Rumor of War - I've

Rumor of War - I've been hearing snippets of rumors all day day.

• There's a presidential press conference tonight.
• The various Baghdad news bureaux are on a vastly higher state of alert today
• The whole UN front seems to have gone quiet - like it's irrelevant.

Might today be the final ultimatum?

We're approaching the new moon (next week). Most of the troops that really need to be in position, are. We've hit that critical mass of 250,000 troops that we'll supposedly need to prosecute the campaign.

What do you think?

Sex For War! - I've been reading for the last few weeks about the Lysistrata Project - a takeoff on the classical Aristophanes play in which a nation's women (all apparently pacifists) protest their menfolks' hawkishness (uniformly so, natch) by withholding sex. The "Project" will involve roughly 1,000 readings of the play in 56 countries (which means, if they use the same math as used by the Million Man and Million Mom Marches, we can expect about 75 readings in six countries, but I digress).

Like "Poets Against War", it smacks of the sort of pretentious, self-important diddling that artists have always embraced to try to "send messages" about life and death events.

I'd love to comment - but this one, by blogger Asparagirl, is too good to pass up:

And it's not enough for these "feminists" that sexuality, or even specifically female sexuality, be used as an oxymoronic anti-war weapon, but that it must be denial of female sexuality that is the weapon, that very special tool for keeping their social order and their status quo intact. Sex, after all, should only be given up in the appropriate manner and to the appropriate person, and woe to they who disagree...waitaminute, this is starting to sound kinda familiar...

What also galls me is that these women are claiming not only sex, but femininity itself as a uniformly passive, gentle, loving, pacifist attribute. What rubbish. I shouldn't support waging war on a mass-killing dictator because as a woman, my place is to elevate discourse and consensus and eschew "manly", messy action? They're even implying that if I am not a peaceful, good-mannered, right-thinking woman like them, a woman for peace, then perhaps I am not really a woman at all? And these are the women who are telling me this?

The whole article is worth a read, as are the various links to it.

As far as I'm concerned - while I support the war, as a military historian I do observe a fairly high standard of proof for whether a war is just or necessary. And I find the left-feminist notion that war is just a symptom of a masculine culture - a form of societal testosterone poisoning - as offensive as any racial epithet. Any feminists who want to debate the point are hereby invited to try.

(via Jeff Fecke)

Insane - What is it about Ohio's congressional delegation?

Democrat Marcy Kaptur, who represents the Toledo area, has compared Bin Laden with our own founding fathers.

One could say that Osama bin Laden and these non-nation-state fighters with religious purpose are very similar to those kind of atypical revolutionaries that helped to cast off the British crown," Miss Kaptur said.

In Iraq and other Arab nations where revolutions are potentially brewing, religious fervor will play a vital role in shaping political events, she said, and the United States must be careful "not to get caught in the crossfire."

"I think that one thing that people of faith understand about the world of Islam is that the kind of insurgency we see occurring in many of these countries is an act of hope that life will be better using Islam as the only reed that they have to lean on.

That Rep. Kaptur ignores the completely different aims of the different "people of faith" - liberal democracy versus fascist theocracy - is...

...depressing. After 227 years of independence, centuries of political tradition and a solid (if far from perfect) educational tradition, and two world wars, that anyone - much less a US Representative - could compare James Madison with Khalid Mohammed or Mullah Omar is enough to render one catatonic with despair.

Posted by Mitch at March 6, 2003 11:29 AM