Prepare to be Chastened

You remember Bruce Anderson from his ethnically sensitive column on Hurricane Katrina (Don't blame Bush - Blame black people!), or perhaps from his "carbon emissions, schmarbon emissions" column about global warming (Yes, The real leader on climate change is Mr Bush ). Watch out, Bush critics - he's coming for you.

It is not difficult to make the case against George Bush.

Ouch.

There have been mistakes.

Mistakes, plural? My how the world has changed following Bush's final press conference... Bush sort of admits to three mistakes,

Clearly putting a "Mission Accomplished" on a aircraft carrier was a mistake. It sent the wrong message. We were trying to say something differently, but nevertheless, it conveyed a different message. Obviously, some of my rhetoric has been a mistake.

* * *

I believe that running the Social Security idea right after the '04 elections was a mistake. I should have argued for immigration reform.

Back to Anderson:

But in their abuse of him, many of his liberal critics demonstrate their own weak hold on reality.

You mean, like crazily being concerned about carbon emissions, or not blaming the Katrina disaster on African Americans? Or what? (Sorry, Bruce - I'm not even sure G.W. is on your side on those points.)

In trying to belittle him, they merely reveal their own littleness.

Yes, yes. Tiny little liberals. We get it.

George Bush is a much more considerable figure than the caricature version.

Er, Bruce, that's not a defense... you're damning him with faint praise.

As he has set great events in motion, it will be impossible to judge his Presidency for many years.

Another presentation of the "You can't judge Bush by his decisions, but must wait a few decades or generations to see what comes next. If you parked a feces flinging monkey in front of a fan, Anderson would likely assure us that "You have to wait to see if a verdant tomorrow grows out of the monkey's newly fertilized surroundings." Had Bush initiated a nuclear war, Anderson would probably be telling us that we have to wait and see if the benefits of reduced world population and possible beneficial mutations of the human genome lead future generations to regard him as a great man. Or, as Anderson so aptly puts it,

It is not impossible that history will offer a partial vindication.

Partial vindication is not impossible? Does praise get any fainter than that?

Okay, that was Anderson's first paragraph and there's a lot more... of similar quality. Read it and weep, you tiny little liberals. Anderson continues to make sweeping, unsubstantiated statements (e.g., "Although some of George Bush junior's speeches will rank high in the annals of political oratory, once he was without a text, he often went adrift." - er, which speeches?), and presents a second-hand depiction of Bush's astonishing leadership behind closed doors that's worthy of a SNL skit. For eight years we've been told that Bush is brilliant, witty, smart and commanding, until a camera lens hits him at which time his brain seems to turn to mush. Maybe there's some hidden camera footage? An audio recording? Because as much as I want to give Bush the benefit of the doubt, you would think by now we wouldn't have to take people like Anderson's apocryphal friend at their (purported) word.

Typical of Bush's defenders, Anderson wants to reinvent the Iraq war.

After 11 September, the US Administration asked itself one repeated and agonised question. Why do these people hate us? The Bush team came up with their answer: because they live in failed states, which offer their young no hope in this world and thus leave them open to the temptations of fanaticism and a better deal in another world.

Well, not quite. What Bush actually said was,

They hate what we see right here in this chamber - a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms - our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.

That's not quite the same thing, is it.... Anderson apparently didn't convince even himself, as he carries on about Hussein's desire for WMD's and suggests that choosing not to invade Iraq and topple Hussein would have been tantamount to waiting "until the certainty of a mushroom cloud".

It seemed that all the routes to progress in the Middle East and safety in the West led to Iraq.

Talk about your hyperbole.... But "seemed"? His defense of the entire Iraq debacle is "Appearances were deceiving"?

But in moving forward with the war, "There was one problem." Just one, mind you. Wanna guess? I'll give you three tries.

Largely because of the malign influence of that fraud and tautology, international law, we have grown squeamish about regime change.

I bet that was at the top of your list. I mean, think of all the leaders who weren't toppled due to American squeamishness about regime change and fear of international law. Manuel Noriega, Bernard Coard, Slobodan Milosevic, Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras... all happily ruling their countries. Squeamishness like that almost assuredly was why the U.S. would never have backed a coup attempt in Venezuela before not invading Iraq.

As a result, the overwhelming desirability of regime change in Iraq had to be downplayed, and there was a further difficulty: the most unfortunate un-meeting of minds in recent public policy. After 2001, in both Washington and London, there was a split between those who knew Iraq, who were generally hostile to the War, and those who wanted war but usually knew nothing about Iraq.

Oh, this is too good. Here's Bush, downplaying regime change in a joint press conference with Blair, April 6, 2002:

THE PRESIDENT: Maybe I should be a little less direct and be a little more nuanced, and say we support regime change.

Q That's a change though, isn't it, a change in policy?

THE PRESIDENT: No, it's really not. Regime change was the policy of my predecessor, as well.

Q And your father?

THE PRESIDENT: You know, I can't remember that far back. (Laughter.) It's certainly the policy of my administration. I think regime change sounds a lot more civil, doesn't it? The world would be better off without him. Let me put it that way, though. And so will the future.

Talk about nuance. But what about Anderson's concern about the split of opinion on the Iraq invasion between, shall we say, those who knew what they were talking about and those who didn't?

George Bush had little confidence in his Secretary of State, Colin Powell. Unable to sack Mr Powell, he made up for it by not listening to the State Department. Tony Blair never took much notice of his foreign secretaries.

As a result, the Arabists' expertise was disregarded and ... the direction of events was left to the neo-conservatives, most of whom were dangerous idealists who believed that democracy was an infallible political antibiotic.

But enough about Fred Hiatt. No, in fairness to Hiatt, he at least recognized Bush's "commitment" to democratization for what it was. If the people Bush in fact allowed to lead him around by their nose were even half as informed as Hiatt, Anderson's account would fall apart. What's amazing to me is that Anderson's trying to defend Bush by arguing that Bush had a choice between going with knowledgeable experts and Colin Powell, and people who knew absolutely nothing about anything - and that Bush made the wrong choice. Anderson elaborates that, if Iraq hadn't been such an unmitigated disaster in the hands of the incompetents picked by Bush, "George Bush's ratings would be much higher". Well, yeah, but in that universe we might be talking about how Bush's record of good decision-making justifies calling him a good President, rather than how once the dust settles and future Presidents and people put Humpty Dumpty back together, it's "not impossible that history will offer a partial vindication".

The funny thing is, having just said that, Anderson tells us:

There was one unfortunate side effect of the war on terror: Guantanamo.

I guess Anderson sees the rest of the side-effects, including two years of chaos and lost opportunity in Iraq, the idiotic disbanding of the Iraqi military, loss of world respect, loss of respect as the world's preeminent military power, as fortunate side effects?

At the time, it seemed a good idea: a cunning means of preventing American lawyers from undermining America's security. But the US prides itself on being a nation founded upon laws. It follows that a legal vacuum is only tolerable for a brief period.

So it seemed like a good idea to ignore U.S. law and values, create a legal black hole where you could drop prisoners, many of whom were picked up by mistake, deny them due process, charges, access to lawyers, trial, smear anybody who tried to assert that we would be better off respecting our historic values and providing an example for the world of fairness and justice (the type of American values somebody like Anderson sees as "undermining America's security"), and engaging in treatment of some prisoners so atrocious that, despite their crimes, we may have virtually no evidence that we can use against them in court in anything resembling a fair trial. By now even Anderson's ready to bring the Guantanamo prisoners back into the light, but he adds,

That said, anyone who denies that there are some exceedingly dangerous men in Guantanamo should be forced to live among them.

No, in fact, it's the people who flouted American law, and people like Anderson who cheered them on, who should be forced to live among those we are unable to convict due to the Bush Administration's use of torture and contempt for the law.

Funny how only a couple of years ago Anderson saw Bush's Katrina failure as relevant to his legacy, but now... nary a mention. But there's a consistency with his prior piece - then, as now, every failure that occurs on Bush's watch is the fault of something that came before his Presidency:

The decisions which doomed New Orleans were taken years before he became President, including the one to build the city in the first place.

Yes, I'm sure that there were many times in the wee hours of the morning when Bush woke up screaming, "Darn you, French Mississippi Company! Darn you, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville! How could you do this to Brownie and me!" How could Bush possibly have foreseen a disaster that was a mere 287 years in the making. In fact, it's unfair to expect that Bush would have foreseen any disaster. Really:

On the economy, and like Gordon Brown, George Bush could be accused of failing to fix the roof while the sun was shining. But two years' ago, it all seemed to be working. ... George Bush did not foresee the crisis. Who did?

A lot of people saw disaster coming, actually. Sure, they were largely marginalized by the media, save most notably for Paul Krugman who hollered loud, clear warnings from the editorial page of the New York Times. If all of that flew below Bush's radar, it can fairly be said that as with Iraq, a large part of the fault lies with his natural tendency to surround himself with incompetents who tell him what he wants to hear, while marginalizing and ignoring anybody who knows anything about anything.

So there you go, Bush critics. Don't you feel small?

Look What You Can Make From A Sow's Ear!

Imagine a football game, three seconds left, the team with possession trails by five points, they're on their own forty yard line... What do they do? Even people who aren't acquainted with football knows what comes next - the "Hail Mary pass". So imagine the next day you open the sports page and read something like this:

If the abysmal performance of his team through most of the season represents a massive stain on the coach's record, his decision to call for a "Hail Mary pass" now looks like his finest hour. Given the mood in the stadium and the team's fan base as a whole, it would have been far easier to do the opposite. Politically, the coach took the path of most resistance. He endured an avalanche of scorn, and now he has been vindicated. He was not only right; he was courageous.

You would recognize that for what it is: horse puckey. The coach's only other choice was to admit defeat. So how is this different:

But if Iraq overall represents a massive stain on Bush's record, his decision to increase America's troop presence in late 2006 now looks like his finest hour. Given the mood in Washington and the country as a whole, it would have been far easier to do the opposite. Politically, Bush took the path of most resistance. He endured an avalanche of scorn, and now he has been vindicated. He was not only right; he was courageous.

There's no courage in throwing a Hail Mary. It's an act of desperation. In Bush's case, given the choice between admitting his failures and making a desperate last effort to redeem himself, there was never a chance that he would go on camera and tell the American people, honestly and candidly, of the mess he made and the odds against success.

Like William Kristol, Peter Beinart points to the Anbar Awakening as evidence of the success of the surge, despite the fact that it preceded the surge. At least Beinart adds this:

Is the surge solely responsible for the turnaround? Of course not. Al-Qaeda alienated the Sunni tribes; Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army decided to stand down; the United States assassinated key insurgent and militia leaders, all of which mattered as much if not more than the increase in U.S. troops. And the decline in violence isn't necessarily permanent. Iraq watchers warn that communal distrust remains high; if someone strikes a match, civil war could again rage out of control.

In other words, we're judging the surge solely by the question of whether it has been a military success. We're attributing successes to the surge that are, in fact, wholly or partially attributable to other factors or changes in strategy. And we're completely ignoring G.W.'s own criteria for whether or not the surge is a success - political progress, made possible by a reduction in violence.

The surge has been a success militarily, but it has not accomplished its goals. To quote, you know, the President:

A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.

To establish its authority, the Iraqi government plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq's provinces by November. To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis. To show that it is committed to delivering a better life, the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs. To empower local leaders, Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year. And to allow more Iraqis to re-enter their nation's political life, the government will reform de-Baathification laws, and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq's constitution.

By what measure beyond the military - something the President told us up-front was an inadequate measure - is the Surge a success?

To me, when the surge was announced, the largest questions were "is it big enough to suppress the violence", and "is it too little, too late?" On the first question, the answer appears to be that in the full context of Iraq - other changes in leadership and strategy, the Anbar Awakening, physical separation of warring sects, etc. - it was sufficient in size to help reduce and control violence. But I can't applaud Bush as having formed a great or brave strategy in sending what a potentially insufficient number of troops as he had no real choice - our armed forces are overextended, and many are concerned that our commitments in Iraq have jeopardized our progress and chances of success in Afghanistan. As for the political progress that Bush told us is the true measure of success.... Well, let's let's revisit Beinart's answer:

Iraq watchers warn that communal distrust remains high; if someone strikes a match, civil war could again rage out of control.

Ouch. I'm happy to agree with General Petraeus, that the surge has helped suppress violence and create opportunity for political progress. But unless and until that political progress occurs, it's premature to call the surge a success.

Here, Beinart's every bit the football fan, judging decisions not by the thought or strategy that went into them, but by the final score. He has concluded that the surge worked, so everybody should judge it by the outcome, admit that G.W. showed good judgment and that it was a great success. But at the same time he suggests that "Iraq overall represents a massive stain on Bush's record". If five, ten, twenty, fifty years from now Iraq is a peaceful, progressive democracy, based on the same kind of outcome-driven measure, is Beinart going to be telling us that the decision to invade Iraq "now looks like his finest hour"?

Because Without Political Progress....

A reminder from the Kurdish region of Iraq: Without political progress, at least by his original measure G.W. is right - the surge will have been a failure.

Kurdish officials this fall took delivery of three planeloads of small arms and ammunition imported from Bulgaria, three U.S. military officials said, an acquisition that occurred outside the weapons procurement procedures of Iraq's central government.

The large quantity of weapons and the timing of the shipment alarmed U.S. officials, who have grown concerned about the prospect of an armed confrontation between Iraqi Kurds and the government at a time when the Kurds are attempting to expand their control over parts of northern Iraq.

How well is "national reconciliation" coming along?

"Yes, the Kurds have this autonomous region and they're authorized to keep the pesh," one of the [U.S.] officials said, referring to the militia. "But arming themselves and bringing in weapons stealthily like that - if I were the Iraqi government, I'd be pretty concerned."

While violence in Iraq has decreased markedly in recent months, political tension is rising as Iraqi leaders gear up for provincial and national elections scheduled to take place next year, and as they prepare for an era in which the U.S. military will have a smaller presence there.

Of the primary fault lines - which include tension between Sunnis and Shiites and rivalry among Shiite political parties - the rift between Kurds and the Arab-dominated Iraqi government has become a top concern in recent months. Senior government officials have engaged in a war of words, and Iraqi army and pesh merga units have come close to clashing.

"You could easily have a huge eruption of violence in the north," said Kenneth B. Katzman, a Middle East specialist at the Congressional Research Service in Washington. "Nothing having to do with the Kurds is resolved."

And of course, the Kurds welcome us to stay:

Central government officials recently bristled at Barzani's offer to allow U.S. troops to establish bases in the Kurdish autonomous region, saying the regional government had no authority to make such an overture, especially as Iraqi officials are calling for a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops.

The factions that want us in and the factions that want us out, it seems, are all trying to advance their own agendas. But reconciliation isn't very high on anybody else's list of priorities and... for that matter, may not even be on any list but ours.

Fred Hiatt's Last Minute Potshot

Remember Fred Hiatt's execrable column on how everything's coming up roses in Iraq? His editorial page mindlessly regurgitates his views today, in a last minute potshot at Obama. But apparently, this time around nobody wanted to sign the thing.

Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Iran?

Clifford Orwin serves up plenty of nothing in an editorial that refuses to endorse either Obama or McCain, but attempts to attack Obama who Orwin clearly expects to win.

Fact No. 1 is that the new president will face very bad times. Already last spring, when lecturing at a leading U.S. political science department, I learned that a majority of my colleagues there, regardless of their leanings, held that each party should hope the other won this race. And that was before the financial meltdown.

Is Mr. Obama the man for such a dire moment?

Orwin attempts to insulate himself from criticism of this point by refusing to endorse McCain, but the obvious retort is, "Is McCain?" or "Is anybody?" As Orwin notes,

Already last spring, when lecturing at a leading U.S. political science department, I learned that a majority of my colleagues there, regardless of their leanings, held that each party should hope the other won this race. And that was before the financial meltdown.

So what we have here is not really so much a point about Obama or his qualification as Presidency, but Orwin setting himself up to say "I told you so" if things don't quickly come up roses without actually having to put his neck on the chopping block by suggesting how McCain might be more qualified or what a candidate might do to make roses grow from the fertilizer into which G.W. has transformed most aspects of American government.

Look at Mr. Obama's domestic plans. Behind his rhetoric of unity shelter the same old Democratic policies that the two parties have wrangled over for four decades. If that's what Mr. Obama means by Change We Can Believe In, well then Yes We Can.

So Democrats support Democratic policies, and believe that implementing Democratic policies in the place of Republican policies constitutes change? Is Orwin unfamiliar with the meaning of the word, "change"?

Now if he means to argue that the Democratic policies he chooses not to identify are somehow worse than the Republican policies they would replace, I'm eager to hear the argument - to me, that's red meat and, as with pretty much any policy debate, a robust debate can follow with valid points to be made on both sides. But the way Orwin goes about this? It's a cop-out.

Orwin's only specifics come in relation to "foreign policy", by which he apparently means war, war, and only war:

Here, the best news is that not even Mr. Obama's own advisers believe he intends an early withdrawal from Iraq.

Given Orwin's open support for the Iraq war, and ability to find self-vindication in any outcome, it's no surprise that he apparently finds perverse pleasure in the difficulty of ending that war. But what nonsense:

Al-Qaeda has declared again and again (contra Mr. Obama) that the main theatre of its struggle with the United States is not marginal Afghanistan but geopolitically crucial Iraq. Lately, it has been absorbing a royal beating there. Nothing would delight it more than for the Americans to abandon Iraq prematurely to chase Osama bin Laden. Handed a new lease on life in Iraq, it would press on with renewed confidence in Kandahar.

This man is a political scientist who has been writing for years in favor of the Iraq war, yet he is ignorant of Al-Qaeda's actual goals? In their wildest pipe dream, Al-Qaeda doesn't imagine gaining control of Iraq, and it's absurd and dishonest for Orwin to pretend otherwise. Their unambiguous goal has been to drag the U.S. into a perpetual conflict that bankrupts us as a nation, in much the same manner as Russia's war in Afghanistan contributed to its own collapse. Orwin tells us that we're in "an era of shrinking resources" that would force us to forego policies that might improve the lives of Americans - well, you know, that's kind of what Al-Qaeda wants, isn't it.

If Orwin were more honest, or is it more knowledgeable, he would be aware that a Shiite-dominated Iraq is not going to tolerate Al-Qaeda. They'll be vastly less tolerant than Hussein's Sunni government and, despite various specious efforts to tie Hussein to Al-Qaeda, they weren't connected. Odds are they'll be significantly more ruthless in rooting it out, once the U.S. is gone and they are no longer limited by western sensitivities or insistence upon "reconciliation".

Even if we assume that Orwin is engaged in the all-too-typical sleight of hand, conflating Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) with Bin Laden's Al Qaeda, really, does he think that the Shiite government is going to make any sort of home in Iraq for an aggressively expansionist, militaristic, fundamentalist brand of Sunni Islam, openly dedicated to its overthrow? Where in the Shiite world is Al-Qaeda tolerated, let alone welcomed? Meanwhile, there's a real price being paid for turning Iraq into a proving ground for AQI and other terrorist groups:

Despite debate over the extent to which AQI fighters are dispersing to new battlefields, there's little question that the organization's methods are increasingly being employed outside of Iraq. The number of suicide attacks, for example, rare in Afghanistan and Pakistan before 9/11, has grown exponentially; according to Pakistan's intelligence service, in the first eight months of this year, there were 28 suicide attacks in Pakistan and 36 in Afghanistan, together claiming over 900 lives. (During that same period, for the first time, suicide bombers killed more people in Pakistan than in Iraq: 471 versus 463.) "Whether or not the actual people migrate, the tactics and techniques are [migrating], and they're going to change the nature of warfare," says [Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at Georgetown University]. "The people coming from Iraq have expertise almost across the board in insurgency, from suicide tactics to force-on-force attacks to sophisticated standoff attacks with remote-controlled missiles or rockets to IED types of technologies. It just means that the learning curve for insurgents is now short, and they're able to learn from previous experience and adapt almost immediately, almost in real time."

The disingenuous nature of Orwin's argument is only amplified by his suggestion that Obama's policy in Iraq would "hardly differ from Mr. McCain's". If that's true, what happens is going to happen under either leader.

So far, Orwin's offerings have been pretty generic. At best, he can be said to be criticizing Obama for offering "change" that doesn't involve ideas that are new enough, while refusing to endorse McCain who I guess we are to infer is offering "more of the same". So what's the one point of distinction that Orwin is willing to openly make?

Which brings us to Iran, whose impending nuclear weapons (in tandem with its global terrorist network, advanced ballistic missile systems and proneness to messianic delusions) is the real sum of all fears confronting the next U.S. president. Mr. Obama has declared that a nuclear Iran is absolutely unacceptable to him, and I believe him. I believe that he'll talk just as hard as he can to prevent it, "without preconditions" if necessary. But what will he do once talking has failed?

I guess we are to presuppose that McCain would bypass any attempt to resolve Iran's nuclear ambitious through diplomacy, and would skip straight to the song and dance? If Orwin wants us to go to war with Iran, without bothering with so much as an attempt at diplomacy, he should have the courage and honesty to say so. If not, then we're first going to take steps short of war.

What Orwin appears to offer here is his disappointment that Obama isn't going to advance domestic policies that he prefers (but won't specify), and that neither candidate is likely at this point to endorse a never-ending war in Iraq or expanding that war into Iran.

Bad War Coverage

Fred Hiatt personifies a lot of the problems with the mainstream media, not the least of which is its coverage of the Iraq war. Throughout the conflict, the media focus has been on military action and violence. There's been scant coverage of the political situation in Iraq, or how inter- and even intra-sectarian conflicts continues to pose an impediment to peace and the withdrawal of forces. Hiatt, a reliable cheerleader for the war, now brings us this:

It's easy to forget the utter hopelessness that had settled on Washington with regard to Iraq less than two years ago.

Sure, it's easy to forget because without high levels of violence, the mainstream media sees little need to even cover the war. Britney's public meltdown? Lipstick on a pig? Those are stories.

And it's easy to forget the nearly universal skepticism that greeted President Bush's announcement of a new strategy in January 2007.

It's easy to forget how well-grounded that skepticism was, given the abject incompetence of the Bush Administration's conduct of the war to that point. A lot of the skepticism wasn't directed at the idea that more troops could reduce violence - it was a question of, "Is this too little, too late." As it turns out, the Anbar Awakening had a profound effect on levels of violence, as has the effective ethnic segregation of formerly integrated neighborhoods of Baghdad. Those aren't effects of "the surge", though, and it isn't even clear to what degree the surge has helped with recent successes in Iraq. Don't take my word for it - take the word of General Petraeus:¹

So would the Sunni Awakening have succeeded without the surge? Possibly, he concedes, but the surge came at that time and helped empower Sunni leaders, paying their fighters and backing them up on the streets. This is where Seneca the Younger comes in: "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."

It would be reasonable to credit the Bush Administration for letting its military leaders (finally) move away from its bad strategies of the preceding five years, so as to create the opportunity. But instead, people like Hiatt consistently ignore the positions of people who are aware of the facts on the ground in order to spin the fiction that everything is about the surge, and only the surge. My suspicion is that Hiatt is acting deliberately, as this fiction allows him to support McCain and attack Obama (consistent with Hiatt's own preferred interventionist foreign policy), whereas telling the truth would hamper him in his political goals.

Hiatt also elides from history the overstated success and impact of the surge, which resulted in stories like this:

Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of Multinational Force Iraq, told the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees today that the surge in Iraq is showing progress, and that he believes troop reductions to pre-surge levels could begin by summer 2008 without jeopardizing gains made.

How well did that turn out, again?

Hiatt reinvents the success of the surge, consistent with the mainstream media's principal interest in covering acts of violence, as being about the violence, not about political progress. Although he is cautious enough to refer to the surge as creating only "a chance of success", Hiatt fails to describe any of the benchmarks of success described by the Bush Administration or how they have been met. Earlier this year we had columnists like Charles Krauthammer pretending that significant progress had been made on at least some of those criteria. But despite the amount of progress we were promises by the end of 2007, we're still waiting for even one of Bush's benchmarks to be fulfilled. So yes, changes of strategy combined with the surge created a significant window of opportunity - one Hiatt would be correct to celebrate - but it appears that under Bush's "leadership" that opportunity is (again) being squandered.

While Hiatt praises national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley for quietly lobbying for the surge, consistent with the rest of his piece he omits mention of others who played a role (and perhaps a more important role) in bringing about the policy changes that created the groundwork for the surge's contribution to holding down violence.² Hiatt observes,

Out of that success, in fact, a new conventional wisdom seems to be settling on Washington - that the U.S. job in Iraq is nearing completion, and the time has come to move on to Afghanistan and other challenges.

Okay, let's call that the consensus. Has it arisen because of good media coverage and commentary about the realities in Iraq, or has it arisen due to the absence of good coverage and commentary? Hiatt's implicit answer: the latter:

If, as seems likely, the celebration is premature and U.S. troops will be needed in Iraq for some time to come, we can hope that the next national security adviser again has the strength to resist the crowd and the deftness to steer the country in the right direction.

If that's what Hiatt believes, why did he devote 98% of his column to suggesting the opposite - that the surge has been a great success, and vindicates Bush to the degree that historians will assess the surge "as an act of remarkable courage"? And how is it "an act of remarkable courage" to advance a policy when virtually everybody in your party has your back?
____________
1. It's coincidence, but should we find some amusement in the fact that Petraeus likes to use the "lipstick on a pig" metaphor? And that his doing so was deemed "media-savvy"?

2. I'm content to assume that the surge has played a role in the reduction of violence, even a substantial role, but given the difficulty that even General Petraeus has in quantifying its contribution I'm not going to try to state a figure, save for observing that Hiatt's implied "100%" is both overconfident and overstated.

Peace Is At Hand....

One of Henry Kissinger's finer moments:

In October [of 1972] Kissinger euphorically reported to the world that "peace is at hand" in Viet Nam. Then, as it has so many times before in America's longest and strangest war, the peace proved once again elusive. As the Paris negotiations dissolved in a fog of linguistic ambiguities and recriminations, Richard Nixon suddenly sent the bombers north again. All through the year, Nixon and Kissinger labored at a new global design, a multipolar world in which an equilibrium of power would ensure what Nixon called "a full generation of peace." But at year's end, the design remained dangerously flawed by the ugly war from which, once again, there seemed no early exit.

If you don't study history, or even if you do, you may find that it repeats itself - today, Henry Kissinger "has McCain's back", and argues that peace is at hand in Iraq.

This is an example of a smart man, even one whose foreign policy mistakes are something of legend, lowering himself to writing a base, simplistic diatribe - something one might expect in an undergraduate speech class, but that somebody of Kissinger's background and intelligence would have to know is an unadulterated heap of crap. But Kissinger's not trying to convince himself. He's trying to convince people at the margins of the Republican party who are sick of the war that they should back McCain. And he's counting on them not to think very hard about his claims and assertions.

Kissinger opens with one of the famously nebulous "They say"-type assertions, that allow you to fabricate a claim that you put into the mouths of people who don't actually exist.

Above all, [supporters of a deadline for withdrawal] argued, the war was lost, and withdrawal would represent the least costly way to deal with the debacle.

I'll grant that you will be able to find isolated individuals who took that position, but they're exceptions. Which of course is why Kissinger fails to identify any actual people who hold this position - to do so would only serve to highlight how exceptional it is. He's also conflating two issues - the question of whether the war is lost, and the question of whether withdrawal is the "least costly" (and here it's not clear if we're talking lives, dollars, political influence, something else, or some combination thereof) option. It's possible to believe that we're winning, but that we should still get out of Iraq on a short timetable.

Kissinger attempts to argue that there are three reasons why "events" have overtaken arguments in support of withdrawal. He claims that al-Qaeda (and here he seems to mean the real thing, not "al-Qaeda in Iraq") "seems on the run"; the Sunni insurrection "has largely died down"; and the Shiite dominated central government has "at least temporarily" suppressed Shiite militias that challenged its authority. In other words, even in pitching this as a great success, Kissinger can't bring himself to claim any concrete achievements. He couches his claims in appearances or as temporary. He continues, "Of course, we cannot tell now whether these changes are permanent or whether, and to what extent, they reflect a decision by our adversaries, including Iran, to husband their forces for the aftermath of the Bush administration." That's kind of important, don't you think? If we're going to be declaring that "peace is at hand", we don't want to be in a situation where "at year's end, the design remain[s] dangerously flawed by the ugly war from which, once again, there seem[s] no early exit" - do we?

Kissinger apparently has forgotten the mantra of the past five years, "Iraq is not Vietnam". He quickly resorts to the standard, Vietnam War line that we must try to mind read our enemies, and we can't do anything that could potentially make our enemies see us as weak.

Any appearance that radical Islamic forces were responsible for a U.S. defeat would have enormous destabilizing consequences far beyond the region.

This may sound incredibly empowering to our enemies - they get to dictate our foreign policy. Except, of course, that it's not really about what our enemy might want - it's about Kissinger. If the shoe were on the other foot, and somebody were telling him "Your policies strengthen the enemy" - for example, "Staying in Iraq provides terrorists with a powerful recruiting tool, in attracting people to plot against us, kill our soldiers, and potentially attack civilian targets," he would be dismissive. If the enemy flat-out said something like, "I'm trying to draw you into a protracted, unwinnable war in the Middle East in order to weaken your military", they would presumably be deemed to be lying. Facts, schmacts - the enemy never benefits from Kissinger's policies, but always benefits from the policies of those who oppose him.

Kissinger paints a portrait of how he sees things magically unfurling from this point forward, concluding,

American deployment is transformed from abdication into part of a geopolitical design. Its culmination should be a diplomatic conference charged with establishing a formal peace settlement.

Hey - let's hold it in Paris!

Kissinger imagines himself clairvoyant, presenting a parade of horribles that a deadline would supposedly create:

• "It will encourage largely defeated internal groups to go underground until a world more congenial to their survival arises with the departure of American forces." We're supposed to assume this hasn't already happened? Or that the factions presently paid for cooperating and working with the U.S. won't turn their backs on our interests (if not take up arms against us) the moment the payments stop? How is this changed by the presence or absence of a deadline?

• "Al-Qaeda will have a deadline against which to plan a full-scale resumption of operations." Again he seems to be playing the cheap parlor trick of conflating "al-Qaeda" with "al-Qaeda in Iraq". The former group wasn't in Iraq before the U.S. invasion, and seems perfectly happy with us stayin in Iraq forever. But if Kissinger's describing the latter group, and if it's truly about to pop up like a jack-in-the-box the moment any pressure is taken off the lid, this argument belies Kissinger's claims about the success of the surge and how ready the Sunni factions are to join a unity government. Even if he means that Sunnis might again invite and support foreign fighters from al-Qaeda proper, his claim speaks ill of his notion that the nation is ready to reconcile.

• "And it will give Iran an incentive to strengthen its supporters in the Shiite community for the period after the American withdrawal." Who are Iran's supporters in the Shiite community? I mean, other than people like Maliki and Chalabi? Really, we're going to have to deal with the fact that Shiite-controlled Iraq is going to be close with Shiite-controlled Iran, and continued occupation isn't going to create a magic separation barrier between the two states.

• "Establishing a fixed deadline would also dissipate assets needed for the diplomatic endgame." For instance? (But making conclusory statements is more fun than, you know, making substantive claims.)

Kissinger goes on to explain that with a timetable, you might not have sufficient combat forces in place if things go to Hades in a handbasket. But he ridicules the notion that the withdrawal of forces could be measured against any new insurrection or resurgence of violence, with troops kept in place for longer if needed. He then proposes that McCain is going to withdraw a secret number of troops - presumably just the right number to keep anything bad from happening while giving us more manpower for fighting in Afghanistan - but that this mystical troop withdrawal won't threaten the stability of Iraq. Wonderful - not only is "peace at hand", we are now counting on McCain's secret plan to deliver it!

Toward the end, he delivers a real gem:

These considerations explain Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's conduct on the occasion of Obama's visit to Iraq. Maliki is negotiating with the Bush administration about a status-of-forces agreement for the residual forces to remain in Iraq. Given popular attitudes and the imminence of provincial elections, he probably wanted to convey that the American presence was not planned as a permanent occupation. The accident of the arrival of a presidential candidate, who had already-published views on that subject, reinforced that incentive. To reject the senator's withdrawal plan in front of a large media contingent would have been to antagonize someone with whom Maliki might have to deal as president.

At least it's not a repeat of the absurd "Maliki was ambiguous" argument raised by other McCain shills. But get this - Kissinger concedes that Iraqis want our forces out on a timetable, meaning that the Iraqis apparently see none of the dangers proposed by Kissinger or see them as a good thing. (If it's the former, it's classic Kissinger narcissism - nobody could know the situation better than him, even if they're living through it. If it's the latter, it undermines his entire thesis.) But beyond that, he's arguing that Maliki was happy to spit in the eye of the sitting President, and undermine the position of the Republican presidential candidate, because the Democratic candidate might win. Why wasn't Maliki concerned about antagonizing the President, or the other person "with whom Maliki might have to deal as president"? Kissinger's rationalization is insipid.

As you would expect, for his closing statement Kissinger falls back on Vietnam.

Thirty years ago, Congress cut off aid to Vietnam and Cambodia two years after American troops had been withdrawn and local forces were still desperate to resist. Domestic divisions had overcome all other considerations. We must not repeat the tragedy that followed.

Of course it could be that but for our war in Vietnam, that country would not be one of the five remaining communist nations in the world (Vietnam, Laos, China, Cuba, North and Korea). It could be that, but for the illegal war Kissinger supported in Cambodia, Pol Pot would never have come to power. It could be that a continued war in Vietnam would have resulted in a worse outcome than we presently see - a nation that is still communist and oppressive, but which has become our trade partner instead of our military adversary.

If the worst case scenario for Iraq was that it would end up, after twenty-five or thirty years, looking like modern Vietnam, would Kissinger truly want to roll the dice on endless war? (I suspect so, but he should at least have the honesty of admitting that he's gambling, and could bring about a much worse outcome.)

Anti-Obama Duplicity In The Washington Post

When I saw this unsigned editorial last night, my thoughts were, "It's no surprise that the author lacked the courage to attach his name to it," and "I'm tired, so I'll wait for others to reply to it." So far I've come across a post in Tapped taking on the Post's characterization of Obama's positions as "eccentric"

One wonders what word the Post will use to categorize McCain's policy when someone asks him whether he'll stick by his pledge to leave when Iraqi leaders request it. Peculiar?

and a TPM Election Central post taking on the Post's claim that Iraqi officials don't support Obama's plan. But I think a response should also be made to this claim:

Other Iraqi leaders were more directly critical. As Mr. Obama acknowledged, Sunni leaders in Anbar province told him that American troops are essential to maintaining the peace among Iraq's rival sects and said they were worried about a rapid drawdown.

Right now, the U.S. is maintaining the status quo in Iraq. The Sunni factions would like to regain control of the entire nation. They surely have some justifiable fear that if the U.S. pulls out, they might become subject to treatment similar to what they dished out to Shiite factions under G.H.W.B.'s watch after the first Iraq War, or given the short end of the stick on oil revenues. But the reality is, one of the reasons there is so little meaningful progress on political reconciliation is that right now the Sunni factions don't have to negotiate. They can stonewall, and fall back on U.S. protection. A drawdown, rapid or otherwise, could force them into a political compromise that gives them far less than what they want. But maintaining the status quo gets us no closer to any sort of compromise.

Also in the Post, Ruth Marcus lets us know that, in a military conflict and post-conflict occupation, the "reward of careful perseverance may become visible only in the long arc of history", something that of course can be said about any armed conflict. Unfortunately, it does not inexorably follow that continuing an occupation will inevitably make things better, nor does it inexorably follow that the costs (financial and otherwise) of continuing an occupation will outweigh the possible long-term benefits. (And we face those great unknowns even if we hand out lots and lots of candy to Iraqi children.)

Poor Maliki

So Maliki made the "mistake" of essentially agreeing with Obama on the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq. Almost immediately we were told, "The translator got it wrong." Except it turns out that it was Maliki's own translator, and his translator didn't get it wrong. Then an effort was made to interject nuance into the endorsement. That didn't work out so well, either. So now what? Let's ask McCain backer and uberhawk Max Boot.

There is some irony in the fact that Democrats, after years of deriding Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as a hopeless bungler and conniving Shiite sectarian, are now treating as sacrosanct his suggestion that Iraq will be ready to assume responsibility for its own security by 2010.

Ah. So it must follow that Republicans view Nouri al-Maliki as a competent leader, supported by Shiites and Sunnis alike, right? Well... Maybe not.

• His public support for the U.S. is mixed: "[Maliki] has hardly been an unwavering friend of the United States - at least in public." (But thank goodness, he's two-faced: "To his credit, although he has postured as a fierce nationalist in public, Maliki has often accommodated American concerns in private.")

• He's skeptical of U.S. motives: "[He] has had to overcome deeply ingrained suspicions of the United States."

• He's incompetent on military issues and insulated from reality: "Maliki has no military experience and that he has been trapped in the Green Zone, relatively isolated from day-to-day life."

• He has poor judgment: "[H]e has been a consistent font of misguided predictions about how quickly U.S. forces could leave."

• He's ungrateful: "Maliki won't give U.S. troops their due"

  In the famous interview with Der Spiegel last weekend, he was asked why Iraq has become more peaceful. He mentioned "many factors," including "the political rapprochement we have managed to achieve," "the progress being made by our security forces," "the deep sense of abhorrence with which the population has reacted to the atrocities of al-Qaida and the militias," and "the economic recovery." No mention of the surge.

• He's unreliable: "Maliki's public utterances do not provide a reliable guide as to when it will be safe to pull out U.S. troops."

So... basically Boot seeks Maliki as an out-of-touch, hopeless bungler and two-faced opportunist, but not necessarily a "conniving Shiite sectarian"? I'm glad Boot set that record straight.

Oh yes, and Boot tells us that this statement is "ambiguous":

When asked in and interview with SPIEGEL when he thinks US troops should leave Iraq, Maliki responded "as soon as possible, as far as we are concerned." He then continued: "US presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes."

Wow. You can barely tell that Maliki is expressly endorsing withdrawal of combat forces "as soon as possible", on a schedule largely consistent with Obama's timeframe. Darn that ambiguity.

Incidentally, as others have noted, there's no inconsistency between observing that Maliki's dependence upon U.S. backing makes his endorsement of continued occupation questionable, while also observing that his willingness to stand up to the Bush Administration may be qualitatively different - he has a lot to lose by what the Bush Administration and McCain's backers plainly see as biting the hand that feeds him.
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Update: Charles Krauthammer offers a much more generous interpretation of Maliki's choices:

What is Maliki thinking? Clearly, he believes that the Iraq war is won. Al-Qaeda is defeated, the Sunni insurgency is in abeyance, the Shiite extremists are scattered and marginalized. There will, of course, be some continued level of violence, recurring challenges to the authority of the central government and perhaps even mini-Tet Offensives by both Shiite and Sunni terrorists trying to demoralize U.S. and Iraqi public opinion in the run-up to their respective elections. But in Maliki's view, the strategic threats to the unity of the state and to the viability of the new democratic government are over.

Maliki believes that his armed forces are strong enough to sustain the new Iraq with minimal U.S. help. He may be overconfident, as he has been repeatedly in estimating his army's capacities, most recently in launching a somewhat premature attack on militias in Basra that ultimately required U.S. and British support to succeed. And he is certainly more confident of his own capacities than is Gen. David Petraeus.

Another way to look at that is that Maliki believes he will be more free to cement his party and his religious sect's control over Iraq in the absence of U.S. combat forces than in their presence - something entirely consistent with the Sunni factions' concerns about U.S. troop withdrawal. Needless to say, Krauthammer carries on to present a rather churlish attack on the Democratic Party as being too "pliant" in willing to be something other than an autonomous occupying power prepared to stay in Iraq until we establish a "strategic relationship that would not only make the new Iraq a strong ally in the war on terror but would also provide the U.S. with the infrastructure and freedom of action to project American power regionally, as do U.S. forces in Germany, Japan and South Korea." In other words, Krauthammer believes we should occupy Iraq until they learn to like it.

Taking A Wrong Turn At The End

In what seems like an odd column for somebody who so frequently embraces an inch-deep version of evolutionary psychology, David Brooks warns us that our knowledge of how genetics affect behavior is very limited. (You needed to be told that, right?)

Is it needless to say? He extrapolates the idea that we don't know much about "nature" to argue against trying to improve things on the "nurture" side:

Today, we have access to our own genetic recipe. But we seem not to be falling into the arrogant temptation — to try to re-engineer society on the basis of what we think we know. Saying farewell to the sort of horrible social engineering projects that dominated the 20th century is a major example of human progress.

We can strive to eliminate that multivariate thing we call poverty. We can take people out of environments that (somehow) produce bad outcomes and try to immerse them into environments that (somehow) produce better ones. But we’re not close to understanding how A leads to B, and probably never will be.

David, actually, some things are pretty obvious. We have a pretty good idea how poverty leads to reduced opportunity, how putting children from marginally literate homes into dangerous, failing schools is a recipe for poor academic performance, how child abuse and neglect may contribute to lack of later success and even mental illness and criminal conduct.... The fact that we can't pinpoint the interplay between environmental variables and a person's genes doesn't mean that we have to throw up our hands and do nothing.

This age of tremendous scientific achievement has underlined an ancient philosophic truth — that there are severe limits to what we know and can know; that the best political actions are incremental, respectful toward accumulated practice and more attuned to particular circumstances than universal laws.

That from a cheerleader for the Iraq War....

That's An Awfully Big Word....

John Yoo, who could certainly tell us what the meaning of "is" is, has trouble with the word "implemented". He and David Addington, again demonstrating that the Bush Administration is overflowing with men who have no sense of honor, apparently decided that the best defense of their decisions and actions was to alternate between playing stupid and being petulant.

The American Conservative suggests the ten lessons we can draw from this painful bit of testimony.

Paradox? What Paradox?

In yet another effort to reinvent "the surge", David Brooks heaps praise on G.W. Bush. Everybody in the world - the Republicans, the Democrats, the generals, the punditocracy - Brooks tells us, was against the surge.

In these circumstances, it’s amazing that George Bush decided on the surge. And looking back, one thing is clear: Every personal trait that led Bush to make a hash of the first years of the war led him to make a successful decision when it came to this crucial call.

Bush is a stubborn man. Well, without that stubbornness, that unwillingness to accept defeat on his watch, he never would have bucked the opposition to the surge.

This is an implicit endorsement of my theory of the surge - not as a calmly reasoned strategy, but as a "Hail Mary" pass. Brooks also glosses over a lot of the criticism of the surge - which was not just that it might be too late, but also that it was too little. The tenuous nature of the pacts that keep sectarian violence relatively low have even General Petraeus worried that violence may again flare up. Meanwhile, there is scant political progress.

The best sound bite Brooks can find suggests scant political progress:

Iraq has moved from being a failed state to, as Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations has put it, merely a fragile one.

If the measure is "statehood", by what measure, other than its having being a state prior to the war, would Iraq satisfy the traditional elements of statehood? If it were a territory arguing for statehood, would we accept that there was effective and independent government control of its entire territory? That it can effectively and independently engage in foreign relations? That it controls its own population? Hardly. The real question is what it will take to transform Iraq into an effective state, even in the absence of U.S. troops. Brooks and Bush have no answer to that, and McCain's best answer to date is to post troops in Iraq indefinitely.

Brooks sneers at opponents of "the surge",

The cocksure war supporters learned this humbling lesson during the dark days of 2006. And now the cocksure surge opponents, drunk on their own vindication, will get to enjoy their season of humility. They have already gone through the stages of intellectual denial. First, they simply disbelieved that the surge and the Petraeus strategy was doing any good. Then they accused people who noticed progress in Iraq of duplicity and derangement. Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress. Lately they have skipped over to the argument that Iraq is progressing so well that the U.S. forces can quickly come home.

So... Brooks is saying that it took him until 2006 to realize that "Bush to make a hash of the first years of the war"? Fair enough. But what about his present attack on those who dare question "the surge"?

• "First, they simply disbelieved that the surge and the Petraeus strategy was doing any good." - Didn't Brooks just tell us (rather dishonestly) that the only people in the entire world who believed in the Surge were G.W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and... a whopping six other people? So this attack is aimed at... the other six billion or so people in the world?

• "Then they accused people who noticed progress in Iraq of duplicity and derangement." - That seems like a fair response to people who lie to you, repudiate G.W. Bush's own benchmarks as being unfair measures of progress, shift the date the surge began so they can attribute pre-surge improvements to "the surge", etc. But people who lie to you never like to be "called out", so I can see why Brooks takes umbrage.

• "Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress." - Right. Fierce opponents of the surge like General Petraeus did exactly that. You know why? Because the surge has resulted primarily in military, not political, progress. Again, examine the Bush Administration's own benchmarks.

• "Lately they have skipped over to the argument that Iraq is progressing so well that the U.S. forces can quickly come home." - Because the six billion or so people that Brooks tells us opposed the surge think as a monolith? Well, leaving that aside, those presenting rosy scenarios invite the question - if things are going so well, why shouldn't people ask, "When will the troops come home?"

  By the same token, why do the most dogmatic proponents of the surge suggest that our troops may never come home? Why does Bush want fifty-eight permanent military bases in Iraq (up from a claimed "zero" only a few months ago) if he's expecting it to have a stable, successful government at any time in the foreseeable future? To state the obvious, he wouldn't.

Brooks carries on,

But before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today.

Actually, I think the surge highlights the worst of Bush - narcissism, ineffectiveness and cowardice. He was afraid of admitting mistakes, so he threw his "Hail Mary", but as with every other stage of the war he was afraid of the political consequences of committing enough troops for enough time to ensure success. The decrease in violence justifies cautious optimism but, despite his cheerleaders' efforts to point the other way whenever the subject of "political progress" is raised, if political progress is not achieved "the surge" will become yet another entry in Bush's long line of missed opportunities.

Life is complicated. The reason we have democracy is that no one side is right all the time. The only people who are dangerous are those who can’t admit, even to themselves, that obvious fact.

That's rich. Here's Bush admitting his mistakes on Iraq: he made "a miscalculation of what the conditions would be" in post-war Iraq." Why? Because he refused to listen to the experts, including his own generals. Yet Brooks tells us, "Bush was at his worst when he was humbly deferring to the generals and at his best when he was arrogantly overruling them." At this point, Brooks' mistakes are compounding almost as quickly as Bush's; but I see no sign that either is going to admit them.

It Should Be Easy Pickin's, But....

If I were a right-wing columnist, fresh out of ideas on what to complain about today, I might say to myself, "What's MoveOn been up to lately?" Then I make fun of it, and I'm done. It should be easy, right?

I was having trouble putting my finder on just why until I came across a post by a mother of a soldier recently deployed in Iraq, at the Web site BlueStarChronicles.com.

I was having a little bit of trouble putting my finder finger on what was wrong with that sentence, then I realized... Kristol doesn't even proofread his own work. He's entirely reactive, presents no new ideas, and mostly regurgitates Republican talking points. He's blogging for the New York times, for an easy six figures per year. But, okay... he's picking on MoveOn, they do things that are easy to pick on, so a typo should be about the worst defect in his column, right?

The ad is simple. A mother speaks as she holds her baby boy:

“Hi, John McCain. This is Alex. And he’s my first. So far his talents include trying any new food and chasing after our dog. That, and making my heart pound every time I look at him. And so, John McCain, when you say you would stay in Iraq for 100 years, were you counting on Alex? Because if you were, you can’t have him.”

Take that, warmonger!

Now it might be pedantic to point out that John McCain isn’t counting on Alex to serve in Iraq, because little Alex will only be 9 years old when President McCain leaves office after two terms.

"Pedantic"? Does Kristol know the meaning of the word? The ad uses hyperbole, sure, but is it necessary for Kristol to pretend to be stupid? The reference is to McCain's willingness to keep troops in Iraq indefinitely - long after the end of his presidency. It's explicitly stated. Although Kristol yammers for a while about what McCain supposedly meant with his 100 years in Iraq comment, the fact remains - the ad doesn't suggest that there will be a century of active warfare, and is entirely consistent with McCain's comments. And McCain has yet to explain the magic by which Iraq will be transformed from its current state of active warfare to a peaceful idyll where U.S. troops are posted to protect its borders from potentially hostile neighbors. (If the Maliki government holds, Iran seems more likely an ally to Iraq than a potential invader.)

Kristol carries on,

But it is surely relevant to point out that the United States has an all-volunteer Army. Alex won’t be drafted, and his mommy can’t enlist him. He can decide when he’s an adult whether he wants to serve. And, of course, McCain supports the volunteer army.

Sure, we have an all volunteer military. We also have Selective Service, "just in case" we change our minds. Kristol is seriously promising that the United States will never again have a draft, no matter what the circumstances, at any time in the future? My goodness, where can I get one of those rose-colored Kristol crystal balls?

And then Kristol devolves into self-parody:

Here’s what the mother of an actual soldier has to say about the remarks of the mother of the prospective non-soldier in the ad:

“Does that mean that she wants other people’s sons to keep the wolves at bay so that her son can live a life of complete narcissism? What is it she thinks happens in the world? ... Someone has to stand between our society and danger. If not my son, then who? If not little Alex then someone else will have to stand and deliver. Someone’s son, somewhere.”

This is the sober truth. Unless we enter a world without enemies and without war, we will need young men and women willing to risk their lives for our nation. And we’re not entering any such world.

It's too easy. Kristol came of age during the Vietnam war. When did he serve, again? How respectful is Kristol of actual war veterans?

Can you even imagine young Billy sitting at the dinner table with Irving (who, it is fair to note, did serve in the military) and saying, "Dad, I want to join the military to serve my nation against the communist menace." No, like Dick Cheney and so many of his right-wing, war cheerleading peers, Kristol had "other priorities". They didn't serve, their children don't serve, but they put forth a jingoistic pro-military face in public while privately regarding military service as beneath them. And it is thus in defense of self, not nation, that Kristol adds,

We do, however, live in a free country with a volunteer army. In the United States, individuals can choose to serve in the military or not. The choice not to serve should carry no taint, nor should it be viewed with the least prejudice. If Alex chooses to pursue other opportunities, he won’t be criticized by John McCain or anyone else.

I disagree. If you are going to champion wars, sending other people's kids off to fight in wars, and whinge that others view the sacrifice of soldiers as "unnecessary and deplorable relics of the past"¹, I think you should be able to point to at least one tiny incident in your life where you demonstrated a modicum of physical courage. Otherwise, at least have the rhetorical courage to admit that your life choice involves having other people go off to fight and die in the wars you champion, with no consequence to yourself or your family, and you like it that way.
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1. Kristol attacks the ad:

The ad boldly embraces a vision of a selfish and infantilized America, suggesting that military service and sacrifice are unnecessary and deplorable relics of the past.

Although the ad is critical of the Iraq War and McCain's Iraq policy, there's actually nothing in the ad that is even slightly critical of the military or of military service. That part's all Bill.

"I Would Love To Answer That...."

"...But I don't have a brain."

Haynes knew he was in for some cruel and unusual treatment. He took a swig from his Diet Pepsi bottle, put on his reading glasses and announced: "I don't have a formal opening statement." He then read his formal opening statement, in which he defended all those things he couldn't remember doing by saying that "we all rightly fear another assault on our country, one perhaps even more horrific than the last."

He then rested his elbows on the witness table, revealing a big gold watch on his wrist, and allowed the amnesia to wash over him.

With the Bush Administration, unfortunately, who would expect anything else?

On The Other Other Hand....

Apparently, at least according to Thomas Friedman, any policy we set in relation to Iraq is a mistake.

It would be a huge mistake for McCain to give up his goal of salvaging something in Iraq. But it would also be a big mistake to assume that the public would tolerate another president’s open-ended commitment there. Similarly, it would be a huge mistake for Obama to now give up his commitment to a phased withdrawal. That is very important leverage on the Iraqis. But it would also be a big mistake not to give Iraq a fresh look and ask: can something decent still be salvaged there at an acceptable cost — something that can still serve our interests, do right by Iraqis and maybe put in place the seeds of an open society that will pay long-term benefits?

Unfortunately, posing that final question is not the same thing as answering it and, as you might expect, Friedman has no answers.

Ah, remember the good old days? When the question was, "Should we enter a war of choice in Iraq?" And it seemed pretty obvious that the Bush Administration was exaggerating Iraq's threat to the rest of the world? And had no plan for the occupation? And had no exit strategy? How did Thomas "Suck On This" Friedman come down on that one, again - "big mistake" or "huge mistake"?

Hold On A Second There, Fred....

Fred Hiatt, apparenlty being unable to construct an honest defense of his own support for the Iraq war or his paper's editorializing in favor of the war, gives us a scathing attack on... bumper stickers.

Search the Internet for "Bush Lied" products, and you will find sites that offer more than a thousand designs. The basic "Bush Lied, People Died" bumper sticker is only the beginning.

He say's it's only the beginning, but for him it's also the end - he provides no further analysis of the anti-war movement, and pretends that if it cannot be proved that Bush intentionally lied or that he had absolutely no intelligence to back up even his most outlandish claim, his case for war must be seen as fully supported by the available evidence.

In choosing not to look past the "beginning" reflected in a bumper sticker slogan, Hiatt personifies the type of dishonesty we're discussing. Focusing on the most extreme case, representing it as typical, and failing to mention overwhelming contrary data? Some people, quite reasonably, would deem that "lying by omission".

After introducing Rockefeller's conclusion,

"In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent," [Rockefeller] said.

Hyatt proceeds to pretend that Rockefeller's own report doesn't support his own description of his own findings. From Hyatt's self-serving synopsis - and yes, his editorial is at least as much about salvaging his own reputation as it is about Bush's - you might think that Rockefeller's report found support in the intelligence for Bush's claims about an Iraq-al-Qaeda partnership, Iraq's supposedly having trained al-Qaeda fighters, or secret meetings between Iraqi intelligence and Muhammad Atta. You might think that the report found that there was support for the Bush Administration's representations about Iraq's chemical weapons production capacity, or underground manufacturing plants. You might believe that the report substantiated Bush's insinuations about an easy, cheap post-war period. To the contrary, the report found that Bush's representations were either unsupported by the available intelligence or did not reflect the uncertainty of the intelligence. And what of the suggestion that Saddam Hussein was prepared to hand WMD's over to terrorists? That was contradicted by the available intelligence. (But supported, contradicted, what's the difference, right?) The report did not explore the work of Bush's White House Iraq Group, which was devoted to spinning intelligence and propagandizing in favor of war.

This degree of deception goes well beyond what Hyatt excuses as speaking "with too much certainty" or failing "to anticipate or prepare the American people for the enormous undertaking in Iraq". Anybody who paid the slightest bit of attention to the build-up of the war could easily see the Bush Administration cherry-picking intelligence in favor of a war that it wanted to launch, whatever the facts or intelligence. They directly attacked anybody who questioned their spin, and dispatched a slate of retired generals to propagandize in favor of war.

Hyatt wants us to pity Bush, whom he paints as having had to decide "when to act on a threat in the inevitable absence of perfect intelligence and how to mobilize popular support for such action, if deemed essential for national security". The problem is, that's not what Bush did, and Hyatt knows it. Bush didn't weigh the intelligence to decide what response to make - he decided what he was going to do, disregarded anything that did not weigh in favor of war on Iraq, stymied efforts to complete weapons inspections and get better evidence, and employed scorched earth tactics against many who dared oppose him.

This was not a contest of good intelligence versus bad - the good intelligence never had a chance. This was a contest of good judgment versus bad, and at the end of the day Hyatt's finger-pointing at the intelligence community cannot overcome the fact that neither he nor President Bush showed good judgment on Iraq.

Selling A War vs. Telling The Truth

In yet another self-serving narrative, the dumbest ----ing guy on the planet complains that President Bush lost support for the war by changing his rhetoric from emphasizing the evil of Saddam Hussein and the search for elusive WMD's to democratization.

The stunning change in rhetoric appeared to confirm his critics' argument that the security rationale for the war was at best an error, and at worst a lie. That's a shame, for Mr. Bush had solid grounds for worrying about the dangers of leaving Saddam in power.

Feith has a difficult time keeping his story straight, and soon afterward admits that much of the "security rationale for the war" was in error, but (like everything else) that was somebody else's fault:

The CIA assessments of WMD were wrong, but they originated in the years before he became president and they had been accepted by Democratic and Republican members of Congress, as well as by the U.N. and other officials around the world. And, in any event, the erroneous WMD intelligence was not the entire security rationale for overthrowing Saddam.

What's left of the threat, in Feith's view?

The Saddam Hussein regime "had used WMD, supported various terrorist groups, was hostile to the U.S. and had a record of aggression and of defiance of numerous U.N. resolutions."

Okay, we can be pretty sure that Feith doesn't actually support the invasion of every antion that has a history of "defiance of numerous U.N. resolutions." And while everybody knows about Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and Gulf War I, we can only press so far into its history aggression against its neighbors without observing that the Reagan administration supported the Iraq war and turned an intentional blind eye to its use of chemical weapons in its war against Iran:

American diplomats pronounce themselves satisfied with relations between Iraq and the United States and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been restored in all but name.

I'll grant that the calculus shifts when you transform a thuggish dictatorship from an ally of convenience to an enemy, but there's another big part of the "WMD" picture that people like Feith prefer to omit: Iraq lacked an effective delivery mechanism for its chemical weapons, and would disburse chemical weapons from low-flying helicopters. Sure, we were given fictions about how Iraq might attack the world using balsa wood gliders, and could attack the west inside of 45 minutes, and let's not forget the purported Niger uranium deal (that some dead enders still argue was real and proves Iraq might potentially become a nuclear power... in a few decades), but you can only push fiction so far.

Let's accept Feith's argument for a moment - that to this point, the Bush Administration had been acting in good faith: The primary purpose of the Iraq war was to prevent Iraq from developing WMD's and threatening other nations, and secondarily to remove a dangerous thug from power, footnoted by references to liberating Iraq. It does seem disingenuous to suddenly make the footnote the main story, while trying to diminish or erase public consciousness of the other casus belli. But to press his argument, Feith would be demanding something from the Bush Administration an admission that he himself remains unwilling to make - an admission of errors of judgment.

Arguing, "It's everybody else's fault, and lots of other people believed the same wrong information" isn't particularly compelling when you're a disgraced former Bush Administration lackey. Somehow I suspect that Condoleezza Rice and President Bush realized how pathetic a Feith-style speech would have sounded coming from the President. And Donald Rumsfeld seems at least as pathologically incapable of admitting error as Feith and Bush. Further, as Feith admits, it's a pure fiction that Bush's new rhetoric erased discussion of his mistakes:

The president had chosen to talk almost exclusively about Iraq's future. His political opponents noticed that if they talked about the past – about prewar intelligence and prewar planning for the war and the aftermath – no one in the White House communications effort would contradict them.

Is he serious here? That as of May 24, 2004, nobody in the White House made any effort to claim that the Bush Administration's security rationale for invading Iraq was true? So on June 25, 2004, for example, Paul Wolfowitz did not say this?

As I am sure you know, we went into Iraq for a number of reasons, not only to destroy the WMDs that everyone agreed Saddam Hussein had. Remember that he used chemical weapons against his own people and against his neighbors. He had produced biological weapons and come very close to nuclear weapons ten years ago. He was in violation of 17 UN Resolutions. Resolution 1441 was his last and final chance to come clean on WMDs and he failed to do so.

We have not yet determined why we didn’t find more when we got to Iraq, but there is no question that he had the capability to build new ones, and there is no question that Saddam Hussein posed a very real threat to world peace. He invaded his neighbors. His regime supported and harbored terrorist elements like Al Qaida.

And today, a key figure in the resistance in Iraq is an Al Qaida-associated fugitive and terrorist, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who has taken “credit” for personally beheading several U.S. hostages and for sponsoring numerous suicide bombings.

By giving the Iraqi people a chance to live in freedom and peace, we have opened the door to progress throughout the Middle East, which has been a source of so much terrorism. Already there are important signs of positive change in the Middle East from Muammar Qaddafi giving up his WMD to some Arab governments talking for the first time about democratic reform.

On October 27, 2004, Charles Duelfer did not talk up Iraq's pre-war security threat?

Opponents could say anything about the prewar period – misstating Saddam's record, the administration's record or their own – and their statements would go uncorrected. This was a big incentive for them to recriminate about the administration's prewar work, and congressional Democrats have pressed for one retrospective investigation after another.

Does Feith truly believe that anybody but a handful of dead enders are going to believe this revisionist history? Does he think we've wiped from our memory the entire 2004 election campaign, and how Bush and his campaign team savaged Democrats on national security issues? How the Republican-controlled Congress stymied and blocked those calls for investigation, and engineered delay after delay of any consequential reporting from the 9/11 commission until after the election? If that's the best he has to offer, it's no small wonder Georgetown didn't renew his teaching contract.

Feith caps things off with this claim,

This was a public affairs decision that has had enormous strategic consequences for American support for the war. The new formula fails to connect the Iraq war directly to U.S. interests. It causes many Americans to question why we should be investing so much blood and treasure for Iraqis. And many Americans doubt that the new aim is realistic – that stable democracy can be achieved in Iraq in the foreseeable future.

This hints at the core of the problem - the start of the war, where Feith, G.W. Bush, and John McCain were all on the same page. They went into Iraq with no exit strategy - implied promises of candy, flowers, and an occupation that would all but pay for itself. It was inevitable that we would reach a point where, absent a viable exit strategy, the American public would say "Is this worth it?" Unless Feith is even dumber than Tommy Franks suggested, he should have recognized that we could not indefinitely pretend to be hunting for WMD's or responding to the threat of Saddam Hussein.

Once we reached the point where the war was over, the WMD's were (not) found, and Saddam Hussein was in custody, how many more years of, "But we (thought we) had really good reasons for going in," does Feith expect the American people to swallow without demanding, "Yes, but how do we now get out?" And given that G.W. has latched onto democratization as the leading excuse for indefinite war - we have to stay "until we get the job done" - how does Feith imagine that emphasizing "jobs" that are already "done" would have resulted in greater popular support for the war?

No, We Don't Need Another Perot....

Michael O'Hanlon and a Alice Rivlin take on domestic politics and the budget.

We hear that Ralph Nader is running again, but the third-party candidate we need is Ross Perot. In 1992, with his squeaky voice and endless charts, Perot focused attention on the rising federal deficit. His warnings helped keep the major-party candidates from talking budgetary nonsense.

Well, whatever credit we can extent to Perot for bringing attention to the budget, it's not like the deficit and massive national debt are a state secret.

For now, let's play along and assume that the Perot candidacy was truly about balanced budgets, and not about dissatisfaction with the major parties. We can overlook the fact that the poorly articulated Perot platform allowed voters to project their own wishes and desires for the country onto Perot, as evidenced by the collapse of the "Reform Party" pretty much the moment it tried to form a coherent platform. And of course, we'll overlook the fact that Perot didn't win.

For all of their impressive qualities, this year's presidential candidates are woefully short on fiscal prudence. And the next president will face two daunting budget problems. The winner will inherit a large deficit resulting from a weak economy, an expensive war and the persistent political inclination to spend more and tax less. The bigger challenge? Promises made to the growing population of retirees as health-care spending continues to soar.

So they want to resurrect a 1992-era candidacy that promised health care reforms and could lead to a balanced budget? That (despite the failure of his attempt at health care reforms) was Bill Clinton, not Ross Perot. As for promising tax increases, how did Alice Rivlin, view tax increases back in 2001? She saw George H.W. Bush's tax increases as having constituted "political suicide". That's political suicide after being elected, in contrast with Walter Mondale's politically suicidal promise to raise taxes during an election. Like it or not, the odds of having a viable candidate emerge and promise tax increases to cover O'Hanlon's favorite expenditure, the military, plus the cost of trying to stabilize health care cost and (for the two of three candidates who care about the issue) broadening health insurance coverage to most or all Americans? About zero percent.

I'm not entirely clear on what O'Hanlon and Rivlin see as the solution, other than a massive tax increase. It's reasonable to assume that O'Hanlon, a leading cheerleader of the Iraq war and a long-time proponent of military spending, would oppose saving money by ending the war or limiting military spending. They don't say, "candidates should promise to slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and continue to decline to invest in the nation's crumbling infrastructure", another platform pretty much guaranteed to bring about a crushing defeat in November. What effect do they believe a new Perot would have on this election?

As for trying to elicit a promise not to make the deficits worse, Rivlin has previously noted that deficit spending can boost a troubled economy - I'll grant that she's been arguing that the Bush Administration has been fiscally irresponsible, but is it truly best to demand restraint now, such that yet again we see a Reagan/Bush/Bush-style massive deficit coupled with massive accumulation of wealth among the richest Americans, followed by the tired excuse the minute the Democrats take power, "We can't afford to help you."

I'll also share an annoyance about analysts like O'Hanlon, who seem to want fiscal responsibility only when their own budgetary priorities are not at stake. He's happy to tell us that we can't afford health care reform without a massive boost in tax revenues, but where's his column explaining how we similarly can't afford to toss $120+ billion per year into the fiscal black hole commonly known as the Iraq War?

... After The Next Election

Apparently John McCain is not as eager as some believe to distinguish himself from Bush. Speaking about the Iraq war,

“By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom,’’ Mr. McCain said at the Columbus Convention Center. “The Iraq War has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering from the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension. Violence still occurs, but it is spasmodic and much reduced.’’

So we'll see great progress... after the next election. Okay, and how will this be achieved?

“I don’t think it has anything to do with fantasy, I think it has everything to do with setting goals and achieving.’’

Yes, candidate McCain, but how will this be achieved? No answer? Okay, let's try another question....

If your "flowers and candy in 2013" scenario doesn't actually pan out, and things continue to be as bad as they are now, how long will you keep U.S. forces in Iraq? Oh... no answer to that question, either. Wait a minute - isn't your giving a timetable something that can be taken by the enemy as a sign of surrender and a date they need only await? This is different, you say? Because you'll stay in Iraq until the job is done, even if it takes more than four-and-a-half years? But you still won't tell us how long?

Well, if you can't give us specifics, can you at least share a few more of your pipe dreams? You can? Great.

In Afghanistan, he said, an increase in actionable intelligence will have led to the capture or death of Osama bin Laden.....

And you're basing this assertion on... oh yes, sorry, I forgot. Pipe dreams. Got more?

On domestic policy, Mr. McCain projected that the United States will have experienced several years of “robust economic growth;’’ a reduction in the corporate tax rate; and the beginning of a phase out of the alternative minimum tax.

Because moon fairies will come down to the Earth and sprinkle the economy with magic fairy dust, and...

Oh, sorry. As you said, this has nothing to do with fantasy. How could I have forgotten. We're to assume that you have a rock-solid plan to get us out of the war in Vietnam, er, Iraq, fix the economy, and all that. But it's a secret.