ally.
Iran is a simple problem. The people of Iran want freedom. Kill the leaders that repress them and they will have it. This is a spy operation.
We are in a war of a million fronts. We need to pick one, win and move on. Win unconditionally. This is a forest fire with an unlimited supply of fuel. We could completely lose control, beyond our ability to fight, and then the game is over. America may still have the same name, but America will no longer exist. We the people will be we the serfs.
We clean our own house first.