Stromata Blog

Moments Pass

Today I must prepare for a flight early tomorrow morning, and the Panicdemic has left me badly out of practice at traveling. Hence, this Wednesday is dedicated to brevity and miscellany.

Senator J. D. Vance kicks off his 2028 Presidential campaign with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that, with different details but identical principles, could have been written a century ago by Senator Gerald Nye. [Note to pedants: Yes, I know that Gerald Nye wasn’t yet a Senator in 1923. Please leave room for artistic license.] One sentence particularly caught my eye: “Mr. Bush allowed a just war in Afghanistan to turn into a nation-building quagmire and then started an unjust war in Iraq [emphasis added].” Senator Vance was a high school student in 2003, so he may not know that Saddam Hussein was a murderous tyrant, violated the terms of the cease fire that allowed him to remain in power after his failed invasion of Kuwait, repeatedly attacked U.S. aircraft enforcing the cease fire terms, and furnished money, training and weapons to terrorists. One can argue, with perfect hindsight (which includes the knowledge that President Obama would abandon Iraq, leaving a vacuum for Iran to fill), that overthrowing Saddam’s lethal dystopia accomplished less in the long run than had been hoped. To conclude that it was “unjust”, one must be either ignorant or morally obtuse.

The senator summarizes his creed as, “the U.S. national interest must be pursued ruthlessly but also carefully, with strong words but great restraint”, the opposite of Theodore Roosevelt’s “Speak softly and carry a big stick”. And pursuing our interests “ruthlessly . . . with strong words but great restraint” sounds just like Anthony Blinken. Now that I think about it, which party’s primary will Vance compete in come 2028?

Rep. George Santos has announced his resignation from the Congressional committees to which had had been assigned. He is, needless to say, busy with other ventures: a contract to produce the next three Marvel movies (scripts to be written by ChatGPT), the lead role in Don Giovanni at the Metropolitan Opera, privately funded weapons shipments to the Ukrainian army, and staffing his 2028 Presidential bid. There’s a limit to how much even a polypoetes of his stature can do.

As for the 2024 Presidential shambles, “Here Comes the 2023 Presidential-Candidate Stampede”. Nikki Haley’s chapeau will be tossed into the ring later this month. Judging by who persistently pushes messages into my e-inbox, she will be followed soon by Mike Pompeo, Kristi Noem, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, perhaps Ben Carson and Tim Scott, maybe even Lindsey Graham. There are undoubtedly others who don’t have my email address in their electronic rolodexes (or is it rolodices?). Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis, who everyone agrees is a first-tier candidate, waits for the optimal moment to jump in. The crowd on the third and fourth tiers hope that he will be the next Fred Thompson or Scott Walker, the front runner until he becomes a runner (as Tacitus said, omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset).

In The Spectator, Cockburn, the periodical’s oddly anonymized D.C. gossip columnist (no relation, I presume, to the commie Cockburns), unveils another potential candidate: Boris Johnson. BoJo was born an American citizen during his parents’ residence in New York City. It’s true, as Cockburn notes, that he renounced his citizenship several years ago after losing a tussle with the IRS, but maybe he can resume it and regain “natural born citizen” status. While I doubt that, I don’t doubt that no other candidate would add so much je ne sais quoi to the contest.

Like everybody else whose life involves a lot of reading and writing, I’ve toyed with the idea of giving ChatGPT a spin but haven’t gotten a round tuit. John Hinderaker at PowerLine has now saved me the trouble. After quoting what the app said in response to “Who is John Hinderaker”, “What were some of President Trump’s accomplishments?”, “Which is cheaper, electricity generated with natural gas, or with solar panels?”, “Write an essay in the style of John Hinderaker” and “Write an essay in the style of Steven Hayward”, he summarizes his impressions:

All of this is highly preliminary, and artificial intelligence is a serious subject. But my experiments with ChatGPT confirm my assumptions about its limited utility. It turns out responses that are not as clever as, for example, the Tom Friedman Random Column Generator. But they don’t seem to be overwhelmingly biased, either. If you are a college student and seriously think that generic essays like these will get you a good grade, I can only hope you are going to a lousy school. As, to be fair, most college students are.

Incidentally, with all the brouhaha about ChatGPT, let me recommend Isaac Asimov’s classic story “Galley Slave”.

Schism Over Afghanistan?

A fellow named Matt Lewis, about whom I know nothing but JustOneMinute thinks him worth quoting, writes – perhaps hopefully – about –

the next great schism within the conservative movement. At issue is the war in Afghanistan – and, more specifically, whether Republicans should support President Obama’s approach to a conflict that has now lasted for Americans far longer than World War II.

The “great schism” is rather one-sided at the moment: Ann Coulter, Ron Paul and a handful of other, mostly erratic figures versus almost all Republican officeholders and a phalanx of the dexterosphere. The overwhelming view on the Right is that President Obama’s stated position on the war (who knows what he thinks in his heart?) is the best one for the country and that his choice of General Petraeus to conduct it is brilliant.

If you want to see a schism, the direction to look is Left. The President has proclaimed that Afghanistan is a “war of necessity”. The Vice President praises hard core proponents of immediate withdrawal.

It’s true that, when Michael Steele described Afghanistan as “Obama’s war”, he wasn’t being entirely irrational. President Bush emphasized winning in Iraq while merely holding the line in Afghanistan. That was certainly the right choice at the time. Iraq occupies a central position in the world’s largest energy producing region. Had Saddam Hussein remained in power there, his regime, WMD-possessing or not, would have continued to be a major source of funds and training for Islamofascists throughout the world. Had he been succeeded by al-Qa’eda’s “Islamic state” or a quisling government subservient to Iran, the consequences would have been yet more dire.

Afghanistan is, by comparison, a backwater. Diverting American power to this secondary theater, while the outcome in Iraq hung in the balance, would have been folly. As the saying goes, “He who fights everywhere, fights nowhere.”

Still, though a comparative backwater, Afghanistan isn’t unimportant. It borders on a decreasingly stable nuclear power (Pakistan), directly on two of the world’s leading anti-Western troublemakers (Iran and Red China) and indirectly (via three Central Asian republics) on Tsar Vladimir’s geopolitically ambitious Russia. An Islamofascist takeover would pressurize Pakistan toward an outright break with the West. A vacuum would likely be filled by one or more of our rivals or enemies. Now that Iraq is quieting down, we can channel resources to make secure this front.

We must bear in mind, too, that the President’s militant rhetoric has made Afghanistan more significant than it might otherwise be. Osama bin-Laden trumpeted American pullbacks from Lebanon and Somalia, where we were mere altruistic “peacekeepers”, as evidence of Western impotence. Cutting and running from a war that our commander-in-chief has labeled a vital national interest would prove to the mufsidun that Allah’s cause is on the verge of triumph.

If Barack Obama didn’t intend to win in Afghanistan, he was foolish to speak so boldly, but, foolish or not, we must now deal with the consequences of his words. That a lot of Democrats are indifferent doesn’t surprise me. If a significant fraction of conservatives and Republicans follow suit, that will be surprising and disappointing indeed.

Quote of the Day: Wages of Bush Derangement Syndrome

An NRO Corner reader points out that President Obama’s denunciations of the liberation of Iraq have deprived him of an important message that he could otherwise send to the Iranian people at this moment of crisis:

Imagine how powerful it would be for Obama (or, more likely, a surrogate) to be able to stand up and say to the Iranian protesters, “Under the USA, your neighbor Iraq held free and fair elections. The government of Iran went out of its way to demonize the US and undermine those elections. We are now seeing the results of that mindset come home to Iran as you are denied a voice by your government in your own elections. The US government stands behind all who seek free and fair elections.”

Of course, he can’t say that with any legitimacy because he has spent years putting down Bush and Iraq.

Obviously, the President can’t pick up an Iraqi talking point now, after having trampled it into the dust for the past seven years. Strangely, he also has omitted from his public statements any allusion to America’s role in supporting Moslems in Bosnia and Kosovo (against Christian adversaries, yet). It’s almost as if he wants to avoid hinting that any American military effort, save for those that He Himself engages in, possesses any virtue.

Quote of the Day

James S. Robbins:

The number of daily attacks in Iraq has fallen almost 95% from levels a year ago. Also of note, the murder rate in Iraq in November was 0.9 per 100,000 people. That is lower than the rate from before Saddam was overthrown. For those keeping score, the 2007 murder rate in the US was 5.9 per 100,000. Can we declare victory yet?

Yes, we can – so long as we give all credit to The One and denounce George W. Bush’s failed, incompetent policies.

Orphaned Victory

For once, it isn’t true that “Victory has a hundred fathers; defeat is an orphan”. Oh, in the dexterosphere, for which today is V-I Day, praise will be ladled out to General Petraeus and even to the President who made the decision to put him in command, but the consensus of bien-pensants is that (a) the Iraqi campaign wasn’t an American victory and (b) it wasn’t won by anything America did.

The Obama Version falls into the mainstream of conventional wisdom: The Sunnis in Anbar province spontaneously rose up against al-Qa’eda, motivated by revulsion against its harsh treatment of their tribes. American and allied forces were bystanders, and the “surge” that began shortly after the first stirring in Anbar was a coincidence rather than a cause. According to this “narrative” (hereafter, NINNY, the “New Iraq Nattering Nabobs Yarn”), the Anbar Awakening would have taken place even had there been no U.S. Marines at hand to lend it firepower and expertise.

The vision of the “people’s revolution” against oppression is dear to the Left, for two reasons: First, it casts a warm glow over left-wing revolutions, such as the French and the Russian and the Cuban, that ushered in regimes far more vicious than what they replaced. Second, it provides a handy excuse for passivity in foreign affairs. Hostile tyrants will be overthrown without our having to act – and it they aren’t, their continuance in power demonstrates that they are not really tyrants.

Hence, resolute leftists opposed doing anything about Saddam Hussein. The irresolute were swept along with the post-9/11 tide, then, when the fighting continued, regressed to their mean and called for acquiescence in defeat. The principal motive for the NINNY is to justify their position by stripping victory of its paternity and blurring the distinction between success and failure.

How closely the NINNY corresponds to reality isn’t of interest to historians only. History, in the hands of polemicists, is a form of propaganda. That’s why, for instance, pro-communist A. J. P. Taylor and anti-American Pat Buchanan, two advocates of a wholly passive U.S. foreign policy, have zealously promoted the canard that Adolf Hitler had only moderate, realistic ambitions for Nazi Germany. The canard at the heart of the NINNY likewise leads to passivity.

The NINNY’s fundamental flaw lies in its axiom that Islamofascist terrorism will inevitably inspire revolt. That is not what history shows. The tactics of al-Qa’eda in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan are, in fact, based not on a mere taste for brutality but on what has worked for similar movements in the past.

The first great success of Moslem arms against a Western nation was the Algerian revolt against France. There the rebels’ treatment of the local population featured “the systematic and gruesome slaughter of large numbers of Muslims to show everybody, French and Muslims, who was boss”. Terrorization “was a permanent and systematic modus operandi”. [Laurent Murawiec, The Mind of Jihad (2008), pp. 297–8]. The effect was not, as the NINNY would have predicted, an “Algerian Awakening”. Perhaps (indeed, probably) something of the sort could have been incited by a French counterpart to General Petraeus. Malhereusement pour la belle France, its commanders relied on counter-terror, which “worked” in the narrow sense of keeping the Moslem majority in a state of perpetual fear but didn’t gain allies and eventually, fatally lost support in the mother country.

In Iraq and Afghanistan (and elsewhere), the mufsidun have emulated the tactics that triumphed in Algeria. There is no strong reason to think that the NINNY strategy of leaving it to the victims to help themselves will be, or would have been, an effective countermeasure.

Before the NINNY becomes immovably entrenched, the real history of the Iraqi campaign needs to be told. Like the history of any other war, it contains a fair share of folly and blunder. Those are what the media’s “zeroth draft of history” highlights, reflecting the preposterous notion that making a plan in advance and adhering to it faithfully are the benchmarks of military competence, but they proved unimportant. What’s remarkable – nay, astonishing – about the American performance in Iraq is the speed and skill with which our civilian and military leaders adapted to the unexpected and overcame the friction of war. Consider this short list of feats that were declared impossible until they were accomplished (after which they were instantly taken for granted):

• The thorough defeat, in scarcely three weeks and with trivial American and allied casualties, of an Iraqi army larger than the invading force and supposedly (the MSM told us repeatedly) “battle-hardened”;

• the capture of Baghdad by a coup de main, without the Stalingrad-like siege that the “experts” had predicted;

• the organization of successful elections, notwithstanding a determined terrorist campaign to disrupt them (recall that John Kerry promised, if elected, to cancel the one scheduled for January 2005, declaring that it was bound to be a fiasco);

• and, finally, the eradication of a powerful terrorist apparatus in a period of less than a year and a half, counting from the beginning of the “surge” (comparable achievements elsewhere have taken years or decades).

The Second Gulf War has the highest ratio of controversy to casualties of any in our country’s history. Once contemporary passions subside, however, there can be little doubt that Iraq will be the case study of how to win an anti-insurgent campaign. Names like Rumsfeld and Petraeus will sit comfortably beside Grant and Lee, while George W. Bush will gain the reputation of a wartime President on a par with Roosevelt, if not Lincoln. In a century or so, the fathers of victory will be acknowledged. I hope, though, that their just due doesn’t have to wait quite that long.

Not Yet a First Draft of History

Bob Woodward’s latest book on the Bush Administration, boldly subtitled A Secret White House History 2006-2008, has attracted conservative attention, because, between the lines of the author’s BDS-inspired diatribe, one can find evidence of George W. Bush’s good judgment, courage, imagination and ability to overcome formidable obstacles in the pursuit of America’s national interest. In the words of the Wall Street Journal,

The success of the surge in pacifying Iraq has been so swift and decisive that it’s easy to forget how difficult it was to find the right general, choose the right strategy, and muster the political will to implement it. It is also easy to forget how many obstacles the State and Pentagon bureaucracies threw in Mr. Bush’s way, and how much of their bad advice he had to ignore, especially now that their reputations are also benefiting from Iraq’s dramatic turn for the better.

Then again, American history offers plenty of examples of wartime Presidents who faced similar challenges: Ulysses Grant became Lincoln’s general-in-chief in 1864, barely a year before the surrender at Appomattox. What matters most is that the President had the fortitude to insist on winning. That’s a test President Bush passed – something history, if not Bob Woodward, will recognize.

Peter Wehner offers a similar perspective, while Rich Lowry excoriates the obstinate resistance of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (as reported by Woodward) to the President’s strategy.

The idea of turning a Woodward screed into a source of pro-Bush commentary is delightful, but I must demur. The War Within, like its predecessors, employs a modus operandi that renders it inherently unreliable. As history, it doesn’t qualify as even a zeroth draft.

By his own account, Mr. Woodward’s narrative is based on 150 interviews and an unspecified number of internal Administration documents. I’ve no reason to doubt that he talked to that many people, read a great many memoranda and gathered excellent raw material for a work of history. Unfortunately, those materials are inaccessible to everyone else. There is no way to check the tale that has been extracted from them. Participants in events undoubtedly disagreed about what happened. How did the author weigh their relative credibility? Did he examine their statements for inconsistencies? Has he allowed adequately for their self-interest and bias? Did he make sure to place testimony in its proper context? Did he omit crucial facts or elevate trivia to central importance? There is no way that the reader can know.

It’s commonplace for historians using the same body of evidence to reach strikingly different conclusions, even where they are dealing with a past that no longer excites fervent passions. The addition of ideological animus naturally widens the gulf. It is all but certain that Mr. Woodward’s timbers could be used to construct numerous widely varying buildings. His particular structure could be close to the truth. It could also be a fun house distortion. It certainly cannot be used uncritically – yet critical use requires being able to look at the evidence that the soi disant historian has kept out of sight.

One’s confidence in The War Within’s analysis is seriously undermined by its evident determination to place President Bush in the worst possible light: first, by asserting that the “process” by which he decided to commit more troops to Iraq and alter the way in which they were used was faulty (that is, insufficiently deferential to “expert” opinion that turned out to be wrong); second, by claiming that the “surge” played no important role in shaping the present state of affairs, that things would have worked out about the same if the President had followed the (alleged) advice of the Joint Chiefs and retreated from the Iraqi theater. As Peter Wehner summarizes,

On the matter of the surge, Woodward downplays its importance. He argues that the enormous drop in violence in Iraq is owed mainly to other factors (the Sunni uprising against Al Qaeda in Iraq and the ceasefire with Moktada al-Sadr), and even to luck (a top-secret operation targeting terrorist leaders came online, he claims, at the same time the surge was being executed).

It seems obvious to me, as it does to Mr. Wehner, “that the surge reinforced every good thing that has happened in Iraq. All the other actors – the Sunnis in Anbar, Al Qaeda in Iraq, Sadr and his minions, the government in Baghdad, Iraq’s neighbors – had to factor the staying power and reinforcement of the U.S.-led coalition into their calculations. It enabled everything else to take place.”

There is, however, a more fundamental point to which Mr. Woodward’s anti-Bush passion blinds him. If the situation in Iraq in early 2007 was truly such that the Anbar Awakening was bound to succeed and al-Sadr’s “Mahdi Army” to stand down, then it was not at all desperate. By Mr. Woodward’s lights, the anti-mufsidun forces were in such a strong position that all they needed from the U.S. was a little help with tracking down and executing high-level terrorists. If that was so, doesn’t it vindicate the Administration’s pre-surge strategy, which the same Bob Woodward derided in his earlier volume, State of Denial?

It’s not hard to infer that this book was begun in confidence that the surge would fail. The plot was preordained: Stubborn, out-of-touch President ignores the wise advice of his generals. They struggle manfully to rescue him from himself but, sad to say, are outmaneuvered.

Reality, though, failed to conform to the narrative, sending Mr. Woodward into his own “state of denial”. He has obviously tried to adhere to his original thesis to the maximum possible extent. Perhaps he is personally satisfied with the resulting work product. There is no reason why anyone else should take it seriously as a guide to what really occurred.

Barry’s Words

Gregory S. McNeal:

In view of his non-existent record, Obama’s words must merit greater scrutiny because they are the only remaining measure voters have for what Obama believes. Those words have been woefully inconsistent over the totality of Obama’s short career, and are full of generalities like “hope” and “change.” In fact, the only consistent theme in his campaign is one policy change after another. All politicians modify their positions (including McCain), but usually those changes take place over a few years and as circumstances dictate. Obama’s changes on dozens of issues came about in just three and a half years and not for policy reasons, but for political gain.

But let’s be fair. At the core of Slick Barry’s shifting words about Iraq is an unchanging principle. A year ago, USA Today interviewed him and reported,

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday [July 19, 2007] the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.

The danger of “a potential genocide in Iraq” has receded, but the candidate’s attitude toward America’s most important Arab ally remains unaltered. The Washington Post – sounding almost like a cog in the VRWC – summarizes:

The message that the Democrat sends is that he is ultimately indifferent to the war's outcome — that Iraq “distracts us from every threat we face” and thus must be speedily evacuated regardless of the consequences. That’s an irrational and ahistorical way to view a country at the strategic center of the Middle East, with some of the world’s largest oil reserves.

It is, nonetheless, a natural view for an isolationist left-winger, who knows little about the world outside Hyde Park and cares less. “Can someone explain why it is, exactly, that Barack Obama is not a laughingstock?”

Legend Making in Progress

Last Friday Scott McClellan, fired press secretary turned left-wing avenger, gave a book report to the House Judiciary Committee. An inevitable topic was the kerfuffle over glamorous superspy Valerie Plame Wilson, whose career of saving the Free World was rudely interrupted when Bob Novak revealed that she worked for the CIA.

Mr. McClellan’s testimony was along the lines everyone expected: Without inside information or other evidence, he speculated that Vice President Cheney ordered his aides to leak Mrs. Wilson’s occupation to reporters as punishment for her husband’s criticism of the invasion of Iraq. The subvillains in this story were Scooter Libby and that ubiquitous man of evil Karl Rove.

It’s a familiar narrative, and, as is also familiar, the teller omitted a couple of plot-spoiling facts: first, that the source for Mr. Novak’s report was then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, whose estrangement from the White House in general, and the Vice President in particular, was notorious; second, that the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Mr. Wilson’s famous anti-war op-ed rested on a lie: Contrary to what he told readers of the New York Times, his mission to Niger uncovered evidence that Saddam Hussein did want to buy uranium in Africa.

It would be interesting, I mused, to see whether press accounts of Mr. McClellan’s committee appearance mentioned this background, so I checked the Nexis database. I don’t think you’ll be surprised at the results.

Here is the sum total of what was said about Mr. Armitage’s role, in each case well after the lede:

Cox News Service: “Libby, former White House political counselor Karl Rove and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage all discussed Plame’s identity with reporters after her husband, former U.S. diplomat Joe Wilson, publicly criticized the White House case for war against Iraq.

Associated Press: “State Department official Richard Armitage first revealed Plame’s CIA identity to columnist Robert Novak, who used Rove as a confirming source for a 2003 article. Around that time Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson was criticizing Bush's march to war in Iraq.”

Among the remainder of the press, silence reigned. Regarding the embarrassing Senate Intelligence Committee report, it was total.

“When legend becomes fact, print the legend” used to be just a line in a movie.

Truman in a Hurry

Cowards, I know, would quit the fighting now
but the man who wants to make his mark in war
must stand his ground and brace for all he’s worth –
suffer his wounds or wound his man to death.

The Iliad, Book XI (Robert Fagels trans.)

Admirers of George W. Bush – not a numerous company but a stubborn one – like to anticipate that he eventually will take a place in history like Harry S Truman’s, a President who left office as a “failure” but is now widely praised for taking the first steps toward victory in the Cold War. It was not at all certain in the immediate aftermath of World War II that the United States would offer serious resistance to the advance of communism in Europe and Asia. We could have pulled back to our own hemisphere and let foreign nations take care of themselves. Similarly, the pro-Bush prediction is that his decision to treat terrorism as an act of war rather than a law enforcement concern, his espousal of the doctrine of defensive preemption, and his successes in Iraq and Afghanistan will set the West on course to suppress Islamofascism, however many detours may lengthen the way.

One element of the Truman-Bush parallel that no one has emphasized strongly is that President Truman started a process with meager short-term results. During his time in office, the Soviet Union swallowed Eastern Europe, Mao Tse-tung took control of mainland China, Stalin’s spies scored their most spectacular espionage feats, deterrence failed in Korea, and the accession of pro-communist governments in Western Europe remained a real possibility. Against those setbacks could be set the salvation of Greece and not much more. It would have been realistic to say in January 1953 that the “War on Communism” was a dismal failure. If either political party then had been like the Democrats now, it would have been said, and loudly, too.

A year ago, it wouldn’t have been excessively gloomy to foresee that President Bush would leave office with his Administration’s defining struggle in a similar state: Iraq would flounder into civil war and be abandoned by a President Clinton or Obama; Afghanistan would fall to resurgent Taliban; Pakistan would become a de facto terrorist ally; the mufsidun ideology, its prestige boosted by such victories, would come to define Islam; an emboldened Iran would emerge as a regional superpower. For every commentator who called the President steadfast in adversity, ten sneered that he was merely obstinate. The War on Terror was certainly not lost, but it looked to be as long as the Cold War.

Today, by startling contrast, it wouldn’t be utterly Pollyannish to say that George W. Bush will walk away a winner, leaving a devastated terrorist movement as his legacy.

About Iraq, the Washington Post’s editorial board (that’s Washington Post, not New York) says,

While Washington’s attention has been fixed elsewhere, military analysts have watched with astonishment as the Iraqi government and army have gained control for the first time of the port city of Basra and the sprawling Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, routing the Shiite militias that have ruled them for years and sending key militants scurrying to Iran. At the same time, Iraqi and U.S. forces have pushed forward with a long-promised offensive in Mosul, the last urban refuge of al-Qaeda. So many of its leaders have now been captured or killed that U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, renowned for his cautious assessments, said that the terrorists have “never been closer to defeat than they are now.”

Iraq passed a turning point last fall when the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign launched in early 2007 produced a dramatic drop in violence and quelled the incipient sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites. Now, another tipping point may be near, one that sees the Iraqi government and army restoring order in almost all of the country, dispersing both rival militias and the Iranian-trained “special groups” that have used them as cover to wage war against Americans. . . .

Gen. Petraeus pointed out that attacks in Iraq hit a four-year low in mid-May and that Iraqi forces were finally taking the lead in combat and on multiple fronts at once – something that was inconceivable a year ago. As a result the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki now has “unparalleled” public support, as Gen. Petraeus put it, and U.S. casualties are dropping sharply. Eighteen American soldiers died in May, the lowest total of the war and an 86 percent drop from the 126 who died in May 2007.

The situation is looking good enough that Team Obama is pretending that Slick Barry never said, “We can send 15,000 more troops, 20,000 more troops, 30,000 more troops: I don’t know any expert on the region or any military officer that I’ve spoken to privately that believes that that is going to make a substantial difference on the situation on the ground.”

“Win the War? Yes, We Can!”

And in Afghanistan,

Missions by special forces and air strikes by unmanned drones have “decapitated” the Taliban and brought the war in Afghanistan to a “tipping point”, the commander of British forces has said.

The new “precise, surgical” tactics have killed scores of insurgent leaders and made it extremely difficult for Pakistan-based Taliban leaders to prosecute the campaign, according to Brig Mark Carleton-Smith.

In the past two years an estimated 7,000 Taliban have been killed, the majority in southern and eastern Afghanistan. But it is the “very effective targeted decapitation operations” that have removed “several echelons of commanders”. . . .

“We have seen increasing fissures of stress through the whole organisation that has led to internecine and fratricidal strife between competing groups.”

Taliban fighters are apparently becoming increasingly unpopular in Helmand, where they are reliant on the local population for food and water.

They have also been subjected to strikes by the RAF’s American-made Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle and the guided Royal Artillery missile system, which have both proved a major battlefield success.

“I can therefore judge the Taliban insurgency a failure at the moment,” said Brig Carleton-Smith. “We have reached the tipping point.”

Meanwhile, Iran’s economy is facing ruin from mismanagement and corruption. Nancy Pelosi’s notion that the mullarchy deserves the credit for the Iraqi government’s gains is a desperate anti-war fantasy, striving to put the worst face possible on victory, but suppose that it were true. Wouldn’t the President deserve kudos for either intimidating or charming the mullahs into a more cooperative frame of mind? As James Taranto says, “Who needs Barack Obama if the Bush administration is generating so much Iranian goodwill?”

And so it goes. Not that this good news amounts to an assured triumph. The enemy retains substantial resources and may be able to regroup. Worse, there is a danger that we will complacently relax the pressure too soon. Nonetheless, the President’s vindication may come much more rapidly than Truman’s, perhaps soon enough to embarrass the Bush haters mightily.

Feith vs. McClellan, Part II

Douglas Feith’s War and Decision was published on April 8, 2008. It is packed with first-hand information about decision making in the Bush Administration, with particular attention to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Included are internal documents that have never before been readily available to the public. Many of its facts are new and surprising.

Scott McClellan’s What Happened, published two days ago, is, by any standard, a far less significant work. Its author was a spokesman, not a policymaker. He played no part in the debates over America’s response to terrorism and has no experience or expertise that makes his commentary more valuable than anybody else’s. Judging by the excerpts that I’ve seen, his analysis is about as insightful as the average left-wing blog’s.

The Nexis database isn’t a perfect measure of media attention, but it’s pretty good. As of this morning, War and Decision had been mentioned in 140 stories over a period of two months. What Happened got 217 mentions – 50 percent more – in two days.

If you think that the mainstream media are engaged in a serious enterprise, the empirical data are against you.

Update (5/29/08): As of late this evening, the count stood at McClellan 355, Feith 143.

Among Scott McClellan’s defenders, side-by-side with Keith Olbermann, is vaguely conservative airhead Peggy Noonan. After a column praising What Happened with faint damns, she concludes, “What’s needed now? More memoirs, more data, more information, more testimony. More serious books, like Doug Feith’s.”

Peggy Noonan has written eight weekly columns since War and Decision was published. These six words are all that she has said about Mr. Feith or his book. More data, sure, but she isn’t going to bother to read it.

Feith vs. McClellan

Having read Douglas Feith’s War and Decision over the long weekend (a better use of anyone’s time than blogging), I was interested to read about former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s unequal and opposite memoir, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. Just as Mr. Feith’s book is an exemplar of what a political insider’s account ought to be, Mr. McClellan’s, unless seriously misrepresented by press accounts and the excerpt reprinted in the Wall Street Journal, is a counter-exemplar, contributing nothing to historical knowledge but the author’s animus.

In fairness to Mr. McClellan, he does not deserve one criticism that has been widely bruited in the dexterosphere: He did not, during his tenure, knowingly retail what he believed to be falsehoods.

As press secretary, I spent countless hours defending the administration from the podium in the White House briefing room. Although the things I said then were sincere, I have since come to realize that some of them were badly misguided. In these pages, I’ve tried to come to grips with some of the truths that life inside the White House bubble obscured. [emphasis added]

In other words, Mr. McClellan did not perceive any “deception” while he served the Administration. It was only later, after it fired him, that he became “genuinely convinced” “that the dis-esteem in which most Americans currently hold it” is deserved. As press secretary, he was not in any event well-placed to detect deception. Unlike Doug Feith, he wasn’t a regular attendee at key policymaking sessions, didn’t debate the pros and cons of strategy with Cabinet secretaries, other top officials and the President himself, didn’t routinely peruse classified documents and didn’t have any significant background in foreign affairs. Where Mr. Feith’s view of the reasons for invading Iraq is founded on expert knowledge of the facts and careful consideration of their importance, Mr. McClellan’s is simply the “narrative” picked up from the media. He concludes with the confident, naïve, ignorant assertion, “Most objective observers today would say that in 2003 there was no urgent need to address the threat posed by Saddam with a large-scale invasion, and therefore the war was not necessary. But this is a question President Bush seems not to want to grapple with.”

War and Decision reviews in detail why, after 9/11, leaving Saddam Hussein in power was a far graver risk than forcibly removing him. To summarize,

• Throughout the 1990’s, liberals decried the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, deplored the refusal of President George H. W. Bush to depose him in 1991, labeled him an “imminent threat” to the American interests and supported legislation that made “regime change” in Iraq official U.S. government policy. Whatever its source or validity, such alarmism cannot have been due to any deception practiced by George W. Bush, who did not become President until 2001.

• Also during the 1990’s, Iraq maintained stockpiles of chemical munitions and actively sought both to improve its chemical capabilities and to develop biological and atomic weapons. These facts, verified directly by the United Nations inspections that Saddam shut down in 1998, were largely admitted by Iraq, which claimed to have subsequently halted them but did not allow verification. The post-war Iraq Study Group reports found that covert development efforts had continued and that full resumption was planned as soon as U.N. economic sanctions came to an end.

• Saddam’s Iraq was a promiscuous provider of training, subsidies and material support to terrorist groups, with little regard for religious or ideological affiliation. This belief was widely held by the intelligence community before George W. Bush took office. Documents captured during and after the war amply confirm it.

• Among the world’s despots, Saddam Hussein stood out for recklessness (invasions of Iran and Kuwait, a threatened reinvasion of Kuwait in 1994), anti-Americanism (the attempted assassination of former President Bush in 1993, daily attempts to shoot down American and British planes patrolling the no-fly zone, murals in honor of the 9/11 attackers) and ferocity (use of poison gas, wanton destruction of Kuwaiti oil fields, internal terrorism and torture). There was no reason to think that he could be reasoned with or deterred.

• International sanctions, which were the one hope of keeping the Ba’athists too weak to be a threat, were proving less and less enforceable. Three permanent members of the Security Council (Russia, France, China) favored weakening or abandoning them. After the war, we learned that corruption in the Oil-for-Food program had given Saddam a multi-billion dollar slush fund with which to bribe foreign politicians, making the demise of sanctions even more of a certainty than it had seemed to be.

American intelligence agencies also believed that Iraq had a large quantity of chemical and biological weapons on hand. That belief (which, Mr. Feith notes, was shared by Iraqi generals in communications intercepted by the U.S.) did no more than add another, redundant item to the long list of reasons to regard Ba’athist Iraq as an international menace. Weapons of mass destruction were, Mr. Feith shows, a relatively small, and never decisive, component of the case. If we had known with certainty that Iraq possessed not a single chemical, biological or nuclear weapon, its ability and willingness to aid terrorists in other ways would have been troubling enough. It could and did give a variety of mufsidun cash, equipment (hundreds of time bombs and suicide vests, for instance), training and safe havens.

All of these facts, none of them obscure in 2003 though the “narrative” has obscured them since then, apparently have slipped from, or never entered, the press secretary’s mind. Likewise less than perceptive is his harping on the “permanent campaign” that the Bush Administration supposedly waged to the detriment of “openness and forthrightness”. If the President has been trying to imitate Bill Clinton’s “war room” approach to governing the country, he has gone about it very strangely. The most conspicuous feature of his public relations strategy has been reticence about responding to his opponents’ allegations. A Clinton would have insisted (correctly) that the “sixteen words” about Ba’athist Iraq’s attempts to purchase uranium in Africa were based on solid evidence, that reports of federal ineptitude in dealing with Hurricane Katrina were grossly exaggerated and that WMD stockpiles were only a small part of the rationale for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. President Bush kept silent on all those counts and more. (Vide Douglas Feith, “How Bush Sold the War”.) It looks like Scott McClellan was blind not just to distant Iraq but also to the press operation that he supposedly headed. Whatever else his book may be, What Happened it is not.

Further reading: The Wall Street Journal, “General McClellan’s War”
Peter Wehner, “Scott’s Truth vs. Reality”

A Unilateral War

When General Petraeus told Congress that Iran is furnishing weapons and training to our enemies in Iraq, and is responsible for the deaths of “hundreds of American soldiers and thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians”, the anti-war Left yawned. To the extent that the pro-defeat crowd paid any attention, they dismissed such charges as more Bushitler lies, designed to stampede the public into war with the Mullarchy.

Yet just the other day, as Abe Greenwald points out, the Los Angeles Times, not often a conduit for Administration propaganda, quoted a Mahdi Army commander casually discussing his men’s receipt of arms shipments from Iran, including “bombs that can rip a hole in a U.S. tank and rockets that can pound Baghdad’s Green Zone”. He professes to “hate Iran”, and maybe he does, even as his pseudo-army’s nominal leader hides out in Tehran, but we ought to have learned by now that expectations that our enemies in the Middle East won’t cooperate with each other are delusory. Like Saddam Hussein before them, the mullahs are happy to arm and subsidize any species of anti-American mufsidun.

Does that matter at all to, say, Barack Obama? He insists that he’s not a pacifist; he’ll pour troops in Afghanistan and maybe Pakistan, too, to find Osama bin-Laden. Why? Because bin-Laden’s organization murdered Americans. Yet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s organization has done the same, and the prospective Democratic President plans to invite him to a summit meeting – much as if President Roosevelt had proposed getting together with Hideki Tojo after Pearl Harbor.

Liberals scorn “unilateralism”, but only when America takes the offensive. Unilateral attacks against us, it seems, are not a cause for concern.

Barack Obama’s Fantasy Universe

Gateway Pundit calls our attention to this, well, remarkable bit from Slick Barry’s North Carolina victory speech:

The man I met in Pennsylvania who lost his job but can’t even afford the gas to drive around and look for a new one. He can’t afford four more years of an energy policy written by the oil companies and for the oil companies; a policy that is not only keeping gas at record prices but funding both sides of the war on terror and destroying our planet. . . . He needs us to take a permanent holiday from our addiction for oil by making automakers raise their fuel standards, corporations pay for their pollution and oil companies invest their record profits in a clean energy future. That’s the change we need.

GP fastened on the peculiar phrase “funding both sides of the war on terror”, wondering what rational meaning it could possibly have, and reaching no satisfactory conclusion. The answer to the riddle can be found, I believe, in the point that caught James Taranto’s eye (second item):

Of course we’re all unhappy that regimes like those in Saudi Arabia and Iran [and don’t forget Venezuela, Jim!] (but no longer Iraq, thanks to Congress and President Bush) are able to use oil revenues to fund terrorism.

But Obama finds fault with funding both sides – that is, he finds fault with funding our side. If Obama wants to stake out a position of neutrality in wartime, he should run for president of Switzerland, not America.

If one takes Senator Obama’s statement at face value, that is, as implying that America has no legitimate role in the War on Terror, “funding both sides” makes sense. The Iraqi government, on the “other side” from the terrorists, supports itself largely through oil profits. A President Obama evidently would adopt energy policies that would keep money away from Baghdad, as well as from its foes. Then he would be off to negotiate peace with Iran and other countries that feel threatened by the Bush Administration, just like FDR did with Hitler and Tojo. To put it another way, he would both withdraw military support from our erstwhile ally and seek to bankrupt it, much as the Democratic Congress in 1975 worked actively to enfeeble South Vietnam.

The rest of the Obama quote contains further layers of fantasy. Slick Barry wants to cut the price of gasoline for that unemployed Pennsylvanian. He also wants to cut the carbon dioxide emissions that are “destroying our planet”. The only way to do that in the short or medium run is to discourage driving by making gasoline more expensive. Consistent with that view, he opposes the modest price relief that would come from suspending the federal gasoline tax. So, does he want lower prices or higher? If lower, how does he propose to reduce the amount of driving that Americans do while making it less expensive to drive? Mileage rationing?

Nothing in the summary of the Obama energy agenda – “making automakers raise their fuel standards, corporations pay for their pollution and oil companies invest their record profits in a clean energy future” – will help the Pennsylvanian buy gas soon enough to aid his job search. Fuel economy standards are a long-term proposition, the economics of which, we know from other evidence, the Senator doesn’t fathom. Taxes on “corporate pollution” – whatever he may be thinking of there – aren’t obvious energy cost savers. Compelling oil companies to invest in “clean energy” will leave them less money to explore and drill for oil. Between 1992 and 2006 (the latest available data), the U.S. oil industry invested $1.25 trillion in those activities, four-thirds of its net income. An Obama Administration will put a stop to that.

Subjected to even mild scrutiny, Senator Obama’s statements about energy and the war are adolescent fantasizing. Superbama’s will of steel can bend logic with its bare thought and leap contradictions at a single bound. How long before this guy adopts a secret identity?

Pitchfork Pat’s Patriotism

Five years ago, David Frum penned a rather brutal essay for National Review on “Unpatriotic Conservatives”.

From the very beginning of the War on Terror, there has been dissent, and as the war has proceeded to Iraq, the dissent has grown more radical and more vociferous. Perhaps that was to be expected. But here is what never could have been: Some of the leading figures in this antiwar movement call themselves “conservatives.”

These conservatives are relatively few in number, but their ambitions are large. They aspire to reinvent conservative ideology: to junk the 50-year-old conservative commitment to defend American interests and values throughout the world — the commitment that inspired the founding of this magazine — in favor of a fearful policy of ignoring threats and appeasing enemies.

Since then, the targets of Mr. Frum’s accusation have pilloried him vociferously, particularly on the pages of that ill-named journal, The American Conservative. The paleocons shout to the world that they are the true conservatives, the only guardians of America’s real national interests. Now and then, however, they let their disguises slip, revealing an anti-American animus scarcely distinguishable from Moveon.org or Daily Kos.

Last week, Pat Buchanan, The American Conservative’s founder and guru, published a piece titled “Who’s Behind the Proxy Wars?”. Taking note of “what [General] Petraeus and [Ambassador] Crocker allege” about how “Iran is conducting a proxy war against the United States”, and not bothering to dispute the truth of their allegations, Pitchfork Pat goes on to ask,

What is Tehran’s motive?

Iran, after all, is the principal beneficiary of the U.S. invasion that dethroned its enemy Saddam, ended the Sunni Baath Party’s monopoly of power and opened the door to Shia politicians with strong ties to Tehran. The regime in the Green Zone is the same regime that rolled out a red carpet for President Ahmadinejad.

Why, then, would Iran bloody it up? Why, when things are going Iran’s way in Iraq, would it risk war with the United States over Iraq?

Because a precipitous American exit from Iraq is a necessary condition to Iranian hegemony over that country, and eventually, in Ahmadinejad’s dreams, over the Middle East? Because the Iranian regime has been conducting a war against the United States since 1979 and is taking the opportunity to inflict as much damage as possible on the “Great Satan”? Because the mullarchy in Tehran is fanatically anti-Jewish, anti-Christian and anti-Western?

If any of those explanations occurred to the dean of the paleoconservatives, he left them unexpressed. No, it is all America’s fault.

The April 16 Los Angeles Times offers an answer. Iran’s proxy war against us in Iraq may be Tehran’s response to a U.S. proxy war being waged against Iran. Ahmadinejad may be exacting blood for blood.

According to Times’ writer Borzou Daragahi, Iran believes the United States is behind groups that are systematically killing Iranians along the border.

Buchanan goes on to insinuate that the Bush Administration is aiding anti-Iranian operations by two groups that it has designated as terrorists, the PEJAK and the Mujahedin Khalq. He add, “Iranians also believe the United States is behind attacks in the oil-rich and Arab Khuzestan region of southwest Iran.”

Is there a scintilla of evidence for these charges? Not unless one regards Tehran as a credible source. Buchanan evidently does:

Needed now are congressional hearings to determine if President Bush has authorized a proxy war against Iran – by funding or arming guerrillas to attack the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and if that is what is behind the IRG-backed attacks on U.S. forces.

Back in December 1941, not even the most fervent isolationists called for Congress to consider whether Pearl Harbor had been provoked by U.S. actions. Pat Buchanan no doubt would have. Like one of the Krazy Kos Kidz, he sees no evil in the world – except among the leaders of his own country. About his patriotism, David Frum was right.

Bits and Pieces

■ First of all, let me recommend Robert Ferrigno’s portrayal of a future Bill Clinton’s interior monologue as he waits for the start of a gig at a high school gym in his new role as President Obama’s “Outreach Ambassador to the Heartland”, “Missing Rush Limbaugh”:

He stared at cheerleaders, the white one sawing away at the nails on his left hand, the black one working on the left. Their tight sweaters said Ruth Bader Ginsberg High School, class of 2012. The Tennessee Education Commission had renamed the school two years ago, changed it from Ronald Reagan High and the locals still hadn’t gotten over it. Part of the reason he had been sent down here to Mecklenburg for the grin and grab. Tomorrow he hit two Baptist church pancake breakfasts, a Rotary luncheon, and a Boy Scout banquet that evening. There was an election in November and the party needed every vote to be counted. . . .

The TV in the corner of the cramped, high school dressing room had the sound off, but he still flinched when Barry . . . President Obama and Michelle came onscreen. Follow Us to the Promised Land floated just below their smug faces. Their daily inspirational hour broadcast live to the American people. Michelle had taken a rolled-up newspaper to the FCC right after the inauguration and that had been that. . . .

Nothing on the tube but those two, and nothing on radio but Air America from sea to shining sea, the bad-news-and-it’s-your-fault radio network. Some girl in Salt Lake fell and skinned her knee, the American people and their past leaders had failed her, past leaders meaning him, Willie Boy, Elvis, the Big Him. Like he should have installed marshmallow sidewalks or given away bubble wrap pants. He absently rubbed the I’m Sorry button in his lapel. Well, he might be wearing the button, but he wasn’t sorry. . . .

Not that his job as Heartland Ambassador didn’t carry some risks. He patted his ample belly. Getting pretty jowly too. He had put on over 30 pounds since his appointment. Seems like every group he talked to served nothing but barbeque, mashed potatoes, and peach cobbler — his three favorite food groups. His cholesterol spiked higher every day, while the president and First Lady stayed sleek as minks, never missing a chance to flaunt themselves at the “Fat is More Dangerous than Terrorism” rallies that Nancy Pelosi organized. Which, as White House press secretary Chris Mathews put it, effectively made Bill the new Osama bin Laden. Ha ha. . . .

He pulled out his I-Phone, tried to catch Limbaugh’s latest on the web, but the new NASA filters were blocking it out. Dangit, he missed Rush. One time, Hillary had walked in on him in the Oval Office — no, not that time — and caught him listening to Rush. He had his feet up on the desk, smoking a stogie and just roaring as the Maha Rushy tore into the two of them. Funny stuff. If you can’t laugh at yourself . . . and, truth be told, the man was right about most of it, heck everyone knew that. Hillary though, she started screaming, why are you listening to that maniac? He tapped the ash off his cigar and turned the radio down a little as Rush took a call from Rita X. Just keeping track of the enemy, honeykins, he had said, and besides, you expect me to listen to NPR? Evidently she did.

■ For the Quote of the Day, here is Roger Clegg:

From an L.A. Times op-ed today, about why it’s racist to call Obama “elitist”: “`Elitist’ is another word for ‘arrogant,’ which is another word for ‘uppity,’ that old calumny applied to blacks who stood up for themselves.” Of course, “humble” is another word for “subservient,” which is another word for “slavish.” I guess it’s best not to say anything about Senator Obama, but isn’t ignoring someone because he’s black something that racists do, too?

Yes, it is. Are you wearing your “I’m Sorry” button, Roger?

■ The ABC moderators in last night’s Hillary-Obama 12-rounder asked somewhat tougher questions than, f’rinstance, Slick Barry faced at last week’s Associated Press annual meeting, including mirabile dictu one pointing out that, “in each instance, when the [capital gains tax] rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased; the government took in more money. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down.”

But Senator Obama has higher priorities than government revenues. He responded, “Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.” He then proceeded to rant about how much hedge fund managers get paid. He could have shortened his answer by reciting Huey Long’s little ditty:

Every man can be a king,
Every man a millionaire.
There is money everywhere,
If only they would share!

Both candidates pledged that taxes will go up for anyone earning over $250,000 a year. That is just a tad higher than what Barack and Michelle Obama were making before book royalties for him and a big raise for her sent their fortunes skyrocketing. Let’s recall that Michelle Obama laments how hard it was to make ends meet on $240,000 a year. Yet $10,000 above that is the plateau of the idle, milkable rich.

■ I’ll take good news where I find it and thus am delighted that Barack Obama has killed federal campaign finance regulation. Since January, the Federal Election Commission has had two members and four vacancies. Without a quorum, it can’t do anything. President Bush nominated two new commissioners last year: one Democrat and one Republican, as required by law. Senator Obama has blocked a vote on the Republican, on the ground that, when he held a post in the Justice Department, he defended the constitutionality of laws requiring voters to show identification at the polls. (Having spent his political career in squeaky clean Chicago, the Senator believes that vote fraud is a myth.)

On Monday, the Democratic nominee withdrew, saying that he couldn’t wait any longer for confirmation. The Democratic Senate leader promptly announced that finding a replacement will take “several months”, which means that the FEC is all but certain to remain hors de combat until after the Presidential election.

Yes, this is a misfortune for Senator McCain, who now won’t be able to get public financing for his campaign even if he wants it. (A two-member FEC can’t release funds.) But we can hope that, instead of indulging in schadenfreude over the ironic legacy of McCain-Feingold, conservatives will decide that digging into their wallets for campaign contributions is better than four years of higher taxes at home and national humiliation abroad. And maybe President McCain will thereafter see his handiwork in a less sunny light.

■ Finally, everybody should read Michael Totten’s “Hope for Iraq’s Meanest City”, telling how, after a long, hard struggle, American and Iraqi forces have broken the mufsidun stranglehold on Fallujah. It’s not a tale of brilliant plans brilliantly executed but of persistence in the face of adversity, of learning from mistakes, trying again and never giving up – the qualities that are essential to winning any war, especially one against an enemy for whom atrocities are the weapon of choice and whose chief hope of victory lies in our unwillingness to keep going when the going isn’t smooth.

With a Fiasco Like This . . .

. . . who needs victories?

Google “Basra” and “fiasco”, and you’ll get “about 128,000” hits. On Fox News, the network that lefties want to shut down for its right-wing bias, you can read the headline, “Iraqi Government Sacks 1,300 Soldiers, Police Following Basra Fiasco”. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson will inform you that “Basra fiasco shows war policy flaws”. As for the Senate Democratic leader –

While people of good will on both left and right were trying to figure out what the fighting in Basra meant, Reid needed no time to gather facts. Instead, he leapt to his usual conclusions, insisting that the Basra fighting foretold disaster and exposed Bush administration mendacity and incompetence. "Instead of making our own country safer," Reid droned, “we are greasing the pockets of corrupt Iraqi politicians and buying their temporary cooperation.”

Superficial hawks might contend that the outcome of the Basra operation, half-baked though its conception seemed to be, had hardly been dire. The bien-pensants knew better: The Madhi Army had “humiliated” the Iraqi government, then cleverly declared a cease-fire, in return for which Prime Minister Maliki had no doubt granted secret concessions.

Now time has passed, and this defeat has had a strange aftermath:

Basra residents welcome Iraq army crackdown

BASRA, Iraq (AFP) — Three weeks after Iraqi troops swarmed into the southern city of Basra to take on armed militiamen who had overrun the streets, many residents say they feel safer and that their lives have improved.

The fierce fighting which marked the first week of Operation Sawlat al-Fursan (Charge of the Knights) has given way to slower, more focused house-by-house searches by Iraqi troops, which led on Monday to the freeing of an abducted British journalist.

Residents say the streets have been cleared of gunmen, markets have reopened, basic services have been resumed and a measure of normality has returned to the oil-rich city.

The port of Umm Qasr is in the hands of the Iraqi forces who wrested control of the facility from Shiite militiamen, and according to the British military it is operational once again.

However, the city is flooded with troops, innumerable checkpoints constantly snarl the traffic, residents are scared to go out at night despite the curfew being relaxed, and the sound of sporadic gunfire can still be heard.

An AFP correspondent said three northwestern neighbourhoods once under the firm control of the Mahdi Army militia of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr – Al-Hayaniyah, Khamsamile and Garma – are now encircled by Iraqi troops who are carrying out door-to-door searches.

Two other neighbourhoods once dominated by the Mahdi Army, Al-Qiblah in the southwest and Al-Taymiyyah in the centre, have been cleared of weaponry and many people have been arrested, military officials say.

So the “defeated” army controls the battlefield, and the enemy is being strangled. Nor is that just the propaganda of military spokesmen. AFP (not, let’s remember, a notably pro-Iraqi source) quotes local residents:

“I am very happy about the situation right now. The deployment of the Iraqi army has made gunmen and gangsters disappear from the streets,” said court employee Mahdi Fallah, 42.

“The gangs were controlling the ports and smuggling oil. Now the ports are back in government hands. Everything in Basra is better than before.”

Taxi driver Samir Hashim, 35, said he now felt safer driving through the city’s streets and was willing to put up with the traffic jams caused by the many security checkpoints.

“We feel secure. Assassinations have ended, organised crime is finished and armed groups are no longer on the streets,” said Hashim.

“I think Basra will be the best city in Iraq,” he added optimistically. “We are finally beginning to feel there is law in Basra.”

“We feel comfortable and safe and secure,” said civil servant Alah Mustapha.

“The situation in Basra is stable. The Iraqi army controls the city and there are no longer armed groups on the streets.”

We can’t be sure that there won’t be relapses and crises in Basra. The enemy hasn’t given up, and why should then, when Harry Reid’s party may be dictating American policy next year? Still, if we suffer a few more defeats like this, the Mesopotamian mufsidun will be undone before President Obama or Clinton can bail them out.

Where Would We Rather Fight?

No matter how often we hear this from al-Qa’eda’s second-in-command and chief public spokesman:

As-Sahab: And what is the most important field in which this Mujahid vanguard is wrestling with the enemies of Islam?

Zawahiri: Iraq is the most important of these fields.

– Democrats know better:

As we've said before and I'll end by saying: How is this war in Iraq helping us fight the war on terrorism, the real war on terrorism, Afghanistan? [Rep. Nancy Pelosi, 4/3/08]

I’m well aware of the lefty counterargument to cries that the likes of Ayman al-Zawahiri regard Iraq as the “most important field” in their war against the West: What brought Iraq to the fore was our invasion and toppling of Saddam Hussein. If it weren’t for American actions, a Ba’athist dictatorship would reign over a peaceful Iraq, and it would be nobody’s battlefield.

That is undoubtedly true, as far as it goes. Two questions follow:

First, what role would that “peaceful” Iraq be playing in the War on Terror? The recent report from the Institute for Defense Analyses, based on thousands of captured documents, tells us the answer. It shows how energetic and promiscuous the Ba’athist regime was in its backing for terrorism, particularly terrorism directed at the United States and Israel. Stephens F. Hayes has a side-by-side, comparing the IDA’s discoveries to the opinions of a pair of liberal foreign policy analysts. As Hayes demonstrates, their confidence that Saddam Hussein had no interests in common with, and in fact was hostile toward, religiously motivated Islamofascism has been thorough discredited, even if the elite media haven’t bothered to give the evidence a second glance.

We can be sure, then, that a Saddam-controlled Iraq would be a source of money and material for whatever mufsidun were attacking us. Even under the burden of U.N. sanctions, Iraq sent cash, time bombs, suicide vests and other assistance to terrorists of every stripe. Once the sanctions became a joke, as was already happening before the invasion, that aid and comfort would have grown more extensive and effective. Where would it have been deployed?

That leads to the second question: If Iraq were not the main front, what would be? An obvious but unstated premise underlying much criticism of our Iraqi policy is that, had we not acted against Saddam, al-Qa’eda and its allies would have been content to hunker down passively in whatever hideaways they could find in Afghanistan and vicinity. That course of conduct hardly seems congruent with their other words and deeds. There are numerous targets that Osama bin-Laden could hit if Iraq were not on the front lines: Saudi-controlled Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, Morocco – each fragile, each an excellent prize for the nascent “Caliphate”, each harboring substantial pro-jihadist sentiment among its population. I doubt that Cairo or Amman or Rabat would be an easier battleground for American forces than Baghdad. I doubt more that Nancy Pelosi would be willing to fight in any of them.

The mufsidun certainly have no incentive to confine themselves to Afghanistan. As a base of operations, it is impoverished, remote and turbulent. If our enemies ever reach the point that they can act nowhere else, the war will be effectively over. On the other hand, so long as they are operating anywhere else, it’s hard to imagine a more foolish strategy than concentrating our military strength against a famous graveyard of armies. We should do what’s necessary to keep the other side from winning on the Afghan front, and we should harass the enemy’s high command whenever and wherever we can. But the way to win the “real war” is to wage it in the Middle East, which is economically and politically far more vital than Central Asia and to which we can readily deploy our forces. In order to gain any worthwhile objective, the enemy must come to us there. That is the place to defeat them.

What’s the News from Basra?

I don’t know. Which makes me wiser, by Socrates’s standard, than a great many pundits who have started telling us who won and lost in the clashes between government forces and the “Madhi Army” in Iraq’s second largest city, as well as what will “inevitably” happen next. Much of this commentary is what Sherlock Holmes would have dismissed as speculation in advance of the evidence. Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, both military historians, have posted an incisive article (“The Basra Business”) summarizing (as of yesterday afternoon) “what we can say with confidence about recent operations and what we cannot”.

Among the unknowns are most of the hard data needed to evaluate how the fighting went on the ground and why it abruptly ended.

How well did the ISF fight in Basra and, in general, what actually happened there? The absence of partnered Coalition Forces in the city makes it extremely difficult to understand the nature of the fighting and the Iraqi forces’ performance – long experience in the limitations of stringers and “eyewitnesses” or hospital sources in places where we did know what had actually happened should leave us skeptical of all initial reports of combat coming out of Basra. . . .

Did Maliki accept a deal with Sadr in return for his stand-down order and, if so, what was involved? We know what Sadr’s demands were (at least publicly), but he ordered his forces to stop fighting before Maliki publicly accepted his terms.

We also don’t know the future, e. g.,

Who will gain or lose more credit in the eyes of the Iraqi people, and particularly the Shia-Maliki or Sadr? . . .

Will Maliki persist in his efforts to disarm JAM [the Mahdi Army] and Special Groups [Iran’s direct proxies] or will he lose his nerve? . . .

How will JAM and Special Groups react? Will they continue with or accelerate the offensive they had already been conducting since the start of the year, or has this operation blunted that offensive and thrown them off-balance?

It’s remarkable how many reporters, editorial writers, U.S. politicians and bloggers can tell us the answers to those questions already. The consensus of the news media is that Moqtada al-Sadr, nominal leader of the Mahdi Army, is in a stronger position than ever, having “won” because the central government didn’t carry through with its ambitious project of destroying his movement in Basra. For what they’re worth, one can read opposing viewpoints at the Belmont Club: An optimistic appraisal is quoted, and a lengthy comment presents a convoluted reply by a left-wing blogger (which, I must say, reminds me a bit of those right-wing analyses in the 1960’s arguing that the Sino-Soviet split was just a deception).

What we do know is less extensive but not uninteresting. Most significant, I think, is that Prime Minister Maliki thought that an all-Iraqi operation could regain control of Basra from the Sadrists and Iranians. What’s more, on the surface at least, that cockiness (as most observers would call it) was not wholly unjustified:

The ISF operation did not clear Basra or destroy either Special Groups or the Mahdi Army.

But the ISF performed remarkably well, moving numerous units to Basra on short notice, establishing them in the city, engaging in hard fighting, and stopping only when Sadr caved.

On the other side, the outcome was not so happy:

The Sadrists and Special Groups failed to set Iraq alight despite their efforts – Iraqi forces kept the Five Cities area (Najaf, Karbala, Hillah, Diwaniyah, and Kut) under control with very little Coalition assistance; Iraqi and Coalition forces kept Baghdad under control.

Sadr never moved to return to Iraq, ordered his forces to stop fighting without achieving anything, and further demonstrated his dependence on (and control by) Iran. . . .

On March 30, Sadr ordered his followers to stop fighting. This decision contrasts with his 2004 decision to fight on, and his continued presence in Iran combined with this surrender results from weakness, rather than strength.

These appearances could be illusory. Many of the aforementioned commentators insist that they must be. A popular parallel is the aftermath of last year’s Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, where Israel did better militarily but is generally perceived to have lost through its failure to render Hezbollah impotent. There is some resemblance but also an important distinction: Israel broke off the fighting unilaterally. Iraq did not. Instead, its enemies declared a truce, which it apparently has felt no obligation to observe.

While we can’t be sure how this offensive, whether half a success or half a failure, will affect Iraqis’ views of the Prime Minister, it is remarkably more than very many foreigners thought his government could do. According to his detractors, Mr. Maliki leans more toward Tehran than Washington and has at his disposal an army that can accomplish nothing without massive American support. In Basra, he acted against Iran’s close allies, and his troops were able to perform creditably under difficult circumstances. Non-vatic though I am, that looks like a good omen to me.

Further reading: Kimberly Kagan, “The Second Iran-Iraq War”:

Senior officials of the Iranian government, the U.S. military has noted in press briefings, support and in some cases control, illegal armed groups that are fighting American forces and undermining the Iraqi government. In particular, the recent fighting in Basra and Baghdad is not at root a civil war between Iraqi Shia political factions, but an ongoing struggle between the Iraqi government and illegal militias organized, trained, equipped and funded by Iran.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the Iraqi Security Forces are now fighting these militias, a long-standing demand of the U.S. that was articulated in congressional benchmarks in 2006. The question for Americans is simple: Will we support Iraq in this fight, or abandon its government and people? . . .

Mr. Maliki demonstrated his willingness to challenge Shiite militias and Iran in the Shiite heartland of Iraq. The Iraqi Security Forces ably demonstrated their capability to defend central Iraq, and quell an uprising of the Mahdi Army and the Special Groups in the most important cities between Baghdad and Basra. The remaining security problems in Basra will have to be addressed in future operations, which we should encourage the government of Iraq to undertake after additional planning and, perhaps, reinforcement. . . .

Iran and Mr. Sadr could not simply unleash a floodtide of violence that would overwhelm Iraqi Security Forces partnered with U.S. units, because they are more capable of handling the situation. For all of his nationalist rhetoric, Mr. Sadr is evidently not in control of his movement – it appears that the decision to fight or not rested with the Qods Force commander and not with him. But Mr. Sadr’s militia remains a reserve from which the Special Groups can and will draw in crisis.

These events provide an enormous opportunity for either the U.S. or for Iran – and whichever state responds most intelligently and quickly to the circumstances on the ground will gain the benefit. The U.S. should encourage the Iraqi government to defeat Iran’s proxies and agents, and should provide the requisite assistance. It should encourage and support the Iraqi government’s laudable determination to establish the rule of law throughout Iraq, not just where U.S. forces are present. . . .

Above all, the U.S. must recognize that Iran is engaged in a full-up proxy war against it in Iraq. Iranian agents and military forces are actively attacking U.S. forces and the government of Iraq. Every rocket that lands in the Green Zone should remind us that Iran’s aims are evidently not benign – they are at best destabilizing and at worst hegemonic. The U.S. must defeat al Qaeda in Iraq, and protect Iraq from the direct military intervention of Iran. Failure to do so will invite Iranian domination of an Arab state that now seeks to be our ally.

Failure, Success and George W. Bush

The opinion that the Bush fils Administration is a “failed Presidency” has become the conventional wisdom of both the Left, which yearned for failure, and the Right, which has a distressing tendency to fall into line with leftist historical verdicts. If by “failure” we simply mean unpopularity, I can’t dissent, although I can observe that, by that standard, America’s first failed President was another George, George Washington.

On the merits, “failure” is as absurd a label for George W. Bush as “mature” for Britney Spears. Here is a President who entered office during a just aborning recession, promoted exactly the right remedy, oversaw a seven-year economic expansion (now apparently ending, but repealing the business cycle would go beyond successful to miraculous), responded instantly to an unprecedented terrorist attack by launching a successful military campaign half a world away (and making it look easy), ousted one of the world’s most dangerous anti-American tyrants in another short, sharp invasion, and has since kept up relentless pressure on terrorist groups, reducing their attacks against the West to a trickle rather than the flood that most observers anticipated after 9/11. Six and a half years without a major follow-up atrocity on American soil would have been regarded as an insanely optimistic forecast on September 12, 2001.

Not all has gone well, of course. When has it ever? But the demerits are comparatively minor. Some, like the supposedly inept handling of Hurricane Katrina, are outright lies. Virtually all of the horror stories from New Orleans proved to be wildly exaggerated or fraudulent, and it is now clear that the federal relief efforts would have been more than adequate, had it not been for incompetent local officials. The worst than one can say about the White House is that it lacked the imagination to conceive that the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana would fail so comprehensively. Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.

Iraq is the center of the case against President Bush. It is a case that can be sustained only by applying a standard of hindsight and perfectionism (and, as a final resort, ignoring the story when it doesn’t fit the “narrative”). The invasion was a fast, almost bloodless victory, in the face of “expert” opinion that predicted high casualties, a long slog to Baghdad and a Stalingrad-like siege. The subsequent recuperation of the country has gone remarkably well – if one compares it to historical counterparts instead of Utopia. Again, “experts” (mostly the same ones who had forecast a Soviet-style disaster in Afghanistan and a stiff resistance by Saddam Hussein’s “battle tested army”) “knew” that free elections, self-government and economic recovery were distant prospects for post-Ba’athist Iraq.

What didn’t go well in Iraq was a continued high level of terrorism. That stemmed from a strategic decision by the enemy. Although their militarily rational course of action would have been to shift to another theater, where they would not have to confront the world’s strongest army on highly unequal terms, al-Qa’eda and its allies chose Iraq as the “main front” in their war against the West. The upshot was that they lost thousands of foot soldiers and a number of top leaders, lacked the resources to move against promising targets among the weak regimes of the Moslem world, and were distracted from undertaking 9/11-style attacks in Western nations. Eventually, too, their brutality and lack of victories cost them support in Iraq and prestige among their co-religionists. Moslems who don’t like America know now that al-Qa’eda is a broken reed that will pierce the hand that leans on it.

The defeat of the mufsidun in Iraq would doubtless have come more quickly if the Administration had not stuck to a “light footprint” strategy for over three years. The concept was, ironically, the one that the Left incessantly demands: forcing the Iraqis to take responsibility for their own security. Unhappily, the Ba’athists had broken too much. Their armed forces had to be disbanded. (I’m flabbergasted that some otherwise rational pundits regret that decision. Would they have used the Wehrmacht to keep order in Germany after World War II?) The police were unreliable. Civilian bureaucrats were corrupt. The national infrastructure was dilapidated. The new government thus needed more help to get onto its feet than optimistic Americans had expected.

What’s remarkable is not that misestimation but that, once the old strategy was abandoned, the new one, the “surge”, worked so well in so little time. I doubt that any anti-insurgency campaign in history has made more rapid progress. At this point, the enemy’s only hope of victory in Iraq lies in an unforced, premature American withdrawal, which would demoralize supporters of the government, spark an armed struggle for sectarian advantage, allow al-Qa’eda to rebuild its forces, give pro-terrorist neighbors freedom to intervene, and compel other Arab governments to react militarily. The civil war that didn’t happen would turn into a major regional conflict and a moral defeat for the United States on a scale never before seen. If any of that occurs, however, it will be despite, rather than because of, President Bush.

Yet, whatever I or anyone else may say about the President’s objective record of success, the subjective impression of failure is overwhelming. That perception is partly the fault of the Right. Either because he was never a hard-line conservative or because he hoped to forge a broad coalition against terrorism after 9/11, Mr. Bush never attended much to slowing the growth of government spending, implementing socially conservative policies or cracking down on illegal immigration. Those departures from “movement” conservatism much dampened the enthusiasm of his natural allies. On immigration especially, he has had to endure poisonous restrictionist abuse, of the “Bush hates America” variety.

Meanwhile, the surreal shrillness of the Left is echoed by the newspapers and television networks that still provide most Americans with most of their picture of the world. I’ve been paying attention to politics since the waning years of the Eisenhower Administration and can say with certainty that never before, including the worst days of Vietnam and Watergate, has our public discourse been so filled with irrational venom. I’m not surprised that many Administration officials have given up trying to answer the flow of fact-free insults and fun-house distortions. When detailed documentation of Saddam Hussein’s encouragement of terrorism, willingness to aid any enemy of America and close ties to Osama bin-Laden’s highest ranking lieutenant’s is reported as proof that he had no connection with al-Qa’eda, the media have abandoned not just fairness and balance but reason itself. One might as well have looked for factual reporting in Pravda or the radio broadcasts of Lord Haw-Haw.

In this atmosphere, it is hard to look the facts in the eye and ignore the invective. When emotions die down and historians consider the early 21st Century without rancor, it will, I think, be clear that George W. Bush faced severer challenges than all but a couple of his predecessors and met them capably. If the West prevails in the present conflict, he will be honored as the pioneer in the defense of civilization. If we do not, he will be abused as a dangerous foe of Islamic hegemony. In either case, his present day detractors will go down as among the most vacuous and near-sighted of history’s fools.

And What Would Be a Link?

The Institute for Defense Analyses has just released a new report entitled “Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents”. Through either a master stroke of psychological warfare or bureaucratic inertia, the Pentagon made copies somewhat difficult to obtain and decided not to hold a press briefing. Reporters ill-disposed toward our ouster of Saddam Hussein naturally intuited that the study’s conclusion must have been, in the New York Times’ words, “Oh, By the Way, There Was No Al Qaeda Link” and therefore immediately began publicizing it, without taking the precaution of reading the text first. The Times’s blog based its summary on the left-wing McClatchey Newspapers:

Remember those weapons of mass destruction that could not be found in Iraq? Well, the supposed tight links between Saddam Hussein and the Al Qaeda terrorist network have evaporated as well. . . .

The study, entitled “Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents,” concludes that while Saddam’s regime provided some support for groups in the Middle East that have been labeled as terrorist, his main efforts were directed against Israel and against groups he considered enemies of his government, including Shiite Muslims, Kurds and Iraqi exiles.

Stephen F. Hayes, who has written about the connection that the Left is at such pains to deny, has done his reading. He’ll have a major article up soon [Update: now on-line]. Meanwhile, readers in search of amusement may want to try to figure out how the report’s executive summary, reproduced below, got transmogrified by a leftist mindset into the soothing snark purveyed by McClatchey and the Times.

Executive Summary

The Iraqi Perspectives Project (IPP) review of captured Iraqi documents uncovered strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism. Despite their incompatible long-term goals, many terrorist movements and Saddam found a common enemy in the United States. At times these organizations worked together, trading access for capability. In the period after the 1991 Gulf War, the regime of Saddam Hussein supported a complex and increasingly disparate mix of pan-Arab revolutionary causes and emerging pan-Islamic radical movements. The relationship between Iraq and forces of pan-Arab socialism was well known and was in fact one of the defining qualities of the Ba’ath movement.

But the relationships between Iraq and the groups advocating radical pan-Islamic doctrines are much more complex. This study found no “smoking gun” (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam’s Iraq and al Qaeda. Saddam’s interest in, and support for, non-state actors was spread across a variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist, and Islamic terrorist organizations. Some in the regime recognized the potential high internal and external costs of maintaining relationships with radical Islamic groups, yet they concluded that in some cases, the benefits of association outweighed the risks. A review of available Iraqi documents indicated the following:

• The Iraqi regime was involved in regional and international terrorist operations prior to OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM. The predominant targets of Iraqi state terror operations were Iraqi citizens, both inside and outside of Iraq.
• On occasion, the Iraqi intelligence servIces directly targeted the regime’s perceived enemies, including non-Iraqis. Non-Iraqi casualties often resulted from Iraqi sponsorship of non-governmental terrorist groups.
• Saddam’s regime often cooperated directly, albeit cautiously, with terrorist groups when they believed such groups could help advance Iraq’s long-term goals. The regime carefully recorded its connections to Palestinian terror organizations in numerous government memos. One such example documents Iraqi financial support to families of suicide bombers in Gaza and the West Bank.
• State sponsorship of terrorism became such a routine tool of state power that Iraq developed elaborate bureaucratic processes to monitor progress and accountability in the recruiting, training, and resourcing of terrorists. Examples include the regime’s development, construction, certification, and training for car bombs and suicide vests in 1999 and 2000.

From the beginning of his rise to power, one of Saddam’s major objectives was to shift the regional balance of power favorably towards Iraq. After the 1991 Gulf War, pursuing this objective motivated Saddam and his regime to increase their cooperation with – and attempts to manipulate – Islamic fundamentalists and related terrorist organizations. Documents indicate that the regime’s use of terrorism was standard practice, although not always successful. From 1991 through 2003, the Saddam regime regarded inspiring, sponsoring, directing, and executing acts of terrorism as an element of state power.

To some minds, I realize, those links just won’t be enough. For those who are determined to believe that a wicked neo-Zionist cabal launched an unjustified war against a peaceable tyrant, no link will ever be enough. No terrorists count except al-Qa’eda, and no association with al-Qa’eda counts unless it includes Saddam’s personal fingerprints on 9/11.

From any rational point of view, the Ba’athist regime’s willingness to aid and abet “a variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist, and Islamic terrorist organizations” was a more serious threat to America and the West than a single-minded relationship with al-Qa’eda would have been. The ultimate lesson of “Saddam and Terrorism” is that Iraq was at war with us for over a decade after the Gulf War. The invasion in 2003 was merely our belated recognition of that fact.

Further reading: Eli Lake, “Report Details Saddam's Terrorist Ties”
Stephen F. Hayes, “Saddam’s Dangerous Friends”
Abe Greenwald, “No Smoking Gun – Thankfully”:

Perhaps it’s me, but there seems to be something sloppy about the metaphorical turn of phrase the MSM has been repeating in describing the supposed lack of connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. There is indeed “no smoking gun” in the report recently released by the Institute for Defense Analyses.

And thank God for that. There is, however, a purchased gun, some bullets, a trained shooter, and a plan to kill. “No smoking gun” is what happens when the crime is prevented. “No smoking gun” is exactly the stated outcome the Bush administration was hoping for back in 2003 when making the case for going into Iraq.

Thomas Joscelyn, “Only Connected”:

I think it is worth pointing out that the report ties Saddam’s regime to at least five different al Qaeda associated groups, including two groups that formed the core of al Qaeda.

The Iraqi Intelligence documents discussed in the report link Saddam’s regime to: the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (the “EIJ” is al Qaeda number-two Ayman al Zawahiri's group), the Islamic Group or “IG” (once headed by a key al Qaeda ideologue, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman), the Army of Mohammed (al Qaeda's affiliate in Bahrain), the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan (a forerunner to Ansar al-Islam, al Qaeda's affiliate in Iraq), and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (a long-time ally of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan), among other terrorist groups. Documents cited by the report, but not discussed at length in the publicly available version (they may be in a redacted portion of the report), also detail Saddam’s ties to a sixth al Qaeda affiliate: the Abu Sayyaf group, an al Qaeda affiliate in the Philippines.

Both the EIJ and the IG were early and important core allies for Osama bin Laden as he forged the al Qaeda terror network, which comprises a number of affiliates around the world.

Sometimes It’s Cleverest to Keep Your Sources Secret

During last night’s debate, Barack Obama launched an explosive anecdote against the man whom he hopes to succeed:

OBAMA: You know, I’ve heard from an Army captain who was the head of a rifle platoon — supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon. Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24 because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq.

And as a consequence, they didn’t have enough ammunition, they didn’t have enough Humvees. They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief.

By this morning, several platoons of military men had denounced this story in terms ranging from unlikely aberration to out-and-out f*****g lie. Among other oddities –

• Captains don’t command platoons. That’s a job for a second lieutenant.

• Platoons aren’t split between theaters.

• Having fewer men than called for by organizational charts is a routine condition. As one soldier put it, “Rifle platoons are not at full strength, war or peace, ever. The TO&E (Table of Organization and Equipment) may call for a certain number of soldiers, but you never have all of them. It just doesn’t happen, and on the odd chance it does, it only means you’re days, or even hours, away from being understrength. The natural strength of a platoon is understrength.

• Soldiers currently serving in Afghanistan asserted that our troops have no shortage of weapons or ammunition. According to an Army captain with two tours there,

  During my last deployment with 2-87 Infantry (3D BCT, 10th MTN DIV) that took place from January 2006 until May of 2007, every soldier in our task force was equipped with state of the art equipment, and plentiful amounts of it. We fired veritable mountains of ammunition during combat operations, and always had more on hand. Vehicles were plentiful, as were the resources required to maintain (the REAL challenge!) them. . . .

  What do we do with captured Taliban/Al-Qaeda/Haqqani/Waziri equipment? We turn some of it over to the Afghan police (what is serviceable, which usually isn’t much) and Afghan army units, but the majority is destroyed.

If the matter had rested there – left-wing Senator makes statement, right-wing blogs question it – it would have been a stalemate. Declarations of implausibility aren’t the same as proof of falsity, and the community-based reality of the sinistrosphere would have delightedly retailed the sad plight of the weapon-deprived U.S. troops from now till election day.

Then a left-wing journalist forgot the maxim, “If it’s too good to check, don’t.” Annoyed by all this right-wing noise, Jake Tapper called the Obama campaign and asked for its source. The campaign identified him, and Mr. Tapper gave him a call, which satisfied him that “Obama’s anecdote checks out”.

Well, for very small values of checking out. The candidate took a smattering of facts and twisted them into a factoid so distorted that it is indistinguishable from outright invention:

1. The captain (then a lieutenant, explaining one of the discrepancies) was deployed in Afghanistan “from the Summer of 2003 through Spring 2004”. So his information is four years old, telling us nothing much about the current state of affairs.

2. He told Mr. Tapper that his platoon was at full strength when he took command at Fort Drum but that 15 men were reassigned “in ones and twos” before it went to Afghanistan. That is consistent with Senator Obama’s statement but isn’t proof that the demands of Iraq led to troop shortages elsewhere. Not only do platoons hardly ever remain at full strength (as noted above), but the fact that Lieutenant X’s platoon was under TO&E doesn’t indicate that the force sent to the theater had too little manpower. One can send three 24-man in lieu of two 39-man platoons without any loss of combat effectiveness (perhaps with a gain, since the larger number of units improves tactical flexibility, and the force has the benefit of three platoons’ worth of automatic rifles and machine guns).

3. “Getting parts or ammunition for their standard rifles was not a problem.” The captain’s complaints centered on MK-19 automatic grenade launcher and the M2 heavy machine gun, neither of which is a platoon-level weapon. An infantry platoon has two M240B machine guns. There’s no mention of any problem with supplying those. Given our military’s immense firepower advantage over the mufsidun irregulars, the MK-19 and M2 difficulties, if real and still present, are hardly likely to be a significant detriment.

4. “Not enough Humvees” turns out to mean “two or three” instead of the standard four. Vehicles were nonetheless available: “‘To get the rest of the platoon to the fight,’ he says, ‘we would use Toyota Hilux pickup trucks or unarmored flatbed humvees.’ Sometimes with sandbags, sometimes without.” Against an enemy that has little heavy armament and was not yet, in 2003–04, making much use of IED’s, that doesn’t look like much of a handicap. The shortage of Humvees during that period, caused by inadequate domestic armor production capacity, is well known and has since been surmounted.

5. As for the most shocking of Senator Obama’s revelations – “They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped” – there is no corroboration from the supposed source:

   “The purpose of going after the Taliban was not to get their weapons,” he said, but on occasion they used Taliban weapons. Sometimes AK-47s, and they also mounted a Soviet-model DShK (or "Dishka") on one of their humvees instead of their 50 cal.

   There’s no hint that this occasional, opportunistic use of enemy equipment was born of necessity. Many soldiers like to have an extra weapon at hand (it’s no fun if your M16 jams during a firefight), and the AK-47 has a high reputation for reliability and stopping power.

I don’t see how anybody can honestly think that Senator Obama made intelligent or accurate use of the information that he was provided. He evidently worked up this story, as shown by his knowing the full complement of a platoon (not a fact that many life-long civilians have ready to hand) and the exact number of his captain’s actual muster roll, but he didn’t bother to stick to the facts. It would have been better for his credibility if his informant, like the soldiers who supposedly vouched for Scott Beauchamp’s stories, had remained unknown.

Further reading: Christian Lowe, “Obama and His Captain”
Stuart Koehl, “The Captain Tells a Different Story”:

Jake Tapper may think the captain “backs up Obama’s story.” Not really – if the “story” is the story as told by Obama. His version is misleading as a reporting of what the captain said. More fundamentally, it was intended as an indictment of our management of the war. But in this respect it’s silly. In fact, the “story” here merely shows the operation of “real war,” as opposed to “war on paper.” That a presidential candidate would make something of it either shows a cynical attempt to score political points, or an appalling ignorance of military realities.

A Year-End Counterfactual

Twelve months ago, the idea that America could do anything to improve conditions in Iraq was controversial, to say the least. The Left had settled on a “narrative”: We were standing between the combatants in a civil war. Without our presence, Iraq might become a huge humanitarian disaster, but it was bound to be a disaster in any event. All that we did by staying there was expose our troops to needless risk and inflame Moslem opinion against us.

Obviously, circumstances in Iraq have changed markedly for the better since then. Between that improvement and President Bush’s decision to wage war more vigorously, instead of accepting the “realistic” counsel to cut back and leave Iraq’s fate in other hands, there may be a bit of a connection. The theory of coincidence hasn’t gained a great deal of traction, though I’m sure that it’s clung to in a few desperate corners of the Angry Left. The preferred course hasn’t been to fashion a new Iraq narrative that accounts for the phenomena but simply to ignore (or strive to find a dark side to) everything that has happened and stick to the old policy prescriptions. Thus “Santa Hillary” places “Bring the Troops Home” under the national Christmas tree. All the facts may have changed, but the conclusion remains the same.

Suppose that the President had heeded the advice of Senator Clinton, the Iraq Study Group and the elite media. How would the war against the mufsidun stand today?

There were three sides to what one might call the “Non-Bush Consensus Strategy” as formulated in early 2007. The first priority was reducing American troop strength in Iraq and redirecting the remaining forces to training and support roles. That step was not, however, supposed to be tantamount to giving up on either Iraq in particular or the War on Terror in general. Replacing our military presence in Iraq would be “engagement” with the country’s neighbors, who would be encouraged to mediate among the rival factions. Meanwhile, American troops would pour into Afghanistan to quell the much feared Taliban/al-Qa’eda comeback there.

No one can know what might have been, but don’t the following seem highly likely?

• Iraq’s politically significant neighbors are Turkey, Iran, Saudi-controlled Arabia and Syria – not an harmonious quartet. The ISG and Foggy Bottom may imagine that they can be brought together to pursue a happier future for Iraq, but isn’t it more probable that, with American influence waning, each would have pursued its own national interests? For Turkey, that means hot pursuit of Kurdish terrorists (only U.S. pressure has limited Turkish incursions so far); for Iran and its semi-puppet Syria, greater power in the hands of pro-Iranian Shi’ite leaders like Moqtada al-Sadr (recently cowed by the “surge” into ordering his followers to observe a cease fire); for the Saudis, minimizing the danger of a revival of Saddam Hussein’s drive to the south.

  Had these parties been able to reach a grand deal, it could hardly have made the situation better from the West’s point of view. The lowest common denominator would be a central government controlled by the mullarchy’s friends, a rapprochement between Tehran and Riyadh guaranteeing the safety of the Saudi oligarchs, bribes to al-Qa’eda in return for taking its battle elsewhere, and a free hand for Turkey in northern Iraq: that is, an anti-Western regime in Baghdad, the expansion of Iranian hegemony into Mesopotamia and Arabia, greater resources for the mufsidun, and a war between hitherto pro-Western Turkey and Kurdistan.

  The alternative to a settlement on those unappealing lines would be an unambiguous civil war, pitting Iranian-backed Shi’ites against Saudi-backed Sunnis (including al-Qa’eda, the strongest Sunni force as of the beginning of 2007). The Turko-Kurdish conflict is part of both scenarios. In neither would there be any force within Iraq possessing the power and the will to keep the PKK in check. Only the U.S. has a hope of persuading the Kurdish authorities that it is in their own best interests to avoid giving aid and comfort to terrorists of their own nationality and discouraging Turkey from engaging in violent self-help.

• A bigger American force in Afghanistan would doubtless have limited enemy gains, but that war will grind on endlessly so long as al-Qa’eda and the Taliban have sanctuaries in Pakistan. The ideal solution would be a joint Paki-NATO campaign to clear the mufsidun from Waziristan. That would be a tougher, bloodier prospect than the “surge” in Iraq. Amateurs like Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee may casually recommend it, but it’s scarcely conceivable. Would a shaky Pakistani government sanction what would be labeled a “Christian invasion” of its territory? If it did, would Democrats and liberals retain their enthusiasm as the casualties mounted? Would they be willing to help police the Pakistani frontier for years to come? On the other hand, if we carefully confined our power to one side of the border, how long would it take for the Afghan campaign to become as frustrating and unpopular as the Iraqi one was at the end of 2006?

  Some on the Left have been straining to link our presence in Iraq to the assassination of Benzair Bhutto. Suppose that we had a many more troops in Afghanistan. It would then be a cinch to argue that the murder, and the popularity of the mufsidun with the Pakistani public, was an angry reaction to our inflammatory proximity to their country’s borders. The Clinton-Obama-Edwards-Kossack talking points practically write themselves. They wouldn’t be true – Pakistan’s plight arises from decades of governmental failure – but the elite media would fall for them, and the American Left would by now be following its Canadian cousins in demanding that Kabul be thrown away like Baghdad. “Bring the troops home” would still be Hillary’s Christmas promise.

• What about the broader War on Terror? Our counterfactual hands al-Qa’eda two huge propaganda points: that they “forced” America out of Iraq and are fighting it bravely in Afghanistan. In the real universe, Osama bin-Laden and his lieutenants have been placed on the rhetorical defensive, imploring the mufsiun not to give up on Iraq and issuing increasingly strident and non-credible threats against a growing cohort of enemies.

  If you were an angry young Moslem, which scenario would more strongly move you to take up arms and risk your life, rather than safely grumble - the one in which your side is humiliating the giaours or the one in which it is being humiliated?

There are no controlled experiments in history, but the year 2007 comes close.

Further reading: Michael Barone, “Surge 101”
The Daily Telegraph, “General Petraeus: Man with a Message of Hope”
William Kristol, “General David Petraeus: Man of the Year”
Victor Davis Hanson, “A Long War in a Nutshell”

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 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 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?

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.

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)

Good News and Bad

“Real life”, in the form of a long, long chapter on 403(b), 457(b) and 457(f) plans for a forthcoming book (if you don’t recognize the numbers, you aren’t interested), having absorbed 110 percent of my free time, there hasn’t been much blogging here lately. Eventually that will change. In the meantime, a couple of items about the current state of the War on Terror struck me as worth repeating.

First, the sounds of silence from Iraq:

Two weeks ago, at the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Al Qaeda declared that it would escalate attacks and specifically target leaders who were cooperating with Iraqi security forces. (This strategy, in and of itself, is a sign that Al Qaeda fears the growing strength of Sunni tribal cooperation). But instead of escalating attacks, the U.S. military reports that violence across Iraq during Ramadan dropped by 40% compared to last year. In addition, mass-casualty producing, spectacular attacks – long a hallmark of Al Qaeda – have occurred with far less frequency.

This is not to say they cannot still deliver such attacks, but the new U.S. strategy has crippled them. Don’t just take my word for it, listen to the latest Al Qaeda “martyr,” Abu Osama al-Tunisi. In a handwritten note found at the site of his death, the Al Qaeda in Iraq #2 wrote, “I have been surrounded…for two and a half months because the road has been closed by the Apostate, and there is no other way.” He added, “We are so desperate for your help.” The words of this high-ranking Al Qaeda member speak volumes, and underscore the now undeniable counter-narrative happening in Iraq.

Rather than deny the undeniable, our news media simply don’t report it. I wonder how much attention will be given tomorrow morning to the September death toll. The Coalition lost 42 soldiers to hostile action during the month (according to icasualties). In the past three years, only four months have had equal or lower figures.

On the other hand, the media’s silence about Lebanon masks a less happy state of affairs:

There are only 50,000 Lebanese soldiers (including the Lebanese Army, Navy, and Air Force), and as is the case with any nation’s combined military forces, only a marginal percentage of Lebanon’s soldiers actually carry rifles and kick down doors. And the country has virtually no air force – no serviceable fixed-wing aircraft, no attack helicopters.

Worse, Lebanon is crawling with Syrian and Iranian-supported — and Al Qaeda-affiliated — terrorists. Most are operating covertly. Many are actually in the streets, controlling sectors (where the legitimate army and police do not enter) and they are armed.

As I mentioned a few days ago, a Hezbollah militia camp has been set up between the Lebanese Parliament and the Serail. And more than 50 pro-Cedar Revolution parliamentarians (there are 68 pro-Cedar members of parliament, a majority of the country's total 127 MPs), struggling to elect a president, are holed up in the Hotel Intercontinental Phoenicia in Beirut's Ain El-Mreysseh district less than one mile from the HezB tent city. This doesn’t include those parliamentarians elsewhere under very heavy security.

The MPs know they are under threat of death. Their cell-phone calls are being monitored and the signals tracked. It’s believed MP Antoine Ghanem, who was killed less than two weeks ago (I’ve actually seen what's left of his blown-up car) was tracked by his cell-phone signal.

In Lebanon, at least, the alarmists who claim that cell phones are dangerous to one’s health are right.

Low Intensity Victory

Three sets of numbers tell much about the direction and scale of the Iraqi campaign.

First, Michael Goldfarb compares both the quantity and trend of our casualties and the enemy’s. On the enemy side, as reported by USA Today (which for some reason antiseptically refers to men who are trying to kill American soldiers and Iraqi civilians as “militants” – remember those “Nazi militants” in WWII?):

More than 19,000 militants have been killed in fighting with coalition forces since the insurgency began more than four years ago, according to military statistics released for the first time.

The statistics show that 4,882 militants were killed in clashes with coalition forces this year, a 25% increase over all of last year. . . .

The cited figures start with June 2003 and thus don’t include enemy KIA’s during the invasion. Aside from the permanently disabled hostiles, Coalition forces hold about 25,000 enemy prisoners. Our POW tally is four.

During the same period, the Coalition forces have suffered 3,195 combat deaths. (There were also 143 before June 2003. Deaths from accidents and other non-hostile causes have totaled 763.) Thus the killed/captured ratio is over 13 to one in our favor.

The natural expectation was that the “surge”, which increased both the number of our soldiers in the field and the aggressiveness of their activities, would lead to a higher toll. In the fourth quarter of 2006, when our troop strength was about 100,000 and patrolling tended to be restrained, the monthly average KIA was 89. By June 2007, our force was 60 percent larger, and the body count followed this trajectory:

June: 99
July: 74
August: 60
September (so far): 39
Monthly average: 68

Sixty percent more soldiers and 25 percent fewer casualties – accomplished not by hunkering down but by going after an enemy that certainly resembles a punch drunk fighter hanging on the ropes and hoping for salvation from his (or a Democratic Congress’s) corner. Reinforcing that impression is the sudden, sharp decline in Iraqi Security Forces losses: 197 in June, 232 in July, 76 in August, 86 so far in September. The mufsidun can still spread random terror against civilians, but their capacity to deal with armed opponents appears to be dwindling rapidly.

The enemy could, of course, revive, as has happened before. Iranian intervention, which the political climate in Washington won’t allow us to counter vigorously, is a serious worry. Nonetheless, Senator Reid’s declaration of defeat a few months back looks more preposterous by the day.

Second, a left-wing MSNBC interviewer recently caught a Republican Congresswoman off guard by asking her to name the last serviceman from her district killed in Iraq and crowing when she didn’t know the answer. It turns out that his own answer was wrong, which was rather amusing, but there is a nontrivial point here. While Rep. Blackburn hadn’t kept track of local fatalities, she could have. Since June 2003, a period of 51 months, U.S. deaths from hostile action have totaled 2,994, an average of just under seven per Congressional district. While the numbers vary a bit, remembering five to ten names isn’t beyond the mental capacities of any Republican member of Congress.

Looking at the butcher’s bill more broadly, a moderately diligent Representative could have visited every constituent who was wounded severely enough to require medical evacuation from Iraq. That’s an average of under 20 per district, i. e., one every two and a half months.

I cite these figures not to excoriate uncaring Congresscritters but to highlight the low intensity of this conflict, at least so far as our side is concerned. During World War I, World War II, Korea or Vietnam, could any member of Congress have been embarrassed not to know his district’s individual honor roll by heart?

Finally, The Monkey Tennis Center has plucked a nugget from a routine New York Times assault on Blackwater, the firm that provides a large proportion of the private security guards in Iraq. MTC observes that, according to numbers cited by the Times, guards who escort convoys of American civilians – obviously a prime target for terrorist attack – hardly ever fire their weapons.

DynCorp’s “shoot rate” [“all cases in which weapons are fired, including those meant as warning shots”] was around one mission in a hundred in 2005, and around one mission in 150 in 2006. Blackwater’s shoot rate was about twice as high, so if we average the shoot rate for DynCorp over the two years (one incident per 125 missions) then double it and round down for good measure, that gives Blackwater a shoot rate of one incident per 60 missions.

I don’t know about you, but I find those figures – both for Blackwater and DynCorp – staggering, even allowing for the fact that there must be other incidents where convoys come under attack, but keep going without returning fire.

Blackwater has a reputation for hiring macho, soldier-of-fortune types. They must be getting real bored in mid-surge Mesopotamia.

A Sphinx But Not a Moonbat

Not having read, or even seen a copy of, Alan Greenspan’s about-to-be-published memoirs, I don’t know the context of the sentence that so excited Matt Drudge and the Times of London (and an atypically unperceptive Little Green Footballs, too): “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Those words will doubtless be seized on by moonbats of all stripes, from the Paulitarians to the Krazy Kos Kidz, as “proof” that the “petroleum elite” conspired to invade Iraq, steal its oil and sell the plunder for outrageous profits.

That reaction shows why Mr. Greenspan is “saddened”. The Angry Left has set up a snare for timid politicians. With one side of its mouth it shrieks that the Iraqi campaign isn’t in the national interest. Then, when anyone responds that what happens in the world’s largest energy-producing region is too a matter of American concern, the other side of its mouth sneers that war supporters want to trade “blood for oil”. The same trick was deployed during the Vietnam War: Whoever pointed to America’s concrete interests in Southeast Asia was accused of imperialism; whoever invoked idealism, of waging a war in a region where our interests were nil.

Mr. Greenspan’s point – easier to divine that his oracular pronouncements on monetary policy – is that rich anti-Western tyrants are a greater danger than impoverished ones. Robert Mugabe is as hostile to us as Saddam Hussein was, but he can’t fund suicide bombers or bribe Western politicians, much less finance weapons programs. It was oil that made Saddam dangerous, so in that sense “the Iraq war is largely about oil”. If its eventual outcome is a peaceful Iraq under a lawful and reasonably competent government, oil will help bring prosperity. If the mufsidun prevail, as every Democratic Presidential candidate is willing to see happen, oil will pay for attacks on our friends and ourselves.

Addendum: A New York Times preview says, perhaps accurately,

Of the presidents he worked with, Mr. Greenspan reserves his highest praise for Bill Clinton, whom he described in his book as a sponge for economic data who maintained “a consistent, disciplined focus on long-term economic growth.”

Here I think we see Greenspan the Sphinx again. Bill Clinton never expended a syllable in behalf of policies to promote long-term economic growth. But, after his initial round of tax hikes, he was the most ineffectual President since Gerald Ford. His “consistent, disciplined focus” consisted of doing nothing, which was, in all likelihood, exactly what his Fed chairman wanted to be done.

Update (9/17/07): My interpretation of the Sphinx is vindicated. The Washington Post reports:

Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said in an interview that the removal of Saddam Hussein had been “essential” to secure world oil supplies, a point he emphasized to the White House in private conversations before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. . . .

He said that in his discussions with President Bush and Vice President Cheney, “I have never heard them basically say, ‘We’ve got to protect the oil supplies of the world,’ but that would have been my motive.” Greenspan said that he made his economic argument to White House officials and that one lower-level official, whom he declined to identify, told him, “Well, unfortunately, we can’t talk about oil.” Asked if he had made his point to Cheney specifically, Greenspan said yes, then added, “I talked to everybody about that.”

Greenspan said he had backed Hussein’s ouster, either through war or covert action. “I wasn’t arguing for war per se,” he said. But “to take [Hussein] out, in my judgment, it was something important for the West to do and essential, but I never saw Plan B” – an alternative to war. . . .

Greenspan said that at the time of the invasion, he believed, like Bush, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction “because Saddam was acting so guiltily trying to protect something.” While he was “reasonably sure he did not have an atomic weapon,” he added, “my view was that if we do nothing, eventually he would gain control of a weapon.”

His main support for Hussein’s ouster, though, was economically motivated. “If Saddam Hussein had been head of Iraq and there was no oil under those sands,” Greenspan said, “our response to him would not have been as strong as it was in the first gulf war. And the second gulf war is an extension of the first. My view is that Saddam, looking over his 30-year history, very clearly was giving evidence of moving towards controlling the Straits of Hormuz, where there are 17, 18, 19 million barrels a day” passing through.

Greenspan said disruption of even 3 to 4 million barrels a day could translate into oil prices as high as $120 a barrel -- far above even the recent highs of $80 set last week -- and the loss of anything more would mean “chaos” to the global economy.

Given that, “I’m saying taking Saddam out was essential,” he said. But he added that he was not implying that the war was an oil grab.

“No, no, no,” he said. Getting rid of Hussein achieved the purpose of “making certain that the existing system [of oil markets] continues to work, frankly, until we find other [energy supplies], which ultimately we will.”

The Rest of the Vietnam Analogy

Max Boot’s “Another Vietnam?”, in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, looks at several lessons that we should have learned from the Vietnam War beyond the obvious ones to which President Bush referred in his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars the day before yesterday. Unfortunately, the Left’s utterly ahistorical narrative has become conventional. Mr. Boot revisits what really happened in Vietnam and points to similar dangers that we face in Iraq:

• The danger of prematurely dumping allied leaders. . . . In the early 1960s, American officials were frustrated with Ngo Dinh Diem, and in 1963 the Kennedy administration sanctioned a coup against him, in the hope of installing more effective leadership in Saigon. The result was the opposite: a succession of weak leaders who spent most of their time plotting to stay in power. In retrospect it’s obvious that, for all his faults, we should have stuck with Diem. . . .
• The danger of winning militarily and losing politically. . . .By 1972 most of the south was judged secure and the South Vietnamese armed forces were able to throw back the Easter Offensive with help from lots of American aircraft but few American soldiers. If the U.S. had continued to support Saigon with a small troop presence and substantial supplies, there is every reason to believe that South Vietnam could have survived. It was no less viable than South Korea, another artificial state kept in existence by force of arms over many decades. But after the signing of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, we all but cut off South Vietnam, even while its enemies across the borders continued to be resupplied by their patrons in Moscow and Beijing. . . .
• The danger of allowing enemy sanctuaries across the border. This a parallel that Mr. Bush might not be so eager to cite, because in many ways he is repeating the mistakes of Lyndon Johnson, who allowed communist forces to use safe rear areas in Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam to stage attacks into South Vietnam. No matter how much success American and South Vietnamese forces had, there were always fresh troops and supplies being smuggled over the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

And, finally, if Congress insists that we treat Baghdad as dishonorably as we did Saigon:

• The danger of not making plans for refugees. One of the great stains on American honor in Indochina was the horrible fate suffered by so many Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians who put their trust in us. When the end came we left far too many of them in the lurch, consigning them to prison, death or desperate attempts to escape.

As the saying goes, Read the whole thing.

The Democrats’ Tin Lady

Instapundit is strangely encouraged by Hillary Clinton’s speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, highlighting the single sentence, “We have to be preparing to fight the new war”. Symmetrically, the Left is routinely angry.

Context matters. That statement came in remarks during which Senator Clinton, who opposed the surge, criticized President Bush for not starting it earlier, declared that it “is working” in at least one key province, and demanded that it be called off. The one who should have been “preparing to fight the next war”, according to the Senator, was George W. Bush. Her own way to “fight” will be to tell the world, immediately upon her election to the Presidency, that “Diplomacy is back!”

Diplomacy with whom, and to what end?

She says she would pull together key allies and people from countries bordering Iraq to mediate among sectarian groups in Iraq, and dissuade Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Syria from getting involved in civil war in Iraq, either directly or indirectly.

The magic of jaw-jaw, like mommy’s kiss, will make it all better.

Many opponents of the mufsidun console themselves with the thought that, because Hillary Clinton has a record of single-minded nastiness toward the “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy”, she would be a Thatcher-like Iron Lady in the war against Islamofascist terrorism. At the moment, though, her metal is more like tin.

The Progressives’ Static World

Anti-Iraq types are much pleased by the video of a snippet of an April 1994 interview with Dick Cheney, in which the former Defense Secretary explains the Bush père Administration’s decision not to depose Saddam Hussein in 1991, using words that could have been uttered by any leftist a moment ago, e. g., “How many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? And our judgment was, not very many.”

So, doesn’t that prove, from the Neocon-in-Chief’s own lips, that deposing Saddam twelve years later was a dreadful mistake? Sure, if one supposes that the world remained changeless between 1991 and 2003. At the time of the First Gulf War, Islamofascism was the concern of a handful of scholars and policy analysts. Though Moslem terrorist groups already existed, very few saw them as likely to act outside the Middle East. We would have done well to pay more attention to the nascent threat, but, if we had, we could have crushed it with measures far less strenuous than a substantial military campaign.

Moreover, in 1991 Saddam Hussein was just another Arab dictator. It was reasonable to assume that, having roundly lost a war, he would fade away. Or he might, like Anwar Sadat under parallel circumstances, shift his policy 180 degrees. No one foresaw that he would remain in power, renege on his cease fire agreements, regularly try to shoot down U.S. and British aircraft, subsidize suicide bombers, form friendly ties with al-Qa’eda, celebrate the 9/11 attacks, provide facilities for terrorist training camps, refuse to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspections, and spread bribes massively among Western politicians and opinion makers.

In brief, the answer to “how many dead Americans is Saddam Hussein worth?” rose dramatically over time. A perfectly prescient President Bush would have known that he had the opportunity in February 1991 to strangle a monster in its cradle. To an ordinary mortal, it didn’t look like there would be much point to the exercise.

What the Cheney interview actually demonstrates is that one of the key architects of the Second Gulf War had no illusions about the difficulties that could follow Saddam’s overthrow. To mitigate them, President Bush fils took a number of steps that weren’t taken by his father: He secured a series of U.N. Security Council resolutions explicitly condemning the Ba’athist regime and implying that continued defiance would lead to military action. (In 1991 the U.S. had no mandate beyond expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait.) He assembled a coalition of over 30 countries to take part in the invasion. (In 1991, no other nation was willing to proceed from the Kuwaiti border to Baghdad.) He determined that Saddam should be replaced by a democratically elected government. (In 1991, no one thought seriously of that possibility.) He strengthened ties with the Kurds to ensure that their province would not instantly split off from the rest of Iraq. (In 1991, fears of Kurdish secession and the breakup of the country were a leading motive for caution, as Mr. Cheney says in the interview.)

The upshot wasn’t instant peace and contentment in Iraq, but it’s notable that the purely domestic sources of violence proved much less serious than Messrs. Bush, Cheney et al. envisioned a decade and a half ago. The spur for violence has been the terrorism carried out by al-Qa’eda in Iraq, the overt purpose of which is to set the Iraqis against each other. What made matters temporarily precarious and prompted the American “surge” was the bombing of the al-Askareyya Mosque in February 2006. Without such al-Qa’eda atrocities, Iraq would be relatively stable, as is shown by the visible improvements on the ground since the “surge” began.

So Mr. Cheney had tenable reasons for inaction in 1991 and powerful ones for action in 2003. Conceiving the world as a dynamic place, where changed circumstances call for changed policies, is, I realize, hard for the essentially reactionary Progressive mindset. We’re fortunate that the Dick Cheneys of the world aren’t hopelessly mired in the past.

John F. Kerry, Historian and Moralist

Responding to a Wall Street Journal columnist’s criticism of his nonchalant claim that the communist takeover of South Vietnam didn’t have untoward consequences – “We heard that argument over and over again about the bloodbath that would engulf the entire Southeast Asia, and it didn’t happen” – Senator John Kerry says [link probably for subscribers only, so I quote him in full],

James Taranto misinterpreted my words and misreads history (“‘It Didn’t Happen,’” Opinion, July 26). I know the tragedy that followed a tragic war. John McCain and I led the effort to locate American POWs and ultimately normalize relations with Vietnam. I traveled to Cambodia to help create a genocide tribunal to bring to justice the butchers of the killing fields.

But what did not happen was the region-wide war or immediate chaos predicted by many who believed we had to maintain our massive military presence in Vietnam. A brutal dictatorship consolidated power in Vietnam, the region’s refugee crisis worsened and two years after we left Vietnam, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge launched a genocide.

Mr. Taranto mistakenly views the violence after 1973 as a direct result of our withdrawal. In fact, the violence arose from the conditions that led us to withdraw: a Vietnamese civil war we couldn’t stop supported by a Cambodian insurgency we couldn’t bomb into submission. It’s horrifying that so many South Vietnamese suffered. But, even accepting Mr. Taranto’s estimate of 165,000 Vietnamese deaths – double that of most academic sources – this is a significant decrease from the preceding eight years when 450,000 civilians and 1.1 million soldiers were killed.

We should not repeat the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq, but let’s have an honest debate rather than a hysterical one. The agony of exiting a quagmire is that there are few certainties and no good options. That choice was created not by the advocates for changing course, but by the architects of a disastrous war.

The number of distortions and falsifications in these four paragraphs is remarkable. What the supporters of South Vietnam predicted was precisely that “a brutal dictatorship” would “consolidate power in Vietnam”. They further predicted, quite accurately, that it would kill tens of thousands of Vietnamese, imprison hundreds of thousands and drive millions into exile, and that the same catastrophes would overwhelm Laos and Cambodia. No one foresaw “region-wide war or immediate chaos”, because, unfortunately, once the U.S. cut off all aid to the free nations of Southeast Asia, in December 1974, no one there had the wherewithal to resist the communists.

South Vietnam succumbed not to civil war but to a conventional invasion from the North. Indigenous guerilla activity had largely come to an end after the failure of the Tet Offensive in 1968. The supposedly southern-bred Viet Cong increasingly consisted of Northern infiltrators, as Hanoi itself openly declared after the war. In 1972, after American troop levels had been reduced drastically, the North launched its first invasion. The South Vietnamese Army, bolstered by American air and naval support, defeated it so soundly that the communists in January 1973 accepted a peace agreement that, if its terms had been adhered to, would have permanently ended Northern aggression against the rest of Southeast Asia. For the next two years, South Vietnam was reasonably peaceful, while neither the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia nor the Pathet Lao in Laos made any appreciable progress in their wars against admittedly inept anti-communist governments.

But the American Left did not want a noncommunist Southeast Asia to endure as a monument to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. It pooh-poohed Hanoi’s violations of the Paris Accords, and the post-Watergate Congress cut off military assistance, to the point of forbidding ammunition sales to the South Vietnamese armed forces. When the North invaded again, in 1975, the South lacked the means, not the will, to defend itself. The U.S. Seventh Fleet, which could have pulverized the invaders, was strictly forbidden to intervene.

South Vietnam’s collapse in April 1975 led swiftly and inevitably to the Khmer Rouge takeover in Phnom Penh, notwithstanding Senator Kerry’s artless attempt to put as much distance as possible between that disastrous event and America’s abandonment of its allies.

Senator Kerry’s moral calculus is as disturbing as his historical revisionism. I suppose that, if South Vietnam had surrendered to Hanoi in 1963, the aggregate death toll there would have been lower. Similarly, if Europe had declined to oppose Hitler, millions of lives, a great many of them American, would have been saved. And we could avoid a lot of future deaths by hailing Osama bin-Laden as the Caliph of Islam and submitting to his beneficent rule. Resistance to tyranny costs lives and fortune. By Senator Kerry’s implicit calculations, it isn’t worth it: The murders carried out by communist Vietnam or Ba’athist Iraq are weighed equally with the sacrifices of soldiers in combat against them.

In his final paragraph, Senator Kerry writes of “the agony of exiting a quagmire”. In Vietnam, we didn’t “exit a quagmire”; we abandoned an ally, at a point where very little was needed from us. In Iraq, we are at an earlier stage, best compared, perhaps, to South Vietnam circa 1963. Of course we can “exit”, saving a few American lives and a little American money, at the price of inspiring all of our enemies with confidence that we won’t fight anywhere else either. The people of Iraq can’t exit so easily, but Senator Kerry seems to care as little for them as for the South Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians. A few years from now, he will be smilingly at work to normalize relations with post-democratic Baghdad, or will sponsor the establishment of a “genocide tribunal” for the Middle East. That was, after all, a great comfort to the dead in Cambodia.

Further reading: I haven’t footnoted this post, because two remarkable histories contain all the needed references and background: Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965 by Mark Moyar and A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam by Lewis Sorley. Eventually, when history supersedes contemporary politics, America’s treatment of Vietnam will be recognized as an unmitigated national disgrace.

Update (8/8/07): Best of the Web published readers’ responses to Senator Kerry on August 6th and 8th. The second set adds an important point: Senator Kerry compares the number of post-war murders by the Vietnamese communists to “1.1 million soldiers” killed during “the preceding eight years”. He does not note that three-quarters of those casualties were enemy troops.

[C]onsider what Kerry is claiming: that it [would have been] worth sacrificing the lives and freedom of the South Vietnamese – our ally – in order to prevent casualties on the enemy side. Imagine what the world would look like if we’d taken that approach during World War II – or, for that matter, what it will look like if we take it with Muslim terrorists.

Iraq for the Iraqis!

At least three conflicts are going on in Iraq. Separating them in our minds would promote clarity of thought.

The first is the effort of al-Qa’eda and its allies to drive the Coalition forces out of the country. This is a “war of choice” on the enemy’s part, which both Osama bin-Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri have declared to be the front line in their struggle to establish a world-dominating Islamic caliphate. Mufsidun have poured in to fight beside “al-Qa’eda of the Land of the Two Rivers”. Al-Qa’eda will win this conflict if America pulls out, and the West will win if the mufsidun give up.

The second is a civil war between two loose factions that want to replace Iraq’s democratic government with a dictatorship – either a revival of the Ba’athist regime or one emulating (and controlled by) the Iranian mullarchy. Both al-Qa’eda and Iran see advantages for themselves in fostering this conflict by aggravating enmity between the Sunni and Shi’ite communities. All the belligerents in this war oppose the elected Iraqi government and can do nothing unless it collapses. Therefore, they have dual objectives: to defeat the government and to defeat the other faction; in what order matters very little.

Finally, the elected leaders of the government disagree sharply on a variety of matters. Some are, in fact, spokesmen for one or the other of the pro-dictatorship factions. The rest aim to employ democratic means get the best possible arrangements for themselves and their constituents. This conflict is political rather than military, though the presence of anti-democrats in Parliament may blur the boundaries between it and the dictatorial camp’s aspirations for a coup d’etat.

The most obvious fact about the first conflict is the absurd disproportion between the enemy’s means and its ends. Far inferior in numbers, leadership, equipment and technology, the mufsidun have zero hope of defeating the Coalition on the battlefield. They barely have the capability for minor harassment. Recognizing this fact, they have fixed their strategy around America’s conspicuous weakness: the unwillingness of much of our political class to engage in long wars, even if casualties are low and costs affordable. In normal times, that would have been an unlikely road to success. It didn’t work for the Serbs in Bosnia, for instance. It is our enemy’s good fortune that many prominent figures on the American Left are consumed by irrational hatred of the incumbent Administration and regard its defeats as their own victories. Bush Derangement Syndrome may succeed for the mufsidun where force of arms fails.

The second conflict is, like much contemporary ethnic and sectarian strife, largely the artificial product of ambitious demagogues. In and of itself, the Sunni-Shi’a split began with an issue – must the caliph of Islam be a member of Mohammed’s family? – that lost its burning practical relevance in the 7th Century. Since then, the “sects” (probably too grand a name for them) have been little more than geographical markers. Each has customs and folkways of its own, but their religious significance is trivial. They would be no more divisive than the divergences between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Judaism, were it not for their appropriation as handy instruments for assembling mobs.

In this case, al-Qa’eda and the mufsidun perceive that vigorous bloodletting between Sunni and Shi’ite reinforces the arguments of the pro-retreat faction in America, so they have helped matters along with abundant atrocities against civilians. The “sectarian” fighting started in earnest when al-Qa’eda bombed the bombing of the al-Askareyya Shrine in February 2006, sparking Shi’ite outrage that extremist leaders channeled into counter-atrocities against ordinary Sunnis. Iran has gladly lent a hand by supplying arms to both its puppet Moqtada al-Sadr and Ba’athists who yearn for a new Saddam Hussein.

For a long time, the American strategy was to do what the Left says we ought to do: Pay little attention to internecine struggles in Iraq, and concentrate on our direct enemies. So we pursued al-Qa’eda and generally ignored the “Mahdi Army”. The “Surge” changes that policy, with the goal of winning the first conflict decisively in a fairly short time and damping the other two. The change wasn’t dictated by facts on the ground but by facts in Washington. From the hazy perspective of the Potomac, every time a terrorist murdered a group of schoolchildren, he strengthened the “proof” that America had “lost” and that it was only a matter of time before helicopters would be airlifting the last remnants of our army from the rooftops of Baghdad. So winning the war on the home front entailed adding the pro-dictatorial militias to our enemies’ list.

Inevitably, given the magical thinking that is so commonplace in Washington, the Surge included resolution of the third conflict, the hurly-burly of Iraq’s political factions, among its goals. American policy wonks devised a set of legislative proposals that, according their calculations, would give each interest group its fair and reasonable share of the spoils of government, from which national reconciliation would blossom.

The Iraqi Parliament hasn’t rushed to enact these foreign-written prescriptions into law. Maybe that is because Iraqis are incapable of governing themselves and are doomed to an ineluctable slide into chaos. Or maybe it is because the responsible members of Parliament doubt that either the al-Qa’eda invaders or the local anti-democrats will be appeased by laws concerning the allocation of oil revenues and the eligibility of former Ba’athists for government jobs.

None of the proposals that Washington has elevated to the level of “benchmarks” has much to do with fundamental principles. Their goal isn’t to make Iraqi society more open, to extend the realm of liberty or to protect oppressed minorities (Christians, for example). No, they represent an attempt to micromanage relationships about which we don’t know a great deal. Mesopotamia est omnis divisa in partes tres sounds truer here than in Baghdad or Mosul or Ramadi or Kirkuk.

Leftist sensitivity to other cultures stops at the Euphrates, it seems. The Baghdad government is declared to be an irredeemable failure unless it conforms to American dictates, though the same critics objected to America’s “imposition” of democracy. Worse still, Iraqi nonconformity has been enlisted as an excuse for giving up on the military conflicts and dismissing as irrelevant all the evidence that those wars are turning in favor of the Iraqi freedom.

The Left has an excellent chance of winning the battle that it wants to win, where the objective is to abandon Iraq to its fate. If so, the price of victory will be the transformation of its own ideology into one that is insouciant toward mass murder, scornful of the ability of foreigners to govern themselves and hostile toward democracy. The latest version of the Left looks more and more like the racist, blimpish Right of yore. I confess to an absence of surprise. The affinity between the leftist notion of liberty and practical totalitarianism was clear to Edmund Burke two centuries ago. Each passing decade has confirmed it, and the debate over Iraq is a kind of culmination.

When Good News Is “A Real Big Problem”

Is it unfair to say the, for many Congressional Democrats, an American defeat in Iraq is an important objective? The standard liberal line is that the Dems’ eagerness to abandon that country merely recognizes that the U.S. has been defeated – so thoroughly and irrevocably defeated that all we can do is throw in the towel. If the consequence is a tremendous propaganda harvest for al-Qa’eda and a genocidal civil war in Iraq – who cares?

If our circumstances were like those of the Confederacy in April 1865 or Germany in November 1918, accepting defeat might indeed be the only realistic course. But what if matters are not quite so dire? A paragraph in today’s Washington Post gives an insight into how Rep. James Clyburn (D–S.C.), the number three man among House Democrats, views that possibility:

Many Democrats have anticipated that, at best, Petraeus and U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker would present a mixed analysis of the success of the current troop surge strategy, given continued violence in Baghdad. But of late there have been signs that the commander of U.S. forces might be preparing something more generally positive. Clyburn said that would be “a real big problem for us.”

So good news about the fight against terrorists is “a real big problem” for the Democratic Party?

The other development on the good news front was in today’s New York Times, an op-ed by two Brookings Institution fellows, both hitherto pessimistic about the prospects for Iraq, titled “A War We Just Might Win”:

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with. [Sounds like a good approximation of “victory” to me.] . . .

Everywhere, Army and Marine units were focused on securing the Iraqi population, working with Iraqi security units, creating new political and economic arrangements at the local level and providing basic services — electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation — to the people. Yet in each place, operations had been appropriately tailored to the specific needs of the community. As a result, civilian fatality rates are down roughly a third since the surge began — though they remain very high, underscoring how much more still needs to be done. . . .

We traveled to the northern cities of Tal Afar and Mosul. This is an ethnically rich area, with large numbers of Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens. American troop levels in both cities now number only in the hundreds because the Iraqis have stepped up to the plate. Reliable police officers man the checkpoints in the cities, while Iraqi Army troops cover the countryside. A local mayor told us his greatest fear was an overly rapid American departure from Iraq. All across the country, the dependability of Iraqi security forces over the long term remains a major question mark.

But for now, things look much better than before. American advisers told us that many of the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi commanders who once infested the force have been removed. The American high command assesses that more than three-quarters of the Iraqi Army battalion commanders in Baghdad are now reliable partners (at least for as long as American forces remain in Iraq). . . .

How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.

Left-winger Joe Klein has a “see no good” response ready:

It could be argued that what the U.S. military is now accomplishing is clearing the field of foreigners – i.e. the Al Qaeda in Iraq foreign fighters – so that the indigenous Sunnis and Shi’ites can go at each other in a full-blown civil war, complete with Srebrenica style massacres.

Ponder that: Mr. Klein doesn’t think it important for us to defeat al-Qa’eda. If we don’t leave behind a peaceful, stable Iraq, we will have failed. And since peace and stability will be hard to achieve, we should pull out and let the “Srebrenica style massacres” commence instanter.

Not long ago, the Left was sneering at President Bush’s desire to bring democracy to Iraq. Now it complains that he is only defeating our enemies, not building a utopia in Mesopotamia.

The constant for leftists is, George W. Bush must lose, no matter what the cost. Put another way, they would destroy America in order to save it.

Life Imitates Protest Music

That’s the heading of the lead item of Best of the Web Today, where James Taranto juxtaposes two quotes in a way that ought to be seared into the conscience of every decent American.

Here is the one from the protest song, a 1967 Phil Ochs ballad:

Look outside the window, there's a woman being grabbed
They've dragged her to the bushes and now she's being stabbed
Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain
But Monopoly is so much fun, I'd hate to blow the game
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.

And here is the one from life, in today’s Baltimore Sun:

Many acknowledged that Iraq could first plunge into vicious sectarian fighting. . . . Yet they flatly rejected the use of U.S. troops to stop the killing. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s horrendous,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat who has helped lead the drive against the war. “The only hope for the Iraqis is their own damned government, and there’s slim hope for that.”

And nobody will care what happens to Iraqis, outside of a small circle of friends.

America isn’t omnipotent and can’t stanch all the bloodletting in the world, just as the Monopoly players in the song couldn’t report every crime. But we have 150,000 soldiers in Iraq right now. They have done a great deal to reduce violence in Anbar and Diyala provinces, formerly epicenters of terrorist activity, and in Baghdad itself. Yet Rep. Obey and his fellow doves want to give up and let mass murder proceed.

Do they really hate George W. Bush that much? That they would punish him by executing the people of Iraq?

Addendum: Here is what John Burns, the lead New York Times reporter on the ground in Iraq, has to say about the role of the American military and the likely consequences of the Left’s strategy:

I find this to be very widely agreed amongst Iraqis that I know, of all ethnic and sectarian backgrounds – the United States armed forces are a very important inhibitor against violence. I know it’s argued by some people that they provoke the violence. I simply don’t believe that to be in the main true. I think it’s a much larger truth that where American forces are present, they are inhibiting sectarian violence, and they are going after the people, particularly al-Qaeda and the Shiite death squads, who are provoking that violence. Remove them or at least remove them quickly, and it seems to me . . . that you have to weigh the price. And the price would very likely be very, very high levels of violence, at least in the short run and perhaps, perhaps - perhaps for quite a considerable period of time. . . .

[I]t seems to me incontrovertible that the most likely outcome of an American withdrawal any time soon would be cataclysmic violence. And I find that to be widely agreed amongst Iraqis, including Iraqis who strongly opposed the invasion.

But the editors of the Times don’t listen to their reporters. Or perhaps they, like Rep. Obey, just don’t care.

Who Are the Imperialists Now?

One of the accusations against neoconservatives, you may recall, is that they “imperialistically” try to impose their own ideas of proper governance on other countries, trampling on the rich cultural heritages of despotism. It was thus a crime and a blunder to “force” Iraqis to practice democratic politics instead of leaving Uncle Saddam, with his mass murders, gulags and gang-raping sons, in charge.

Well, now Saddam has swung unlamented from the end of a rope. (Don’t the predictions that he would be hailed as martyr throughout the dar al-Islām have a quaint ring?) Iraq has held three democratic elections. Al-Qa’eda, ever alert to the menace of what its former Iraqi honcho called “the evil principle of democracy”, has declared the country to be the “central front” in its war against Western civilization. The American military, after back-and-forthing on how to deal with an unfamiliar conflict, has learned how to drive the mufsidun from what used to be their strongest enclaves. Murders of civilians appear to be on a downward trend, despite the occasional spectacular atrocity. Anti-American blowhard Muqtada al-Sadr has scrammed back to the safety of Iran.

All this makes the old “we’ve lost the war” shibboleth less persuasive, however loudly and mindlessly the Left keeps repeating. So what is the new excuse for an American withdrawal, a course of action that even the New York Times has a high likelihood of leading to “further ethnic cleansing, even genocide”? The answer, as brought to us by the Associated Press: The Iraqi government isn’t moving rapidly enough to meet American “benchmarks” for what it ought to do. It hasn’t yet, for instance, agreed to the plan written in Washington for divvying up oil reserves among the Shiites, Sunni and Kurds.

Might I suggest that we take a non-imperialistic deep breath? Instituting good government into a region where it has scarcely ever existed is bound to be a slow task, and damping political violence – the reason behind the surge – will make it easier. Railing that the wogs aren’t good enough to deserve our beneficence, because they won’t instantly fall in line behind our ideas, is a good way to bring about an otherwise evitable disaster.

Mother Moonbat for Congress!

It’s only comic relief, of course, but Cindy Sheehan, a charter member of the Jew-hating Left, has announced that she is eyeing Nancy Pelosi’s seat in Congress:

Sheehan said she will run against the San Francisco Democrat in 2008 as an independent if Pelosi does not seek by July 23 to impeach Bush. . . .

Sheehan announced in late May that she was leaving the anti-war movement. She said that she felt her efforts had been in vain and that she had endured smear tactics and hatred from the left, as well as the right. She said she wanted to change course. . . .

Sheehan, who has never held political office, recently said that she was leaving the Democratic Party because it “caved” in to the president. Last week, she announced her caravan to Washington, an undertaking she calls the “people’s accountability movement.”

“I didn’t expect to be back so soon, but the focus is different than it was before,” Sheehan said Sunday. “Instead of talking and making accusations, we’re going into communities and talking to the people who’ve been hurt by the Bush regime. We’re finding out how we can help people.”

Sheehan, who will turn 50 on Tuesday, said Bush should be impeached because she believes he misled the public about the reasons for going to war, violated the Geneva Convention by torturing detainees, and crossed the line by commuting the prison sentence of former vice presidential aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. She said other grounds for impeachment are the domestic spying program and the “inadequate and tragic” response to Hurricane Katrina. [So much for not “talking and making accusations”.]

Speaker Pelosi, being a fool but not an idiot, won’t be introducing any articles of impeachment, so the Sheehan challenge will go forward. I trust that the Speaker will find this close encounter with her party’s hard core base of support enlightening. She probably won’t learn as much as Joe Lieberman did, but one can always hope.

Further reading: Jules Crittenden, “Sometimes Life Can Look So Bleak”

“Is Anybody There? Does Anybody Care?”

Every Fourth of July, I try to find time to re-watch 1776, a movie that demonstrates how to be patriotic without being either vainglorious or insipid. Its last big number is titled, “Is Anybody There?” John Adams sings it at a point where his cause, American independence, looks hopeless, both in Philadelphia, where his staunchest allies have lost heart, and in the field, where General Washington is losing battles.

They want me to quit,
They say, “John, give up the fight!”
Still to England I say:
“Good night forever, good night!”

For I have crossed the Rubicon,
Let the bridge be burned behind me!
Come what may, come what may. . .
Commitment!

The croakers all say
We’ll rue the day,
There’ll be hell to pay in
Fiery Purgatory!

Through all the gloom,
Through all the gloom, I can
See the rays of ravishing light and
Glory!

Is anybody there?!
Does anybody care?!
Does anybody see
What I see?!

President Bush must have similar feelings as he strives to rally our countrymen against our real enemies, the mufsidun who murder women and children, in the hope of terrifying the world into bowing down to an Islamofascist caliph. Half or more of our political class isn’t much concerned with that enemy. In its eyes, the real enemy is George W. Bush. Thus we see a prominent law professor respond to the commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence by declaring that Mr. Libby was part of “the cabal to turn the presidency (and vice-presidency) into ‘regal,’ if not out-and-out dictatorial, authorities totally independent from any scrutiny or accountability”. His paranoia and revolutionary fervor (“mendacity and corruption [lie] at the heart of the Bush Administration (and, therefore, of the present American system of government” [emphasis added]) are scarcely unique. In fact, they are so commonplace that we tend to ignore the direction in which they point. If one genuinely believes that the country is moving toward dictatorship and that “mendacity and corruption” are core characteristics “of the present American system of government”, what course of action logically follows?

This morning the President addressed the West Virginia Air National Guard. He, at least, knows how hard the fight for liberty is and hasn’t abandoned it in the face of foreign or domestic foes:

Our first Independence Day celebration took place in a midst of a war – a bloody and difficult struggle that would not end for six more years before America finally secured her freedom. More than two [centuries] later, it is hard to imagine the Revolutionary War coming out any other way – but at the time, America’s victory was far from certain. . . .

We were a small band of freedom-loving patriots taking on the most powerful empire in the world. . . . You’re the successors of those brave men. Those who wear the uniform are the successors of those who dropped their pitchforks and picked up their muskets to fight for liberty. Like those early patriots, you’re fighting a new and unprecedented war – pledging your lives and honor to defend our freedom and way of life. In this war, the weapons have changed, and so have our enemies, but one thing remains the same: The men and women of the Guard stand ready to put on the uniform and fight for America. . . .

Oh, I know the passage of time has convinced some . . . that danger doesn’t exist. But that’s not how I see it, and that’s not how many of you see it. These people want to strike us again. We learned on September the 11th that in the age of terror, the best way to do our duty, which is to protect the American people, is to go on the offense and stay on the offense. And that's exactly what we’ve been doing against these radicals and extremists.

It is best that we take the fight to where the enemy lives, so we don’t have to face them where we live. And so since 9/11, that’s precisely the strategy we have followed. In Afghanistan . . . we removed a regime that gave sanctuary and support to al Qaeda as they planned the 9/11 attacks. . . .

Today, because we acted, the terrorist camps in Afghanistan have been shut down, 25 million people have been liberated, and the Afghan people have elected a government that is fighting terrorists, instead of harboring terrorists. This enemy of ours – they have got an ideology. They believe in something. In other words, the attacks are just a tactic to enable them to spread their dark vision of the world. Perhaps one way to differentiate between our thoughts is just think about religion. In the great country of the United States, we believe that you should be able to worship any way you see fit; that you’re equally American, regardless of your religious beliefs. They believe that if you don’t worship the way they see it, then they’re going to bring you harm. . . .

There’s more than one front in this war against these radicals and extremists. And, obviously, the toughest threat of all is in Iraq. In that country, we removed a cruel dictator who harbored terrorists, paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, invaded his neighbors, defied the United Nations Security Council, pursued and used weapons of mass destruction. The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power. And today, U.S. and coalition troops are standing with the Iraqi troops and the nearly 12 million Iraqis who voted for a future of peace. We’re opposing ruthless enemies who want to bring down Iraq’s democracy and turn that nation into a terrorist safe haven. . . .

It’s a tough fight, but I wouldn’t have asked those troops to go into harm’s way if the fight was not essential to the security of the United States of America. Many of the spectacular car bombings and killings you see are as a result of al Qaeda – the very same folks that attacked us on September the 11th. A major enemy in Iraq is the same enemy that dared attack the United States on that fateful day.

Al Qaeda hasn’t given up its objectives inside Iraq. And that is to cause enough chaos and confusion so America would leave, and they would be able to establish their safe haven from which to do two things: to further spread their ideology; and to plan and plot attacks against the United States. If we were to quit Iraq before the job is done, the terrorists we are fighting would not declare victory and lay down their arms – they would follow us here, home. If we were to allow them to gain control of Iraq, they would have control of a nation with massive oil reserves – which they could use to fund new attacks and exhort economic blackmail on those who didn’t kowtow to their wishes. However difficult the fight is in Iraq, we must win it – we must succeed for our own sake; for the security of our citizens, we must support our troops, we must support the Iraqi government, and we must defeat al Qaeda in Iraq.

Those who, like the professor quoted above, would rather defeat the Bush Administration than al-Qa’eda will discover that, in this case, the enemies of their enemies are not their friends. A liberal President or a leftist junto will have to deal with terrorism, too. The difference is that the terrorists will have the moral impetus of having driven the Great Satan from Iraq, while an America that fights the way that the Left demands – with the most acute sensitivity to our enemies’ easily injured feelings and the most tender respect for the broadest possible reading of their liberties – will have no hope of victory.

The great irony is that the ostensible opponents of war advocate policies that will guarantee war in perpetuity, or until our liberties vanish beneath an Islamofascist tide.

Further reading: Michael Medved, “Independence Day Messages from John Adams”
NRO Symposium, “Why We Fight”
James Lileks, “I Expect a Good Fourth”

The New “Cut and Run”

Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter is worried that Democrats will sound like “surrender monkeys” if they continue to demand withdrawal from Iraq without putting forward any alternative strategy for fighting terrorism. So he has an idea for a Dem “bumper sticker” to compete with the GOP’s “War on Terror”: “Pull and Strike”.

All right, the meaning isn’t instantly clear. In full, but too long for most bumpers, it is “Pull out of Iraq and strike al-Qa’eda from the air.” It is presented as a replay of the course that Bill Clinton chose in Kosovo. There the U.S. committed no ground troops. Instead, by bombing Belgrade and harassing Serbian troop convoys, we compelled the Milosevich regime to relinquish its hold on the province. Mr. Alter thinks we can be equally successful in the same way against al-Qa’eda in Iraq, and he has found a freshman Congressman and war veteran, Patrick Murphy (D–Pa.), to endorse the concept.

In just how many ways is it ridiculous?

First, Serbia is a nation-state and fielded an army in Kosovo. It had readily identifiable targets to attack. Al-Qa’eda doesn’t have a capital that can be devastated, and its soldiers don’t travel in columns along roads or engage in conventional battles. Mr. Alter and Rep. Murphy are confident that, once the “irritation” of an American presence is gone, intelligence about the enemy’s whereabouts will flow in from now-friendly Iraqis, more than offsetting the absence of eyes in the theater. How this will work isn’t explained. Will we set up a call center in Kuwait and advertise its 800 number on late night Baghdad TV?

Second, what made it possible for the Kosovo operation to succeed without the insertion of ground forces was the shaky standing of President Milosevich and his communist cadre, which had already lost most of the former Yugoslavia to breakaway republics. It couldn’t ask a demoralized populace to endure unending disruption of its daily life. Again, there is no al-Qa’eda parallel. The group has no real population base and is, in any case, indifferent to civilian suffering.

Third, the aftermath in Kosovo wasn’t especially admirable. Once the Serbian army left and the American didn’t appear on the scence, there was no force at hand to restrain ethnic strife. As a result, the Serbian minority was forced to flee after suffering a vast amount of death and destruction. The parallel to Iraq is obvious.

As a thought experiment, one might try to imagine how “Pull and Strike” would have worked in Anbar province, where American invincibility encouraged local leaders to throw in with the Marines rather than the mufsidun. How could air strikes have had the same effect?

If unassisted air power could carry the day in Iraq, that would be wonderful. Unfortunately, the problems with locating targets, the inability of bombs to hold ground and the high risk of collateral damage make the Kosovo approach unworkable. I doubt, indeed, that the inventors of “Pull and Strike” actually care whether it could succeed. They are searching for a slogan to shield them during the 2008 election campaign. Once their faction has control of both Congress and the White House, the surrender monkeys can party like it’s 1938.

What If They Gave a War and Only One Side Came?

In the course of a long, balanced post on the Al-Marri case, Orin Kerr, who has often criticized the Bush Administration’s use of executive power in the War on Terror, makes an elementary point that is too often overlooked. Explaining the reasons why he thinks the defendant should have been regarded as an enemy combatant rather than a civilian criminal, he writes,

The first and most important is that members of a terrorist cell see themselves at war; they see themselves as soldiers in a holy war against the United States, and are acting accordingly. When a group sees themselves as soldiers at war trying to kill you, it seems fair that you should want to return the favor. [emphasis in original]

A majority of the 4th Circuit panel thought otherwise. To the judges’ rarified perception, an individual who, according to uncontradicted evidence, was a member of al-Qa’eda and entered the United States for the purpose of killing Americans was just an ordinary criminal defendant who couldn’t be restrained by the government until after he committed a crime.

Well, that’s what one expects of a brace of Clinton appointees. But before we sneer and blame the First Husband-to-be, it’s only fair to note that the same view prevails in surprising quarters. For example, from the Washington Post:

The insurgents who kill our young soldiers are ruthless, but we have sometimes been cautious in our response. Take the question of targeting bomb makers: There may be an unlimited supply of explosives in Iraq, but there is not an unlimited supply of people who know how to wire the detonators. In 2004, CIA operatives in Iraq believed that they had identified the signatures of 11 bomb makers. They proposed a diabolical — but potentially effective — sabotage program that would have flooded Iraq with booby-trapped detonators designed to explode in the bomb makers’ hands. But the CIA general counsel’s office said no. The lawyers claimed that the agency lacked authority for such an operation, one source recalled.

There are technologies that would allow us to detonate every roadside bomb in Iraq by heating the wires in the detonators to the point that they triggered an explosion. But these systems could severely harm civilians nearby, so we’re not using them, either. “In our system, we often are not given credit for the fact that we are very concerned about collateral damage,” [Gen. Montgomery] Meigs [who headed a Pentagon task force on how to neutralize the IED threat] said.

(Maybe civilians could be warned when bomb sweeping teams come through and get away from the area. Or would that disrupt life in Baghdad too severely? And don’t bombs likewise “severely harm civilians” when they explode on the terrorists’ timetable rather than ours?)

And then there is this from an Army squad leader recently back from the front lines:

A perfect example of problems arising from [Rules of Engagement] was when a buddy of mine was guarding a section of the exterior of one of the forward operating bases in Iraq from which we were operating.

While he was on duty, he was getting shot at. But rules of engagement say, you can’t engage without permission. So he radioed the sergeant-of-the-guard and said, “Hey, I’m getting shot at. May I return fire?”

The sergeant asked, “Are you in any immediate danger?”

My buddy responded, “No, not as long as I’m ducking behind the concrete [barrier].”

The sergeant said, “OK, don’t return fire until you are in immediate danger.”

The sergeant, adhering to his understanding of the ROE, was saying, Fight only if you can’t hide. Is that how we fought World War II?

The rationale for this legalism is, no doubt, the avoidance of atrocities. I agree with the goal, but the means are misguided. Historically, almost all battlefield excesses by American troops have resulted from panic, low morale or poor situational awareness. Rigid rules of engagement don’t have much influence over a guy in one of those states. I’d be surprised if the ROE have saved any lives in Iraq, except for the lives of terrorists.

Whether or not one approves of this particular war, restrictions that serve only to make life easier for men who “see themselves as soldiers in a holy war against the United States, and are acting accordingly” are bizarrely misguided. Except for the Michael Moore types, not many critics of the Iraqi campaign openly root for defeat. Many declare that they want to wage war vigorously on other fronts. But won’t the shackles that hamper our soldiers in Iraq be just as detrimental in Afghanistan? Or New York?

Further reading: Andrew C. McCarthy, “Lawfare Strikes Again”

Quote of the Day

ShrinkWrapped summarizes a radio commentary on what would follow a precipitous American withdrawal from Iraq. The commentator is Time magazine’s Baghdad bureau chief, and the report was on National Public Radio, so these are not the opinions of a bloodthirsty neoconservative warhawk.

Ghosh started by describing how the Sunni tribes have been breaking their ties with al Qaeda and forging alliances with the Americans in Iraq. He offers several reasons for this and does not hesitate to describe the current alliances as based more on bottom line utility than any profound philosophical awakening to the value of Democracy. He also points out that the recent statements repudiating al Qaeda by the leader of the Sunni scholars and Imams in Iraq is extremely significant. His conclusions are striking. He makes it quite clear that any efforts to withdraw would endanger all of these advances. The tribes, for purposes of self preservation, would not only immediately drop out of the fight against al Qaeda, but the Sunni provinces would in short order become al Qaeda mini-states, offering a source of manpower, training, funding, and support that they currently do not have anywhere in the developed world.

Do critics of the American presence in Iraq have reasons (other than sheer hope) for thinking that forecast is wrong? Or do they view the prospect with indifference? There isn’t a third choice.

So What Is the Democrats’ “Plan”?

A constant refrain of anti-war polemics is that Messrs. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. had no “plan” for Iraq. They (supposedly) expected a long-oppressed people to make an effortless transition to free and democratic self-government and thus failed to take the steps necessary to avert the present “civil war” and “quagmire”.

The truth or falsity of this indictment is an interesting subject for future historical debate. It isn’t self-evident that it ought to be at the center of the debate about what to do next. In particular, if it were true, it would not support the position for which it is most ardently deployed, viz., that the United States ought to withdraw its forces forthwith from Iraq. After all, many wars have begun badly. Almost everything that the Allies did during the first years of World War II was a blunder, from giving Poland a guarantee that couldn’t be honored to assuming that the Ardennes Forest was impassable to putting most of the Soviet Army on the extreme western border of its territory to keeping inadequate watch at Pearl Harbor. Narvik, Crete, Singapore, Kasserine Pass. . . . – The litany of failure rolls on. If Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had been in Parliament in 1941, they would, I presume, have demanded that England withdraw from Mr. Churchill’s disastrous enterprise.

Critics like Senators Clinton and Obama apparently think that America can rewind to 9/11 and embark on a new course of action unencumbered by all that has happened during the past five and a half years. I have two questions, and a few follow-ups, to pose:

First, since you consider the historical debate so crucial, what is “the plan” that the President ought to have pursued? Presumably, it starts with leaving Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq. By the logic of “the Iraqi campaign has made us less safe”, the continued presence in the Middle East of an anti-American despot financed by oil revenue would have made us safer. The unstated but obvious premise is that our actions provoked the terrorists’ violent response. They would hate us less and be less diligent in trying to kill us, if only we had not made war on Ba’athist Iraq.

There is a danger of constructing straw men, but in this case we have only straw with which to work. I have never heard any opponent of the war offer any more cogent reason to think that Saddam’s best interests were congruent with our own. Their attitude seems much like that of Neville Chamberlain during the “Phony War”. As Hitler’s armies overran Poland, British bombers dropped leaflets on the Rhineland. The Prime Minister refused to authorize the bombing of factories and rail lines, because he did not want to provoke the enemy. It wasn’t until months after the war began that England engaged in any offensive action, and then only in the half-hearted Norwegian fiasco. Should Senator Obama ever turn historian, I wonder whether he will blame English intervention in Norway for inciting Hitler to invade France.

Let’s suppose that our liberation of Iraq drew al-Qa’eda into that country, as we are so often told. If we had not invaded, where would it be instead? Would it have just faded away? I’d think that it would have had a pretty good recruiting pitch, pointing to American impotence in the face of a defiant Saddam Hussein and calling on enthusiastic young Moslems to continue the attack against the infidels and Jews. Where the war’s main battle lines would have been drawn is unknowable, but it’s preposterous to say that we would not be fighting somewhere today. And wherever that somewhere was, we would have to face terrorist tactics, unsatisfactory allies and an unwelcome death toll.

Unless one believes that al-Qa’eda and the other Islamofascists really are reasonable fellows who would have dozed contentedly had we not done them unendurable wrong, it is undeniable that we would be at war today, Iraq or no Iraq. We are fighting on a battlefield of our own choosing, with overwhelmingly strong forces and a friendly, if less than fully competent, local government behind us. The war critics’ argument amounts to this: We would have done better to let the enemy choose the battlefield. We don’t know where we would be fighting in that alternative universe, or who our allies would be, or how much force would be needed. Nonetheless, the critics know the unknown alternative would be materially better than reality.

We should give the anti-warriors the chance to explain what their “plan” would have been and why it would have made the world a safer place. Unfortunately, they are never asked and never come forward sua sponte.

Second, what is your plan now? Senator Obama and his ilk declare that, once we are out of Iraq, our troops will be in a position to wage a “real” fight against terrorism. Could we have a few details?

Would a President Obama, Clinton or Edwards send massive reinforcements to Afghanistan? If so, do they pledge not to withdraw even if (i) the conflict looks like a civil war (civil war has been pretty much the default state of Afghan politics since roughly the time of Alexander the Great), (ii) the current government appears to be weak and inept, (iii) the enemy kills civilians in terrorist attacks and (iv) American soldiers suffer casualties? Oh, and if the enemy in Afghanistan draws much of its strength from across the Pakistani border, will they promise not to leave its sanctuaries intact?

If a prospective President is willing to make those commitments to Afghanistan, why not to Iraq? If not, how long will an Afghan campaign last before it falls victim to the same complaints as the one in Iraq?

Let’s think about other possible fronts: Somalia, Lebanon, a preemptive strike against Iran? I’m pretty sure that, if the Democrats would address the issue, their prospective strategy would boil down to this: Withdraw to our own borders, react to what the enemy does, preferably with indictments rather than Marines, and spread lots of money to as many units of government as possible.

But, again, let’s hear them tell us about their plans, not as abstractions (“fighting smarter”) but as concrete propositions. It would, I suspect, be highly educational for the electorate.

The War Generalissima Pelosi Can’t End – Part II

Having insisted for a long time that Iraq has nothing to do with, in fact is a distraction from, the War on Terror, the Left cannot argue consistently that an American withdrawal from Iraq will bring the bigger conflict to a close. At most, it can claim that defeat in this battle will make it easier to win the war. (I leave to one side the substantial minority of the Left that denies the existence of any war to win. They are by and large immune to rational argument.)

The Left’s own preferred narrative unfortunately doesn’t support its professed expectations. According to Generalissima Pelosi and her general staff, al-Qa’eda and kindred groups had no interest in Iraq until April 2003, when the Coalition’s armies drove the Ba’athist regime from power. Then the prospect of attacking Americans led them to throw thousands of terrorists into Iraqi territory. They also elevated Iraq to the top of their propaganda menu and whipped up Moslem anger against the giaours’ “aggression” against the dar al-Islām, gaining a harvest of recruits to their cause.

Let’s assume for the moment that the Left has all of that right. What can reasonably be anticipated after America’s abandonment of the government that we have supported in Baghdad?

Looking ahead to the post-bug-out future requires trying to think like the enemy, which entails taking into account the differences between their beliefs and values, and ours. Hidden in the premises of much left-wing discussion of the war is the assumption that those differences aren’t particularly important. If al-Qa’eda plants booby traps for schoolchildren and beheads prisoners, that is merely evidence of the intensity of its grievances. The proper Western reaction is mollification, not military escalation.

On that optimistic view of enemy psychology, how much will the bug-out calm the mufsiduns’ passions? Recall that, again according to the left-wing narrative, al-Qa’eda despised Saddam Hussein for his secularism and therefore could not conceivably have cooperated with him. Yet the Coalition’s attack on Saddam and his replacement by a different flavor of “bad Moslem” allegedly inflamed them to a new pitch of outrage.

Isn’t it more likely that the Iraqi campaign was an excuse rather than a reason for the outrage, and that other American actions would have served just as well? One suggestive fact is that America gets no credit in Islamofascist quarters for what we have done to assist Moslems against their secularist and Christian enemies. American aid was crucial to the expulsion of the Soviets from Afghanistan, and we intervened directly to support Moslems in Bosnia and Kosovo. Even in Iraq, we have (shamefully) done almost nothing to safeguard the indigenous Christians from persecution while showing exaggerated respect for what we take to be Islamic sensitivities. None of that weighs in the balance against our Great Satanism.

La Generalissima says that she doesn’t want to retreat across the ocean and ignore the rest of the world. So our soldiers will go on fighting – in Afghanistan, for instance – and will garrison at least Kuwait and the Gulf emirates. Won’t those be “grievances”, too, and inspire al-Qa’eda et al. to rush their forces, freed from fighting in Iraq, to the new battlegrounds? After all, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, just as we invaded Iraq, and there threw out al-Qa’eda’s ideological soulmates. And Osama bin-Laden’s original declaration of war against America emphasized the enormity of our presence in Saudi-controlled Arabia. Presumably, he is no more pleased by U.S. boots on the ground of Qatar or Kuwait.

It is, in short, illogical, in terms of the Left’s own analytical framework, to imagine that our leaving Iraq will have a calming effect on our foes. The war will move seamlessly from Baghdad to Kabul, the emirates and wherever else in prospective caliphate Western targets are found.

In that continuation of the conflict, the enemy will enjoy two advantages that it doesn’t have at present. First will be the momentum that springs from victory; second, the conviction that it has mastered the tactics needed to defeat our superficially overwhelming military supremacy.

Aside from boosting the terrorist cadre’s morale, victory will have important effects in the wider Moslem world. Osama bin-Laden’s jihad is far from the first ever proclaimed by a Wahabbi-Salafist soi-disant imam. These outbreaks were routine in the British Raj. In the past, however, the jihadis were scorned by traditional Moslems, who regarded them as ignorant heretics. Indian Moslems had real, as opposed to puffed-up, grievances, but they weren’t tempted to join forces with what the British called “the Hindoostani fanatics”.

Since those days, the Wahabbi ideology has made great progress within Islam, thanks to generous Saudi financing and the gradual decay of traditionalism. From being an exotic sect, the Wahabbis have grown to a familiar part of the Moslem thought universe. That development alone has blunted much of the scorn they once attracted. Now they are on the verge of laying claim to the first clear-cut Moslem victory over the Christian powers since the day of Suleiman the Magnificent.

Also worth pondering is the impact on the Democratic Party. A portion of its base already reckons American humiliation as a feature, not a bug. Will La Generalissima be able to keep her troops in line behind a long, troublesome campaign in Afghanistan? If (more realistically, when) the mufsidun raise revolts in Egypt, Jordan, the UAE and Algeria, how will rank-and-file Democrats react to deploying American soldiers in defense of dictatorships and hereditary monarchies? Baghdad wasn’t worth 3,000 American lives. Will Cairo be worth 300? Will Amman be worth 30?

By any reasonable inference from the Left’s own presumptions, the post-Iraq war will be fought on terms vastly less favorable to our interests than those that exist today. Like the British after Saratoga, Napoleon after Borodino or Lee after Gettysburg, we will struggle on the defensive against an enemy with the initiative and moral, if not material, preponderance. Welcome to the real quagmire, lovers of peace.

The War Generalissima Pelosi Can’t End – Part I

Morton Kondracke yesterday put forward what he called “Plan B”, a/k/a “winning dirty”, less, I suspect, as a real proposal than as an awful plausibility intended to prod anti-war liberals into thinking seriously about the consequences of an American bug-out from Iraq.

Right now, the administration is committed to building a unified, reconciled, multisectarian Iraq – “winning clean”. Most Democrats say that’s what they want, too. But it may not be possible. . . .

Winning dirty would involve taking sides in the civil war – backing the Shiite-dominated elected government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and ensuring that he and his allies prevail over both the Sunni insurgency and his Shiite adversary Muqtada al-Sadr, who’s now Iran’s candidate to rule Iraq. . . .

Prudence calls for preparation of a Plan B. The withdrawal policy advocated by most Democrats virtually guarantees catastrophic ethnic cleansing – but without any guarantee that a government friendly to the United States would emerge. Almost certainly, Shiites will dominate Iraq because they outnumber Sunnis three to one. But the United States would get no credit for helping the Shiites win. In fact, America’s credibility would suffer because it abandoned its mission. And, there is no guarantee that al-Sadr – currently residing in Iran and resting his militias – would not emerge as the victor in a power struggle with al-Maliki’s Dawa Party and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq [“SCIRI”], led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.

Iran formerly backed the SCIRI and its Badr Brigades but recently switched allegiances . . . to al-Sadr, who’s regarded by other Shiites as young, volatile and unreliable. Under a win dirty strategy, the United States would have to back al-Maliki and the Badr Brigades in their eventual showdown with al-Sadr. It also would have to help Jordan and Saudi Arabia care for a surge in Sunni refugees, possibly 1 million to 2 million joining an equal number who already have fled.

No politically correct left-winger will be able to stomach the idea of supporting the perpetrators a huge campaign of ethnic cleansing for the sake of installing a pro-American dictatorship. But what does the Left prefer? Ethnic cleansing by an anti-American dictatorship? A proxy war among Iran, Turkey and Saudi-controlled Arabia? Endless chaos? Or will these champions of humanitarian values watch the slaughter without concern?

“Plan A” – whether in the form of Secretary Rumsfeld’s “light footprint” or General Petraeus’s “surge” – holds out the reasonable hope of an unambiguous victory and the certainty of a tolerable state of affairs. Against an enemy that relies almost wholly on the murder of civilians, we can bolster a friendly government indefinitely, at a cost in men and money that is well within our resources. It is an elementary axiom of warfare that guerillas cannot win until and unless they gather enough strength to launch conventional attacks. The mufsidun are centuries away from crossing that threshold and receding by the month.

But La Generalissima and her party don’t think that Plan A is good enough. Mr. Kondracke has proffered a shocking, right-wing “Plan B”. What “Plan B” does the Left have?

The Humane Perspective of the Religious Left

The Rev. Wesley Granberg-Michaelson is a pillar of the Religious Left. In his youth, he worked on the staff of liberal Republican Senator Mark Hatfield. Today he is general secretary of the American branch of the Dutch Reformed Church (a far different denomination from what it was in William the Silent’s day). Writing on the modestly named God’s Politics blog (maintained by leftist fakir Jim Wallis of Sojourners), he preached yesterday about how to apply the “lessons of Vietnam” to the Iraqi campaign. The sermon is the usual hogwash, but one sentence struck me. About the other side of the Vietnam debate, he says dismissively, “Despite their dire predictions of outcomes, today U.S. companies are racing to catch up with other corporations heavily investing in Vietnam’s economy.”

As Mark Tooley observes,

Yes, thirty years later, free enterprise is taking root in still communist-governed Vietnam. But this follows at least 1.7 million killed by the communist genocide in Cambodia in the immediate aftermath of the war, along with tens of thousands murdered by the victorious communists in Laos and in reunified Vietnam. There were also the concentration camps, hundreds of thousands of fleeing refugees, thousands of whom drowned at sea, and decades of totalitarian oppression, where free speech and rule of law were extinguished by nightmarish police states.

Yet, to the Rev. Mr. Granberg-Michaelson, the “dire predictions” are disproven by the fact that multinational corporations nowadays find that they can do business with Hanoi. If that is the Religious Left’s standard, what, in the Ground of All Being’s name, so upset them about General Pinochet?