The more things change ... and all that.

Back in 1898 an invading force took the whole of the Sudan, chronicled in Winston Churchill's now hugely expensive two-volume "The River War". Later abridged editions are still a riveting read for insights into the messianic Mahdi, Islam, the successful employment of Muslim soldiers, especially Egyptian, under British officers, and the benefits of a well-planned and equipped campaign with specific goals and a clear exit strategy.

A free e-book of the abridged "The River War" is available at
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4943

But some things do not stay the same. Any UN "Peacekeepers" that may be sent would have a far harder time of it than did Churchill and Kitchener, with all the advantages then of technology, transport and empire. And that was hard enough.

An impossibly hard time.

Posted by: MBR at August 30, 2006 5:05 AM

The mo-foes make it easy for we confused secularists...

It's black or white - dar al Islam or dar al-Harb - infidel or al mu'minum

Do we stand by the 'Never Again' of our grandparents or not?

Do we stand by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or not?

It's time to balance the ledger.

Posted by: A_Plague_on_Both_Houses at August 30, 2006 10:48 AM

The seizure by Western, NATO forces, using American airpower -- is there any thought of an American base in Ethiopia, the last known address of that fabled Christian king Prester John, and a name which resonates as much today in some minds as it did when the Negus, Haile Selassie, showed up to plead his case before the League of Nations. That mental substratum (Selassie, Ethiopia, fascism, the Christian kingdom beyond the Muslim-conquered lands led by Prester John who would help to rescue beleaguered Western Christendom) can be appealed to, can be played upon. And if a few thousand American and Western troops can wipe out the Janjaweed in a day, which is merely an agent of the Khartoum regime, this will hearten black Africans, especially Christians, everywhere -- in East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia itself), in southern Africa (including those in South Africa who in Cape Town have experienced the intermittent acts of nightclub-bombing that the devotees of Islam engage in to remind everyone of the immorality of alcohol and other mild diversions), and of course in West Africa, especially in southern Nigeria, and the Ivory Coast (where the Christian fear of foreign Muslims has been regarded with cruel indifference, even hostility, by the French government that, as we all remember thought nothing of destroying, at one blow, the entire ivoirian air force, and has shown in other ways its hostility to the Christian leaders, and popular street movement, determined not to let the Ivory Coast be overwhelmed).

The West has been here before, with the Mad Mahdi, and The Four Feathers (see the old movie, then read the recently-republished book), and Chinese Gordon, and Kitchener of Khartoum. Yes, and Churchill's "The River Wars." But this time it is not that "we have the gatling gun and they have not" but rather -- we have the planes, the helicopters, the everything, and they have not.

Think of the pictures -- the photographs, not the fauxtogrphs -- of those grateful black faces surrounding the American trooops (some of them also black). Think of that spectacle. Think of the declaration that Darfur, and for that matter the entire southern Sudan, which has endured over the past 20 years enslavement and mass murder of the black African Christians and animists, will be "protected" -- yes, the Protected Peoples, but not as Islam defines them -- until such time as a referendum can be arranged. Oh, let the U.N. do the arranging, and let the Muslim, especially Muslim Arab states, raise Cain, raise holy hell, do whateve they can to stop this, and thereby, of course, with each maneuver, and each feint, they will only be demonstrating, to the world's non-Muslims but also the world's non-Arab Muslims, the Arab supremacist doctrine of which Islam has always been the most powerful, most horse-powered vehicle.

Stop the Jihad in its African tracks. Do everything to force Infidels into no longer denying the evidence of their senses. Pull off the cloak of camouflage wherever it exists (as with that careful repackaging of the Lesser Jihad against Israel as merely a striving for the "rights of the 'Palestinian' people." Create situations, through the often modest application of military force, that will expose the fault lines of Islam, between Arab and non-Arab Muslims.

It would take very little. Far less than is risked, or squandered, every day, in tarbaby Iraq. But that tarbaby is using up men, materiel, money, and morale, and getting in the way not of the "war on terror," but the much larger war, using against those promoting Jihad, the very instruments that they employ, or at least diminishing their successful employment of such instruments. Lessen their ability to accumulate, and then deploy, the "money weapon"; make propaganda -- or rather, simply tell the truth, constantly, about the doctrine and practice of Islam over 1350 years, and do not worry about alienating so-called "moderate" Muslims. Their cooperation will be obtained not by lying about Islam, but by threatening their interests, threatening to harm them economically and to expel them from their comfortable positions in the West. Tha is what will obtain their coooperation with Western security services -- that, and those willing to spy for money, or subject to the kind of pressures that security services in some other countries have employed so so successfully.

There are opportunities.

Iraq presents the perfect opportunity to resurrect, in some fashion, the Iran-Iraq War, by allowing the permanent sectarian split to widen, and doing nothing to prevent the sending of arms, money, and "volunteers" by both Sunni Arab states, and by Iran -- let them, and don't worry about the final outcome, because the situation is such that no final winner is likely ever to emerge, and the fault line between Sunni Islam and Shi'a Islam will run through Iraq, and forever be threatening tremors as far away as Pakistan, Yemen, and Lebanon.

And Sudan presents another: the opportunity to push back the forces of Islam, to foil the Egyptian and Arab League attempt to further islamize the southern Sudan and further arabize Darfur, in the hope of completely refashioning that artificial construct, the largest so-called country in Africa, and then on, ever on, to Ethiopia.

Who was that political boss or magnate in the Mauve Decade who famously said when queried by investigators or journalists, hoping to exculpate himself: "I seen my opportunities, and I took 'em." He was just one more malefactor of great wealth, trying to offer some semi-plausible and semi-humorous defense for his outrageous behavior.

But it's not a bad idea for the Bush Administration, or any successor, to be able to say about the war, the world-wide Resistance, to the forces of Jihad (or Jihad and Shari'a, if you wish):

"We seen our opportunities, and we took 'em."

Posted by: Hugh at August 30, 2006 11:32 AM

The originator of the phrase was George Washington Plunkitt:

"Everybody is talkin‘ these days about Tammany men growin’ rich on graft, but nobody thinks of drawin‘ the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft. There’s all the difference in the world between the two. Yes, many of our men have grown rich in politics. I have myself. I’ve made a big fortune out of the game, and I’m gettin’ richer every day, but I’ve not gone in for dishonest graft—blackmailin' gamblers, saloonkeepers, disorderly people, etc.—and neither has any of the men who have made big fortunes in politics.

There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin‘: “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.”

Just let me explain by examples. My party’s in power in the city, and it’s goin' to undertake a lot of public improvements. Well, I’m tipped off, say, that they’re going to lay out a new park at a certain place.

I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particular for before.

Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. Well, that’s honest graft. Or supposin‘ it’s a new bridge they’re goin’ to build. I get tipped off and I buy as much property as I can that has to be taken for approaches. I sell at my own price later on and drop some more money in the bank.

Wouldn’t you? It’s just like lookin‘ ahead in Wall Street or in the coffee or cotton market. It’s honest graft, and I’m lookin’ for it every day in the year. I will tell you frankly that I’ve got a good lot of it, too.

I’ll tell you of one case. They were goin‘ to fix up a big park, no matter where. I got on to it, and went lookin’ about for land in that neighborhood.

I could get nothin' at a bargain but a big piece of swamp, but I took it fast enough and held on to it. What turned out was just what I counted on. They couldn’t make the park complete without Plunkitt’s swamp, and they had to pay a good price for it. Anything dishonest in that?

Up in the watershed I made some money, too. I bought up several bits of land there some years ago and made a pretty good guess that they would be bought up for water purposes later by the city.

Somehow, I always guessed about right, and shouldn’t I enjoy the profit of my foresight? It was rather amusin' when the condemnation commissioners came along and found piece after piece of the land in the name of George Plunkitt of the Fifteenth Assembly District, New York City. They wondered how I knew just what to buy. The answer is—I seen my opportunity and I took it. I haven’t confined myself to land; anything that pays is in my line.

For instance, the city is repavin' a street and has several hundred thousand old granite blocks to sell. I am on hand to buy, and I know just what they are worth.

How? Never mind that. I had a sort of monopoly of this business for a while, but once a newspaper tried to do me. It got some outside men to come over from Brooklyn and New Jersey to bid against me.

Was I done? Not much. I went to each of the men and said: “How many of these 250,000 stones do you want?” One said 20,000, and another wanted 15,000, and other wanted 10,000. I said: “All right, let me bid for the lot, and I’ll give each of you all you want for nothin'.”

They agreed, of course. Then the auctioneer yelled: “How much am I bid for these 250,000 fine pavin' stones?”

“Two dollars and fifty cents,” says I.

“Two dollars and fifty cents” screamed the auctioneer. “Oh, that’s a joke Give me a real bid.”

He found the bid was real enough. My rivals stood silent. I got the lot for $2.50 and gave them their share. That’s how the attempt to do Plunkitt ended, and that’s how all such attempts end.

I’ve told you how I got rich by honest graft. Now, let me tell you that most politicians who are accused of robbin' the city get rich the same way.

They didn’t steal a dollar from the city treasury. They just seen their opportunities and took them. That is why, when a reform administration comes in and spends a half million dollars in tryin' to find the public robberies they talked about in the campaign, they don’t find them.

The books are always all right. The money in the city treasury is all right. Everything is all right. All they can show is that the Tammany heads of departments looked after their friends, within the law, and gave them what opportunities they could to make honest graft. Now, let me tell you that’s never goin' to hurt Tammany with the people. Every good man looks after his friends, and any man who doesn’t isn’t likely to be popular. If I have a good thing to hand out in private life, I give it to a friend. Why shouldn’t I do the same in public life?

Another kind of honest graft. Tammany has raised a good many salaries. There was an awful howl by the reformers, but don’t you know that Tammany gains ten votes for every one it lost by salary raisin'?

The Wall Street banker thinks it shameful to raise a department clerk’s salary from $1500 to $1800 a year, but every man who draws a salary himself says: “That’s all right. I wish it was me.” And he feels very much like votin' the Tammany ticket on election day, just out of sympathy.

Tammany was beat in 1901 because the people were deceived into believin‘ that it worked dishonest graft. They didn’t draw a distinction between dishonest and honest graft, but they saw that some Tammany men grew rich, and supposed they had been robbin’ the city treasury or levyin‘ blackmail on disorderly houses, or workin’ in with the gamblers and lawbreakers.

As a matter of policy, if nothing else, why should the Tammany leaders go into such dirty business, when there is so much honest graft lyin' around when they are in power? Did you ever consider that?

Now, in conclusion, I want to say that I don’t own a dishonest dollar. If my worst enemy was given the job of writin' my epitaph when I’m gone, he couldn’t do more than write:

"George W. Plunkitt. He Seen His Opportunities, and He Took 'Em."

Source: William L. Riordan, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall (1905; reprint, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1963 ), 3–6.

Well, with a tip of the hat to those days, and now I think I'd like to visit McSorley's Wonderful Saloon with the ghost of Joseph Mitchell, or even better, the saloon run by Mr. Dooley, in peace and war, with the ghost of Finley Peter Dunne.

Care to join me? My treat.

Posted by: Hugh at August 30, 2006 11:38 AM

Meeting "under the clock at the Astor at seven" again?

Posted by: MarisolJW at August 30, 2006 11:52 AM

Well then you can count the French out. They want a memo and guarentee from the UN that their troops won't get hurt and if they do they have pretty bandaids.

If they know someone might actually plan on hurting them, the French and most of the UN nations will not show up. The Americans will have to do it. Who needs the UN?

Posted by: alaskan1000 at August 30, 2006 12:50 PM

"under the clock at the Astor at seven"...
-- from a posting above

Biltmore. In New York, not Asheville. But when they meet, that man and that woman, they are not likely to be going off to an Irish bar akin either to the real one described by Mitchell, or tro the imagined one carefully undescribed by Finley Peter Dunne. No, if headed unbedwards, and in those chaste movies they always were, it would be to a nightclub. Not the noisy kind, not the raucous Prohibition-era place (the rap on the door, the peep-hole, the password, the promised raid by the police with the whistles blowing and the paddy-wagon filling up outside with those dancing girls) that was a staple in certain kinds of crime movies starring Jimmy Cagney or Edward G. Robinson (both of whom could have exchanged stories on the set in Yiddish), but rather a place in the early 1930s, without those speakeasy noises on and off, and where the swells gathered -- say, isn't that Edward Everett Horton, playing the upper-class twit from Tuxedo Park or Oyster Bay, chatting up the cigarette-girl? -- but the decibel-level diminished, and there was time for Boy and Girl, or Man and Woman, to talk.

No, if you were to meet someone under the Biltmore clock, and then went to sit somewhere over a drink, that place would not be presided over by McSorley or Mr. Dooley. And the drinks would not have been a beer and gin and whiskey, or an Anna-Christie don't-be-stingy-baby viskey, baby, but rather cocktails for two, we'll take manhattans, and dry martinis, and singapore slings, and there will be a cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces, and smoke will get in your eyes, and let's face it, at least one of us will be bewitched, bothered, and bewildered, but still I can't get started, and perhaps much later at least one of us will discover that a big mistake was made when you agreed to meet me, fatidically, under the Biltmore clock.

Posted by: Hugh at August 30, 2006 1:22 PM

testing here

Posted by: limes at August 30, 2006 1:48 PM

Memo to: MSM,UN, Kofi Anan,China, Russia,France,Germany,Arab League,Mad Mullahs and Govt of Iran, Syria and all Guardianista's and wooly treehuggers not forgetting CAIR, Muslim Council of Great Britain and all other Mohammedans.

The World was up in arms and screaming 'IMMEDIATE' ceasefire when the Joooz in justified RETALIATION killed 1000 SO CALLED civilians in Lebanon. The MSM was accepting carte blanche everything the Hizzbollah Terrorists told them and participating in Pallywood photoshoots and lies. Kofi and the UN were flying everywhere the Arab League was screaming the Lebanon Govt bleating.
But not too far away in Sudan a GENOICIDE was and is taking place with more than 200,000 yes 200 times MORE men women and children being killed and these are not Hezzbollah terrorists in civilian clothes either. So where is the OUTRAGE by Muslim leaders and countries about this carnage NOWHERE. In fact the Arab League are supporting the Sudan Govt in stopping the deployment of UN forces to halt the genoicide. Most probably because the Arab Militia (read MUSLIM for Arab) is the perpetrator of this genocide with the full support of the Sudan Govt and the victims are mainly Black animists. Then there is the case of the Iraqi Civil War (read Shia/Sunni sectarian violence) killing many THOUSANDS. Again not a peep from the Mohammedans and all their Governments and organisations.
HYPOCRITES one and all.

Posted by: Realist at August 31, 2006 3:07 AM

Hugh's back! Good to hear from you. What I have to say is deeply personal. It relates to the tiny minority of Arab Muslims who rule supreme over a vast territory of whose cultures they know nothing and care even less...

I work very closely with 3 Sudanese Christian families who are in Australia to stay. Not one of these families is complete. Not one of these families does not bear deep and unhealing scars of their memories of the Janjaweed. Not one person in those families seeks vengeance (blood reprisals) for their terrible losses (mothers, all the children, fathers, personal identity (one lady thinks she might be 28, but her documents were destroyed in a direct hit by a helicopter gunship on her family home ie hut GO Khartoum!!!). Yet they have all learned one thing, in a way that most of us cannot even imagine. To live on...

The Janjaweed, and their backers, do not negotiate. When they come, all must submit. But to submit does not mean that you shall live. When they come, they are true masters. When they come, no-one must argue. When they come... God help you if you are female over 6 years of age.

Mohammed was exactly the same. And when he comes...?

The Matriarch of this wonderful, beaming and very gentle family explained:

My man (her husband) and the other men... they go out to kill (rats, pests, vermin etc. NOTE VERY WELL THAT THEY DID NOT THINK THAT THEY WERE GOING OUT TO KILL LIONS! Yet her husband had killed a lion, when he least wanted or expected to have to do so! and he was very afraid of the lion, but not the vermin.)

Some of the men came back and said: We have killed many vermin. Now you can leave to find a safe house away from the locusts. But you must leave now. Many of the men cannot help you again (they were killed in action) because they cannot fight the birds of the sky (helicopter gunships) and the men on camels (Janjaweed) together. But they have won for you two days. Go now!

She grabbed as many of her family as she could find and she fled, no questions asked, into the arms of an NGO that finally helped secure their migration to Australia. To get there, over many, many miles of desert with no water, she often carried 3 little children (Yes 3!) because she could leave none behind.

Her answer was simple: To save life, kill vermin. The Janjaweed do not see men, women or children. They see power. They see blood. They like blood. They see slaves and money. Only when our men see these camel riders as vermin, then it is easy to kill them. They do not like this, when our men kill them as vermin, but their courage fails when our men kill them. Then they cry, and many helicopters come, like many lions that fly. But even when this happens, the men say: now we can push the vermin away! And we sing to celebrate. But then there are no guns (she meant "bullets"). There is nothing. The men ask for guns to stop the vermin, but someone says: No guns. Only medicine and food. But these things cannot help the dead. (Does THAT sound, to you, like the UN doing what only it can do?)

With antiquated hunting rifles and lion hunting tactics, Sudanese fathers and uncles were holding off the hordes of well-armed, heavily backed Janjaweed raiders (viz. rapists, raiders, looters, murderers etc. because they saw these Muslim faithful as vermin (no better than locusts). Is this a harsh indictment? According to Kofi Annan... Yes ("and we must spend at least 15 years discussing our differences of opinion, at the expense of primarily the US). According to My Lady? Nah! Her story is too explicit for PG rated websites, but over 1 million dead, x tens of thousands working as slaves in Jordan, the Arabias, Egypt, Syria, Iran, EVEN IN PALESTINE!!! Nuff said...

Posted by: maranatha50 at September 1, 2006 9:00 AM