Stromata Blog

Punditry

I work with individual retirement accounts all the time. So why didn’t I come up with this?

The Irish joined forces with the Jews to carry out 9/11. Haven’t you heard of the dread Roth IRA?

Quote of the Day

OpinionJournal Political Diary (more wide-ranging than ever at just $3.95 a month) uncovers the SF element in this year’s Presidential race:

According to a new book by actress Shirley MacLaine, Dennis Kucinich received inspiration and possibly policy advice from an alien life form. Ms. MacLaine, the godmother of Mr. Kucinich’s daughter, writes that the diminutive Ohio congressman “had a close sighting over my home in Graham, Washington, when I lived there.... Dennis found his encounter extremely moving. The smell of roses drew him out to my balcony where, when he looked up, he saw a gigantic triangular craft, silent, and observing him.”

Hmmm. Mr. Kucinich has objected to weaponizing space and many of his economic views also seem alien-inspired (assuming there’s an upside-down alien universe where socialism works). But give the candidate credit: Where Mitt Romney would have flip-flopped on the issue of alien visitation and Barack Obama would have launched a paean to inclusiveness, the Kucinich campaign is remaining discreetly quiet.

Could Rep. Kucinich be a reincarnation of Claude Degler?

“Taking the Israeli Line”

The realpolitik of a Newsweek senior editor (highlighted by Michael Ledeen) is chilling in its way:

World War III? Is that really what would result if Iran gained the “knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon”? Not if you listen to one of Bush’s former top generals, recently retired CENTCOM commander Gen. John Abizaid. “There are ways to live with a nuclear Iran,” Abizaid said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies last month. “I believe nuclear deterrence will work with the Iranians,” Abizaid said. “I mean, Iran is not a suicide nation. They may have some people in charge that don’t appear to be rational, but I doubt that the Iranians intend to attack us with a nuclear weapon … Let’s face it: we lived with a nuclear Soviet Union, we’ve lived with a nuclear China, and we’re living with [other] nuclear powers, as well.”

But that’s the realist line, and Bush is taking the Israeli line. For the Israelis, angered by Ahmadinejad’s lunatic rhetoric about wiping them off the map, an Iranian bomb would seem to portend World War III. And indeed, an Iranian bomb, followed perhaps by several Arab bombs, would put Israel in mortal danger. But the same isn’t true of the United States. [emphasis added]

“Taking the Israeli line”? During the massacres in Rwanda, there were those who said that America had nothing at stake in that part of Africa and others who disagreed. The former might be said to have taken “the realist line”, but who would call the opposite view “the Tutsi line”? Were objections to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans “the Croatian line” and “the Bosnian Moslem line”? Is there a “Sudanese Christian line” about Darfur?

Why is siding with peoples who are “in mortal danger” called “humanitarian” or, at worst, “sentimental” in all those other cases – but “taking the Israeli line” in this one?

Stepping back a bit, the writer’s concept of “realism” in foreign policy is a good distance from Metternich’s. The central idea of “realism” is that hard-headed national interest trumps all other concerns, particularly morality and popularity. On what analysis of American national interests can a vehemently hostile, nuclear armed antagonist in the world’s major oil-producing region be regarded with equanimity? Particularly when that antagonist has already attacked American targets repeatedly and furnishes weapons to our enemies in Iraq?

Assume, as the writer does, that the Mullarchy would respond to overt American military action by unleashing a wave of terrorism. In the realist calculus, would the resulting deaths be worse than the alternative?

But there is more. The policy to which the writer so stridently objects is not military action to knock out Iran’s nuclear facilities. He does not want to impose economic sanctions against elements of the Iranian terror apparatus. That step is too risky: “Realism” has morphed into passivity, coupled with the wishful hope that, if we don’t “stake out an extreme position”, Tehran’s extremism will miraculously melt away.

All Federal Debt Is Not Created Equal

A Washington Times editorial, ominously titled “The Debt Bomb”, linked by Instapundit, argues that the vanishingly small level of the Federal deficit isn’t cause for good cheer.

By 2001, the debt/GDP ratio fell to 57.4 percent, having plunged nearly 10 percentage points in five years. Over the next six years, however, unified budget deficits achieved record nominal levels, and borrowing from trust funds reached fiscally epidemic proportions. During the last six years, the national debt increased by a staggering $3.25 trillion, or 56 percent. The national debt now exceeds $9 trillion. Because the economy has been growing much slower than the national debt, the debt/GDP ratio is now about 66 percent, nearly 10 percentage points higher than just six years ago.

The Bush administration and congressional Republicans have spent the past several weeks celebrating the fact that the unified budget deficit for fiscal 2007 ($161 billion) was 1.2 percent of GDP. But that ratio has become increasingly misleading in recent years because the annual increase in the national debt has dwarfed the unified budget deficit and the nominal growth rate of the economy. While cumulative unified budget deficits during the past five years have astoundingly exceeded $1.5 trillion, the cumulative increase in the national debt over the same period has been a much more mind-boggling $2.8 trillion. That is nearly double the cumulative increase in the more widely reported budget deficits, which have become increasingly less important (relatively speaking) than the change in the national debt.

Professor Reynolds adds, “Falling deficits are good, but not sufficient. And even during the “surpluses” of the 1990s the national debt continued to grow. It’s not really a surplus unless debt goes down.”

That sounds ominous, and it would be, were it not for an elementary analytical error. The “debt” to which the Washington Times points is calculated by including the very large amount that the federal government “owes” itself. The primary effect is to exclude Social Security tax receipts from federal revenues. The resulting “gross federal debt” is an accounting artifact. If one looks at debt held by the public, which is the only kind that has fiscal significance, the numbers are much less grim. (Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States, Federal Budget Debt: 1960–2006.) In 2001, publicly held debt amounted to 33.0 percent of GDP, an historically very low level. In 1960, it was 45.7 percent. In the late 1960’s and the 1970’s, the figure plummeted, thanks to high inflation rates that eroded the value of government obligations (the very opposite of sound economic management), then moved up again. The latest available estimates are 38.5 percent for 2006 and 39.2 percent for 2007, still well below the post-stagflation era norm (and also a bit too high, as they predate the recent surprise improvement in the government’s cash flow.)

If one wants to worry about federal finances, the present value of projected Social Security and Medicare liabilities dwarfs the national debt. That is, however, a different kind of problem, one that cannot be mitigated by any level of surplus in the current year’s budget. We could reduce the federal debt to zero without making entitlements 50 years out any less worrisome. President Bush, you may recall, tried to make a start toward addressing these long-term woes; only a few right-wingers rallied to support him. Hardly anybody cares to look closely at a real “debt bomb”.

Addendum: Hello to Instapundit visitors! A commenter has asked for further explanation of why government debt held by the Social Security trust fund isn’t real federal debt. Maybe a hypothetical will help. Suppose that, recognizing that the War on Terror will last a long time and incur large future costs, Congress designated the first $250 billion of each year’s income tax receipts as a “war tax”, to be deposited into a “War Reserve Trust”. Then, suppose that it authorized the Treasury to borrow from the Trust to pay current expenses, giving the Trust government bonds in return. All federal income and expenditures would remain exactly the same as at present, yet gross federal debt would be boosted by the $250 billion of bonds issued annually to the Trust. That is precisely what happens with Social Security taxes and the Social Security trust fund: The government takes money in, spends it and writes itself an I.O.U. The I.O.U. is a completely artificial obligation that has no economic impact whatsoever.

Paranoia Writ Small

In and of itself, “Shock Troops”, one of a series of “Baghdad Diaries” published by The New Republic, is not very significant. Many of the “facts” related by the diarist are almost certainly fictions, but they are trivial fictions, portraying military misconduct of a low level kind, far distant from Abu Ghraib or Mylai or the atrocities that Islamofascist propagandists allege that American soldiers routinely commit in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Were I the allocator of resources on the right side of the blogosphere, I wouldn’t have devoted a farthing to effort to examining the truth of falsity of the diarist’s stories. But the dexterospherists have no central command. Bloggers familiar with conditions in Iraq expressed doubts about the anecdotes’ veracity. All of the evidence that is now accessible, both that gathered by blogs like Confederate Yankee and the findings of the Army’s own investigation, discredits the diarist: Parts of his accounts, such as hot rodding maneuvers by Bradley APC’s, are implausible on their face, and no one has come forward to corroborate any of the believable bits.

At this point, the debate about whether the reported incidents occurred is too one-sided to be interesting. There are, however, a couple of points that are worth dwelling on. In its way, what would otherwise be hardly a kerfuffle reveals much about the current state of our country’s armed forces and of the portion of our political class that constitutes the “loyal opposition”.

The Duke of Wellington, whose opinion of his troops was summed up in the phrase “scum of the earth”, would barely have blinked, and certainly would not have bothered to order an inquiry, had he been informed that British redcoats had mocked cripples, killed wild dogs for sport, or shown disrespect for corpses. Our military’s intolerance for such actions is an amazing anomaly in the history of warfare. More amazingly, instead of giving the commanders credit for an extraordinarily humane and civilized standard of war making, we civilians take it for granted, then carp at every deviation from a norm that no past army could match. We ought to be filled with admiration for soldiers who can both outfight any other force on earth and mitigate, to the extent that mitigation is possible, the brutality of combat. Were there ever knights sans peur et sans reproche, men for whom ballads should be composed and chansons de geste recited, American infantrymen are they.

The New Republic takes a rather different view. As its editors’ latest apologia makes clear, they believe that the U.S. Army, for the sake of suppressing Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp’s “revelations”, has intimidated witnesses, hidden evidence, coerced the diarist to recant, blocked third party inquiries, and officially orchestrated leaks of distorted information. There’s not the proverbial scintilla of evidence for any of those accusations. They simply form TNR’s presumptions about how Americans in uniform will act. Nothing that the military does will change those idées fixes. The investigations of Abu Ghraib and Haditha, vigorously conducted and resulting in prosecutions (since shown to be largely unwarranted in the latter case), don’t shake the certainty that the United States Armed Forces operate in a manner reminiscent of the Mafia.

The New Republic is not, let’s note, the Daily Kos. It is supposed to typify the most thoughtful, fair-minded and rational segment of contemporary liberalism. Yet it shares the central, paranoid premise of the Angry Left: that its ideological opponents engage in dark conspiracies against it, conspiracies so well hidden that no proof of their existence is needed. Claiming that the Army has somehow obscured all evidence in favor of the Baghdad Diarist is less inflammatory than, say, Air America’s speculations that one of its presenters was mugged by right wingers out to silence her or that Blackwater set the California wildfires, not to mention Pete Stark’s declaration that our soldiers die in Iraq for George W. Bush’s amusement. Less inflammatory, but just as twisted. If Franklin Foer and his colleagues are representative of the respectable Left in this country, “respectable” has lost its meaning.

The Simple Plan

The last place I would look for humor is Daily Kos, ordinarily a pit of paranoia, antisemitism and bile. But a genuine satirist, under the giveaway moniker Yacka Jah Yacka, has slipped past Markos “Screw ’em” Moulitsas’ gatekeepers. Yacka proposes a quick and easy way to make peace between Western civilization and the Islamofascists:

While it appears from more than one point of view that the War in Iraq and the War on Terror are situations from which we may never be able to extricate ourselves, from the mountains of Pakistan comes a very simple solution: convert to Islam. . . .

How many of us are really just religious lightweights, happy to simply go to church every Sunday, attend church socials, knock back a drink or two every Christmas and not worry ourselves about the deeper implications of our faith?

Given the way most of us pay any real attention to the tenets of our faith, life really wouldn’t be that different if we were to exchange one faith for another. The prayers would be different, but we would recite them just as mindlessly as we do today. The sermons would in all likelihood be exactly the same, and we’d continue to snore through them.

Sure, there are a few people here and there who take religion seriously, but they are in such a small minority that their protests can be easily ignored.

All too true, I fear. If Christ means almost nothing to us, how easy it is to go along with an anti-Christ.

The Ironimeter Explodes

Too much irony for one day – or one year.

First, the editor of The New Republic, formerly a nonfiction magazine, complains about leaks to the press and is seconded by a multitude of left-wing bloggers, e. g., The Horse’s Mouth. Naturally, the leak didn’t undermine national security; it consisted of documents about TNR’s former “Baghdad Diarist”, Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, documents that were in the process of being released in response to FOIA requests. (Needless to say, they shouldn’t have been passed on to Matt Drudge outside of official channels, and I hope the malefactor gets a stiff dose of military discipline.)

What this incident establishes is that the sinistrosphere agrees that some secrets are worth protecting. It just disagrees with the rest of us about what they are. Government strategies to catch terrorists: nah. Transcripts showing that liberal journalists have engaged in a dishonest cover-up: yeah.

And then the New York Times insinuates that John Podhoretz got his new job as editor of Commentary through nepotism. Let’s do a quick comparison:

• Norman Podhoretz retired as Commentary’s editor 12 years ago. He doesn’t own or control the magazine, which is published by an not-for-profit foundation. John, his son, is inter alia a newspaper columnist, the author of several books, a former speech writer for President Reagan and a former managing editor of the Weekly Standard, about whose performance David Frum writes, “John was one of the most effective editors I have ever known, brilliantly capable in every aspect of the job, from conceptualizing new directions for the magazine to fixing commas.”

• The current publisher of the New York Times is the son and grandson of former publishers. His family owns a majority of the paper’s voting stock. Four years after graduating from college, he was hired by the Times and has worked there ever since. He has been the publisher for the past 15 years, chairman of the New York Times Company for ten. Based on performance, he would have been fired years ago if the public stockholders’ economic interests played any role in corporate decisions. He has never written anything of substance, though he did manage last year to deliver one of history’s weirdest commencement addresses.

Talk about the pot calling the polished porcelain black!

BTW, Michael Yon reports that Private Beauchamp was offered a chance to transfer out of Iraq and declined it, choosing to stay with his unit and fight for his country. So far as I’m concerned, that act washes away any and all prior misdeeds. Deus tecum, Scott.

The War Within

“Cold Civil War” isn’t a euphonious phrase, but it’s the best available in English to describe what Thucydides called stasis: the clash of factions that are more zealous for their own advantage than for the safety of their country. It is also a not unreasonable description of the state of mind of a large portion of the contemporary Left. I worried about the phenomenon years ago. Yesterday, Mark Steyn said much the same thing (more incisively and wittily, of course):

A year before this next election in the U.S., the common space required for civil debate and civilized disagreement has shrivelled to a very thin sliver of ground. Politics requires a minimum of shared assumptions. To compete you have to be playing the same game: you can’t thwack the ball back and forth if one of you thinks he’s playing baseball and the other fellow thinks he’s playing badminton. Likewise, if you want to discuss the best way forward in the war on terror, you can’t do that if the guy you’re talking to doesn’t believe there is a war on terror, only a racket cooked up by the Bushitler and the rest of the Halliburton stooges as a pretext to tear up the constitution. . . .

Asked what would determine the course of his premiership, Britain’s Harold Macmillan famously replied, “Events, dear boy, events.” Yet in the end even “events” require broad acknowledgement. For Republicans, 9/11 is the decisive event; for Democrats, late November 2000 in the chadlands of Florida still looms larger. And elsewhere real hot wars seem to matter less than the ersatz Beltway battles back home. “The domestic political debate has nothing to do with what we’re doing here,” one U.S. officer in Iraq told the National Review’s Rich Lowry this week, “in a representative comment offered not in a spirit of bitterness, but of cold fact.” As Lowry remarked, “This is the lonely war” – its actual progress all but irrelevant to the pseudo combat on the home front. In Neuromancer, William Gibson defined “cyberspace” as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation.” The “cold civil war” may be another “consensual hallucination,” but for many it’s more real than “the lonely war.”

Some people imagine that American politics “has usually been this way”. They remember a more turbulent past than we’ve actually had. Even during the Vietnam War, a Congressman who declared that the President of the United States gained “amusement” from seeing our soldiers die would have been drummed into infamy. Today the most that happens is that he eventually offers a pseudo-apology – “I shouldn’t have distracted the House” rather than “I am ashamed of myself and beg forgiveness” – after his Democratic colleagues rally to defeat a censure motion. (Only five Democrats voted to condemn the slander; eight were lamely “present”.) Less politique leftists were livid that Rep. Stark backed down, however slightly, from “speaking the truth”.

The worst feature of stasis is that it is self-aggravating. For the time being, as Mr. Steyn also observes, the conflict is largely unilateral, like the Terror War before 9/11:

Well, it takes two to have a cold civil war. The right must be doing some of this stuff, too, surely? Up to a point. But for the most part they either go along, or secede from the system – they home-school, turn to talk radio and the Internet, read Christian publishers’ books that shift millions of copies without ever showing up on a New York Times bestsellers list. The established institutions of the state remain under the monolithic control of forces that ceaselessly applaud themselves for being terrifically iconoclastic:

Hollywood’s latest war movie? Rendition. Oh, as in the same old song?

A college kid writes a four-word editorial in a campus newspaper – “Taser this: F--k Bush” – and the Denver Post hails him as “the future of journalism. Smart. Confident. Audacious.” Anyone audacious enough to write “F--k Hillary” or “F--k Obama” at a college paper? Or would the Muse of Confident Smarts refer you to the relevant portions of the hate-speech code?

Speaking of which, Columbia University won’t allow U.S. military recruiters on campus because “Don’t ask, don’t tell” discriminates against homosexuals, but it will invite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose government beheads you if they think you’re bebottoming.

But how long will it be before hatred and paranoia on one side draw forth a reaction from the other? It’s not so easy to think civilly about people who accuse you of plotting murder and mayhem – especially not when they also advocate silencing conservative spokesmen via a revived “fairness doctrine” (actually deployed for that purpose within living memory).

There are few evils worse than civil war. I much fear that our hopes of avoiding them are fading steadily.

The Beginning of the Beginning

Future historians of the present war, whether they write in English or in Arabic, will very likely begin their first chapters on October 23, 1984, when Hezbollah, the “Army of God”, destroyed a U.S. Marine base in Beirut, killing 241 Americans. President Reagan and his advisors, seeing only an isolated incident, decided that the best response was to take our men out of harm’s way. Without precognition, retreat seemed like a prudent course, a withdrawal from a secondary conflict at a time when the Cold War was far from won. I recall very few objections at the time. Not one person in a hundred, even among “experts” on the Middle East, had heard of Hezbollah or foresaw that its retrograde strain of Islam would ever be a palpable threat to anyone but its own self-benighted adherents.

But to the budding Islamofascists, Beirut was no sideshow; it was the main event, from which they took away two lessons: first, that relatively low-technology attacks can inflict immense destruction and, second, that the most powerful Western nation will flee from bloodshed. Taken together, those discoveries formed the basis of a strategy for driving back the long dominant infidels and restoring Islam to the position that it held 500 years ago. It must have seemed that the promise made by the Koran, that Allah would cast terror into the unbelievers’ hearts, had been dramatically confirmed.

By 2001, the evidence of Western weakness in the face of terror had accumulated to the point where even the most cautious mufsidun could not doubt it. Thence followed 9/11, which Osama bin-Laden evidently expected would smash Western morale at a single blow. He was wrong about that – for a while. Unfortunately, it takes a long time to unlearn “truths” that make one’s cause seem invincible. There was a chance that the American hammer blows in Afghanistan and Iraq would jump start the unlearning process, but then a large segment of our political class started acting the way it was supposed to: seeking and finding excuses for inaction, blaming the victims of terror, ignoring or even justifying acts of war against us, promoting paranoid fantasies about neoconservative conspiracies, and otherwise treating defense against self-avowed enemies as a greater threat than the enemies themselves.

The sane view of the War on Terror can be encapsulated in one question: Given what we know now, should the United States have withdrawn from Lebanon 24 years ago? If not, what is the justification for shrinking from confrontation with Islamofascism today?

The Supply Side Edge

For some reason or another, jeering at supply side economics is suddenly popular on the Right. Greg Mankiw likens Arthur Laffer to Algore; Tyler Cowen thinks that the whole idea is essentially dead; Megan McArdle says the same thing. And now Ramesh Ponnuru declares that there can be no doubt that the Bush tax cuts lowered federal revenues.

None of these commentators denies (so far as I know) that ceteris paribus lower marginal tax rates lead to higher economic growth, which is the fundamental supply side principle. Their criticism is that the extra growth doesn’t, in the very near term, generate enough tax revenue to make the government whole. That’s true enough, but it represents short-sighted and incomplete thinking. If one grants supply side premise, tax rate reductions inevitably pay for themselves, albeit not by tomorrow morning, and they generate other good effects along the way.

To illustrate, let’s hypothesize that a ten percent reduction in the government’s tax take, as a share of the GDP, will result in an extra one percent annual GDP growth. (The real numbers aren’t terribly important; all that different ones would do is change to time frame not the trends.) In that case (proof left as an exercise for the reader’s spreadsheet), government revenues after-tax-cut reach the base year level within three years. After eleven, they are higher than under the same scenario without tax cuts. More importantly, at that point the economy is over 11 percent larger with tax cuts than it would have been without. Hence, individual citizens are richer and better able to cope with whatever challenges they face (to the extent that wealth makes a difference). Even if one isn’t much concerned about private citizens, the government, too, has greater potential resources from which to find the wherewithal to deal with a war or other sudden crisis. The national debt will, it’s true, be larger (assuming that government spending grows independently of revenues and that none of the problems it is supposed to address are palliated by higher national income), but the country’s ability to carry debt will have grown also.

After the crossing point, the supply side advantage increases rapidly. After 20 years, the tax cut scenario has an edge of ten percent in government revenue and 23 percent in GDP. Those who claim to think night and day about “the children” ought to cheer that outcome.

Turning more specifically to the Bush tax cuts versus the Clinton status quo ante, we can’t know what might have been. It’s hard to believe, though, that the recession that began late in President Clinton’s second term would have been so short and shallow if there had been no tax reductions. As matters stand, six years after EGTRRA, the federal deficit is a trivial 1.2 percent of GDP. If there had been no war, or if Congress had exercised even mild fiscal restraint, the budget could hardly have avoided being balanced by now. If a Democratic President had a record like George W. Bush’s, he would be hailed as another Ludwig Erhard, and if supply side economics had been invented by Democrats (as it almost was under John F. Kennedy), no one would doubt that it deserved the credit.

Symbols and Ghosts

Modern Turks are foolish to be defensive about the massacres of Armenian Christians carried out by the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The regime that committed those atrocities doesn’t exist any more, and the Turkish Republic was built on rejecting its ideology. It would make just about as much sense for a modern Southerner to cavil at condemnations of slavery or a modern German at denunciations of the Holocaust.

Almost as foolish are the Armenian-Americans who press zealously for an official declaration that the killings were an act of genocide. Armenia has won the historical battle. Except for Turkish ultra-nationalists, no one defends the Ottomans’ actions. An otiose endorsement by Congress is worse than gilding over gold: The public wisely doubts the acumen of historians turned politicians; those who know little about the events in question will naturally suspect that an assertion about the past must be pretty weak if it needs a Professor Nancy Pelosi to sustain it.

In ordinary times, maybe it would be of no moment for our legislators to irritate one folly and indulge the other, but we don’t live in ordinary times. One needn’t suspect that the Democratic leadership’s enthusiasm for an Armenian Genocide Resolution is prompted by a desire to make mischief in Iraq. That is, however, its predictable effect. And thus it is a folly surpassing those that inspired it.

What’s more, if we must risk alienating one of our country’s most important allies, why not hang it for its own sins rather than for its disowned ancestors’? The persecution of the Orthodox Church in contemporary Turkey is a tragic and undeniable blot on Turkish standing in the community of civilized states. (Vide Otmar Oehring, “Is There Religious Freedom in Turkey?” and United States Commission On Security And Cooperation In Europe, “The Greek Orthodox Church in Turkey: A Victim of Systematic Exploitation”.) If Rep. Pelosi and her colleagues aimed their fire thither, the net consequences would still be negative, but at least they would address injustices whose perpetrators are alive and able to alter their conduct. Instead, they hector ghosts.

General Sanchez’s Indirect Approach

It’s a safe bet that every American military officer who hopes to become a general has studied B. H. Liddell Hart’s classic work Strategy: The Indirect Approach. Liddell Hart was the great exponent of fighting the enemy command psychologically and upending its expectations. That is, he taught, the surest route to victory in war, and his insight has applications elsewhere.

Last Friday, General Ricardo Sanchez, former commander the U.S. forces in Iraq, addressed a group of reporters in Washington, D.C. His speech sounded three themes:

First, that events in Iraq have been badly distorted by a dishonest, agenda-driven press corps;

Second, that the civilian agencies of government are lagging badly in their handling of the political side of the war effort;

Third, that the preference of domestic politicians for partisan gain over national victory sabotages the fight against Islamofascism.

Those messages were not congenial to his listeners, who consisted largely of his rhetorical targets. OpinionJournal Political Diary [subscribers only; a cheap $3.95 a month] took note of their reaction:

The audience of military reporters appeared stunned as General Sanchez calmly laid out his indictment. He concluded: “We must ask ourselves – who is responsible for maintaining the ethical standards of the profession in order to ensure that our democracy does not continue to be threatened by this dangerous shift away from your sacred duty of public enlightenment?” After an uncomfortable silence, punctuated by smatters of applause, James Crawley, president of the Military Reporters and Editors Association, thanked the general for his “unvarnished” look at the media.

There is a close triangular bond among left-wing journalists, civilian officials who have no sympathy for fighting the mufsidun and the leadership of the Democratic Party, to whom every setback abroad represents a step toward victory at home. Had General Sanchez done nothing more than deliver his blasts, his words would have vanished into the air – or they would have been reported in a way that made him sound unhinged and vindictive, along the lines of “General Ricardo Sanchez, who was relieved of his command in Iraq following press reports of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, lashed out at his critics, etc.”

So, practicing the indirect approach, the general sweetened his invective with phrases that the media love to hear, about how “this administration has failed to employ and synchronize its political, economic and military power”, making the situation in Iraq “catastrophic” and “intractable”. The upshot was that he was not ignored. Better than that, the elite media’s accounts strikingly confirmed his accusations.

He had charged that, with honorable but not very frequent exceptions, reporters picked out only the tidbits of war news that fit their anti-Administration prejudices. Sure enough, the Washington Post led off with –

Retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who led U.S. forces in Iraq for a year after the March 2003 invasion, accused the Bush administration yesterday of going to war with a “catastrophically flawed” plan and said the United States is “living a nightmare with no end in sight.”

Sanchez also bluntly criticized the current troop increase in Iraq, describing it as “a desperate attempt by the administration that has not accepted the political and economic realities of this war.”

And so on till the very last of the 17 paragraphs, where we read,

Sanchez opened by criticizing the U.S. news media, saying he was unfairly labeled “a liar” and “a torturer” because of the Abu Ghraib scandal, and he alleged that the media have lost their sense of ethics. He said that members of the media blow stories out of proportion and are unwilling to correct mistakes, and that the “media environment is doing a great disservice to the nation.”

That was little enough, but more attention than the Associated Press gave to the major theme of the speech. About the not-too-veiled criticism of Congressional Democrats, there was nary a word anywhere.

We may now legitimately ask: When we read disheartening news about Iraq (or other topics), why should we believe that we’re seeing anything other a highly selective version of reality, aimed at “advancing a narrative” rather than conveying the facts?

No one will ever get the media to confess to bias and misrepresentation, but General Sanchez has cleverly duped them into furnishing an irrefutable demonstration.

Nobel or Noble?

That the Nobel “Peace” Prize is really the Nobel Political Prize has been obvious for a long time. I suppose that one has no right to complain. The universe has room for many and varied prizes. One for the individual or group that most admirably advances, or suffers in behalf of, “progressive” ideals is fine. It does, however, tell us a bit about the current state of the progressive mindset when one considers, as the weekend Wall Street Journal did, a list of those who did not receive the accolade in 2007:

• Burmese monks whose defiance against, and brutalization at the hands of, the country's military junta in recent weeks captured the attention of the Free World. . . .

• Morgan Tsvangirai, Arthur Mutambara and other Zimbabwe opposition leaders who were arrested and in some cases beaten by police earlier this year. . . .

• Father Nguyen Van Ly, a Catholic priest in Vietnam arrested this year and sentenced to eight years in prison for helping the pro-democracy group Block 8406. . . .

• Wajeha al-Huwaider and Fawzia al-Uyyouni, co-founders of the League of Demanders of Women's Right to Drive Cars in Saudi Arabia. . . .

• Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, who has fought tirelessly to end the violence wrought by left-wing terrorists and drug lords in his country. . . .

• Garry Kasparov and the several hundred Russians who were arrested in April, and are continually harassed, for resisting President Vladimir Putin's slide toward authoritarian rule. . . .

• the people of Iraq, who bravely work to rebuild and reunite their country. . . .

• Presidents Viktor Yushchenko and Mikheil Saakashvili who, despite the efforts of the Kremlin to undermine their young states, stayed true to the spirit of the peaceful "color" revolutions they led in Ukraine and Georgia. . . .

• Britain's Tony Blair, Ireland's Bertie Ahern and the voters of Northern Ireland, who in March were able to set aside decades of hatred to establish joint Catholic-Protestant rule in Northern Ireland. . . .

• thousands of Chinese bloggers who run the risk of arrest by trying to bring uncensored information to their countrymen. . . .

• scholar and activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, jailed presidential candidate Ayman Nour and other democracy campaigners in Egypt. . . .

• lawmakers Walid Eido, Pierre Gemayel, Antoine Ghanem, Rafik Hariri, George Hawi and Gibran Tueni; journalist Samir Kassir; and other Lebanese citizens who've been assassinated since 2005 for their efforts to free their country from Syrian control. . . .

• the Reverend Phillip Buck; Pastor Chun Ki Won and his organization, Durihana; Tim Peters and his Helping Hands Korea; and Liberty in North Korea, who help North Korean refugees escape to safety in free nations. . . .

Idealism, courage, resistance to tyrants – all of those once drew the admiration of the kind of men who make up the Nobel Peace Prize committee. And now?

Hillary the Goldwater Girl?

James Taranto thinks, either mischievously or optimistically, that Hillary Clinton is reverting to her teenage ways. On both Social Security and Iraq, she sounds “fairly conservative” – well, sort of, at least for low values of “fairly”.

Her retirement savings proposal – tax-financed matching contributions for people (excluding the evil “rich”, naturally) who put money into IRA’s – is nominally unrelated to Social Security, but it is only cosmetically different from a timid form of privatization. A couple of years ago, House Republicans urged that surplus FICA taxes be put into individual accounts, as an add-on to Social Security, instead of subsidizing unrelated government programs. Democrats objected furiously. Senator Clinton’s idea is essentially the same, except that she makes no overt link to the FICA surplus, and her plan would benefit only those who also save on their own.

On Iraq, Mr. Taranto quotes a number of statements suggesting that the prospective Democratic Presidential nominee recognizes that abandoning our friends is a bad idea. Compared to John Edwards, Barack Obama or Bill Richardson, she could be mistaken for – not a hawk, but a mildly combative sparrow. Certainly she stands too far to the right to please the Angry Left. No doubt she calculates that, once the general election comes, the Krazy Kossack Kidz and their ilk will prefer power to purity and fall quietly in line.

Unfortunately, disdaining the Kidz is only a necessary, not a sufficient, qualification for the Presidency. The stands that cheer Mr. Taranto, however mildly, furnish further proof of the Tin Lady’s disastrous incapacity for the office she seeks.

In both cases, she recognizes a problem, then shies away from confronting it. The Social Security system in its present form is demographically unsustainable, and correcting the imbalance will become more painful the longer it is put off. Senator Clinton has, however, ruled out every serious remedy. She is against converting the public liability into private assets, against raising FICA taxes, against reducing promised benefits in any way whatsoever. Having rejected all medicines, she offers a placebo. And, in putting it forward, she didn’t even give primary emphasis to the need for enhanced retirement savings; her pitch was largely a rationale for the retention of that liberal idol, the death tax.

Her Iraqi stance similarly displays a glimmering of support for sound ends, coupled with a shrill rejection of adequate means. Keeping troops in Iraq isn’t an objective. Those soldiers will be of no use unless they are fighting our enemies, as they are doing right now. Senator Clinton has made it clear that she would, if she had her way, scale back their employment against the mufsidun. Her expressed preference is for fewer men, fewer missions, less violence, more attention to the “rights” of our enemies and much more “diplomacy”, with whom and about what to be filled in later. In other words, she is willing to fight hard enough to irritate but not hard enough to win.

All in all, the Tin Lady’s policies in both of these areas (it would be easy to extend the list) are “moderation” of the worst kind: short-sighted, faint-hearted, and aimed at smoothing over political bumps rather than dealing with national problems. Her husband was much the same way, but he had the good fortune to reign during a vacation from history. The next President will not have that advantage.

One O’Hanlon Does Not Make a Hawk

Michael Goldfarb is mightily impressed by Tin Lady Clinton’s taking on Michael O’Hanlon, co-author of a pro-surge op-ed, as a foreign policy advisor. That confirms, he says, that she “has staked out a nuanced position on the surge” and “is no friend of the antiwar left”. In fact, “it isn’t at all clear that the senator’s position on the war is all that different from the president’s”.

Okay, if “nuanced” is a synonym for “self-contradictory”, there is something to that analysis. The large, glaring fact is that Senator Clinton has given no support to the war effort, has criticized the Iraqi campaign incessantly, declares that her answer to Islamofascism will be “Diplomacy is back!” and asserted that to believe General Petraeus’ report on the situation in Iraq requires “willing suspension of disbelief”. She has never come within a country mile of endorsing the Pollack-O’Hanlon view that “there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008”.

The President’s position on the war is that we are faced with an implacable and immoral enemy and have no good alternative to victory. The Tin Lady’s is that this brouhaha a long ways off is a domestic political problem to be managed and triangulated. Her addition of a single moderate hawk to her long list of “advisors” (and how often do you suppose they give actual advice to the candidate?) is evidence that the triangulation is in process. If she were a genuine convert to the Bush doctrine, she would join Joe Lieberman in berating the follies of her fellow Democrats.

Noted in Passing

Though I’m still paying little attention to the non-403(b) portion of the universe, a few items have caught my eye over the past several days.

■ A Fox News poll has caught many other dexterospheric eyes, because one in five Democrats answered “yes” to “Do you personally think the world would be better off if the United States loses the war in Iraq?” Another fifth didn’t know. But the flip side is that 62 percent said “no”. Perhaps a few of those lied, not wanting to display their true feelings openly to a strange pollster. Nonetheless, if that figure is roughly accurate, the anti-war cause is doomed when and if pro-America Democrats realize that abandoning the battlefield, as every Democratic Presidential candidate advocates, is the essence of losing. A war isn’t a friendly card game, where you can cash in your chips when you get tired of playing.

■ As it happens, it looks less and less like we’re losing. Particularly striking is this map depicting senior al-Qa’eda leaders killed or captured in Iraq last month.

As Steve Schippert says,

And just a few short moths ago, Sen. Charles Schumer demanded that the United States withdraw our military forces to the periphery and vacate the heart of Iraq in order to “change our mission and focus it more narrowly on counterterrorism, [and go] after al Qaeda camps that might arise in Iraq.” . . .

The latest developments above surely confirm, “This Is Counterterrorism, Senator.” The elimination of safe havens, the high rate of AQI foot-soldiers dying in our offensive ground operations, and the rolling up of leadership elements cannot be mistaken for anything else.

Also worth reading is a brand new column by Rich Lowry, writing from Baghdad. His big worry is that we are winning so rapidly that the Iraqi government will have trouble recognizing what is happening and taking steps to bring the losers back into the fold.

Inspired tactics by our troops, coupled with a Sunni turn against al-Qaida, have — in a microcosm of what’s happening throughout Iraq — transformed the northwest part of Baghdad controlled by this brigade. “People ask me if we’re at a tipping point,” says the brigade’s leader, Col. J.B. Burton. “I say, ‘No, we have a window of opportunity.’”

The opportunity is knocking at, among other places, an intersection on one of the main roads in the Sunni neighborhood of Ghazaliya. Once, Americans couldn’t come here without getting hit. Now, they stop and get out to shake hands with some of the same people who had been shooting at them. . . .

Politicians in the U.S. often argue that we should “stop policing the civil war” and “go back to our bases” to focus on “counterterrorism.” The experience of Ghazaliya says otherwise — tamping down the civil war and getting out in the streets created the predicate for prying Sunnis from al Qaeda in an enormous blow to the terror group.

A similar turn has happened throughout Iraq, with tens of thousands of Sunnis allying with Americans and volunteering for local police forces. But American officers worry that the Shia government won’t welcome them into formal government-security forces, which would be a crucial step toward Sunni-Shia reconciliation. . . .

What worries the Shia is precisely that Sunni volunteers not too long ago were facilitating horrific acts of terrorism against them. Why should they trust them now? This legitimate concern is augmented by Shia paranoia and insecurity. In the absence of a bold act of outreach by the government, we pay the Sunni volunteers and work to improve their communities, trying to foster their change of heart.

“There’s a risk of this turning off and going back,” says Burton. Lee and Jackson appear ready to surrender. But will the Iraqi government accept it?

■ Former biologist Richard Dawkins wants to turn atheism into a proselytizing cult, according to the not unsympathetic but mildly bemused Guardian. And why does the world need a campaign, complete with its own t-shirt (blazoned with a bright red “A”), to reach the “big closet population of atheists who need to come out”? Mr. Dawkins explains:

In an interview with the Guardian, he said: “When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told – religious Jews anyway – than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence, the world would be a better place.”

One of the ways in which it “would be a better place”, then, is that the newly influential atheists would spread paranoid theories about Jewish conspiracies.

■ The State Department has started a blog. Its name is “Dipnote”. Self-awareness at last? (Thanx to Greg Pollowitz)