A Trip to the Moon

By Alan Caruba

Sometime in the 1980s I found myself on assignment at Cape Kennedy visiting the launch site for all the trips to the moon and the various shuttle voyages to the International Space Station. The shuttle was the size of a small building and the notion that it could be lifted beyond the pull of gravity, flown about in outer space, and return, staggers the imagination.

I was already in my early 30s by the time the United States of America put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon on July 20, 1969. I can recall when President John F. Kennedy spoke of sending men to the moon in 1961.

The subject was primarily the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States that already involved building an arsenal of missiles. That rivalry had sparked the Cold War that began at the end of World War Two in 1945. It was the focus of Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. In 1957, the Soviets had launched Sputnik, a small device that circled the Earth emitting a beeping noise. It confirmed that the Soviets were ahead of the U.S. The space program was a cover for the acceleration of missile technology.

There is a cruel irony in the fact that, with the last launch of the shuttle program, the U.S. no longer has the means to put humans in space and must, in fact, secure the assistance of the Russian Federation to send or return its astronauts from the International Space Station.

The Apollo program was an extraordinary achievement in many ways, but the reason the U.S. sent men to the moon was to demonstrate it could also launch a devastating response to the Soviet Union in the event of a missile attack or even a preemptive attack of our own. The message was not lost on the Russians.

So, we put men on the moon, collected a bunch of moon rocks, confirmed it is entirely inhospitable to habitation, and have not returned since December 1972.

Indeed, all of space is inhospitable to mankind. We are Earth-bound creatures and can exist in space only in obscenely expensive vehicles. Meanwhile, unmanned satellites of every description perform a myriad of services including the exploration of lifeless planets far, far away.

On September 12, 1962, President Kennedy, speaking at Rice University, said, “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

“Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” This was a quintessentially American attitude and explains how in those years and earlier, Americans achieved so much. It explains why Americans pushed beyond the western borders of the original Thirteen States until they reached the Pacific Ocean. It explains how and why they built a vast system of railroads, turned fertile plains into a breadbasket for the nation and vast engine of export. It is why we developed so many technologies we and the rest of the world now take for granted.

Capitalism built this nation. Socialism is destroying it.

The generation of the 1960s and since has also managed to spend themselves into horrendous debt. President Johnson who replaced an assassinated JFK not only expanded a war in Vietnam, but instituted a “Great Society” program in “a war on poverty.” It was a precursor of recent “stimulus” programs. In the process, the nation wasted billions, along with more than 50,000 lives of a generation of young men. President Reagan restored the economy to balance in the 1980s, but since then the profligate spending has not ceased.

The trip to the moon was an exciting adventure, but its purpose was to deter the Soviet Union from gaining too great an advantage over our national security. Today, the present administration stands by idly as Iran develops its own missile and nuclear weapons programs. The Iranians have done so with assistance from the Russians.

Our financial crisis has left Americans feeling defeated in our own eyes and looking weak in the eyes of our allies and our enemies. We have done this to ourselves with “entitlement” programs that began in the 1930s and by allowing an “environmental” movement to strangle domestic development and thwart access to our own vast reserves of energy.

The people whose parents and grandparents put men on the moon stand by as the present national leadership fails and refuses to come to grips with the present challenges. They stand by as their schools turn out new generations that cannot spell, don’t like to read, have little grasp of their nation’s history or values, and rank lower and lower among other nations as educated people.

A tea party in Boston helped launch a war that established our sovereignty and our ascendance among all other nations. A Tea Party today, a movement of patriotic Americans, is all that stands between a nation that sent men to the moon and one that is headed hell-bent to the poorhouse.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Time to Leave Afghanistan

By Alan Caruba

The Greek philosopher Plato said, “Only the dead know the end of war.” I doubt that in the five thousand years of what we call civilization there has ever been a day when war has not been taking place somewhere on the planet. All wars, in one fashion or another, however, have to come to an end.

The war in Afghanistan has degraded into a distraction from the nation’s desperately deteriorating financial situation. Even worse, it is part of that problem. On January 30, 2009, Bill Bonnor, best known for his newsletter, Dead Reckoning, wrote the following:

“’Bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy’, was what he (Osama bin laden) was up to, he said in a videotape. He even did the math. ‘Every dollar spent by al-Qaeda in attacking the United States has cost Washington $1 million in economic fallout and military spending’, said the report.

“’We, alongside the mujahideen, bled Russian for ten years, [in Afghanistan] until it went bankrupt…So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.’”

Can anyone deny that bin Laden was right? Can anyone deny that the U.S. under Presidents Bush and Obama has now expended billions in the name of bringing democracy to people who should be responsible for overthrowing their own despots? There was, after all, a time when the U.S. was an ally of bin Laden and even of Saddam Hussein!

On May 9, Rasmussen Reports noted that 56% of those surveyed favored bringing U.S. troops home from Afghanistan within a year. What do the people know that all the genius strategists in the State Department and Pentagon do not? They know these wars, Iraq included, are a distraction from our real problems.

I do not know how many times over the years since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq I have written that we should withdraw our troops. I have noted how extended military occupations and expeditions have historically always drained and destroyed empires from the Roman to the British and now the present day Pax Americana.

America is now over $14 trillion in debt and yet we keep sending billions to nations like Pakistan and to the United Nations, most of whom must think us stupid beyond belief.

The exception to this was the long Cold War that America fought against the former Soviet Union from the end of World War Two until the collapse of the Berlin Wall and eventual collapse of that Communist nation in 1991. That collapse, however, was facilitated by the decision of the former Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan!

Over the course of the forty-six years the Cold War ground on, the U.S. fought hot wars in Korea and Vietnam. We spent what we had to for a powerful military deterrent. From Truman to Bush41 Presidents remained firm in their determination to resist the Soviet Union.

The war with Islam is different. The asymmetrical war waged against America, Israel, and the West began in earnest after Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979 and continued through a succession of al Qaeda attacks on U.S. Marines in Beirut, U.S. embassies, the USS Cole, and ultimately 9/11. Israel has had to wage a war of self defense since its first day 63 years ago. Most recently, it resisted Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

Islam has been around since the seventh century A.D. Its initial success saw it sweep across vast regions of the Middle East, Africa, India, up into Spain and to the gates of Europe. The inherent failure of Islam has been its resistance to all Western values that confirm the dignity of the individual, representative government, and the advances of science, literature, and the arts.

Our global opponents, Russia and China among others, are pleased that America must drain its treasury and expend the blood of its children to hold the line against Islam, but it is a short-sighted strategic error because they will find themselves on the frontlines of the war that we have been waging with massive troop deployments. Consider how much more effective drones and special operations have been.

Europe has reluctantly discovered the enemy in their midst. The flood of Muslims it invited as workers because of its failure to ensure a sufficient native population is causing Europeans to grasp at measures to either placate the Muslim population or outlaw some of its practices. The fear is palpable and is why some now refer to it as Eurabia.

NATO nations, rarely credited, have been by our side throughout the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. They are now charged with determining the outcome of the insurgency in Libya, but Britain is making plans for an early withdrawal from Afghanistan for the same reasons outlined above.

It is a very old war. In 732 A.D., Muslims were defeated at Poitiers, France, halting their expansion. In 1492, Christians recaptured Grenada, the last Muslim stronghold in Europe. In 1683 A.D. Muslims were defeated near Vienna. Europe was safe, but that was then and this is now.

It is reason enough for America and European nations to put their financial houses to avoid a collapse that will leave us vulnerable to the most terrible scourge of mankind.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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