Conservative Donnybrook

Via Sailer, Esquire has compiled the list. It’s good fun.

Above: Monument to the Founding of the North Korean Workers’ Party. Recurring themes in these autocratic art projects include giant fists and enormous metallic statues of departed despots.

From the Washington Post:

Overall, “there doesn’t seem to be a lot of progress being made. . . . I would think that from [the Taliban] standpoint, things are looking decent,” the intelligence official said. …

While U.S. and other NATO forces have maintained a firm hold on major cities, they have been unable to retain territory in the vast rural areas where 75 percent of Afghanistan’s population lives, several sources said. Ground hard-won in combat has been abandoned and reoccupied by Taliban forces, which establish dominance over local governmental bodies.

Emphasis mine. Sounds similar to what’s gone on in Iraq. Do we need a surge in Afghanistan, too? All this seems to put to lie the argument, put forth by Iraq War boosters, that the Iraq War has in no way diverted resources from our occupation of Afghanistan, thus harming our efforts there.

The strategy is “clear, hold and build,” said Seth Jones, an Afghanistan expert at the Rand Corp. “You clear the Taliban out, then you hold it for a period of time. You keep forces there, including Afghan forces, then you begin to build, then expand and go into neighboring districts. The problem has been that when you move troops into neighboring districts, you don’t have enough to hold what you just cleared.”

Of course, this is old news. Evidence of the Iraq War diverting resources and focus from Afghanistan was clear from this NYT article back in August:

At critical moments in the fight for Afghanistan, the Bush administration diverted scarce intelligence and reconstruction resources to Iraq, including elite C.I.A. teams and Special Forces units involved in the search for terrorists. As sophisticated Predator spy planes rolled off assembly lines in the United States, they were shipped to Iraq, undercutting the search for Taliban and terrorist leaders, according to senior military and intelligence officials.

Guess it’s just that traitorous MSM trying to undermine the war effort!

I have just come across an interview with columnist and blogginghead James Pinkerton on Lawrence Auster’s blog regarding Pinkerton’s The American Conservative cover story The Once & Future Christendom, in which he elucidates his “Shire Strategy” for the defense of Western civilization.

The AmConMag piece and interview both appeared in September, so this is a terribly un-timely blog post. So sue me!

In the exchange with Auster, Pinkerton expands on the thinking behind his AmConMag article:

What really impelled me to write this piece was the vision of the Muslims dynamiting the Vatican, as I read about 30 plus years ago in Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints–and I’ve had plenty of occasion to think to myself that Raspail was not wrong about where current trends are headed. I am Protestant, not Catholic, but still. And once I thought about that, and prayed on that, it became clear to me that if the Muslims overran Europe, Christendom would never recover–at least not here on earth. To use a Tolkien analogy that I don’t think made it into the final draft, it would be as if all Christians were wounded by the Blade of Morgul. Frodo was so wounded, and never recovered–the books end happily, but that can’t really be said for Frodo himself. By contrast, if it’s merely the atheists and secularists who overrun Europe, then the Continent can be won back, or at least preserved, allowing the Remnant to exist, and Europe to find its way, hopefully, eventually, without being conquered from without.

Read the whole thing! And for those of you on Facebook, Pinkerton has begun a group called “Council of the West” as a followup to his AmConMag piece, and also two other Facebook groups–”Sovereignty Caucus” and “American Sovereignty Caucus” (why the need for both, I don’t know)–along with their respective blogs.