[editor’s note: this post was “pasted” in — it appeared originally at the old Dawson’s Danube site, which is archived here.]A great Nelson Ascher blog entry.  It starts like this…

When the Argentinian military dictatorship invaded the Falklands in 1982, all my country’s and, by the way, all the Latin American left backed the torturing murderers. Why? Well, because deep in their souls they were angry losers, descendents of the once great Iberian Catholic civilization, lusting for some kind of revenge against the new winners, the English-speaking Protestant world. Though they tried to depict it as some kind of class or anti-imperialistic struggle, their arguments were nothing but bull.

…and it just keeps on goin’ in the right direction.  Read all of it.

[editor’s note: this post was “pasted” in — it appeared originally at the old Dawson’s Danube site, which is archived here.]

Mark Steyn pounds pretty hard on British security services:

The difference is that 9/11 hit out of the blue – literally and politically; 7/7 came after four years of Her Majesty’s Government prioritising terrorism and “security” above all else – and the failure rate was still 100 per cent. After the Madrid bombing, I was struck by the spate of comic security breaches in London: two Greenpeace guys shin up St Stephen’s Tower, a Mirror reporter blags his way into a servants’ gig at Buckingham Palace a week before Bush comes to stay; an Osama lookalike gatecrashes Prince William’s party.

(…)

It’s not a question of trying and prodding and testing and finding the weak link in the chain, the one day – on Monday or Wednesday, in January or November, when an immigration official or a luggage checker is a bit absent-minded and distracted and you slip quietly through. Instead, the jihad, via one of its wholly owned but independently operated subsidiaries, scheduled an atrocity for the start of the G8 summit and managed to pull it off – at a time when ports and airports and internal security were all supposed to be on heightened alert. That’s quite a feat.

I’ve always assumed that Britain has remarkably good security agencies, but of course I don’t know a damn thing about that.  But one of the problems is that we only see the failures.  How many times since 9/11 did British anti-terror officials successfully deter attacks?  We don’t know, but it could be many.  And “deter” doesn’t necessarily mean stopping something just before it happens.  It can also mean that would-be terrorists have realized that they have been surveilled so successfully that they give up some attack plans before they really even finalize them.

On the other hand… By pointing out the somewhat comical mishaps such as the Osama look-alike gig, Steyn is fairly persuasive.

He goes on and wonders what I think many of us have wondered: did the need to send security reinforcements up North to the G8 summit leave London more open to attack?  Would it have made a difference if they weren’t dispatched to Gleneagle?

Of course, many resources had been redeployed to Scotland to cope with Bob Geldof’s pathetic call for a million anti-globalist ninnies to descend on the G8 summit. In theory, the anti-glob mob should be furious with al-Qa’eda and its political tin ear for ensuring that their own pitiful narcissist protests – the pâpier-maché Bush and Blair puppets, the ethnic drumming, etc – will be crowded off the news bulletins.

Here’s Steyn at his best, laying out alternatives:

The choice for Britons now is whether they wish to be Australians post-Bali or Spaniards post-Madrid.

I think I know which choice they’ll make.  But I have to admit that Charmaine Yoest’s reports worry me.

[editor’s note: this post was “pasted” in — it appeared originally at the old Dawson’s Danube site, which is archived here.]

Well the London massacre didn’t digest any better after a night of sleep.  Waking up after a sleep that follows a major event is always a bit weird.  Every morning when you wake up you have those few seconds of returning to lucidity: “What day? Friday.  Work today? Yes. Can sleep longer? No.”  But on the mornings after horrible events, this gets tacked on: “What’s this weighing down on me? Oh yeah, yesterday.”

I’ve been perusing blogs, of course, though I should be in the shower.  Alan Adamson sent me an e-mail that he linked to my “Least Favorite Quotes” entry, so I stopped by “Silly Little Country” and was quickly reminded of something I already knew: that Alan was in the UK on holiday after staying for a bit in Austria.  Go read his entries from yesterday because it’s always interesting to read the thoughts of a “foreign observer” who finds himself quite accidentally near the center of a major event.

Alan reports on British pluckiness, but also on the inevitable signs of what I would characterize as at least a mild dhimmitude:

I am disappointed at the morning Times, which has included the compulsory page on how Islam is a religion of peace (when what we are going through is the sorting out of the question whether it can become such a religion), though one finds across the fold a chilling portrayal of some of the dysfunctional edges of London’s generally amazing multiculturalism.

I was thinking this morning of starting a new blog entry that I would update throughout the day.  Its purpose would have been to note at different times during the day whether the Guardian has yet put up the inevitable article or opinion piece that firmly places the root causes of the bombing on British involvement in Iraq.  Tariq Ali saved me the trouble:

And all this happened despite the various Prevention of Terrorism Acts passed by the Commons.

The bombers who targeted London yesterday are anonymous. It is assumed that those who carried out these attacks are linked to al-Qaida. We simply do not know. Al-Qaida is not the only terrorist group in existence. It has rivals within the Muslim diaspora. But it is safe to assume that the cause of these bombs is the unstinting support given by New Labour and its prime minister to the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

One of the arguments deployed by Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, when he appealed to Tony Blair not to support the war in Iraq was prescient: “An assault on Iraq will inflame world opinion and jeopardise security and peace everywhere. London, as one of the major world cities, has a great deal to lose from war and a lot to gain from peace, international cooperation and global stability.”

Most Londoners (as the rest of the country) were opposed to the Iraq war. Tragically, they have suffered the blow and paid the price for the re-election of Blair and a continuation of the war.

Ever since 9/11, I have been arguing that the “war against terror” is immoral and counterproductive.

et cetera ad infinitum

Time to go to work.