THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Gabrielle Interviews: Major Bevelacqua, Fox News Military Analyst

Gabrielle Interviews: Major Bevelacqua, Fox News Military Analyst

Interview January 2nd, 2005:

Major Bob Bevelacqua, Fox News Military Analyst, is on the ground in Iraq. Major Bob answered the following questions regarding the Iraq elections, in an interview conducted via email:

Gabrielle: Do you anticipate the terrorist attacks will decrease after the elections in January?

Major Bob: No, actually I expect attacks to increase both on and after the elections. The insurgents and terrorists must demonstrate that even though a new Iraqi government has been elected they are powerless to stop or control the insurgency.

Gabrielle: If the Sunni’s do boycott the elections, how do you suspect that will affect the election results and how the election is received in Iraq?

Major Bob: The election results due to a Sunni boycott will show a probable landslide for Shia and Kurdish parties. This will give the insurgency the extra support they need to demonstrate the illegitimacy of the government and call for a general uprising. However, I expect prominent Sunni leadership out of the Al Anbar region to join Dr. Allawi’s party and surprise many insurgent groups.

Gabrielle: What role is Al-Sadr and his militia playing in these elections now?

Major Bob: They are playing no role other than the Office of Muqtada Al Sadr (OMAS) participating as a party. They have a weak party platform other than their stance on two issues; immediate removal of Coalition Forces, and allowing militias to exist.

Gabrielle: What role are the Kurds playing?

Major Bob: Three prominent Kurdish parties; Patriotic Union of Kurdistan under Talabani, Kurdistan Democratic Party under Brazani and the Kurdistan Islamic Union under Baha Al-Din are somewhat similar in their party agendas – a sovereign territory for the Kurds. They will probably side with Shia parties that appear to be the dominant leaders in order to further their agendas, but this will come with a price.

Gabrielle: What good news is there from Iraq?

Major Bob: Well let me see………New schools have opened, new water lines and sewerage lines are being dug in Sadr city and there has been NO fighting in the city for weeks. Sheep and Chickens were handed out by the thousands to smiling Iraqis, local civilians are starting to turn in and report on insurgents, tons of grain has recently been handed out to farmers, thousands of book bags, pencils, soccer balls, shoes, note books have been given out to Iraqi school children, heaters are being supplied to schools and poor families, food packages have been handed out to the needy, the Al Farat medical clinic has been reopened and repaired after rocket attacks, insurgents have been arrested and killed by the hundreds in the past week…………. How much of that did you see on the news………..??

Gabrielle: How is it being on the ground in Iraq compared to the coverage you see on American TV?

Major Bob: There is no comparison, the news has it all upside down. Yes there is killing here, yes there is corruption in the government, yes security is poor at times, but that is only 25% OF THE STORY! I have run the streets of Baghdad for 6 months and have mostly seen prosperity, commerce and a buzz on the street corners and store shops in the city.. the problem is the news crews don’t find any of that SEXY and it does’t support their agenda.

Gabrielle: How is it for you personally living in Iraq?

Major Bob: I have truly enjoyed the experience of living with the Iraqis. They are a fascinating culture and actually quite friendly and hospitable, but they are hard headed and very stubborn at times. I think the biggest problem with our relationship in the Middle East is communication, we have only to sit down with each other at the dinner table to realize we actually have much in common. I have been treated very well by the Iraqis and they have kept me safe in more ways than I can say, you know loyalty and respect go a long way. I am very fortunate to have had this experience.

Gabrielle: Hindsight is always 20/20, but is there any thing in particular we could have done differently to improve our results in Iraq?

Major Bob: Yes, we should have never fired the military and police, we continue to pay for this mistake everyday. That is probably the one thing that cut the deepest in or initial follow up to “Combat” operations. We have made other mistakes, but this one has dealt us the most damage.

END OF INTERVIEW

I bow my head and humbily thank Major Bob and all the soldiers fighting in Iraq for protecting the lives of people living right throughout the world. We learnt in WWII that monsters like Hitler and Saddam need to be stopped before hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of lives are lost. Stay alert and come home safely.

Major Bob has a great new book out (I must like it, I endorsed the back cover) "Major Bob Unvarnished - Why We Keep Making The Same Mistakes".

COURAGE

Courage is not simply
one of the virtues
but the form of every virtue
at the testing point.

- C.S. Lewis

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Gabrielle Interviews: Major Bevelacqua, Fox News Military Analyst

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