War and global warming

Get a glass, put a few pieces of ice in it and then fill it with water. Draw a line with a magic marker at the water line. Now walk off and forget about it for an hour.

When you come back, look to see where the water level is compared to the line you drew.

Anywhere from a little bit to a whole lot lower (depending on how much ice you put in compared to water), isn't it?

Some would call this experiment a simplistic model that ignores the glaciers, snow-capped mountains and land beneath the Antarctic ice cap. But it's safe to say the floating ice of both icecaps vastly outweighs the landbound ice, and even if they were both present in equal amounts it would be -- dare I say it? -- a wash.

That is, the sea levels would neither rise nor fall.

I am therefore absolutely astonished -- and disgusted -- by all the alarm about how global warming is supposedly going to drown all our coastal areas by melting the polar icecaps. Seems to me that if anything, we'd actually add land areas to all of what used to be coastlines, effectively adding either arable or livable land to what we can use either commercially (plant or build on it) or aesthetically (enjoy it

Nevertheless, global warming advocates rant on about the matter. Quite frantically.

"I don't want to diminish the threat of terrorism at all, it is extremely serious, but on a long-term global basis, global warming is the most serious problem we are facing," said the chief advocate for doing something about global warming, former vice-president Al Gore, as quoted in the Australian online publication The Age this last Monday.

So, global warming that would create receding coastlines that would provide more land on which people might live, is worse than terrorists who seek to kill off as many as possible of the folks that would otherwise live on that land (us, for example)?

Gee, I wonder how he would have fought the war on terror had his goons in Florida succeeded in their efforts to disqualify more of the votes of servicemen now fighting that war who in a very real sense made the difference between a Gore presidency and a Bush presidency.

But I think I know the answer to that. And anyone who looks at recent activities in the cities of San Francisco and Seattle -- currently very strongly on the political Left in the same ways as Al Gore -- has the answer as well.

San Francisco on Nov. 8 voted to oppose the presence of military recruiters on school campuses. Not an outright ban -- gods forfend the city schools should lose funding from The Great White Father In Washington! -- just "[encourage] city officials and university administrators to exclude recruiters and create scholarships and training programs that would reduce the military's appeal to young adults," as an Associated Press story the next day put it.

And since at least May in the city where I was born (Seattle), the Parent Teacher Association has been deviling military recruiters. According to a Reuters story from May 24, the Parent-Teacher-Student Association passed a resolution that said: "Students should not be harassed by military recruiters … The U.S. military should not recruit in public schools."

The San Francisco measure passed by a 20 percent margin, prompting at least one commentator to note the lack of appreciation for the military of that city. "If al-Qaida comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it," Bill O'Reilly fumed on his top-rated TV show last week.

Don't know if I'd go that far, but the fact is that the situation is being portrayed by the Left as another Vietnam and -- whatever one thinks of our cause in war -- the situation is fundamentally different in terms of where the services get their personnel.

There is no draft. Everyone that joins the military does is a volunteer. That means the services have to compete with other employers, and to make things difficult for recruiters -- but not for other employers -- is discrimination. Furthermore, not letting the individual recruiter say his piece seems to constitute infringement of freedom of speech, expressly prohibited by the First Amendment.

You know, that's one of the rights we're fighting to keep in the war against terrorists.

At least one of the arguments against allowing recruiters on school campuses involves a legitimate concern for the safety of one's children. But it has been perverted by the rationale of the opponents of the recruiters: the title of a column by Maureen Farrell, "Is it time for war zealots to send their kids to Iraq?" pretty much sums up the mentality.

It's a perversion because it's a lie: nobody sends their kids to Iraq. Everyone in Iraq both now an even during the last Gulf War are all volunteers.

However, the opposition to exposing these kids to military recruiters is nevertheless most instructive. That's because it displays the attitude on the part of those opposed to military recruitment that mere mortals like such kids are to be saved from their inability to see "the truth" by those able to see it, the opponents.

And never mind that this "truth," that keeping kids from serving in the armed forces to keep them from Iraq, merely enhances the chances for the enemy to establish a terror haven, exactly as Al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri proposed to fellow terrorist Abu Musab' al-Zarqawi in that July letter.

And the last time they did that, we got 9-11.

The idea of the anti-recruitment crowd, however, is that if we don't fight them, they'll leave us alone. Or that if nobody's kids get sent to Iraq, nobody's kids will get killed.

But forget that we tried that and got 9-11 anyway: look at the bombings in Amman, Jordan on Nov. 9. The vast majority of the 57 victims of this attack were noncombatant Jordanians, whose king has sent no troops to Iraq in the first place.

The bottom line is, in Amman just as in 9-11, you don't have to make yourself a target in this war on terror to become one.

That obvious fact has obviously escaped the anti-recruiter crowd, just as the ice-cube experiment has escaped the global-warming crowd.

But that's no surprise. They are one and the same, by and large, characterized by the "we're-the-only-ones-who-know-anything-worth-knowing" attitude.

And if they don't know it, it's not worth knowing.

Just ask 'em.

E-mail Gary at gexelby@dailystatesman.com and visit his website, http://exelby.vnovus.com.