The New Year 2004 comes bouncing in with a smile. Saddam is using government issue toilets as he awaits trial, the economy is strong heading into the first quarter and the role of the US as global peacekeeper is established: Libya has said it will lay down its arms, the peace process continues in Israel and China has declared private property exists and will be protected under law, leaving only North Korea and Cuba as the remaining calcified cowpies left over from the Bolshevik-Soviet fiasco.
Things are rosy indeed compared to the agonies that began with the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks in 2001. Two months later, an American Airlines passenger jet crashed into Queens. As if to challenge America at its weakest moment, North Korea rattled its only asset, nuclear arms, sending panic throughout Asia as ancient enemies Japan and China bristled and prepared for war. If that was not enough to keep the world in a state of panic, India and Pakistan, both possessing nuclear weapons, began massing troops on the Punjab border rekindling the on-and-off dispute created in 1947 with the partition of India after independence from Great Britain. Disasters continued in February 2003 with the explosion of the Space shuttlelike the World Trade Center, a symbol of American ascendancy.
These catastrophes, and the continuous terrorist attacks in the Middle East and Indonesia, occurred in the midst of the dot.com stock market bust that plunged retirement plans below the water line, decimated corporate profits, raised unemployment and caused worldwide recession. After pacifying Afghanistan, the hotbed of terrorist training, in 2003 the invasion of Iraq was launched, but only after acrimony in the United Nations and dissembling by our alleged allies Germany, France and Canada and our new sometimes friend Russia. With the national mass media refusing to back their own country, the race for Baghdad was the beginning of victory and the end of respect for the so-called free press, a sad day for the efficacy of the Republic.
Interesting Times
As the Chinese say, as an ironical insult, May you live in interesting times. And indeed we did. But there is more. As Americans sought spiritual guidance in this perilous period, the mother church of all Christians erupted in an appalling scandal. Parishioners in Roman Catholic dioceses across the country were horrified as they learned that Catholic priests used the power of their holy orders to sexually molest young boys. This plunged the Church into chaos but the Pope, the Vicar of Christ and successor of St. Peter, remained strangely silent. At the same time, the Catholic Churchs first cousin, the American branch of the Church of England, began to disintegrate, laying the groundwork for schism over the election of an openly gay bishop and a movement to bless gay unions.
The institutions of religion were unraveling like the economy and then another blow was hurled as revelations emerged of massive corruption in corporate America. Beginning with the Enron scandal, company after companyincluding investment houses that handle the savings of working Americansadmitted shady practices in their public accounting. These sickening events only deflated the markets and company earnings even more.
Things are certainly improved as the New Year dawns, yet there are plenty of interesting issues on the national and global plate to deal with in the New Year. The transition of Iraq into a democratic society will continue to be troublesome. American lives will remain at risk, even in the aftermath of the capture of Saddam Hussein. But US commitment is unflagging and we are doing the right thing despite the sniping by terrorists and the New York Times. While China is ridding itself of the communist cancer, they still have their eye on repatriating Taiwan (actually the Republic of China), creating a potential super-power confrontation with the US.
Africa continues to collapse under dictators, most notably Zimbabwe under Mugabe. Although carefully pruned from the news in order to keep up the faade of the saintliness of Nelson Mandela, murders of white farmers in South Africa continue. The slab of the continent below North Africa remains very dark indeed as economies, infrastructure and security collapse. The pressure on the US to intervene is strong and will remain on the nations global agenda well into the century.
Top of the List
I predict the biggest issue the US will confront is the rising arrogance of the European Union. We saw their true colors as they postured during the Iraq war and its prelude, choosing to defy the US rather than make common accord with a dangerous and necessary operation to bring down Saddam. They did the same thing in Bosnia and we stepped in and cleaned up a mess in their own backyard due to their cowardice and ineffectiveness as a political entity, just like we did in 1917 and 1942.
The EU is a construct along the lines of the USSR. It requires disparate peoples and nations to subsume their identity and sovereignty to a higher power in the name of an ideal. This higher power is run by bureaucrats with an agenda to confront the United States in trade, global political influence and military power. This stance was born in 1957 with the Treaty of Rome between De Gaulle of France and Adenauer of West Germany to re-create the union of the Franks and Huns under Charlemagne in 800 AD that laid the groundwork for the Holy Roman Empire. These two leaders personified at that time what we glean from the pompous pronouncements of the EU today: resentment that the upstart United States saved their nations and remained on European soil to keep the peace.
This peace, guaranteed by the establishment of NATO, protected Europe from a revived Germany and a menacing Soviet Union, allowing them an unprecedented period of peace in which they have enjoyed the luxury to run their mouths. Now they go about building the EU with cast-aside Marxist central state theory using a curia of apparatchiks to enforce preposterous trade restrictions and rules as a jackboot to force compliance. As George Bush put it in his eloquent address to the British Foreign Office on his state visit to the UK last November, until 60 years ago Europe was like the Middle East, always at war, until the US stepped in and created order as we are doing in Iraq.
Thats why my man of the year from outside the US is British Prime Minister Tony Blair, not just because of his eloquent defense of the war in Iraq and his steadfast and politically dangerous commitment to the Atlantic Alliance between the UK and America, but for his refusal to drag Britain into the European Union even after calling for entry when he first ran for office.
The good news has been the setbacks recently in EU empire-building. Denmark refused to adopt the Euro, the ruble of the 21st century, and Poland walked out of a meeting when confronted with sleight-of-hand dealings by Brussels that attempted to allow member nations with lesser populations more status. The US is standing firm on trade restrictions imposed by the EU and France and Germany were excluded from the approved list of nations to be selected to bid on the reconstruction of Iraq. But look for the struggle ahead as the EU poseurs seek political, economic and military power fueled by one overriding motive: hatred and jealousy of the United States.
Man of the Year
Through these almost Biblical setbacks from 9-11 on, one man has stood strong and led us through to the Promised Land of 2004. President George W. Bush was the right leader at the right time for the United States. With his administration beset by terrorism, disasters, economic and moral collapse, global danger, betrayal by our allies and our own media, he and his team have stayed the course and got us through. This Presidency, whatever you may think of it, has done all you can ask of a man or a nation. It did what it said it would do no matter the nay-saying by the chattering class. And when it seemed the world and his own citizens had lost hope, Bush kept his. The Bush team did not wring its hands after 9-11. It went to work. As of this day there has been no terrorist attack on American soil since the World Trade Center attack. Iraq is liberated and Al-Queda is on the run. The economy, under the guidance of Federal Reserve Chairman Allan Greenspan in concert with White House policy, was carefully shepherded through dire straits back to robust health. And just as important, we have confidence that the US will deal with global military and diplomatic emergencies with deft and strength. All through American history somehow the right man is at the helm during passage of our most dangerous shoals. This time its an unlikely hero, but a hero nonetheless.
Notes from La-La Land
More really good news. Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish scientist who dared question the junk science used by activist environmentalists in his book The Skeptical Environmentalist has survived the usual auto-de-fe by academic tyrants who attempted to discredit his revelations as they did not fit the party-line embraced by green zealots. Lomborg was called before the Danish science ministry on alleged evidence that his work was clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice cooked up by a coterie within the Danish Research Agency that wanted to bring him down in a Stalinesque kangaroo court of his peers. At least this Orwellian ordeal was public. Every day in American universities a professor who dares to question the politically correct status quo is stained by secret tribunals of radical scholars who orchestrate cowardly campaigns of innuendo to prevent dissident professors from getting tenure or advancing their careers.
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And more good news. Michael Crichton, the physician, historian, writer and filmmaker has publicly pronounced, in a speech in San Francisco, that the environmental radicalism currently dictating US policy is using the same flawed data exposed by Lomborg. In reaction to the truth, Crichton says, the green radicals have transformed conservation into a religion in which belief is based on faith, not facts. Crichton feels strongly that current environmental policy is endangering the well-being of the economy, our lives and the viability of a secure future. And both Crichton and Lomborg point out the futility and waste of most recycling, now forced on the public by well-meaning municipalities with no facts to support the cost. Are we listening in our neck of the woods? No, instead in Raleigh some of us are singled out for the gulag of street-side trash pick-up in a temporary pilot program that appears to never end to cover up the truth: Recycling is costing so much they feel the need to punish a segment of the citizenry to save money some other way