This past week has seen a good many Reaganaut Reunions here in Washington DC. At several of them, we raised our glasses to toast Gorby - Mikhail Gorbachev. All of the Reagan Doctrine guys loved Gorbachev - but not quite in the same way as did the State Department squishes.Mikhail Gorbachev seemed to burst from nowhere when he became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) and leader of the USSR in March of 1985. The liberal media swooned over the smiling suave telegenic Russian - so smart, so sophisticated, so capable of making a shining success of Soviet Communism! We did everything we could to encourage the swooning press’ delusion - for we knew the truth about Gorby.

In October of 1965, Ronald Reagan came to speak at UCLA. I was a senior, and it was a depressing time to be a College Republican. Barry Goldwater had been thrashed the previous year, and my professors were so left-wing that I took one to court because of her biased grading. The UCLA Student Union was packed, SRO. There was a buzz that Reagan was considering running for governor against the entrenched Democrat, Pat Brown. My buddy and fellow CR Bill Anthony and I sat expectantly in the audience. As Reagan began to speak, he filled the room with an energy that was both exciting and soothing, and the thousand-plus students were entranced. Then he caught us by surprise.

As an Army General, Colin Powell knows how to wage war. Unfortunately, the kind of war he knows how to wage best is bureaucratic, not military. Worse than unfortunately, the war he is waging is against his own president.It is tempting to hurl accusations of treason or something close to it in the face of the State Department’s chronic obsession of coddling America’s enemies. But with rare exceptions, the Pinstripes are far from traitors and look upon themselves as loyal Americans. Conservatives need to resist the urge to question their patriotism, and examine instead their method of diplomatic reasoning - which can be characterized as Sophisticated Stupidity.

In order to understand what is going on in Iraq right now, it is simply imperative that you do a quick re-read of Childishness in Iraq written in August of 2003 and posted in Classics. This will give you the initial background on Ahmad Chalabi and the source of the vendetta Jordan’s King Hussein, the CIA, and the State Department have been conducting against him.What’s changed is that the line in the second paragraph about Jerry Bremer following the lead of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz rather than “his putative bosses at State” is no longer true. Bremer’s real boss is Robert Blackwill, Deputy National Security Advisor at the White House. He is directly in charge of US policy and operations in Iraq, and he has sold out to the squishes at State and the CIA. Which means he has sold America out to the UN.This is a first-class disaster, folks. It is the real scandal in Iraq, not the humiliation of Baathist thugs by seven yahoos in one cell block of Abu Ghraib. The trashing of Ahmad Chalabi, epitomized by Newsweek’s cover story this week entitled “Our Con Man in Iraq,” means that State and the CIA have staged a coup in Iraq - and that only Chalabi had the guts to oppose it. So he had to be destroyed.Here’s the sordid deal.

We know conclusively that the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal is as phony as a Bill Clinton sex denial because there are no calls for the resignation of the one individual most responsible for the abuses. That would be the officer in charge of Abu Ghraib and all US military prisons in Iraq, the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski. And why have there been no calls for her resignation? Let’s be honest. It is because she is a woman. Thus the frightening lesson of the abuse scandal: Political correctness trumps national security even in wartime.

The most oft-quoted line of Walt Kelly’s comic strip Pogo of the 50s and 60s is “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Given that the liberal media has so clearly become cheerleaders for America’s defeat in Iraq, it is only appropriate that To The Point refer from now on to them as the Pogo Press. Perhaps such a label will help the Bush White House to realize that the Pogo Press has become so suffused with Bush-hatred that it has become America’s Number One Enemy in the War on Terrorism. That is, the Pogos understand that America cannot be defeated militarily in Iraq, just as we couldn’t in Vietnam, and can only be defeated politically, which we were in Vietnam. Thus they are determined to engineer a Vietnam-like political defeat in Iraq no matter how catastrophic the loss of Iraqi lives in a resultant civil war or the future of freedom for the entire Middle East or America’s capacity to defend itself against Al Qaeda terrorism - that’s all worth it in order to ensure George Bush’s defeat in November.

Chinese are fond of compressing a social, political, or economic issue into a set of bullet points designated by the number of them. One of the most famous was “The Three Rounds,” encapsulating Chinese material dreams as they began emerging from the horror of Mao Tse Tung. You were wealthy in post-Mao China if you possessed a watch, a bicycle, and a sewing machine -- the three “rounds.” That was a quarter-century ago. Comparing the dream of having The Three Rounds to China’s economy today gives you an idea of how amazingly far China has traveled in that period. China has been speeding along a highway of wealth creation that has few parallels in history - yet now it looks like it is going to drive right off a cliff.What is transforming the Chinese economy from a dream to a nightmare are The Three No’s: No Water, No Wives, and No Banks.

Playwright and socialism-advocate George Bernard Shaw famously declared a century ago that “We’re all socialists now” - meaning that socialist ideas had so permeated English society they were advocated however disguised even by their opponents. The current hysteria over the “abuse” of Iraqi prisoners is evidence that American society has become so infected with envy-appeasing liberalism that “We’re all liberals now.”

Cortez and his Spanish soldiers who conquered the Aztecs are known to history as “Conquistadors.” That label of “Conquerors” was applied to them by their contemporaries -- but it originated a generation earlier. It was first used to describe the Spaniards who liberated their own country from Islam. Arab invaders had swept across Spain in the early 700s, and it took centuries for the Spanish to kick them out. Cortez was not yet 10 years old when they were finally ejected from their last stronghold in Grenada in 1492. When Cortez first looked upon the pyramid temples of the Aztec gods, he called them mezquitas -- mosques. Cortez saw himself as a liberator -- just as his fathers had liberated Spain from the Islamic yoke, so he would liberate “New Spain” from the Aztec yoke. Yet he had little idea of how deep were the political-religious parallels between the Arabs and the Aztecs. The parallels go beyond the death worship of Aztec warriors and Arab suicide-bombers. One of the latter responsible for the train bombings in Madrid declared in a letter: “You (Christians) love life -- we (Moslems) love death.” Compare this Aztec poem: There is nothing like death in war Nothing like the flowery death So precious to the gods who give us life Far off I see it! My heart yearns for it! The deeper parallel is this: both the Arabs and the Aztecs invented a Religion of Jihad as a rationale to justify their imperialist empires.

The State Department is causing most of the problems in the War in Iraq today. Squishiness is endemic to Foggy Bottom. There’s something that oozes out of Foggy Bottom that emasculates people. Richard Armitage, for example, is a powerfully built weightlifter who intimidated a lot of folks when he was at the Pentagon. Once he became a State bureaucrat, he’s just another sissified pinstripe whimpering about how the Mullah Dictatorship in Iran is really a special kind of democracy.

A prediction we hear often regarding the War on Moslem Terrorism is that it is going to last a long, long time -- for so many years into the future that no one can see the end of it. Maybe it will. Maybe it will be a war our grandchildren will be fighting when they’re our age. But no analysis of the war shows that it must be this way. It’s just a prediction, one which could turn out to be dramatically wrong. It’s entirely possible that the War on Moslem Terrorism could be won quickly.

To update you on the Freedom Research Foundation delegation to Croatia with Congressman George Radonovich, June 26-July 3:The delegation,led by me and accompanied by Congressman George Radonovich, will be focusing on investment opportunities in real estate, tourism, construction companies, and investment banking.As I mentioned last week (“The Pro-America VIP Investment European Vacation,” now posted in the Classics section), we’ll be meeting with Prime Minister Ivo Senader, government officials, business leaders and bankers.

The liberal Alphabet Media is once again doing its best to snatch American defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq. This time, however, there is a very big difference:

In the Senate of Ancient Rome, Marcus Porcius Cato - 234-149 BC, subsequently known as Cato the Elder to distinguish him from his great-grandson Cato the Younger - became famous for concluding every single speech he gave, no matter what the subject, with the exhortation: Carthago delenda est. Carthage must be destroyed.Today, we need Senators and Congressmen to conclude every speech they give with the exhortation: Fallujah delenda est. Fallujah must be destroyed.

The Moslem terrorists who bombed the Madrid trains last month are members of an Islamic movement called Takfir wal Hijra (Repentance and Migration). Originally formed in Egypt in the 1970s as part of Iqwan Muslimi (The Moslem Brotherhood), it was responsible for the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981, and scores of savage atrocities in Algeria. The organizer of the Madrid terrorism, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is a Takfir. (See Michael Ledeen’s column on Zarqawi in this week’s TTP report.)The Takfiris are now leading a “reorganized” Al Qaeda as the main Islamic threat to the West. For not only do they advocate the most purposefully vicious terrorist acts they can conceive, but also using immigration as a Trojan horse to conduct Jihad inside Western countries. As a recent Wall Street Journal article (3/29/04, pA16) puts it: Takfiris see immigration as “a key way to extend the radical ideas into Western Europe. One Takfiri scholar, Abu Basir, wrote in 2001 that ‘jihad and immigration go together...the one cannot be achieved without the other.’”Which brings me to Mexico.

To The Point salutes Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who issued the following press release in response to Israel’s targeting Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin: (Washington, D.C.) Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (CA-46), who at times has been critical of Israel, supports the killing of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. “The Israeli attack focused specifically on the head of Hamas, a terrorist organization that has claimed responsibility for slaughtering innocent civilians,” Rohrabacher said. “No one on either side of this conflict should target women, children, and the elderly.” “Killing a murderer like Sheikh Ahmed Yassin makes noncombatants safer because it eliminates one threat and sends a message to other killers. Sheikh Yassin had the blood of innocents on his hands, and was a danger to Israelis and Palestinians alike. Had he lived, he would certainly have master-minded more killing and destruction, which would then have led to more retaliation. His death is a matter for celebration. It serves the cause of peace and security in the region.” To The Point also salutes our soldiers serving in Iraq on the anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein. One year ago, I wrote “Prouder Than Ever,” in celebration of George Bush’s determination to take the fight to America’s enemies and of the American military’s competence in doing so. I remain prouder than ever of our president, our military, and of our efforts to defeat the terrorists by bringing peace and liberty to the people of Iraq. “Prouder Than Ever” is now posted in the “Classics” section.

Contrary to what you have been told all your life, history is not written by the victors. If this were true, why, then, is there not a single statue of Hernando Cortez in Mexico City? History is made by the victors, but it is the poets who write it. Spain - and Mexico’s - great tragedy is that there never was a Spanish Homer who immortalized the monumental heroism of Cortez. Instead, the Spanish got a smart-aleck novelist, Miguel Cervantes, who ridiculed Spanish heroic values in Don Quixote. It has been downhill for Spain ever since.

That’s the question conservative California Republicans are angrily demanding an answer to. Because there is no doubt in their minds that Karl Rove, the guy who runs GW’s election campaigns, is behaving as if he intentionally wants his boss to lose the Golden State in November.

Remember Robert Torricelli? He was one of the biggest crooks ever to infest the United States Senate (and that’s really saying something, isn’t it?). How crooked was he? “The Torch” was so crooked that… (Johnny Carson drum roll please…) he was too crooked even for New Jersey.The investigations of his taking bribes reached such a fever pitch that in late September of 2002, with less than five weeks before the election, he resigned and gave up his run for re-election. New Jersey law was quite specific that this was too late for the Democrat Party to nominate a replacement. But the Dems got a crooked judge to waive the law, allowing them to put Frank Lautenberg in at the last moment, who then defeated the Republican nominee Doug Forrester.A few days ago, my buddy Capt. Larry Bailey - former Commandant of the Naval Special Warfare Training Center (the place that trains the Navy SEALs) - made an interesting prediction. “You know, Jack, I wouldn’t be surprised if Kerry ends up like Torricelli.”This is not - NOT - to accuse Hanoi John of being a crook. To the best of my knowledge, John Kerry has never used his office to extort bribes like Robert Torricelli. The parallel is different and it is this:

Last week, Vladimir Putin was re-elected President of Russia with over 70% of the vote. Does this portend the re-animation of the Soviet Russian Empire, led by a man with an unchallenged grip on power, possessed with a deep nostalgia for the glory days of the USSR, and determined to bring back those days again? No, it means that Russia has taken itself out of the global game. It means that Russia has no future. It means that Russia is resolutely determined to screw itself.

A good case can be made out that the most arrogant military leaders in the world are the Brahmin generals who run the Indian Army. The hatred and intransigence they have towards Pakistan knows no bounds. Get them in their favorite easy chair at their gentlemen’s club in New Delhi and pour some single-malt scotch into them, and they’ll tell you of how someday nuclear war will be inevitable, that, yes, India will lose a few score million -- but what’s that to a nation of over a billion souls? -- but Pakistan will be wiped out and then India will divide Pakistan up into four Indian provinces and that will be that. You listen and you think these guys need to read some Greek tragedies about the fatal perils of Hubris. For the mind-blow truth is that in a nuclear showdown between Pakistan and India, Pakistan holds the high cards.