NOTE: Articles of note are now encompassed in our ptdblog section... enjoy. (There's some great stuff in the archive below also)

ARTICLE ARCHIVE:

NOTE: Prevent Truth Decay does not officially endorse or monitor content on external sites. The links to external sites may change. If you encounter a broken link, please let us know by emailing us here.

What Peace Isn't > During the 1991 Gulf War and the current Operation Iraqi Freedom, we have heard much from the "peace" movement. And since the 1993 Oslo Accords, we've heard about the Middle East "peace" process. But if we have a movement toward something, and a process to achieve it, we should know what it is. At least we should be able to say what it isn't. And if you know where not to look, you're more likely to find what you're looking for.

IN AMERICAN HISTORY, there are three dire dates--December 7, 1941; November 22, 1963; and September 11, 2001--that send a collective shudder through our memory. The left also has its own special roster of days not to cherish: December 12, 2000, when George W. Bush became president; November 7, 2002, when that choice was roundly endorsed by American voters; and April 9, 2003 when Baghdad was freed and Saddam's grip was broken in one of the swiftest, most successful, most surgical strikes in war history, to the Iraqis' wild delight.

. Read the article

Movies and comic books condition Americans to think in terms of the "evil genius," a dangerously insane but diabolically brilliant adversary who carefully and calculatingly plots to destroy the world. Think Lex Luthor attempting to obliterate the California coast, or the Joker scheming to poison Gotham, or the countless forgettable villains who have conspired to change the orbit of the moon in an effort to unleash destructive tidal waves that will destroy the Earth's major cities.

. Read the article

With the one-year anniversary of former President Jimmy Carter's trip to Cuba fast approaching, we realize that history has repeated itself and Cuba's brutal dictator Fidel Castro has played Mr. Carter once again as a fool.

. Read the article

With the Pentagon declaring the end of "major combat" in Iraq, most Americans are responding with relief and pride. Our troops have performed with skill, courage and even honorable restraint in deposing a dictator half a world away in less than a month. The puzzle is why some Americans, especially media and liberal elites, continue to wallow in pessimism about this liberation.

. Read the article

Indeed they are. In both the Afghanistan war of 2001 and the Iraq one now concluding, traditional features of warfare have been turned upside-down. But it's not just an American phenomenon; the same rewriting also applies in Israel's war against the Palestinians.

. Read the article

It began with former Texas Gov. Ann Richards. She derisively referred to the younger Bush as a "shrub" in their 1994 gubernatorial campaign. He trounced her in the election.

Next came Al Gore. He confidently figured that once he and Bush squared off in the 2000 presidential debates, it would quickly become apparent to the voters who was smarter. Gore came off smart all right — smart aleck was more like it.

The former vice president was followed by Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe. He blithely declared that Bush had neither the political acumen nor the personal popularity to pull his party to victory in the 2002 congressional elections.

Right.

. Read the article

"Cheney: Tells 'Meet the Press' just before war, 'We will be greeted as liberators.' An arrogant blunder for the ages."

--This according to "Conventional Wisdom," Newsweek, April 7 (published March 30)... and a bunch more...

. Read the article

Last Thursday night Tom Brokaw carried a war report that featured an American GI who'd been shot in the leg outside Baghdad. They showed him being treated in the field on a gurney. His pants had been cut away, and you could see his shorts. They were red, white and blue. They had stars and stripes like a flag. And one of the soldiers treating him looked up and smiled. "Nice shorts," he said.

. Read the article

If you're wondering why the media establishment screams long and hard when Republicans say something politically incorrect but virtually ignores the disgraceful rantings of Sen. Patty "Osama Mama" Murray, Rep. Charlie Rangel, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, Rep. Jim Moran, Sen. Robert "KKK" Byrd and so on, ABC has a confession to make....

. Read the article

It's a beat-up little suburban single-story house in a Third World place far away. Faded blue paint on the outside, broken bicycle on a cracked cement walkway, rusty fence. You wouldn't think twice if you drove by. It wasn't interestingly decrepit or antique, just modern, cheap and fallen down...

. Read the article

Hollywood celebrities have become the most visible opponents of liberating Iraq. But as proof that where you stand depends on whether your friends are in power, let's look back at how those same celebrities reacted when Bill Clinton deployed U.S. power in Afghanistan, Sudan and Kosovo.

Actor Mike Farrell, best known for his role as Trapper John's replacement in "M*A*S*H," has emerged as a leading antiwar activist. This month, he even engaged in a surreal debate on geopolitics with former senator Fred Thompson on "Meet the Press." "It is inappropriate," Farrell declared, "for the administration to trump up a case in which we are ballyhooed into war."

. Read the article

War precipitates clarity as well as confusion, and the war against Iraq already has clarified this: The United Nations is not a good idea badly implemented, it is a bad idea.

For France, and for the U.N. through which France magnifies its own significance, the objective of disarming Iraq, if ever seriously held, has been superseded by the objective of frustrating America. And for America, the imperative of disarming Iraq will soon be supplanted by the imperative of insulating U.S. sovereignty from U.N. hubris.

. Read the article

The United States must not fall into the trap of trying to run a war that pleases a hostile world media. It is becoming increasingly obvious that no matter what we do right, the media will focus on the few accidents that always happen in a war.

The Muslim nations have become experts at using the media to reduce Western forces' ineffectiveness. They play upon the well-known conscience of the West concerning causing harm to civilians.

. Read the article

JUST FIVE DAYS into the war in Iraq and the New York Times was hopefully reporting that despite a thrilling beginning, American troops had gotten bogged down. This came as a surprise to regular readers of the Times who remembered that the Times thought we were bogged down the moment the war began. The day after the first bombs were dropped on Baghdad, the New York Times ran a front-page article describing the mood of the nation thus: "Some faced it with tears, others with contempt, none with gladness."

. Read it all

Two of our former presidents, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, have been talking a lot about their views and feelings on Iraq. It would be nice if they took to speaking less and thinking more. They could start with an event in the latter years of Dwight David Eisenhower, a former president who knew how to do the job.

Forty-two years ago this spring, in April 1961, a young American president launched an amphibious invasion on a foreign shore. It was such a thorough failure that to this day the words "Bay of Pigs" are shorthand for "American military fiasco." The American-trained Cuban exiles who stormed the beaches of Cuba in hopes of liberating their homeland were, essentially, abandoned and left to die, denied the support they'd been promised by the U.S. government. Fidel Castro crushed them.

. Read More

Critics of President Bush say he has failed to rally our "traditional allies" - like France - to support his aggressive efforts to disarm Saddam Hussein. But since the Gulf War, in which France had token involvement, Paris has never been our ally where Iraq is concerned. Indeed, it has been more allied with Iraq than with us...

. Read the Article

Have our friends the Saudis stopped beating their wives yet? Apparently not, according to the Arab News, which reports that "wife beating is a widespread phenomenon in Saudi society." The paper itself takes what we might term a moderate pro-wife-beating stance: "It is certainly against Islam to beat a good wife. An erring wife should be warned first and advised. If that does not work, then the husband could give her a light beating, the purpose of that being to embarrass rather than inflict pain." -James Taranto

. Read the Article from Arab News

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."

True enough, but her gesture feels so trite and theatrical partly because celebrities as a class seem stuck in the same hackneyed pose--one rooted in Vietnam-era polarities and untrue to the moment.

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.

. Read More

The opponents of the Bush administration's possible military action against Iraq make the following arguments: "He's simply trying to finish the job his father started"; "No blood for oil"; "Iraq poses no imminent threat"; "Wars kill innocent women and children"; "Allow the United Nations inspections to proceed"; "Containment works"; "Avoid unilateralism, and proceed only with the United Nations' approval"; and the all-encompassing "No smoking gun exists demonstrating that Saddam possesses weapons of mass destruction."

But Bill Clinton, four years ago, took to the airwaves and explained his authorization of non-U.N.-approved missile strikes against Iraq, using the very same arguments now advanced by President Bush. Yet the silence was deafening.

. Read More

America has no business in the United Nations.

Nowhere in the Constitution do I see any provision for our federal government participating in an organization of nations that has dreams of governing the world.

I do, however, see in the writings of the founders many warnings about foreign entanglements and permanent alliances that can threaten to draw this sovereign nation into the conflicts of the old world.

. Read More

How in the world did we get to where we are now? Read this excellent Charles Krauthammer piece from the Washington Post.

Read More

Are you behind the president, in favor of using force to disarm Saddam Hussein, willing to share the risks of combat nationally and personally – and thoroughly rattled by the huge turnouts around the world for the anti-war rallies of Saturday, Feb. 15?

Have some therapy.

Don't try to dismiss the demonstrators as "the usual suspects." The motleyness of many of them may have indeed inspired an agenda-free 8-year-old in New York to exclaim to his mother, "Mom, this place is filled with freaks!" But drop that line. There were also plenty of normal, sincere, employed, sexually untroubled, freedom-loving and pro-American members of those multitudes.

Live with it. You don't have to denounce them, demean them or question their wholeness as human beings.
Read More