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I'll have more blogging later today.

BONUS: Fritz Fischer, Germany's Aims in the First World War.

Former CIA Director James Woolsey to Advise #DonaldTrump's Campaign (VIDEO)

He's obviously a very serious guy, and I've seen him recently on Fox News. He's been offering an ice cold analysis of the increasingly catastrophic global jihad threat.

He's a great pick for the Trump campaign:

Fifteen Years Later, al-Qaeda Threat Has Grown

From Thomas Jocelyn, at the Weekly Standard, "The Al Qaeda Threat Grows":

Fifteen years after the September 11, 2001, hijackings, the al Qaeda threat is growing. Al Qaeda has the capacity to attempt a mass casualty attack inside the U.S. and Europe today.

Many assume that al Qaeda is a spent force, especially after the surge of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi’s Islamic State. But they are wrong. Years of erroneous assessments have clouded our vision of an enemy that remains committed to its anti-American cause...

Keep reading.

Terror Attacks Fuel Debate Over Migrants in Europe (VIDEO)

I'm past worrying about when people are going to wake up.

There's actually no outrage in Europe. It's all daisy-chains and hippie candles (and calls for French fries, oddly enough). The Paris piano-man's going to be singing "Imagine" in Maelbeek any minute now, no doubt. "Solidarity" will see us through, you know. There's no time for the "hate."

It's Pollyanna all the way around.

At the New York Times, "Brussels Attacks Fuel Debate Over Migrants in a Fractured Europe":

LONDON — It did not take long. Almost as soon as the bombs went off in Brussels on Tuesday morning, the new act of terrorism in the heart of Europe was employed in the bitter debate about the influx of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.

Even before the identities and nationalities of the attackers were known, there was an immediate association in popular discourse between the attacks on the airport and subway station in Brussels and the migrant crisis. Right-wing politicians and average citizens alike raised concerns that groups like the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the attacks, are slipping radicalized recruits, including European jihadists, through the vast migrant stream and into an unprepared Europe.

The murderous attacks in another European capital — just days after the Belgians finally tracked down the sole surviving suspect in a series of similarly coordinated attacks that killed 130 people in and around Paris in November — prompted new questions about European solidarity and security. And they came during a period of severe self-doubt about the European Union, with low growth, high unemployment, and the threat of a British exit from the bloc, to be decided in a June referendum.

“There is a growing perception among European public opinion that E.U. leaders are not in control of the Continent’s terrorist threat,” said Mujtaba Rahman of the Eurasia Group, a political risk and consulting company. “Combined, these attacks will increase xenophobic and anti-immigration sentiment across the E.U., which has already been rising in light of the E.U.’s ongoing refugee crisis.”

Right-wing parties all over Europe, and especially the Alternative for Germany party, “have and will continue to conflate refugees with terrorism,” Mr. Rahman said. “This will in turn put more pressure on incumbent governments and limit their space for policy action to address Europe’s multiple crises.”

Nigel Farage, a leader of the populist, conservative U.K. Independence Party, said: “I think we’ve reached a point where we have to admit to ourselves, in Britain and France and much of the rest of Europe, that mass immigration and multicultural division has for now been a failure.”

The attacks will also put more strain on the deal brokered last week by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany with the Turkish government to restrict the migrant flow into Europe, in return for more liberal visa arrangements for travel into Europe by Turkish nationals. That deal was already being criticized as a security threat to Europe and had been questioned on humanitarian and legal grounds...

More.

The PKK: America's Marxist Ally in Iraq

This is a great piece.

I read it ungated on my iPhone last night, but it's behind the subscription wall now. No matter, just click through at the Google link and you can read it.

See, "A Personal War: America's Marxist Allies Against ISIS."

The Sinking of the Lusitania

One hundred years ago today.

There's a new book out from Erik Larson on the mystery, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania.

And see Hampton Sides, at NYT, "Erik Larson’s ‘Dead Wake,’ About the Lusitania."

Remembrance Day 2014: Tower of London Poppies

At the Independent UK, "Remembrance Day 2014: Tower of London Poppy installation captured by drone camera."

Also, at the Toronto Sun, "Tower of London poppy display takes on life of its own."

And CBS Evening News had a wonderful feature the other night:

Labour Party Leader Ed Miliband Slammed for 'Pathetic' and 'Distasteful' Wreath Message

Figures. The dude's a died-in-the-wool leftist.

At the Telegraph UK, "Ed Miliband branded 'crass' for not signing wreath for First World War commemoration":

Labour leader's wreath carries no name or personal message in 'disrespectful' omission.

Miliband not bothering to write a card is not "playing politics" it is a fundamental stain on his character as a political leader. Fail.

— Louise Mensch (@LouiseMensch) August 4, 2014

Rare Archive Footage from Start of World War One in 1914

Via Telegraph UK:

Early cinema newsreel from 1914 captures the outbreak of World War One in Europe.

From the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914 to Britain’s declaration of war on Germany in August of that year, the Telegraph looks the momentous events which defined the The Great War.

An intricate web of alliances began to crumble as nationalist and imperialist rhetoric reached fever-pitch well before 1914.

The Great Powers responded by mobilising their entire populations for a period of total war.

And ICYMI, from last Monday, "100 Years Ago Today: Austria-Hungary Declares War on Serbia."

100 Years Ago Today: Austria-Hungary Declares War on Serbia

When I was going to sleep last night, actually early this morning because it was after Midnight, I noticed it was July 28th, and I thought about that for second. One hundred years ago. Wasn't that the start of World War One? Then I googled it: July 28 1914. Nothing dramatic at the results, besides a few newspapers with WWI coverage.

Then this morning, after I got up and starting web surfing, I checked over at RealClearHistory for more. Seen there:

* Samuel Chi, "Top 10 Battles of World War I."
* David Reynolds, "How WWI Shaped Our World."
* Alan Taylor, "The Great War: A History in Photos."

Plus, commentary at Grim's Hall, "100 Years ago today..."

I'll have more blogging later...

Finished Reading A Soldier of the Great War Yesterday

One of Bird Dog's great pearls of wisdom, long ago (so long, I've no interest in searching for a link), suggested that bloggers need to frequently unplug from the Internet and enjoy the real beauties of life, which are of course offline.

I don't take that advice enough, despite telling myself I should on a daily basis. But yesterday, except for a couple of overnight posts and one mid-day update, I spent the whole day reading, making love to my wife, and enjoying the evening with my youngest son.

I finally finished Mark Helprin's epic novel of World War I, A Soldier of the Great War, which I started last year, in May or June. I read the book on and off again, and of course interspersed reading fiction with all the other stuff I'm normally reading, non-fiction books, and especially political science and policy journals. And that's to say nothing of my daily newspaper reading, especially online, and blogging.

But Helprin's an amazing writer. I indeed took to this book from the opening pages. Occasionally you start a new book and it just doesn't grab you. I've put a few novels back down over the last couple of years because they just didn't do it for me. But I knew I liked A Soldier of the Great War from the opening pages. And then, this last few weeks, when I was down to the last few hundred pages of the book, I just buckled down to finish it. In the old days, when I was an undergraduate especially, I used to read a lot of fiction. I didn't do a whole lot else. I didn't watch as much television. I worked a lot, attended my college classes, went to the gym and hung out with my younger sister (not to mention my mom). Sometimes I would read a novel in just a few days. I can remember reading massive tomes like War and Peace back in the day, and The Fountainhead. With the exception of my schoolwork, there weren't as many distractions as we have today, especially with the Internet and social media. Plus, I have a family nowadays, so that takes a lot of time, lol.

In any case, be sure to read this wonderful novel. Mark Helprin's a conservative who occasionally posts op-eds to the Wall Street Journal (or at least he used to). Here's the book blurb at Amazon:

Alessandro Giuliani, the young son of a prosperous Roman lawyer, enjoys an idyllic life full of privilege: he races horses across the country to the sea, he climbs mountains in the Alps, and, while a student of painting at the ancient university in Bologna, he falls in love. Then the Great War intervenes. Half a century later, in August of 1964, Alessandro, a white-haired professor, tall and proud, meets an illiterate young factory worker on the road. As they walk toward Monte Prato, a village seventy kilometers away, the old man—a soldier and a hero who became a prisoner and then a deserter, wandering in the hell that claimed Europe—tells him how he tragically lost one family and gained another. The boy, envying the richness and drama of Alessandro's experiences, realizes that this magnificent tale is not merely a story: it's a recapitulation of his life, his reckoning with mortality, and above all, a love song for his family.

War Guilt: Questions of Culpability Still Divide German WWI Historians

At Der Spiegel, "World War I Guilt: Culpability Question Divides Historians Today":

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I and the 75th of the start of World War II. Questions over the degree of German guilt remain contentious among historians, who have been fighting over the issue for years.

In his book "The Blood Intoxication of the Bolsheviks," published in the early 1920s, a certain R. Nilostonsky described a particularly horrific form of torture used in the Russian civil war. A rat was placed into an iron pipe, which was then pressed against the body of a prisoner. When the torturers placed the other end of the pipe against a fire, the panic-stricken rat had only one choice: to eat its way through the prisoner.

When Hitler met with his officers on Feb. 1, 1943, after the defeat at Stalingrad, he told them that he suspected some German prisoners were likely to commit treason. "You have to imagine a prisoner being brought to Moscow, and then imagine the 'rat cage.' That prisoner will sign anything."

Historian Ernst Nolte published an essay in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper on June 6, 1986. In it, he suggested that Hitler's use of the term "rat cage" meant that the Nazi leader had heard of the Soviet form of torture involving a rat and a pipe. For Nolte, this served as evidence of the fear that Hitler and his men had of the Russians, a fear that could have "prompted" them to commit genocide.

In 1988, historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler published a book in which he devoted an entire chapter to the "rat cage," in an effort to prove that Nolte's theory was wrong.

As much as their debate seemed to revolve around rats, the real issue was culpability. How much guilt has Germany acquired throughout its history? And does the anecdote about Hitler and the Russian rat torture somehow diminish German guilt?

This year will be a historic one, marking three important anniversaries: the 100th anniversary of the eruption of World War I, the 75th anniversary of the start of World War II and the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The first two dates have been the source of heated debates among German intellectuals. The Fischer controversy in the early 1960s had to do with assigning blame for the eruption of World War I, while the dispute between historians in the mid-1980s revolved around culpability for the Holocaust. Both debates were informed by the positions in what was then a divided nation, including views on German unification.

History is not just history, but also a part of the present. This is especially true of Germany. The overwhelming history of the 20th century engulfed the country and shaped the consciousness of politically active citizens.

Both debates ended in victory for those who advocated Germany accepting the greatest possible culpability and therefore sought to exclude the possibility of German reunification, fearing that a unified Germany could lead to fatal consequences, perhaps even a third world war. As a result, German consciousness was strongly influenced by this acceptance of guilt for decades to come.

A New Identity for Germans?

In the meantime, new information has come to light on the issues in both debates, which tends to support the losing side. Could this lead to a new national identity for Germans?

The importance of this question underscores the need to revisit the Fischer controversy and the dispute among historians in this historic year. It also focuses our attention, once again, on a controversial concept of the day: revisionism. It was once anathema to one side of the debate, and subsequently to the other. But it's a necessary debate.

A device that has already been relegated to history stands on the desk of Hans-Ulrich Wehler: a typewriter. In a sense, Wehler lives between the Netherlands and Italy, in a white house on the outskirts of the northwestern German city of Bielefeld, near the underground Dutch-Italian natural gas pipeline. For Wehler, living so close to the pipeline means that nothing can be built to spoil his view. When he sits in his office, he looks out at trees and meadows. Behind him are enough books to take an ordinary person an entire life to read, but for Wehler they represent only a small portion of his reading material.

He was a professor at the University of Bielefeld for 25 years. His most important work is a book called "Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte" (German Social History). Wehler, 82, is a slim, cheerful man with a hint of the singsong accent typical of the Rhineland region.

When he was an assistant professor at the University of Cologne in the early 1960s, Wehler attended a colloquium led by Hamburg historian Fritz Fischer. But he was disappointed. He had expected something wild and exciting, but Fischer was a conservative man who "engaged in the conventional history of diplomacy."

More.

And go to the source, "Fritz Fischer, "GERMANY AND THE OUTBREAK OF WAR."

How World War I Helped America's Rise to Superpower Status

At Der Spiegel, "'We Saved the World': WWI and America's Rise as a Superpower."

PREVIOUSLY: "100 Years Later, the Continuing Relevance of World War I."

100 Years Later, the Continuing Relevance of World War I

I can't recall reading a better newspaper summary of World War I, at Der Spiegel, "Disaster Centennial: The Disturbing Relevance of World War I":

It has now been 100 years since the outbreak of World War I, but the European catastrophe remains relevant today. As the Continent looks back this year, old wounds could once again be rubbed raw.

Joachim Gauck, the 11th president of the Federal Republic of Germany, executes his duties in a palace built for the Hohenzollern dynasty. But almost all memories of Prussian glory have been eliminated from Bellevue Palace in Berlin, where there is no pomp and there are no uniforms and few flags. The second door on the left in the entrance hall leads into a parlor where Gauck receives visitors.

In the so-called official room, there are busts of poet Heinrich von Kleist and Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert, the first German president after Kaiser Wilhelm II fled the country into exile, on a shelf behind the desk. There are two paintings on the wall: an Italian landscape by a German painter, and a view of Dresden by Canaletto, the Italian painter. Gauck likes the symbolism. Nations and their people often view both the world and the past from different perspectives. The president says that he doesn't find this disconcerting, because he is aware of the reasons. In 2014, the year of the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, the eyes of the world will be focused on Germany's head of state. It will be the biggest historical event to date in the 21st century.

And Gauck represents the losers.

More than 60 million soldiers from five continents participated in that orgy of violence. Almost one in six men died, and millions returned home with injuries or missing body parts -- noses, jaws, arms. Countries like France, Belgium and the United Kingdom are planning international memorial events, wreath-laying ceremonies, concerts and exhibits, as are faraway nations like New Zealand and Australia, which formed their identities during the war.

Poles, citizens of the Baltic countries, Czechs and Slovaks will also commemorate the years between 1914 and 1918, because they emerged as sovereign nations from the murderous conflict between the Entente and the Central Powers.

Unthinkable in Germany

In the coming months, World War I will become a mega issue in the public culture of commemoration. The international book market will present about 150 titles in Germany alone, and twice as many in France -- probably a world record for a historic subject. The story of a generation that has long passed on will be retold. New questions will be asked and new debates will unfold. British Prime Minister David Cameron is even making funds available to enable all children attending Britain's government-run schools to visit the battlefields of the Western Front.

A response of this nature would be unthinkable in pacifist Germany.

But Western Europeans paid a higher death toll in World War I than in any other war in their history, which is why they call it "The Great War" or "La Grande Guerre." Twice as many Britons, three times as many Belgians and four times as many Frenchmen died on the Maas and the Somme than in all of World War II. That's one of the reasons, says Gauck in his office in the Hohenzollern palace, why he could imagine "a German commemoration of World War I as merely a sign of respect for the suffering of those we were fighting at the time."

The "Great War" was not only particularly bloody, but it also ushered in a new era of warfare, involving tanks, aircraft and even chemical weapons. Its outcome would shape the course of history for years to come, even for an entire century in some regions.

In the coming weeks, SPIEGEL will describe the consequences of World War I that continue to affect us today: the emergence of the United States as the world's policeman, France's unique view of Germany, the ethnic hostilities in the Balkans and the arbitrary drawing of borders in the Middle East, consequences that continue to burden and impede the peaceful coexistence of nations to this day.

Several summit meetings are scheduled for the 2014 political calendar, some with and some without Gauck. Queen Elizabeth II will receive the leaders of Commonwealth countries in Glasgow Cathedral. Australia, New Zealand, Poland and Slovenia are also planning meetings of the presidents or prime ministers of all or selected countries involved in World War I.

'A Different Nation Today'

August 3 is at the top of Gauck's list. On that day, he and French President François Hollande will commemorate the war dead at Hartmannswillerkopf, a peak in the Alsace region that was bitterly contested by the Germans and the French in the war. The German president is also among the more than 50 heads of state of all countries involved in World War I who will attend a ceremony at the fortress of Liège hosted by Belgium's King Philippe. Gauck, a former citizen of East Germany, sees himself as "the German who represents a different nation today, and who remembers the various horrors that are associated with the German state."

The 73-year-old president hopes that the series of commemorative events will remind Europeans how far European integration has come since 1945. Gauck notes that the "absolute focus on national interests" à la 1914/1918 did not led to happy times for any of the wartime enemies.

But he knows that the memory of the horrors of a war doesn't just reconcile former enemies but can also tear open wounds that had become scarred over. In this respect, the centenary of World War I comes at an unfavorable time. Many European countries are seeing a surge of nationalist movements and of anti-German sentiment prior to elections to the European Parliament in May 2014.

In a recent poll, 88 percent of Spanish, 82 percent of Italian and 56 percent of French respondents said that Germany has too much influence in the European Union. Some even likened today's Germany to the realm of the blustering Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Last August, a British journalist emerged from a conversation with the press attaché at the German Embassy in London with the impression that Berlin, in the interest of promoting reconciliation, wanted to take part in commemorative ceremony in neighboring countries. This led to an outcry in the British press, which claimed that the Germans were trying to prevent the British from celebrating their victory in World War I ...

It's a fairly long read, but worth your time.

Keep reading.

And previously, "Today's Parallels with World War One's International Politics."

Blackadder Libel: The Left's Typically Depraved Attack on Britain's Education Secretary Michael Gove

I had to look up "Blackadder," not being British and all.

Although I do have some knowledge of the origins of World War I, not to mention the left's nihilistic antiwar hatred of anything resembling patriotic memory. Thus this debate over the comments made by British Education Secretary Michael Gove are completely predictable.

The background's at London's Daily Mail, "Michael Gove blasts 'Blackadder myths' about the First World War spread by television sit-coms and left-wing academics":

Left-wing myths about the First World War peddled by Blackadder belittle Britain and clear Germany of blame, Michael Gove says today.

The Education Secretary criticises historians and TV programmes that denigrate patriotism and courage by depicting the war as a ‘misbegotten shambles’.

As Britain prepares to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of the war, Mr Gove claims only undergraduate cynics would say the soldiers were foolish to fight.

In an article for the Daily Mail, Mr Gove says he has little time for the view of the Department for Culture and the Foreign Office that the commemorations should not lay fault at Germany’s door.

The Education Secretary says the conflict was a ‘just war’ to combat aggression by a German elite bent on domination.

‘The First World War may have been a uniquely horrific war, but it was also plainly a just war,’ he says. ‘The ruthless social Darwinism of the German elites, the pitiless approach they took to occupation, their aggressively expansionist war aims and their scorn for the international order all made resistance more than justified.’

Gove's comments are uncontroversial and smack dab within the historical consensus on both the origins of the war and the counterfactual expectations had Britain not fought in 1914. But leftists are so bloody blinkered with hatred that any historical just-war affirmation is shot down with stupid faux righteousness.

There's more on this at the Independent UK, "Cambridge history professor hits back at Michael Gove's 'ignorant attack'":

The battlefield hostilities may have officially terminated 96 years ago but the argument over the rights and wrongs of the First World War show little sign having been settled. Today, one of Britain’s most eminent historians hit back at what he described as an “ignorant attack” by Education Secretary Michael Gove on his analysis of the conflict.

Writing in the Daily Mail yesterday Mr Gove accused Professor Sir Richard Evans of failing to acknowledge the debt owed to the soldiers that were killed in the Great War claiming he had previously dismissed attempts to honour their sacrifice as “narrow tub-thumping jingoism”.

Sir Richard, Regius Professor of History and President of Wolfson College Cambridge, suggested the criticism stemmed from his vocal opposition to the Education Secretary’s ill-fated attempts to reform the way history is taught in schools.

Professor Evans told The Independent: “I never said that at all. I said his proposals for the National Curriculum were narrow tub-thumping jingoism and there is some relationship between that.”  In his article Mr Gove claimed that the centenary of the start of the war which is being marked this year should not be seen “through the fictional prism” of Oh! What a Lovely War and Black Adder which characterised the four years of fighting which cost 16m lives and resulted in 20m wounded as a “series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite”. “Even to this day there are left-wing academics all too happy to feed these myths,” he wrote.

However, Professor Evans accused Mr Gove of oversimplification.  “How can you possibly claim that Britain was fighting for democracy and liberal values when the main ally was Tsarist Russia? That was a despotism that put Germany in the shade and sponsored pogroms in 1903-6.”

He said that unlike Germany where male suffrage was universal – 40 per cent of those British troops fighting in the war did not have the vote until 1918. “The Kaiser was not like Hitler, he was not a dictator. He could never make his mind up and changed his mind every five minutes. The largest political party in Germany in 1914 were the Social Democrats,” he said. “Germany was a very divided country in 1914 and becomes more so as time goes on. It is not Nazi Germany,” he added.

Professor Evans agreed with Mr Gove that the debate about the war is too much shaped by popular culture. “I think the Government has got it about right. I think the Department for Culture Media and Sport has made money available for groups and institutions to mark the war in any way they see fit. That is the right thing to do. I don’t think anyone should try and impose their political view on the public. The kind of debate we are having now is the right thing to do.”

Professor Gary Sheffield of the University of Wolverhampton, who was praised by Mr Gove for his recent study of Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haig, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force whose Western Front offensives cost nearly one million British lives, said it was not a question of ideology.

“Mr Gove’s politics and mine are pretty different but the view he has put forward is right. What he was wrong about however is that there is a left-right split – there isn’t,” he said.

“The publicity that has been kicking off around the centenary has reflected the Black Adder point of view although he (Mr Gove) is wrong to single it out – it is satire not documentary.”

Professor Sheffield said mainstream historians had been revising their opinions of the conflict over the past three decades overturning the “bad war” theory which had taken hold in the 1930s.

“The war was fought for defensive reasons and Europe would have been a very dark place if Germany had not been defeated. Imperial Germany wasn’t as bad as Nazi Germany but it was bad enough,” he said. “We don’t want this year to be a jingoistic carnival of celebration but rather a sober understanding that what Britain was fighting for was important. It was a war against aggression,” he added.

I disagree with Professor Sheffield on the so called left/right split. The popular culture is already screwed. And should the grade school curriculum be polluted with blather about how the war was a waste of lives, a "misbegotten shambles," then the left's antiwar meme will be indoctrinating generations of British youth.

Here's Gove's initial piece that brought forth the leftist spew, "Why does the Left insist on belittling true British heroes? MICHAEL GOVE asks damning question as the anniversary of the First World War approaches." And more typical antiwar bilge, at the far left New Statesman, "Michael Gove defends deaths of 37 million people as 'just'."

Today's Parallels with World War One's International Politics

An interesting commentary, at the Economist, "The first world war:Look back with angst":

Humanity can learn from its mistakes, as shown by the response to the economic crisis, which was shaped by a determination to avoid the mistakes that led to the Depression. The memory of the horrors unleashed a century ago makes leaders less likely to stumble into war today. So does the explosive power of a modern conflagration: the threat of a nuclear holocaust is a powerful brake on the reckless escalation that dispatched a generation of young men into the trenches.

Yet the parallels remain troubling. The United States is Britain, the superpower on the wane, unable to guarantee global security. Its main trading partner, China, plays the part of Germany, a new economic power bristling with nationalist indignation and building up its armed forces rapidly. Modern Japan is France, an ally of the retreating hegemon and a declining regional power. The parallels are not exact—China lacks the Kaiser’s territorial ambitions and America’s defence budget is far more impressive than imperial Britain’s—but they are close enough for the world to be on its guard.

Which, by and large, it is not. The most troubling similarity between 1914 and now is complacency. Businesspeople today are like businesspeople then: too busy making money to notice the serpents flickering at the bottom of their trading screens. Politicians are playing with nationalism just as they did 100 years ago. China’s leaders whip up Japanophobia, using it as cover for economic reforms, while Shinzo Abe stirs Japanese nationalism for similar reasons. India may next year elect Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist who refuses to atone for a pogrom against Muslims in the state he runs and who would have his finger on the button of a potential nuclear conflict with his Muslim neighbours in Pakistan. Vladimir Putin has been content to watch Syria rip itself apart. And the European Union, which came together in reaction to the bloodshed of the 20th century, is looking more fractious and riven by incipient nationalism than at any point since its formation.

Continue reading.

I think the U.S. is a far more dominant country than most people admit, and thus this idea of China playing the role of Germany (and it's bid for European dominance in the early 20th century) is a stretch to me. And the key technology today is nuclear weapons, which will prevent a great power war even if China catches up to the U.S. (which will be decades if not centuries from now).

An interesting piece, in any case.

Wave of Car Bombings Across Iraq

Terrorists are emboldened by this administration's cowardly retreat from global leadership and resolve.

At CSM, "Bombings across Iraq now touch on formerly safe havens":

A rash of car bombs killed dozens across Baghdad on Monday, the latest in a series of deadly bombings that have racked Iraq over the past several days. The violence has brought the country's civilian death toll to its worst level since 2008.

Al Jazeera reports that nine car bombs killed at least 24 people and wounded scores more, largely in the Iraqi capital's Shiite neighborhoods.

The bombs hit eight different areas on Monday, the deadliest blast tore through a small vegetable market and its car park, killing seven people including two soldiers and wounding sixteen others, a police officer said.

That was followed by four parked car bombs, which went off in quick succession in the neighbourhoods of New Baghdad, Habibiya, Sabaa al-Bour and Kazimiyah - all striking outdoor markets or car parks.

Media reports put the casualty figures at a minimum of 24 dead and 75 wounded to at least 40 killed and more than 170 injured.

Monday's bombings follow several attacks over the weekend in Baghdad. On Sunday, a suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque in the city of Musayyib, about 50 miles south of Baghdad, left 47 dead. And the Kurdish city of Erbil, which had largely been devoid of the violence affecting the rest of the country, saw a series of bombings on Sunday that killed six security officers, according to Kurd news outlet Rudaw.

Although no one has claimed responsibility for the attacks in Baghdad, BBC News reports that "Sunni Muslim insurgents have been blamed for much of the most recent violence."

More at WaPo, "Wave of bombings mainly in Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad kills at least 55."

How Muslims Celebrate September 11th

With cake. What else.

Via My Pet Jawa.



And of course if you criticize this you're RAAAAACIST!!

Lakewood Honors Fallen Veterans on Memorial Day

From yesterday's Long Beach Press Telegram, "Memorial Day: Lakewood honors fallen veterans":

LAKEWOOD -- For many Americans, Memorial Day is a break from work, a day marked by barbecues and special sales.

Veterans, their families and others who gathered at Del Valle Park on Monday for Lakewood's annual Memorial Day ceremony see it differently, as a time to honor those who served their country and gave their lives so it may yet fulfill its promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Los Angeles County Department of Military and Veterans Affairs Chief Deputy Director Stephanie A. Stone noted a somber set of numbers from the last 100 years in her keynote address: more than 100,000 dead in World War I, 400,000 in World War II, 36,000 in the Korean War, 58,000 in Vietnam and 6,000 in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"This day is reserved for the men and women who were part of our lives," Stone said.

"The fathers and the mothers, the sisters and the brothers, the sons and the daughters who lived in our town, went to our schools, played with our children and prayed in our churches."

Lakewood Mayor Steve Croft suggested in his own remarks that the gratitude of the crowd should continue past the day's ceremony.

As a decade of war comes to an end, Croft said, the nation must support, encourage and nurture hundreds of thousands of veterans who need help restarting their lives.

"The challenges facing veterans today range from unemployment to homelessness, to mental, emotional and physical impacts that must be addressed," said Croft.

The mayor noted that many of Lakewood's earliest homebuyers in the 1950s were veterans who fought in World War II, and in a spirit of volunteerism, some founded the Lakewood Youth Sports program and did other work to build the city into what it is today.

"It's our turn now," Croft said, urging citizens to do what they can to ensure that veterans have access to education, jobs and other services so they may transition from war.

Memorial Day

A fabulous photograph via Rep. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers:

And for some linkage, in no particular order:

* Black Five, "MEMORIAL DAY."

* Fox News, "Americans gather to honor fallen service members on Memorial Day."

* Leif Babin, at WSJ, "A Tradition of Sacrifice, From Yorktown to Ramadi."

* The Los Angeles Times, "CALIFORNIA'S WAR DEAD."

* Walter Russell Mead, "A Day of Dedication."

* Ralph Kinney Bennett, at the American, "Fallen Heroes, Never Forgotten."

* "Sebastian Junger, at the Washington Post, "Sharing the Moral Burden of War."

* Wall Street Journal, "Memorial Day."