It's one thing when former Generals McCaffrey and Clark criticize the American plan to liberate Iraq. As I've pointed out before, I think that sort of criticism is imprudent now that the war has started, and I think they may well be carrying water for some people with deep personal grudges against Secretary Rumsfeld. Furthermore, they're retired, out of the loop, and have had no involvement in formulating "the plan," which makes one wonder how they can criticize it so authoritatively.
Nonetheless, they are respected military men, and presumably know enough that the substance of their opinions on any military matter ought not to be simply dismissed.
On the other hand, NRO's Stanley Kurtz today writes the following:
Clearly, the opening of the war was a spectacular success overall. In the conservative media, at least, the historic rapidity and range of our initial advance has been fully acknowledged. We've quickly trapped the Republican Guard units surrounding Baghdad, are well into the process of degrading them, and will sooner or later destroy them.The fact remains?But the fact of the matter is, we went into battle with too few troops.
How's that for chutzpah!?
Too few troops for what? Apparently not too few troops to get us to this point in the battle plan! The battle plan that, presumably, was not shared with the fine folks who write for NRO. And if this is fact, why do Tommy Franks and Vincent Brooks and the guys actually running this war keep denying that fact?
Dr. Kurtz may be an expert in social anthropology, but whatever credibility he has in military affairs is wasted when he starts carelessly throwing about fact as he does. It's a shame, too, because the rest of his column actually makes some fair points -- especially that the military is stretched too thin, and could use additional funding.
But THAT story doesn't get one called to chat on national television, I don't suppose.
To those liberals that are eagerly citing McCaffrey as more proof of the incompetence of the Bush Administration and/or the futility of the war, you might want to consider a war that McCaffrey was in charge of for some time: The drug war.
Now granted, McCaffrey's job wasn't an easy one and the Drug War may indeed by unwinnable (I'm anti-legalization but also skeptical on the War on Drugs). So one could hardly blame McCaffrey for failing to turn the tide on the troubled war. Except for one thing. He believed he was winning it:
After 30 years of drug war hysteria, world record prison populations, record overdose deaths, billions upon billions of tax dollars wasted, countless lives disrupted and destroyed, rampant police and prosecutor corruption, and the virtual evisceration of our civil rights, things are only getting worse. According to the latest report issued from the Office of National Drug Policy Control, heroin and cocaine street prices are at an all-time low, indicating widespread availability, while ecstasy and methamphetamine are competing for the next 'drug epidemic' facing our nation. At the same time, our Drug Czar [Gen. McCaffrey] and director of the ONDCP testified before the House Appropriations subcommittee in March saying, "For those who say this is a war, we are winning,"
Of course, I don't agree with all of what the November Coalition says right here, and maybe liberals don't either, but I will take our progress in Iraq right now over our progress then (or now) on the War on Drugs any day.
Once upon a time, I would have called Barry McCaffrey a patriot.
Now, I'm not sure what to call him.
His continuing attacks on the Secretary of Defense in wartime serve no useful purpose, especially given the fact that the media, who are generally clueless on these matters, are more than happy to fill their reports with such juicy gossip:
Retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, who commanded the 24th Infantry Division during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, said yesterday that he told a senior member of Rumsfeld’s staff shortly before the war that the secretary’s office had to stop meddling in the deployment process and let Army commanders have the units they believed they needed to fight the war.Here I thought we were rather proud of the fact that the United States enjoys civilian control of the military. Apparently, Mr. McCaffrey disagrees. But since he gets to ask questions of MSNBC, here's a question for RETIRED General McCaffrey: why should we listen to a former general attack the Secretary of Defense during wartime, especially when it seems increasingly apparent that McCaffrey and friends have personal issues with said Secretary?
Rumsfeld, McCaffrey said, “sat on each element for weeks and wanted an explanation for every unit called up out of the National Guard and Reserve and argued about every 42-man maintenance detachment. Why would a businessman want to deal with the micromanagement of the force? The bottom line is, a lack of trust that these Army generals knew what they were doing.”
Here's Tom Donnelly's take on the subject:
Poor Rumsfeld. In checking with Tommy Franks, JCS Chairman Gen. Richard Myers, the National Security Council, and a few other civilians--like President Bush, the commander in chief--he neglected to run his war plan past either the New York Times or New Yorker editorial boards. The attack orders were never even fully briefed to the staffs of television rent-a-generals. My goodness, as the secretary might say, even the international neoconservative conspiracy was left somewhat in the dark.There seems to be lots of getting angry and lashing out coming from certain quarters.You have two choices when you're in the dark. One is to get angry and lash out. If you've been opposed to the Bush administration's Iraq policy, that's already a habit that's hard to break. If you're a military officer used to intimidating Clinton administration civilians, you've got some other scores to settle, too.
Only in the self-obsessed world of elite journalists would this analysis be considered "news."
The strange thing is, it's not even really very good analysis. It's just snippets from various Rumsfeld briefings that apparently the journalist, Todd S. Purdum, finds damning or otherwise newsworthy. An excerpt:
On Tuesday, irked at a flood of overlapping, interrupting interrogation, the secretary held up his hand and actually hissed, "Shhhh!"Perhaps a better bit of analysis might be this: as journalists descend into ever greater stupidity with ever greater rapidity, Secretary Rumsfeld is proving up to the challenge.Several days later, he seemed downright irascible in an exchange with a veteran television correspondent.
"Oh, my goodness!" the secretary exclaimed midway through his Friday afternoon briefing, his patented squint congealing into an astonished scowl.
Jim Miklaszewski, the NBC News Pentagon correspondent, had just asked Mr. Rumsfeld about the apparent disparity in the ratio of dead to wounded American troops in Iraq, and whether there was any official effort to "underreport casualties from the battlefield."
Mr. Rumsfeld continued in a tone of both wounded dignity and mounting annoyance, saying, "Now you know that wouldn't be the case."
"There's no — no one in the government, here or on the ground, is going to underreport what's happening," he said. "That's just terrible to think that. Even to suggest it is outrageous. Most certainly not! The facts are reported."
"Oh, my goodness!" to "Most certainly not!" in 15 seconds flat is an even faster trajectory for the man whose famous impatience with news media questions he views as silly or tiresome has been parodied on "Saturday Night Live."
For those who wonder if the United States will be viewed as a liberator or oppressor in Iraq comes this touching bit of news (via Drudge):
Iraqi civilians fleeing heavy fighting have stunned and delighted hungry US marines in central Iraq by giving them food, as guerrilla attacks continue to disrupt coalition supply lines to the rear.We are reminded of a part of that very stirring speech given by the UK's Lt. Col Tim Collins:Sergeant Kenneth Wilson said Arabic-speaking US troops made contact with two busloads of Iraqis fleeing south along Route Seven towards Rafit, one of the first friendly meetings with local people for the marines around here.
"They had slaughtered lambs and chickens and boiled eggs and potatoes for their journey out of the frontlines," Wilson said.
At one camp, the buses stopped and women passed out food to the troops, who have had to ration their army-issue packets of ready-to-eat meals due to disruptions to supply lines by fierce fighting further south.
Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham. Tread lightly there. You will see things that no man could pay to see and you will have to go a long way to find a more decent, generous and upright people than the Iraqis. You will be embarrassed by their hospitality even though they have nothing. Don't treat them as refugees, for they are in their own country. Their children will be poor. In years to come they will know that the light of liberation in their lives was brought by you.It is worth noting that these Iraqis -- we shan't call them refugees -- would surely be killed by Saddam's death squads for merely supplying their liberators with food, food they give up without any "supply line" of their own to fall back on.
Hospitality indeed. We must not let these good people down again.
I have been thinking since the first reports came in about that blast in a market area of Baghdad that there was something suspicious about it. First, the explosion seemed to have left a small crater (it looked like it was no more than 4 feet across on TV). Second, it was a mile and half away from the nearest other target that night. U.S. precision weapons are accurate to within a few feet, so this would be a monumental miss. And finally, both blasts in civilian areas have been in Shiite areas of Baghdad. Just a reminder, the Shiites in Iraq are generally abused and more likely to dislike the Sunni Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein.
Jed Babbin has some observations on this as well, in his latest war blog on NRO.
Seymour Hersh is a busy man.
First, that scurrilous piece of innuendo and insinuation unsupported by any real evidence that ultimately led Richard Perle to resign as chairman of the Defense Policy Board.
Now, a piece repeating all of the rumors that have been circulated by pundits like Ralph Peters and Barry McCaffrey, and Wesley Clark -- that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has essentially been a negligent wartime defense secretary in denying Tommy Franks the troops and material he need to win this war.
Tommy Franks -- who should certainly know! -- denies this, but that will not stop the handful of people who have been outmaneuvered by Rumsfeld on various bureaucratic matters from leaking to flamethrowers like Hersh, who does the regime no favors with his brand of "journalism."
(Update) Jed Babbin comments:
But you can blame the Pentagon character assassins who are now gunning for Big Dog Don Rumsfeld. According to the Washington Post, the Monday edition of that notable defense and foreign policy journal, The New Yorker, is on the attack trying to discredit the war and those who run it. The magazine quotes an unidentified senior Pentagon planner critical of what New Yorker thinks is another Vietnam: "This is the mess Rummy put himself in because he didn't want a heavy footprint on the ground." That disloyal nonsense is bad enough in peacetime. But at war, that "senior Pentagon planner" should be fired. And in the defense establishment, you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out who the "unidentified senior Pentagon planner" is. He should be fired today, and left to pursue his civilian political ambitions without the rank and title that give credence to his comments.(03-31-03 Update) The New Yorker article is now posted to the web. Note that one of the few "sources" willing to put his name on his allegations is one Scott Ritter.
I'll be honest about it, I don't support this war for the sake of the Iraqi people. Now, if Hussein were a benevolent dictator or elected leader, I doubt I'd support the war. Then again, if he were these things, we wouldn't need to go to war in the first place because benevolent dictators and elected leaders don't do the kinds of things that Hussein does.
So while the brutality of Hussein's regime is a necessary condition for my support of the war, it is not a sufficient one. By and large, I am supportive of pre-emptive efforts to insure national security. With nuclear arms development taking place around the world, we can't let the enemy have the first hit anymore. Instead of Pearl Harbor or 9/11, it might be a big crater somewhere in New York, California, or Texas.
That said, I do honestly believe that the people in Iraq will be, in the long run, far better off for what we're doing. The next few months are going to hurt, but much like Afghanistan, whatever arises at the end of the war will be better than what they had before it began.
So why do I buy into all the "government propaganda" about how bad Hussein is and how bad off the Iraqis are? Because of the Iraqis. The former ones, that is.
Being a patchwork nation, we have ancestors from everywhere from Britain to the Thailand. For the most part, our first-generation citizen's take pride in their homeland. Mexican Americans take pride in Mexico, Canadian Americans often won't shut up about how much better Canada is, and so it goes.
There are certain exceptions to this, however. Most apparent is Cuba, where the strongest anti-Castro sentiment exists in Florida among Cuban Americans. Whatever one thinks about lifting sanctions or thought about Elian Gonzalez, that's a very important thing to consider. No one wants to be caught between their present and former homes, but Cuban Americans are front and center in favor of any and all punative measures we can take against Cuba, regardless of how their families may get caught in the crossfire.
And so it goes with the Iraqis. The loudest (indeed, practically the only) Arab-Americans in favor if invasions are the ones that have lived under Hussein's iron fisted rule. A sound clip has made the rounds of an Iraqi American confronting an anti-war young lady in a radio debate. He is at times rude and beligerent sounding, but nothing else if not passionate. At the very least, it makes me hesitant to tell these people that have been there and endured it that they are wrong.
Not only am I satisfied with that, it makes our mission accomplishable. We need Iraqi support, or at the very least compliance, for this to happen. Without it, this will become another Vietnam.
Much has been made of the mixed reaction we have gotten. To an extent, a mixed reaction was unavoidable. In a decision that seemed to make sense of the time, twelve years ago we incited rebellion and then left the rebels to be slaughtered. Time and time again, Hussein has seemed to survive the unsurvivable. The last thing they want to do is get caught praising the invaders and then being left to Saddam's wrath.
Despite this, many are cheering anyway. They could say nothing. They could just stay inside, be neutral, but instead they cheer.
Perhaps more telling was a comment by "Noah D." to a post at Right Wing News. He cites a CNN article and makes a very interesting observation.
Article:
Most of the bodies recovered Friday were found in their burned-out armored vehicle. When the Marines arrived on the scene, they recovered five bodies, said U.S. Marine Capt. Scott Dyer, who oversaw the recovery effort. Some Iraqi civilians came out and showed where they had buried two others, he said. The Iraqis also handed over the personal effects of at least one of the Marines, including photographs and some mail, Dyer said.
Comment:
The Iraqi civvies buried our men, and kept their personal effects safe. This is not insignificant. They didn't play 'drag the soldier', or any of the other games the Fedayeen pull.
Interesting... and hopeful.
Jed Babbin's "warblog" (I still hate that term) on NRO is one of the best going, because Babbin has been a deputy undersecretary in the DoD hierarchy (and knows what he's talking about), and because he's getting good info from Ollie North on the front lines as he subs on Ollie's radio program.
His post earlier was particularly sensible, and a little amusing:
But so it apparently seems to many in the CENTCOM child care center and even some embedded reporters. They are a bit petulant that their vacation plans and resort reservations are being invalidated by what they perceive are delays and failures. Yes, we apparently underestimated the Iraqis intent to use terrorist tactics, as well as their capacity for inhumanity. But just because your plans for April in Paris are being ruined by these inconsiderate men who haven't won the whole thing yet, that doesn't mean that we're losing, or even delayed.CENTCOM child care center. I like that. Even better, I like his mesage that the sky is not falling, and that we need to have a little perspective. Elder Bush didn't have the stomach in 1991 to do the hard work that we are now doing, and continues to hide behind "objective" and "mission" and "UN" and other phrases in an attempt to justify his lack of leadership in finishing the job the first time.
I prefer his son's mettle.
It's rather amazing that Kuwait keeps getting attacked by illegal weapons that Hans Blix couldn't find, Saddam Hussein said didn't exist, and which existence antiwar activists still don't accept.
I'm sure that Kofi Annan will be condemning the Iraqis for this outrageous attack on civilians in short order. And that Al Jazeera will be sending footage of it all over the world, with attribution to Saddam Hussein.
Right?
The American Prowler's gossip column reports that Wesley Clark's stock as a potential politician (not to mention analyst) is taking a beating:
So much for the Democrats' hope that retired General Wesley Clark was going to be their Colin Powell. "He's more Benedict Arnold than anything else, if you believe the mail we've been getting here," says the Democratic National Committee staffer who, only a month ago was touting Clark as his party's answer to the military star power aligned with Republicans.I might take exception that Clark has been more vocal than McCaffrey. He's certainly more visible on CNN, but they've both been pretty vocal. And they could both stand to be less so."Any cachet he might have had he's pretty much pissed away on TV," says the staffer.
Since the outbreak of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Clark has been on CNN, bemoaning the Pentagon and Gen. Tommy Franks's strategy in the opening days of taking down Saddam. And while several other senior retired military men have made critical comments about the ongoing fighting -- Ret. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, another former Clinton-era official, has been quick to criticize during his stints on MSNBC -- Clark has by far been the most vocal.
"It just looks really bad that he's knocking the troops and the way we're executing this war," says the DNC staffer. "He's taking hits everywhere, on TV, in the newspapers, on talk radio. People are furious at him. We can't fundraise off performances like this. The only presidential candidate that would probably want to be seen with him is Howard Dean."
Prior to Clark's "tanking" on CNN, the DNC had Clark pegged for political stardom. He'd visited New Hampshire, and had hinted that he was interested in perhaps running for president as a Democrat. Now, the DNC isn't sure what they can do with the man who directed Bill Clinton's military machinations in Kosovo.
Friend Ben Henick forwards this piece from the Oregonian. It's an interview with former Air Force chief of staff Merrill A. "Tony" McPeak. It's provocative and thoughtful, and I think General McPeak probably shares some of the reservations of McCaffrey and Peters, but contrast the way he's handled it:
And if we sent the 3rd Infantry up there naked, by themselves, because somebody assessed that they'd be throwing bouquets at us, that's the worst thing you could say about political leadership, is that they made optimistic assumptions about warfare.I have no objections to this. And in fact, later in the interview, he gives away his Air Force background:Now I'm not saying they did, and I'm not prejudging this case. We're only a week in here. If we were at a football game, then we're in the first quarter here, and we haven't scored yet, but we're down to the red zone. The fans don't boo at that point. So we've got no right booing what is really quite remarkable progress so far.
[Q:]There was a piece in the Washington Post about how we were overconfident going in, that we have put our soldiers in a bad situation because there's not enough of them there, and the supply lines are too long. Any thoughts on that?Heh. Imagine that, an Air Force general disagreeing with the ground guys on force structure.[A:] Well, I don't agree. My one concern is we don't have enough first-class tactical air support in there; that's a basic problem. If we had F-15s and F-16s in there in large enough numbers, then we can run a pretty thin operation on the ground, and we can succeed.
I'm less inclined towards his political analysis. I think the Middle East is every bit the pivot point that North Korea is, but he thinks North Korea is far more important. Likewise, he asserts that Turkey and Saudi Arabia have decided this is not a legitimate use of power, yet both countries are providing us basing support, which debunks his contention on its face (we would have preferred more support, of course, especially from Turkey). And his suggestion that a three-year siege of Baghdad is a political possibility is way off base -- if this war goes off track, and we are in a siege of Baghdad by the 2004 presidential election, you can bet that a different policy will be in place January 2005.
Where I do agree with his political analysis is his intimation that we are likely to be in Iraq militarily for a while. He cites Japan and Korea, but might have just as easily added Germany. Indeed, I foresee a permanent drawdown in forces based in Germany (where they don't really need to be with the end of the Cold War) to shift them to Iraq and Afghanistan. In this area, I think President Bush should be preparing Americans for a longer stay, although I can understand his wanting to downplay it politically until the liberation is accomplished.
This article is a good read that stimulates thought.
Syria may just make this too easy for the United States.
Today, we have reports that little Assad's nation has been supplying Iraq with military equipment, including night-vision goggles, as well as reports that Syria's IslamoFascist nutcases are calling for suicide missions against coalition troops.
Now, the Australian Telegraph reports that Saddam Hussein has made plans to flee Iraq for Syria before the final moment of destruction, and that he has already sent away family members and further looted his nation's coffers.
His activities against American POWs constituted war crimes (for which he was never held accountable) in the first Gulf War, his atrocities against his own people include genocide, and his regime has perpetrated numerous war crimes already in this war (and Al Jazeera has conveniently provided the evidence). Surely Little Assad will not be stupid enough to think he can provide Saddam Hussein safe haven, given all of his crimes against humanity.
But if Little Assad does think so, Syria will quickly jump to the top of the list of nations that need attention next in the war against terror.
(03-28-03 Update) Fox News reports on Secretary Rumsfeld's reaction today:
But on Friday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld confirmed that Syria was in fact engaging in such activities and sent out a stern warning."These developments pose a direct threat to coalition forces. We consider such trafficking as hostile acts," he said during a press briefing, promising to "hold the Syrian government accountable."
Libertarians have never been taken all that seriously on foreign policy and I'm not seeing much from the journalists at Reason to indicate that's going to change anytime soon.
A few days ago, there was the effort from Tim Cavanaugh.
And today, a piece from Michael Young that is full of all sorts of speculation, much of it ill-informed and/or ill-considered. It's hard to take this sort of analysis seriously:
Two things are interesting in the affair. First, did the US help Khazraji flee, undermining a judicial inquiry in a sovereign country? There is no evidence it did, but if Khazraji were to appear at the door of American commander Tommy Franks, would he be turned away? And if he were not, how would Denmark (a "coalition of the willing" member) feel about being allied to someone it had placed under house arrest?This is just sloppy. There's no evidence to support the outrageous accusation, but that's okay -- he'll make it anyway! Because it leads to all sorts of fun speculation with no basis in reality.
Which kind of sums up what a lot of people think about the Libertarian approach to foreign policy.
I just saw the outspoken Col. David Hunt on O'Reilly.
He basically characterized people like McCaffrey and Peters (he mentioned Wesley Clark by name) as whiners whose main complaint is that the current crew isn't doing things the way THEY ONCE DID, called out their behavior, and urged them just to shut up and save their carping until AFTER the war.
I wonder if Tom Ricks will report THAT?
I'm guessing not.
Richard's Perle's resignation from the Defense Policy Board was pretty much according to script for honorable public officials -- rather than become a distraction for others, it is best simply to resign.
In Perle's case, though, it's a shame that the hit-and-run "journalistic" practices of the Seymour Hersh and Maureen Dowd are now robbing this nation of the services of one of its finer defense-policy intellectuals.
Not that it matters that much, most likely, as Perle still has plenty of friends in DoD who will call him for advice, and he will certainly remain a commentator on defense policy. He might even assume a more public role now that he's relieved of this job.
So liberals probably shouldn't cheer too much over this "victory."
(Update) Perle will remain on the board, but will step down as chairman. This isn't much of a "victory" at all for his liberal critics.
Ralph Peters despises Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
That much we know.
There's no disputing that Ralph Peters is a fine former military man who is able effectively to communicate military concepts to civilians. And there's no disputing that Ralph Peters cares deeply for soldiers.
But he's beginning to use this war to prosecute his grudges against Secretary Rumsfeld and the civilians in charge of the Pentagon. Yesterday's column accused Rumsfeld of near negligence in establishing force levels for the Iraq war, and today's column repeats those charges. He uses such terms as "Rumsfeld and his gang of civilian theorists" and "The civilian planners, the shameless know-it-alls in expensive suits." Not exactly the most objective analysis, or fair.
What Peters doesn't tell you in these grudge columns is that he -- and some of his active military friends who still want to spend money on equipment to fight a war against a Soviet Union that no longer exists -- deeply resent Secretary Rumsfeld's forcing them to justify their expenditure requests in terms of current threats, and his reminding them that the military IS subject to civilian control.
And what a perfect opportunity to attack the Secretary, while the media is obsessing on the negative (Oh my god, it's been a week and the war isn't over! Quagmire alert!).
Peters is really not exercising good judgment here. If his argument is valid, there will be plenty of time AFTER the war for consideration of the charges, which presumably would involve Congressional hearings in which Peters would be invited to make his case. But using the conduct of a war (which, by the way, he has not been involved in planning and presumably only knows about in detail through illegal leaks from his anti-Rumsfeld friends) to continue his vendetta against Secretary Rumsfeld and score easy points is not what I would expect from Peters.
I would have thought he was a better man than that.
(Update) One of the things Peters and McCaffrey have made possible is this sort of column from Robert Novak. Novak has no expertise in military affairs, but he can cite Peters and McCaffrey as experts as he pursues his own personal anti-Iraq-War and anti-neocon agenda via this column. Of course, Novak doesn't mention his running feud with neocons. But since he accuses Secretary Rumsfeld of being disingenuous, we might suggest that his tying Ken Adelman to official DoD policy is disingenuous in itself.
Peter Arnett, now reporting for the Iraqi Information Ministry MSNBC, offers the following observation:
Arnett, 68, also gave some insight into the way CNN's Baghdad crew may have been expelled from the city Thursday, saying they lacked the political skills in dealing with the Iraqi authorities. "It's nothing they did in particular that the Iraqis were irritated at," he said. "A degree of diplomatic and personal relationships get you through in a place like Baghdad."Diplomatic and personal relationship with Iraqis? Gee, Peter, we never would have guessed!
One of the marvelous things about the age of the internet is the amount of information that is available, so that one need not trust the reporting of the NY Times or any other single newspaper.
A case in point is this story in today's NY Times, in which the implication is clearly that General Myers conceded at yesterday's press conference that the strategic plan to liberate Iraq is flawed and has fallen short of expectations:
The nation's top military officer acknowledged today that the Pentagon's strategy to shock the Iraqi government quickly with a devastating early air assault has not worked exactly as desired.I don't think General Myers or Secretary Rumsfeld conceded ANY such thing, and because of the wonderful internet, I can point to the transcript of the briefing in support of my contention. In particular, the portions I reproduce in this post are particularly relevant.
I could say a great deal more about the NY Times article, but I'm going to keep it brief. It is quite a nice piece of rhetoric, to be sure. Note that it doesn't go quite too far with its assertions. It implies certain things about the progress of the war, and the reporter uses OTHER people to make the points he doesn't make himself (in particular, Robert Pape). It's almost lawyerlike, in that nobody can really accuse the reporter of misreporting signficant facts. But it's certainly analysis masquerading as reporting (and it does misrepresent what transpired at the press briefing the reporter is allegedly "covering").
Of course, analysis (with an agenda) masquerading as reporting is pretty much the modus operandi of a once-great newspaper these days.
(Update) Contrast this Washington Post report with the one from the NY Times. Secretary Rumsfeld and General Myers are accurately portrayed as defending the operation and planning to date.
ReasonExpress admits,
Maybe it's unfair to single out megablogger Glenn Reynolds for his simplistic take on the war, as outlined on GlennReynolds.com on March 21.Unfair? No, not really. Anything is fair game on the internet.
It's ironic, though, that RE substitutes one simplistic take for another:
Without enough invulnerable-to-ground-attack Abrams tanks, it is up to infantry, artillery, and tactical air to take care of matters. That takes more time -- and more losses.Proof, I suppose, that the RE bloggers are as good as Peters and McCaffrey (two people who really should know better) at repeating the conventional wisdom of the cable news network talking heads of late, with no evidence that they've been involved in ANY of the planning or have knowledge of the tactical operations substantial enough to justify their assertions.The Bush administration wanted to go with a lightning fast drive to Baghdad in hopes the regime would collapse along the way. It was a gamble that hasn't paid off yet.
Simplistic indeed, along with the rest of the piece.
I was only being slightly tongue-in-cheek with my earlier reference to Tommy Franks as future Governor-General of liberated Iraq. I don't know that there will be a Governor-General (more likely there will be a broader governing council) in the short term, but if there is a Governor-General I don't think it will be General Franks, who will still have plenty of purely military considerations to occupy his considerable intellect after the liberation.
However, this NRO article puts forth Lieutenant General John Abizaid as a key member of a possible post-war governing council:
Named the deputy commander of U.S. Central Command in February, Abizaid is one of the most senior U.S. military officers of direct Arab descent, born in the United States to a Lebanese family. A presence at press briefings at U.S. Central Command headquarters in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar, he is the Pentagon’s point man for operations inside Iraq and U.S. military relations in the Arab world.Governor-General Abizaid. I like it.Abizaid is also frequently mentioned as a likely choice to head the rebuilding of Iraq once the Hussein regime collapses. In early March, when asked whether Abizaid would play a role in reconstructing Iraq, a senior defense official said, "Certainly, eventually he will."
Abizaid’s career has displayed a rare combination of scholarly studies and hands-on military leadership. He earned a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies while at Harvard, after earning the nickname the “Mad Arab” at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Abizaid speaks Arabic, studied at the University of Jordan in Amman as well as a U.S. Army War College Senior Fellowship at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and served as an operations officer with a U.N. observer group in Lebanon.
His other stints have been as an infantry commander, commandant of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and assistant to then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Shalikashvili in 1993. He led a U.S. Army Ranger rifle company during the 1983 invasion of Grenada, and his use of a commandeered bulldozer to advance on a Cuban position inspired a fictional scene in the 1986 Clint Eastwood movie “Heartbreak Ridge."
Ralph Peters is an outstanding military thinker, and certainly he knows more about combat than most of us (thankfully) ever will. Ditto Barry McCaffrey.
However, I think it is safe to say neither Peters nor McCaffrey has been involved in any way in the planning for the war against Iraq. It is certainly true that the war is less than a week old. And it is also true that very few operational details of this war have been released to the public.
How, then, can Peters write the following:
The allied forces on the march in Iraq have performed impressively. Within weeks, major operations will give way to a few months of mopping up. Iraq will be liberated. This will happen despite serious strategic miscalculations by the Office of the Secretary of Defense.Peters goes on to criticize the strategy of shock and awe. In time, he may be proven correct, although I suspect otherwise. But at THIS moment in time, Peters simply cannot justify his critique. Peters doesn't have the information required to write so definitively right now. Most civilians don't.
Peters, McCaffrey, and others have performed years of military service to their country, and their post-military careers have done much to enlighten the rest of us on military affairs. But at this moment in time, their critiques are not particularly useful, because they simply don't have enough information to make some of their claims.
Indeed, one might even suspect that McCaffrey is pursuing a personal agenda with his critique, and Peters has been taking potshots at Rumsfeld for some months now (seemingly repeating the criticism of some of his heavy-artillery military friends who have been outmaneuvered by Rumsfeld on budgetary matters).
They should both back off for a while.
(Update) This transcript from the earlier Rumsfeld/Myers press briefing was not available when I posted this. Rumsfeld and Myers take on criticism of the type above:
Q: Mr. Secretary, you said yourself a moment ago that this operation could become more dangerous for U.S. and allied troops in the coming days as you approach Baghdad. There are Sunday morning generals in every war, and critics are coming out of the walls to criticize this ground campaign. They say that your imprimatur of transformation is heavily on it, and there are simply not enough troops and armor on the ground right now to efficiently take Baghdad or protect your rear. How would you answer that?andRUMSFELD: First of all, I don't know how anyone outside of the government thinks they know what my views are, or what General Franks' views are, or what General Myers' views are. We've all been deeply involved, and the plan has been a plan that's been approved by all the commanders and by, needless to say, General Myers and General Pace and Don Rumsfeld and the president of the United States. And it is a good plan, and it is a plan that in four and a half or five days has moved ground forces to within a short distance of Baghdad. And forces increase in the country every minute and every hour of every day. And that will continue to be the case. There is a force flow that's been put in place weeks and weeks and weeks ago, where people were mobilized, people were trained, people were -- equipment was loaded on ships, ships were leased, ships were sent over, ships moved into position, ships were unloaded, personnel were airlifted over to meet with their equipment. And every hour the number of U.S. and coalition forces in that country are increasing.
So I guess how I would respond to what you say are some folks who are concerned about that is that the people who are involved in this, the -- General Franks and General McKiernan and General DeLong and General Abizaid and Admiral Keating, General Moseley, are very comfortable, as are the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who have met with the president twice in the last two days and discussed it.
One question. You want to comment on that?
MYERS: You bet I do.
It's a plan that's on track. It's a plan everybody had input to. It's a plan everybody agrees to. I've been on public record that I think the plan as finally formulated and, as put together by General Franks with some help and some advice by General Franks and his commanders, is a brilliant plan. And we've been at it now for less than a week. We're just about to Baghdad. Some of the biggest losses we've taken are due to Iraqis committing serious violations of the law of armed conflict in the Geneva Convention by dressing as civilians, by luring us into surrender situations then opening fire on our troops. So this is a plan that is very well thought out, and that will play out, I think, as we expect.
Q: Mr. Secretary, as the nature of the questions before have indicated, and you yourself have anticipated, is at the first sign of any difficulty or casualties, there have been a number of critics, some of them laymen and some of them retired military officers, senior military officers, voicing the kinds of concerns that Charlie did.(03-26-03 Update) Here's a great quote from former Israeli Chief of Staff Amnon Lipkin Shahak:Without again restating it, would you say that you have perhaps not adequately managed the expectations here of -- in the sense that some people believe that just five days into this, the war might be going badly, and you're trying to make the point that we're much closer to the beginning than the end. Do you need to do a better job in giving the American people and the public an idea of what to expect in the days and weeks ahead?
RUMSFELD: I don't know how to answer that, really. If you go back to the Afghanistan situation, it was only a few days into it that it was described by one of the newspapers here as a "quagmire." And it was a matter of days later that things looked quite good and, as I recall, Mazar-e-Sharif fell, and then the other cities began to fall.
I can't manage what people -- civilians or retired military -- want to say. And if they go on and say it enough, people will begin to believe it. It may not be true, and it may reflect more of a misunderstanding of the situation than an analysis or an assessment of it, but there's no way anyone can affect what people say. We have a free country. In Iraq, they can affect what people say because you get shot if you say something they don't like. We don't do that.
Shahak says that until now the American's have managed to conceal their true battle plan. "Do you know what the Americans have planned? I don't. They also never said (what they were planning to do). How do you topple a regime in 48 hours? In a week? Seventeen days? If we don't want to make fools of ourselves, we should wait patiently. It would just be arrogant to judge from what we see on TV."The link comes from Brothers Judd.
Leave it to a journalist located far from combat to write 12 analytical paragraphs for Reason that boil down to the following:
The issue here is not how the actual war is going, but how the battle of images is going. On that front, there hasn't even been a stalemate. So far, it's been a stunning victory for the Arabs.This is an issue? To journalists I suppose it is.
But is it really much of an insight to observe that an Arab network in an Arab land under attack by non-Arabs is getting the scoop on other news organizations? And is this really an "issue" that deserves 12 paragraphs of analysis?
I'm reminded of the Ari Fleischer press conference of a few days ago, when questioners just seemed incredulous that President Bush does not spend every waking hour watching television news broadcasts. Self-obsession seems to be a trait shared by many journalists.
I will at least give Mr. Cavanaugh credit for greater honesty than most:
I have little understanding of and absolutely no interest in military affairs, and if you told me Saddam Hussein is hiding a cache of photon torpedoes I would have no way to prove you wrong.(Update) Now, one point that Mr. Cavanaugh might have made (save for the fact that, as he admits, he's really not educated himself to do so) is that in the Arab world -- especially when it comes to conflict -- images are often used in mythmaking, or the effective creation of reality. Barry Rubin makes this point in a J-Post op-ed today, but it is made much more forcefully in The Closed Circle: An Interpretation Of The Arabs by David Pryce-Jones (a great book for those actually interested in such matters, or those who would write about them).
(03-26-03 Update) Here's an analysis of Al Jazeera that's a little more sophisticated.
Pat Buchanan and his crowd of America-Firsters would close our borders to fine young men like Jose Gutierrez, who seem to understand the promise of America so much better than the bitter angry men of the paleo camp:
Lanky, quiet and full of ambition, Gutierrez, 22, is believed to be the second U.S. serviceman to die in combat, an American soldier with a distinctive Southern California background: He was among thousands of Central American immigrants who for years have made their way to this state in dangerous personal odysseys.Thank you Jose Gutierrez, and godspeed.At age 16, he had traveled by himself from his home in Guatemala, making his way across Mexico into the United States, where he was taken in by an older couple, who later in life had begun sheltering immigrant children.
Gutierrez made the 2,000-mile journey across the continent as one of many young immigrants who come here from Latin America each year, seeking family members or jobs.
Gutierrez made the trip as many of his countrymen do — by any means, said Hector E. Tobar, a longtime friend of the family who had taken in Gutierrez. On the way, he had hopped aboard at least 14 trains, Tobar said.
But like so many immigrants, Gutierrez's past was eclipsed by his new life as an American and as a would-be architect who was quickly learning English and whose eyes were firmly fixed on his future. His neighbors saw simply a nice, young immigrant: a tall, quiet future soldier who spoke with a Spanish accent....
Instead of going on to study architecture, Gutierrez joined the Marines.
Mosquera's adult daughter, Jackie Baker, told KVEA-TV that Gutierrez "wanted to give the United States what the United States gave to him. He came with nothing. This country gave him everything."
I had actually stopped on NBC on Friday and saw this exchange, surely one of the more moving in the coverage so far:
"Is that my son?" On NBC, anchor Tom Brokaw spoke on the telephone to Nancy Chamberlin of Winslow, Maine. Her son, Marine Capt. Jay Aubin, was one of the first American soldiers to die in the conflict.Thank you Captain Aubin, and godspeed.Brokaw greeted her gently, telling her how hard it must be on this, the darkest day of her life. She thanked him, sounding sad but remarkably composed. Her strength, it seemed, did something to Brokaw.
"The country deserves to know about Jay," he said, his voice starting to fray.
So she spoke, recalling how she couldn't afford to send her son to college, so he signed up for the Marines and fell in love with the service. "When he left he reminded me that . . . if he died he would die doing what he absolutely loved and believed in."
Brokaw was sitting with four of NBC's military analysts, a star-spangled array of retired generals and admirals. They're tough guys, accustomed to talking about war in terms of strategy, ordnance and duty. But the words of this woman, her courage in the face of tragedy, shattered their steel. Or maybe it just revealed their molten core.
Gen. Barry McCaffrey wept openly, dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief. Lt. Gen. Michael Short, on the other side of the desk, also cried, while Adm. Dennis McGinn stared grimly forward, his eyes dark and pained.
Speaking directly to Brokaw, Chamberlin said she admired all he and his TV news colleagues were doing to bring news of the war home to America.
"But for mothers and wives it's murder," she said. "It's heartbreak. We can't leave the TV, because with every tank and every helicopter, you're thinking: Is that my son?"
[snip]
"I just need you to be aware that . . . there are moms, dads and wives out there suffering because of this. That's all. That's why I'm doing this."
After she hung up, Brokaw and his team of military brass tried to compose themselves. When he could speak again, Brokaw looked into the camera and spoke directly to his audience.
"Just because you don't have someone directly involved doesn't mean you're not involved," he said. "No matter how you feel about how we got involved in this war, we all have obligations to each other."
Like so many Clinton-era (and Carter-era) internationalists, Martin Indyk seems to have entirely missed the significance of what has just happened in American foreign policy. For Indyk, as with social science positivists in general, right is entirely historically contingent -- in his case, right is seemingly determined by the U.N. Security Council:
It's too late to salvage the Security Council consensus that would have legitimized this war against Iraq. But it's not too late to start rebuilding an international consensus around the twin objectives of providing a better, more democratic future for the people of Iraq, and promoting a more peaceful and safe Middle East. Putin shares those objectives, not only because of Russia's economic stake in Iraq, but also because Moscow is keen to be a constructive partner in the effort to put the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the path to resolution.Sorry, Mr. Indyk, but objective reality legitimized this war to liberate Iraq, or to use the timeless language of the Declaration, the "laws of nature and of nature's God" legitimized it. This is a just war, with or without the consent of various nations of the United Nations. Right is not determined or conferred by the representatives of various nations to the U.N.
Mr. Indyk, like Mr. Dennis Ross, seems still to be clinging to a world in which internationalism is an overarching principle, rather than a mechanism, of American foreign policy. If the liberation and rebuilding of Iraq can best be accomplished within the internationalist framework Mr. Indyk and Mr. Ross urge, fine. If not, the United States must pursue the reordering of Iraq using its best judgment.
As far as Mr. Indyk's romantic notions about the good intentions of Russia to resolve the Israel-Palestinian issue, we would only note that Mr. Indyk would surely have been an important member of a Gore Administration and in a position to act on these sorts of ideas. Thank goodness the election turned as it did.
(Update) Unfortunately for Mr. Indyk, his romantic notions about the good intentions of his Russian friends have already been called into question by reality, in the form of this article in the very newspaper that published his op-ed:
The United States delivered a protest to the government of President Vladimir Putin yesterday for refusing to stop Russian arms dealers from providing illegal weapons and assistance to the Iraqi military.It is safe to say that Russia has its own strategic interests, and that it might well be pursuing them. For many years, one of those strategic interests involved destabilizing the Near East for the United States. One might assume, contrary to Mr. Indyk, that Russian efforts at the UN to obstruct the American war to liberate Iraq might indeed have been a manifestation of its strategic interests, and not simply the notion that Mr. Putin was miffed at being sidelined, as Mr. Indyk suggests. One might also assume that if the Russian government really wanted to stop the transfer of this technology, it is certainly capable of doing so. One might note with further interest that the Russian Embassy in Iraq remains open.Bush administration sources said one Russian company is helping the Iraqi military deploy electronic jamming equipment against U.S. planes and bombs, and two others have sold antitank missiles and thousands of night-vision goggles in violation of U.N. sanctions. The sources said Moscow has ignored entreaties from senior Bush administration officials concerned about the threat to U.S. forces.
During more than a year of intensifying discussions, the Russian officials initially denied the existence of the company that allegedly sold at least a half-dozen devices designed to confound global positioning system guidance gear used in aircraft and bombs, U.S. officials said. Later, the Russians assured the Americans that they were closely watching the company.
"The stuff's there, it's on the ground and they're trying to use it against us," said a well-placed U.S. official who requested anonymity. Of the Russians, the official said, "This is a disregard for human life. It sickens my stomach."
Administration officials have long been frustrated with Russia's failure to crack down on arms sales and technology transfers to countries the U.S. government considers state sponsors of terrorism, including Iran and Syria. The Russians offer a variety of explanations, from the argument that the goods are legal or benign to the assertion that the business is done by private firms over which the Kremlin has no control.
The conduct of American foreign policy is a serious matter, and however much we would like to live in the romantic world of Mr. Indyk -- or even Sting -- reality is often somewhat different.
(Update 2) The UK's Sun newspaper reports that a British listening station has intercepted a plea from Iraqi leadership to Russia for emergency surgery for the tyrant. Surely it is merely coincidence the appeal was made to Russia, right? *dripping sarcasm*
Let me preface what is to follow with the concession that when it sticks to Arts and Letters, Arts and Letters Daily is a real treasure of the web. It's full of essays and reviews that are provocative, even if their manner of selection betrays a sort of guiding non-judgmentalism of the editors, and even better, it's free.
But when it comes to the inclusion of articles about politics, that non-judgmentalism of the editors comes to resemble a relativism that renders the site less than compelling. To wit, the editors yesterday posted a link to an account of Saddam Hussein written by Andrew Cockburn in the Times. Mr. Cockburn is identified by the Times as authoring the (not a but the) definitive work on Saddam Hussein. In reality, Mr. Cockburn's book appears to be a sympathetic, uncritical analysis of Mr. Hussein (the subtitle is all too revealing: An American Obsession!), and Mr. Cockburn's Times op-ed is more of the same:
The next 12 years seemed to justify his ebullience. UN sanctions ruined and starved the Iraqi people, but in no way weakened Saddam. CIA-sponsored initiatives to kill him were detected and snuffed out. Even his efforts to safeguard a few tattered and almost certainly ineffectual remnants of his old unconventional weapons programme from the UN inspectors (whom he suspected, correctly of being a front for a covert CIA operation) seemed to carry little penalty.Sanctions starved his people (never mind his oil revenues, and their diversion into illegal rearmament programs). Oh wait, those programs were "ineffectual remnants" blown out of proportion by a CIA cabal! And then Saddam turned romantic novelist, only to have those damn neocons (why not come right out and say it?) bring up that nasty issue of weapons of mass destruction again. And then the great leader moved to take that issue away, but the hawks would not be deterred.By the summer of 2001 it looked as if he had almost made it out of the wood. Sanctions were collapsing, and Baghdad hotels were thronged with Western salesmen. Saddam himself found the time to publish, pseudonymously, two allegorical novels with romantic overtones that were, unsurprisingly, received with rapturous acclaim by Iraqi critics.
Then came September 11, and Saddam’s luck took a turn for the worse as his foreign enemies sought to use the terrorist assault as an excuse to attack him.
Belatedly, he moved to take away the issue of weapons of mass destruction as a casus belli by co-operating with the inspectors. It appears to have been too late.
Come on. This narrative should not be taken seriously. But there it is posted top-left on a highly visited website (after appearing in one of the world's great newspapers to boot).
But several days before, a quite different article was linked in that prominent top-left position of the same website, an interview with Mark Bowden, the author of a more critical-analytical article on Saddam Hussein (but why not his original article, which of course was linked here in May 2002, as soon as it was available? Perhaps because Bowden portrays Hussein not as a victim of American aggression, but as a cruel, somewhat delusional, and certainly deadly eccentric?). Indeed, it's just two articles down from the Cockburn piece.
I have difficulty reconciling the two articles. And I guess I have trouble understanding the mindset that effectively equates the two articles by placing them on the same page.
Sure, I understand the notion of many publishers that "we're just going to post content without making a judgment about it." But can that truly be done? To rephrase, isn't an editor of a headline-style weblog making an explicit recommendation in posting an article that the article is worthy of being read and taken seriously by thoughtful people (or, in some cases, by a subset of thoughtful people -- say, liberals, or conservatives, or Objectivists, or what have you). What are we to make of such contradictory articles posted within days of each other? Is the message of the editors that they can't decide between them, that they won't decide between them, or that it is impossible to decide between them?
In an article that's over a year old (I've saved it that long, intending to comment), Arts and Letters Daily's Dennis Duton is quoted as follows on his website's purpose:
Founding editor Dutton calls it "an intellectual watering hole." The site is one long broadsheet of single-paragraph teasers, each with a link to some off-site article. Every day Dutton and Dung sift through the Web, looking for "precious nuggets of real content" to sate the intellectual appetite of the 50,000 or so users who visit daily.Partisan issues. Ideological and national biases."The idea," Dutton says, "is to be contrarian, but to avoid directly partisan issues of the moment." Ideological and national biases get diffused in the breadth of the connections, with conservative Commentary pieces listed link-by-jowl with rabble-rousing Nation editorials.
Those terms are tossed like daggers. The suggestion is almost that if one political group believes something to be true, then it must be a bias. A partisan issue. Ideological.
But on the flip side, isn't the absolute refusal to get bogged down in issues that might be claimed by partisans, ideologues, or the like, in effect its own ideology? And isn't that ideology in essence a refusal to believe in the possibility of truth or right. More simply stated, doesn't that editorial guiding principle necessarily endorse relativism?
The bulk of my academic training is in political theory, and by political theorists who do not deny the possibility of truth. And perhaps that's why I'm perplexed by Dutton's comments above. Are his comments intended to deny the possibility of truth altogether, or simply the possibility of the truth of ideology? Because if we understand ideology as the employment of philosophy (which is, by my definition at least, truth seeking) towards an end, then we come to the conclusion that ideology, even though it is not primarily truth-seeking (as is philosophy), can be true in specific instances. We would, of course, not wish to employ it as the ultimate method of getting to truth. But ideology in itself is not "untrue" (or necessarily evil).
On the other hand, if the view is that objective truth does not (indeed cannot) exist, then all "truth" is effectively a political myth, the ultimate triumph of one, non-truth-seeking "ideology" over other competing non-truth-seeking ideologies at some point in time. There's no real reason, long-term, to pick any one over any other. That is simply a question of personal preference, or, as contemporary social science would have it, "values."
I don't know if the editors of Arts and Letters Daily have thought about their enterprise in these terms. I don't know if their tens of thousands of readers have thought much about it, or if our hundreds of daily readers have. But I started to think about it not long after discovering their site and observing their editorial method. And the result of that thought was this site, which I now identify as broadly conservative. I make no pretensions to be value-free in the selection of posted articles here, nor do I claim that the site is free of ideology (or ideologically pure, for that matter!). But there is a method to the editorial selection beyond simply the notion that the article is well-written, provocative, and counter to some article that was posted to the site a few days before.
That's not to say that I agree theoretically, philosophically, or ideologically with every article that is posted. But it is to say that a selected article struck me -- your editor, I suppose, though it seems a bit pretentious to call myself that -- as an article that ought to be of interest to thoughtful people with a preference for a (classically understood) liberal democratic order. I call the front page a "conservative review" because I think American conservatism, broadly conceived, is most concerned with preserving that liberal democratic order.
If that indicts our project here as ideological, then I suppose I plead guilty.
I don't much like cheap journalism, but whenever the various networks put on the failed architects of the last Gulf War (Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, and the like), I would like, just once, for the interviewer to hand said architect this article, and ask: were "stability," and the maintenance of a coalition of democracies and Arab thugocracies alike, and "international multilateralism" worth the distrust of Americans these people express even after we have liberated them from one of those thugocracies?
These people were betrayed by a Bush Administration more consumed with a Kissingerian realism than a more robust, Reaganite defense of the West.
I regard the current Bush Administration, and not elder Bush's, as the third Reagan Administration. And that's why I'm more optimistic that we'll strive to get it right this time.
I normally try not to inject personal comments into this site, reserving those for my more personal site. But I just posted an article that merits a personal note, I think. It's written by a (now retired) professor of strategic studies whom I was lucky enough to study with for a short time, and who has quietly educated countless members of government (and some senior members of the current Administration) in strategic studies over the years.
The article is no good substitute for, say, a seminar with Professor Rood, but, alas, it is the only substitute these days. The reason it is not a good substitute is that there are so many points -- and pivotal points of history -- that are obvious to Professor Rood but are not so obvious to those of us less educated and less thoughtful about these affairs. A seminar is a setting where he can be drawn out on these matters. An article, on the other hand, puts the burden of that work on the reader.
Nonetheless, the article captures the Rood method of thinking about the world, and is accessible to thoughtful readers (in much the same way that Leo Strauss's writings are accessible to thoughtful readers). In this day of the blog and its instapithy soundbite comments, there surely is a place for more elevated fare on the web. This article belongs in that category.
Is Jacques Chirac losing his mind?
Yesterday, he attempted to remove from an EU declaration language demanding that Saddam Hussein disarm.
Today, he asserts that France will not "authorize" a UN resolution allowing the US and UK to administer postwar Iraq.
Thanks, Jacques. We'll keep that in mind as private American and British companies rebuild Iraq under Governor-General Tommy Franks.
Liberating the people of Iraq is not the only reason we fight, and is not perhaps the primary reason. Nonetheless, dispelling a cruel tyrant is not a bad gift from one people to another, and I find this simple reporting to be quite moving:
The first President Bush betrayed these good people in the name of stability, the United Nations, and holding together a disparate coalition. If that's the sort of "multilateralism" and "diplomacy" embraced by France, Tom Daschle, Kofi Annan, etc., then I'm rather pleased to stand with THIS President Bush.U.S. Marines hauled down giant street portraits of Saddam Hussein in a screeching pop of metal and bolts Friday, telling nervous residents of this southern Iraqi town that "Saddam is done."
Milling crowds of men and boys watched as the Marines attached ropes on the front of their Jeeps to one portrait and then backed up, peeling the Iraqi leader's black-and-white metal image off a frame. Some locals briefly joined Maj. David "Bull" Gurfein in a new cheer.
"Iraqis! Iraqis! Iraqis!" Gurfein yelled, pumping his fist in the air.
"We wanted to send a message that Saddam is done," said Gurfein, a New York native in the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. "People are scared to show a lot of emotion. That's why we wanted to show them this time we're here, and Saddam is done."
The Marines arrived in Safwan, just across the Kuwait border, after Cobra attack helicopters, attack jets, tanks, 155 mm howitzers and sharpshooters cleared the way along Route 80, the main road into Iraq.
Safwan, 375 miles south of Baghdad, is a poor, dirty, wrecked town pocked by shrapnel from the last Gulf war. Iraqi forces in the area sporadically fired mortars and guns for hours Thursday and Friday. Most townspeople hid, although residents brought forth a wounded little girl, her palm bleeding after the new fighting. Another man said his wife was shot in the leg by the Americans.
A few men and boys ventured out, putting makeshift white flags on their pickup trucks or waving white T-shirts out truck windows.
"Americans very good," Ali Khemy said. "Iraq wants to be free."
Some chanted, "Ameriki! Ameriki!"
Many others in the starving town just patted their stomachs and raised their hands, begging for food.
A man identifying himself only as Abdullah welcomed the arrival of the U.S. troops: "Saddam Hussein is no good. Saddam Hussein a butcher."
An old woman shrouded in black — one of the very few women outside — knelt toward the feet of Americans, embracing an American woman. A younger man with her pulled her away, giving her a warning sign by sliding his finger across his throat.
(Update) Jonah Goldberg posts this email from one of our fine soldiers:
I fought as a tanker in the first gulf war and it was just outside Safwan as we secured the ceasfire site that my Company commander said to me, "in ten years we'll be back." I'm glad this time we aren't just going to give it back to the thugs in Baghdad. The things I saw around Safwan are what made me realize just how bad Saddam was and is for the Iraqi people. I remember how impotent we felt sitting on our tanks listening to radio reports of the slaughter of the Kurds and the "marsh arabs" who had foolishly believed that we would support their rebellion. I am glad that the day of their liberation is at hand but also a little sad that it took 12 years longer than it should have to arrive.Let me add that I'll also stand on the side of this soldier's morality as opposed to that of Chirac, Daschle, and others previously named.
(Update 2) I just saw footage on Fox News of an American soldier pulling down a large billboard of Saddam Hussein. An Iraqi ran into the picture and started hitting Saddam on the nose with his shoe. That is the least of Saddam's worries today.
(Update 3) Here's a photo of the scene described directly above.
Dennis Ross has written a solid column for the WSJ, and for the most part I agree with him. But one of his prescriptions is highly problematic:
First, with regard to postwar Iraq, we must move quickly to internationalize our peacekeeping responsibilities. If we are to look like liberators, not occupiers, Tommy Franks must not become the new governor of Iraq. To meet our responsibilities for law and order and the provision of services in an environment in which the administrative structure in Iraq has collapsed, we must prepare the ground for others to join us, perhaps with different roles and responsibilities in different regions of Iraq, relatively quickly after the war. We will want to help set up an international administration for dealing with the civil needs of Iraq. And we will want to establish an inclusive Iraqi institution--an executive council--representing all groups, including the returning exiles, that will work in tandem with the peacekeepers and the international administration. Thus we will demonstrate that we are working with others and the Iraqi people to create a stable transition to a broad-based, representative government.Like many State Department types, Ross is prone to throwing around "musts" carelessly, and this is one of those instances. The key aspect of liberating Iraq is that it should be LIBERATED. If that requires a Governor-General Tommy Franks, so be it. A potential Governor-General Franks is a far more appealing prospect than, say an international administration with a French representative more concerned with the needs of TotalFinaElf, or a Chinese representative more concerned with the needs of CNPC, or a Russian representative more concerned with the needs of Lukoil.
Ross probably can't help it that he's stuck in an older way of thinking about the world ("multilateralism" as a principle rather than as a mechanism of foreign policy). Liberation is precisely what needs to take place in Iraq. The mechanism -- whether it's Governor-General Tommy Franks, a slightly larger governing council, or a larger international council -- must be determined by the requirements of liberation, not some lofty commitment to a vague multilateralism.
My favorite line of the day comes from a fun little rant of a column from Thomas Sowell:
If CBS had had Dan Rather during World War II, instead of Edward R. Murrow, perhaps it could have broadcast an interview with Adolf Hitler, who would have explained how he had been misunderstood and how he and FDR should debate their differences publicly instead of having all those troops landing at Normandy.To follow up, Peter Arnett might have shown some of Goebbels home videos.
CIA and other intelligence agencies came under lots of scrutiny and criticism after 9/11 (I have mixed opinions on that, which I'll share at some point), but credit them for being on top of the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan last night, and providing information that led to swift action (more kudos to the administration for acting on this information before it became stale). There's a good early account of the Iraqi intell in the Washington Post today. For the most part, it's a good piece, save for this paragraph:
Bush ventured little militarily -- expending about 40 cruise missiles and placing two pilots and their aircraft in harm's way. He had much to gain. But as an early portent, and in the political psychology of war, shooting at and missing an oft-missed foe carries other costs that are hard to measure.I'm not quite sure what this analysis -- and I would characterize it as depressingly poor analysis from journalists who can claim no training or expertise in war strategy -- is doing in an otherwise highly informative news piece. I'm not even sure of the implication that is intended. It's an odd paragraph. A good editor should simply have cut it. Still, the article is a good read.
And it's good to see the Administration give the go-ahead on this. As an institution, I imagine the military opposed it, on the grounds that it interfered with their overall war plan. But this was well worth the shot, and I'm glad the civilian decisionmakers took it.
What an interesting observation from Mr. Hans Blix, who took time from his busy MTV schedule to talk to print media:
"I don't think it is reasonable to close the door on inspections after 31/2 months," Blix said in his first public appearance since 134 U.N. inspectors were evacuated from Iraq, effectively ending a 12-year effort to disarm Iraq through inspections. "I would have welcomed some more time."Leaving aside Mr. Blix's romantic notions about the reasonableness of Mr. Saddam Hussein, let's focus on the most telling sentence:Blix voiced disappointment and sadness at the failure to complete the peaceful disarmament of Iraq, and said he was confident that Iraqi leadership would not dare to use chemical and biological weapons against U.S.-led forces even if the country faced certain military defeat.
"I doubt that they will have the will," he said. There are "some people who care about their reputation even after death."
I doubt that they will have the will.
Recall that Security Council Resolution 1441, and previous resolutions, demanded that Saddam Hussein and Iraq disarm.
Completely. No negotiations.
And that inspectors were to verify this peaceful, unconditional disarmament.
If that disarmament had actually taken place, shouldn't Mr. Blix have said that "I doubt that they will have the capability?"
The reason the United States is now going to war is that of course Iraq retains the capability, and we are unwilling to trust the will of a madman any longer. No more World Trade Centers (or worse) because of inaction. Never again.
Former President Clinton, whose eternal quest for adulation was slightly derailed by criticism he's received over being such an outspoken critic of Bush foreign policy of late, has taken a slightly different approach.
In an article in the UK's Guardian newspaper today, he praises Tony Blair for his leadership on Iraq. Specifically, he credits Blair with securing UN passage of Security Council 1441 and with trying to save the Atlantic Alliance.
Fair enough.
But recall after the unanimous passage of 1441 that the general consensus, even among liberals, was that it was Colin Powell's greatest triumph.
Why the departure from consensus by the former President?
Simple -- Colin Powell is a key member of the Bush Administration's foreign policy team, however much he may disagree with the likes of Rumsfeld and Cheney, and his successes reflect well on the Bush Administration more broadly. But if it was Tony Blair's idea all along and he had to drag the Bushies kicking and screaming.... then you have the makings of a much more subtle critique of Bush foreign policy, and one that is not likely to have the pundits criticizing the former President for being too outspoken.
Never mind if it's true -- that's just semantics, much like the meaning of "is."
And the article is even more audacious because Mr. Clinton clearly intends it as a way of bolstering support for Mr. Blair among Laborites. How's that for a sense of Bill Clinton's self-importance?!
Slick.
(Update) Comments on Mr. Clinton's contradictions here and here.
Via Drudge comes this comment tonight from the person who torched a bunch of children trying to rescue them from folks with allegedly illegal guns (that were never found):
We will not solve the world's problems by might.No, best to reserve deadly force for religious kooks holed up near Waco, rather than deadly tyrants.
Sometimes the impulse to "fact-check" obscures the fact *ahem* that rhetoric has been employed in a purposeful manner. Jonah Goldberg elaborates on that point in The Corner (in partial response to this post, and blogger/journalist Matt Welch).
Whatever the nitpicking over various "facts," the broader picture painted by Mead is this: the containment regime now (but previously NOT) favored by antiwar liberals certainly has been inhumane, and depending on the conduct of the coming war, may actually be more deadly. And that should give well-meaning liberals something to think about.
Surely Mead's broader point is not objectionable? And I'm with Goldberg -- it's kind of fun to win arguments on the other side's terms.
It all started a week or so back when Dixie Chicks frontwoman Natalie Maines made an asinine comment that recieved considerably more publicity than she would have liked. She said, in effect, that she is ashamed to be from the same state as President Bush.
The feeling is mutual and the anger of Texans palatable. It goes beyond Texas, however, as radio stations throughout the south have removed the Dixie Chicks from their playlist. This is more than a symbolic gesture of protest (as would be, say, boycotting Alec Baldwin movies), seeing as how the Dixie Chicks are one of the biggest country acts in the nation.
The anger is also apparent among web log writers. Scott Chaffin (of Texas), Bill Hobbs (of Tennessee), Mike Hendrix (of Georgia?), Susanna Cornett (originally of Kentucky), and numerous others have weighed in with anger or outrage.
Weighing in on the other side is Jack Cluth, pro-war liberal of my home town of Seabrook, Texas. Cluth argues that the comments are inappropriate, but the outrage that has followed it is considerably worse. A couple commenters liken Dixie Chick detractors to fascists.
The Chicks have released an official apology, explaining their anti-war views but admitting that their comment wasn't appropriate.
So the question becomes whether or not the boycott and continued outrage are beyond the pale or a rational reaction.
There are two things to look at with Maines's comments, the comment and the context. Maines did not merely state that she was against the war. Rather, she exclaimed shame with her connection to our president. There's nothing wrong with being anti-war, wrongheaded as the view may be. I personally would not boycott an artist against the war or even an outspoken critic of it. Nor is there any problem with detesting President Bush. He is a controversial figure and people fall on both sides of our 50/50 Nation president. As a Texan, her use of that connection as a seque is more than a little annoying. Like or don't like President Bush, but leave the rest of us out of it, please. If you're ashamed of being a Texan, then don't come back. I don't say that in the love-it-or-leave-it sense but rather in the sense that if I was ashamed of my state, I'd move.
However, the context is what is much more important to me. Her comments were not made in Texas or Red America (or Blue America, for that matter), but rather in London, where anti-American tensions are running high. Not only were they made abroad, they were made at a time when our President is trying to bring the world on board for the Iraqi invasion. Normally that last part wouldn't matter, but Maines has stated that much of her opposition in Bush is rooted in the fact that he's defying the will of the world and making the world hostile to our country. So her response is to fame the fan of anti-American hostility? Forgive me if that diminishes her credibility.
Additionally, she made this comment abroad without having really said much about Bush and the war domestically. Some have suggested it's because she's scared to. Well, okay. But to fear voicing your opinion here and then doing so before a friendly crowd in London is tantamount to talking about someone behind their back.
Truth be told, they would have recieved scrutiny if they'd made the comment in Dallas or Los Angeles. They would have been shouted down and all the other things that come with making a strong political statement. Cry me a river. But don't say something behind our backs that you're afraid to say in front of our face and then cry at our reaction.
To say the least, it demonstates a clear lack of class and backbone.
Now, about the apology. I may be alone in conservative circles in accepting it. My ex-girlfriend chides that it was likely insincere and written by her publicist. Maybe it was, I don't know. I do know that I've made some boorish comments in the past and I'm generally willing to give anyone a free pass if they retract and take responsibility.
That's one reason I'm inclined to accept the apology: Maines took responsibility. She didn't say "I'm sorry people were offended" or "I'm sorry some can't stand a woman with her own opinion" she said "My comments were inappropriate."
Yes, they were, and I'm glad she at least pretends to realize that.
The firestorm hasn't ceased, however. Houston's two country radio stations have pulled the Chicks from their playlist. Even though I accept Maines's apology, I'm still not inclined to argue that everyone should let it go, even if I have.
For too long celebrities have existed in a vacuum. They live and confer with only people that agree with them and by virtue of their celebrity, they feel that they can tell the rest of us how wrong we are. That is their right, of course, but it's also our right to rebel against this smug self-righteouslness. Conservative celebrities have long told of the sense of alienation they are dealt and where they hold an opinion only 10% of the people out there hold, it stands to reason that would be the case.
If a celebrity espouses conservative opinions, there may or may not be a cost to pay, depending on the truthfulness of conservative celebrity complaints. One thing is for sure, though, that they can be almost as loudly liberal as they want this side of Jane Fonda without any repercussions whatsoever. If there is a price to be paid for offending everyone between New York and Los Angeles, that's not an offense to freedom of speech.
In this country, we can say whatever we would like (barring libel and other mild curtailments). However, there is always a price to be paid for taking a stand. My former web log may come back to haunt me when I start contacting publishers later this year to try to get a contract for a novel. Frankly, I'm worried about that as I am conservative and most publishers are not and we live in a tense political atmosphere. However, to the extent that I leave my works published on the Internet and that I write more, I lose the right to complain about it, however worried that I am.
With any luck, it will make Maines and her ilk think a little harder about theirs next time they spout off. In any case, free speech does not necessitate silence on my part when I'm angered or offended. That's as stifling to free speech as any radio station pulling Dixie Chicks off their playlist.
One gets the feeling that Colin Powell and his associates are allowed the luxury of repeated leaks to news organizations in an Administration that despises leaks more than any other in recent memory simply because they are politically expedient for the Administration -- politically expedient because Powell continues to be viewed as the good cop in an administration full of "bad cops" and that the good cop/bad cop routine has served the administration relatively well.
So long as Powell continues to understand he serves the President, and soldiers on, then President Bush seems willing enough to tolerate these sorts of indulgences. One can't help but wonder if Mr. Powell will overstep one day, however. If so, I suspect all of his friends in the media won't be able to save him.
Four months and counting since 1441, and even the seemingly more reasonable anti-war activists are still lamenting the "rush to war":
Yet as rhetoric and preparation escalate, I find myself worrying that opponents of the rush to war are falling into the same habit of single-mindedness that is getting the country into such trouble. The president insists on reducing a complex world to simple dualisms. Those in opposition complain about this but seem determined to follow his lead in falling back on pieties.Here's a suggestion -- while you're telling the more radical antiwar loons how to be more constructive so that they might be taken more seriously, you might apply the same logic to yourself and stop using the term "rush to war." It's impossible to take anyone who uses that term seriously, yet you use it SEVEN TIMES in your short, sanctimonious article.
This is the slowest "rush to war" in recent times. Four months since 1441 was enacted, over a decade of violations of the armistice that effectively ended the hostilities of the Gulf War, years of violations of every single subsequent Security Council resolution dealing with Iraq.
This is no rush.
At the moment, CNN is televising Wolf Blitzer's interview with Secretary of State Colin Powell.
And I just saw a graphic that the Iraqi Ambassador to the UN would follow shortly, to provide a response to Secretary Powell.
Equal time, CNN style.
No wonder they've fallen to #2 in cable news.
CNN reports that American troops have been placed on "hair-trigger alert" in the fears that Saddam Hussein might launch a pre-emptive strike on them in these last few days before the United States launches its war to liberate Iraq.
That's certainly a concern, but my bigger concern is that Iraq will successfully attack Israel with chemical, biological, or (gawd forbid) nuclear weapons in that period before the U.S. has begun the military campaign (and perhaps before the commencement date of that campaign has been announced with any certainty). Israel was barely able to tolerate the trickle of scuds that got through last time without retaliation, but Mr. Sharon would not be able to weather an attack on Israel by Iraq with weapons of mass destruction by sitting on his hands and hoping the eventual U.S. effort will achieve success, nor should he. Nonetheless, a massive retaliatory attack by Israel before the U.S. campaign has begun would certainly complicate matters.
That's another reason to get this campaign underway. Ultimately, Israel could do the job that needs to be done if she is attacked -- removing Saddam Hussein and eliminating his weapons of mass destruction. But Israel is a small nation that should not be asked to do the work of a superpower. The U.S. can bear the costs (political and economic) of this moral mission. It's time to get on with it.
Daniel Henninger has a fine column in today's WSJ on the dangers of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
Dr. Hans Blix, on the other hand, is less concerned than Mr. Henninger:
I'm more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict.U.S. foreign policy should not be held hostage by the whims and decrees of this unserious little man any longer.
Most bloggers (myself included) don't have the inclination or the attention span to post more than a paragraph or so about world affairs -- at least not very often. And those few who do tend to need the services of a good editor.
And then there's Orrin Judd's blog, which has its share of short items, but also plenty of longer comments that place contemporary affairs in a much broader context. I don't know how he finds the time (not to mention the voracious reading habit that supplies so much of his context!), but it's just top-notch. That's why it's almost always the first place I go when I'm hitting non-primary sources on the web.
Orrin's lengthy post on the current crisis is one of his best ever. Go read.
I've been reading reports, and watching news items on TV of the worsening weather in Kuwait. The sand storms in the deserts of that region are truly horrible, getting in your eyes, your lungs, your food and sensitive military hardware. The delays -- caused by many who call themselves our allies -- pile up and the date for an invasion gets pushed back further and further. The weather gets worse, Saddam Hussein is able to make more preparations for war, and I wonder how many American lives these delays will cost us. And I fume.
I have also quietly accepted that this is the way things are. That there is a purpose to going through the U.N., that it is important we attempt to work with "the international community." Personally, I can no longer accept the deaths of thousands of Americans to placate the concerns of Cameroon, or to sway the anti-American French. It is time to say "goodbye to all that."
Victor Davis Hanson has written an excellent piece for NRO along the lines I've been thinking, Muscular Independence.
As liberal democracies should have learned during the period between World War I and World War II, a regime determined to re-arm itself can find ways to do so covertly, right under the noses of the powers that defeated it.
After the liberation of Iraq, American forces will almost certainly find evidence of a massive covert re-armament program in Iraq, with weapons of mass destruction a large component of that program.
ParaPundit Randall Parker has pulled together various sources on that topic here.
The possibility that Saddam is closer to nukes than most public sources acknowledge is chilling.
Michael Kinsley is such a bright guy that it's a real shame he seems possessed of a political autism of sorts, an inability to focus on the larger picture because of his joy of wallowing in the pedantic. And he's a great pedant! Rarely wrong about his pedantic points.
But as Ramesh Ponnuru notes, he's kind of missed the point of critics of Jim Moran's contention that the U.S. is going to war with Iraq because of a bunch of Jewish groups.
Ben Shapiro today has himself all worked up over Patrick Buchanan.
I share many of the sentiments expressed. But I have trouble mustering much more than a yawn.
It strikes me that one of many areas where President Bush's accomplishments have been underemphasized is that he effectively purged Patrick Buchanan from the GOP and the mainstream conservative movement in the last election (unlike elder Bush, who gave the man an opening with his ridiculous backtracking on the tax pledge, then gave the man a bigger opening by letting him speak at the Houston convention in 1996, bumping Ronald Reagan out of primetime).
Sure, Pat can call himself a conservative, and slap the term "conservative" on his little magazine, and even annoy current mainstream conservatives by needling them with the term "neocon."
But that doesn't change the fact that Buchanan is a marginalized figure -- maybe the Lyndon LaRouche of American conservatism -- because of his goofy views.
That's why it's hard to get that worked up over him.
A local television station reports on the following problem:
There's a startling trend among teenagers. Some of them are having oral sex in the cinemas.Surely the example of the former, impeached President isn't at fault.
Sex in the cinema is what movie-loving teens find in the theaters these days. But it's not only on the big screens. What adults call oral sex, teens are calling oral pleasure or oral massage and it's happening rampantly in theaters around Houston.
"The kids say it's not sex because it's not intercourse," says psychotherapist Micki Grimland. "That's part of what the problem is. It's kind of a fad right now that the kids are having oral sex inside the movie theaters and saying that they're not really having sex."
Could sex on the screen and on TV be at fault? Some say yes. In fact, a recent study confirms that more than 80% of primetime teenage TV viewing has sexual content.
When the advocates of delaying the war on Iraq lose the Washington Post editorial page, then one can't help but wonder who's left.
And why the United States and Britain are delaying a final UN vote while they beg third-world nations to come on board.
It's time to draw this U.N. charade to a close.
(Update) Well, one doesn't have to wonder too much. Nuts like Robert Scheer are left, of course. Emphasis on nuts. And left.
A couple years ago, when the debate on slavery reparations was at its most fervent, David Horowitz took out full page ads in college campus newspapers. The argument Horowitz made was based on principles, reason and logic -- and not in any way hateful. But liberal students on campus didn't like a conservative taking out ads in their newspapers, so they would go around earlier in the morning and gather up all the newspapers from the stands early in the morning.
This left me almost breathless. They were clearly denying Horowitz his right to free speech. This is the same group of people that abhor the burning of books done by others in earlier centuries.
This morning I saw this article, Antiwar Protestors Trash 9/11 Memorial, and was saddened but not surprised.
I've seen many instances of liberal intolerance of the views of others. For instance, Ward Connerly was repeatedly shouted down when doing a lecture tour on college campuses about affirmative action. Mr. Connerly is no racist (he happens to be black), yet he was not even allowed to speak, the heckling got so bad.
Of course, such things as respect for the views of others doesn't apply to liberals because they are the good guys -- and laws protecting rights of free speech are there to protect the good guys from the fascists (i.e., the conservatives). I've got news for you leftwingnuts out there, when you start using force to deny others their right to free speech, you have become the new fascists.
What does it say about the affluence of the United States that we actually maintain a rapid response Coast Guard unit to combat environmental disaster on the high seas? And that it will be deployed in case Saddam Hussein attempts to dump crude in the Gulf?
I doubt many environmentalists will be singing this unit's praises, since most of them are too busy trampling and killing the grass at the latest antiwar rally.
But we're happy to point it out for our kind readers.
What a tough conclusion from Senator Biden's WaPo op-ed:
Saddam Hussein is relentlessly pursuing weapons of mass destruction, abusing his own people and making a mockery of the United Nations.Amazing. A Democrat ready to get tough on Saddam Hussein AND the UN!
Well, not quite. Here's what the Senator proposes above:
Getting to yes on a second resolution will require hard-liners in the Bush administration to do something for which they have shown little aptitude: compromise. Instead of seeking a resolution that says the game is up and war is on, we should show enough flexibility to bring the Security Council with us while keeping the pressure on Hussein. The resolution should combine points that France and others say they want -- more time for Iraq to meet specific disarmament demands -- with a bottom line that we need: a deadline and a clear commitment to use force.So a second resolution giving Saddam more time is a good idea even though Saddam is pursuing WMD, abusing his people, and thumbing his nose at the UN.We should support a new resolution that lists very specifically the tasks we believe Iraq must accomplish to show it is disarming; sets an early deadline for compliance, say the end of March; and makes clear that if Iraq does not meet the deadline, the international community will use force to disarm it.
There is a gaping logical disconnect between those two segments of Senator Biden's op-ed. I suppose there is always the possibility that parts of the op-ed were written by someone else and appropriated by the good Senator. That would at least explain the disconnect.
It seems as if John Kerry didn't want to be upstaged by his party's recent parade of idiots:
"The greatest position of strength is by exercising the best judgement in the pursuit of diplomacy," he said, "not in some trumped-up, so-called coalition of the bribed, the coerced, the bought and the extorted, but in a genuine coalition."I guess the focus groups are telling the Unserious Party that "rush to war" and "big oil" and "unilateralism" aren't resonating with enough Americans, so it's time for something new. But it's not an improvement. (link via Brothers Judd)
Who shall play Mondale in 2004? The parade continues.
Mr. Gary Hart has weighed in on American foreign policy today, in his effort to become the 2004 version of Mondale '84:
While deploying divisions to the Middle East our government has not been training and equipping police, fire and emergency health responders in the United States. [really?] While splitting the United Nations and NATO, our government has not made our vulnerable ports safer. [really?] While paying tens of billions of (deficit) tax dollars to Turkey, Yemen and other countries for basing rights in the Middle East, our president is not preparing the United States to respond to the terrorist attacks the CIA has predicted will most probably occur as a response to our preemptive invasion of a sovereign Arab nation. [really?] It is difficult to imagine that the president seriously believes an invasion of Iraq will reduce the terrorist threat to the United States. [why? he and his entire foreign policy team seem to believe it. work on your imagination, gary!]That's enough to give an idea.What is worse, our president does not trust his own people. [yep, that's it] He does not trust us enough to tell us which other nations will provide combat forces and in what numbers [I bet Tommy Franks would LOVE that!], how long our military will remain in the volatile Middle East [hard to know, unless one claims to be God] or how much the long-term military enterprise will cost in deficit tax dollars. [again, hard to know -- but "deficit tax dollars" is a clever, albeit inane, phrase] Most disturbing, our president does not trust us enough to tell us the casualty estimates for our sons and daughters and for Iraqi civilians. The Pentagon has produced low, medium and high risk estimates. The president simply chooses not to disclose them for the justifiable fear that public support for war with Iraq will erode.
Given the pattern of public deception in Vietnam....
For some reason, a fair number of people in the Democrat Party (and occasionally a prominent blogger or two) actually think Gary Hart is serious about foreign policy. These accusations above may not be as silly as, say, Howard Dean's foreign policy worldview, but they're in the neighborhood. It reads like something penned by the Nation. That's not a compliment.
And are there any Dems who aren't still living Vietnam?
I just finished watching Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean on Meet the Press this morning. I found his statements and positions were clearly revealed for what they truly are. His actions are rooted in a political ambition which drives Dean to attack the president in order to lift himself up.
Certainly, criticism and debate, even in time of war, are an important part of a functioning democracy. It's also our responsibility as citizens to analyze carefully what people are saying and why they are saying it. Not every person challenging the war is doing it for principled reasons.
Tim Russert, the host of MTP, confronted Dean with statements Dean himself had made last August when the debate about whether or not the U.S. should go through the United Nations was at its fiercest. Dean had said at that time, essentially, that the U.S. should go to the U.N. get a resolution demanding disarmament of all WMD in 60 days and should only use force if Husseain fails to disarm after time is up. Well, the U.S. did go to the U.N., passed a resolution demanding immediate and complete disarmament, and it has not done so.
It has been 120 days. Dean is still not for the use of force, saying Iraq does not have a nuclear bomb, and that's his criteria. But the direct quote Russert presented Dean with mentions WMD in general, not nuclear weapons. The Bush administration has done everything Dean demanded in August -- even more, in fact, than Dean demanded -- and he is still vociferously opposed to the President.
Similarly, on the difference between how the U.S. has handled Iraq and North Korea, he tried to sway viewers with similarly twisted logic. The problem with Iraq is that we're being "unilateral." But Russert pointed out that there are over twenty nations supporting U.S. action against Iraq, so it cannot possibly be considered unilateral, because the moment one other country joins us the action is at least bilateral and by the time twenty nations are on board the action is quite demonstrably multilateral. His response? That this was "technically" correct. Does language mean absolutely nothing to people like Dean? How can one have any meaningful discussion if words mean whatever the speaker decides they mean, at that moment?
So Dean's criticism the Bush administration's handling of Iraq is that we have been unilateral and too willing to use military force, even though this is untrue. What's his problem with how Bush has handled North Korea? Surprise! He thinks Bush's multilateral diplomatic push with other nations in the region are inadequate and he wants us to enter into unilateral talks.
His arguments on Meet the Press this morning were simply not logically consistent. He is clearly being disingenious. If you want another post-modern relativistic president who will debate the meaning of the word "is" when he's caught in a lie, then the former Democratic Governor of Vermont is clearly your man.
I hope everyone who saw that show realized that Howard Dean is simply not serious when it comes to foreign policy, and clearly not trustworthy on issues affecting the safety of the nation.
Orrin Judd has just posted what is the best two-sentence reponse to Jimmy Carter that I've ever seen:
That democracy is problematic is proven by the inexplicable fact that this flaming idiot is a former President of the United States. That this is a great nation is amply proven by the fact that we survived that presidency.(Update) Peter Schramm blasts Carter here.
Robert Novak's latest column illustrates why Republicans shall ever be known as The Stupid Party:
In a rare break of House Republican unity, GOP leaders are furious with Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas for letting the party fall into a Democratic trap.Thomas, without informing the House leadership, permitted individual Republican committee members to add their pet projects to a non-controversial bill affecting taxation of military personnel. The result was an abundance of special interest proposals that were immediately targeted by Democrats. When Thomas refused to change the bill, Speaker Dennis Hastert pulled it down Thursday afternoon and adjourned for the weekend.
Republican leaders say Thomas should have been warned when Democratic committee members disdained an offer to attach their own pet proposals to the bill.
Savvy editors should ban the phrase "rush to war."
Unfortunately, there don't seem to be that many savvy editors these days, at least not at the Washington Post:
The amended resolution requires those who oppose a rush to war to get nine "yes" votes to block it by March 17, whereas the original draft would have given opponents of military action like France and Russia a chance to veto it.This is the slowest march to war that I've seen. The phrase "rush to war" is just silly. And unserious.
I would prefer it if the White House simply revoked the press pass of OPINION COLUMNIST Helen Thomas, but I suppose the President's snub of her last night is a less draconian approach.
I've pondered before why any serious newspaper would feature a columnist like Mary McGrory (not because of her politics, but because she's a poor columnist).
After today's column, I'll ask again: why does a serious newspaper like the Washington Post feature Miss McGrory?
Comments are free, as always. :) Please enlighten me.
(Update) RealClearPolitics has posted a lengthy commentary on Mcgrory's latest.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry over this article in the Telegraph:
[A zit] may seed other gumboils, passing poisons in the bloodstream of the face, just as Saddam may well pass his weapons of mass destruction on to the agents of global terror. And then, in the final humiliation of your containment policy, the great wen of Baghdad may erupt after all, doing damage far in excess of any that might have been caused by a pre-emptive strike. That is the risk. That is the calculation. Saddam is a great acne spot on the otherwise beaming face of the earth, and it is time he was squeezed.Somehow one expects better from a statesman and writer in the nation that gave us the Bard, whether this is intended as irony or not.
Good gawd. That's really just dreadful.
(03-06-03 Update) John Derbyshire concurs.
For whatever reason, Senator Lieberman excites some sensible Democrats because he occasionally seems less wacky than other members of his party on foreign affairs.
But Senator Lieberman's chief problem is that most of what excites sensible Democrats must be tempered and twisted so that it does not offend the rest of his party. And so the result can be convolutions such as the following:
Lieberman joined with Republican Sen. John McCain in introducing a resolution passed by Congress last year authorizing Bush to move militarily against Iraq after he seeking initial United Nations approval.So, the United States is viewed as a "greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein" because Bush may move against Iraq, yet Mr. Lieberman voted for a resolution authorizing the President to do just that. He finds international public opinion polls "outrageously wrong" but thinks it's the fault of Bush foreign policy -- the main driver of said opinion being the plan for war against Iraq, which Mr. Lieberman voted to authorize.Yet, Lieberman on Thursday night had this cutting criticism of Bush:
“When more people around the world see the American President as a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein, then you known something is really wrong with our foreign policy.”
Yesterday, Lieberman explained that his comment was based on several international public opinion polls.
He said he found such poll results “astounding,” and quickly added, “Obviously, I believe that is outrageously wrong. But the fact that people elsewhere in world reach that conclusion shows how inferior, overall, the Bush foreign policy has been.”
But Senator Lieberman also seems to think that world public opinion is largely driven by the Administration's position on Kyoto and missile defense:
On a broad range of issues, “Too often he and his administration have sent a ‘go-it-alone’ message,” Lieberman said. “They’re saying, ‘We know what’s best for the world. We’re not going to listen to you when you ask us to listen to you on things like global warming and arms control treaties. But we’re going to come to you and ask you to vote with us on Iraq even though you don’t feel as strongly about it as we do.’Good move for Senator Lieberman, working the Kyoto and Missile Defense issues. That should endear him to liberals everywhere (if only he could have worked in a pro-abortion reference!). Kyoto, of course, would have made the U.S. much less competitive economically, which no doubt would have pleased some world powers, but that is hardly a sensible guide for the conduct of American foreign policy. And the only nation truly affected by the American pullout from the ABM Treaty -- Russia -- hardly raised a whimper. In other words, Senator Lieberman's critique really isn't convincing.
Senator Lieberman is regarded as one of his party's more serious foreign policy voices. Indeed, it's one of his main selling points in his presidential run. But since he IS running for President, he has to find some way to appeal to the liberal base of his party, who despise President Bush in much the same manner as they despised Ronald Reagan. And so the result is these convoluted outbursts of "The President is right here, but [insert liberal wackiness]." Clumsy.
Really, Mr. Lieberman could learn from the junior Senator from New York.
Neither General Wesley Clark nor Senator Bob Graham has a great chance at winning the Dem Presidential nomination, since their claims would be staked largely on foreign policy positions eschewed by their party (and, in Graham's case, at least one position has taken a hit of late).
But look who has become a pro-Bush Democrat hawk all of a sudden? None other than one Hillary Rodham Clinton:
"Sen. Clinton fully supports the steps the president has taken to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction," said Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines.The story also reports that Senator Clinton has come to this view quite recently:
A month ago, she sent a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell charging that the Bush administration wasn't sharing enough intelligence to support the work of U.N. weapons inspectors.Senator Clinton almost certainly has to be looking at the Democrat field of Twiddledee, Twiddledum, and assorted other political midgets, and at least thinking of making a bid for the nomination -- which she would almost certainly win. And she may be the one Democrat who can embrace the President (albeit in a slippery manner) on foreign policy without agitating her base of liberal voters. Indeed, it may well be Senator Clinton's best bridge to moderate voters."If we are truly serious about supporting the U.N. inspections, we should increase our intelligence support to the inspectors," said the letter.
She may well decide to sit this one out and wait for 2008. But I'll give her credit for a nice job of political positioning for a possible 2004 run.
(03-05-03 Update) R. Emmett Tyrrell concludes Senator Clinton is running as well.
(03-05-03 Update 2) More on this topic in today's WaPo.
Here's one in Orrin Judd's tradition of You Don't Even Need To Read Past The Headline:
U.S. Toils On but Appears Increasingly Alone (LA Times)
Democrats who actually have a clue about foreign policy keep touting General Wesley Clark and Senator Bob Graham as potential presidential candidates who can shore up their weaknesses in foreign policy, and perhaps even run to the right of President Bush.
I pointed out some difficulties with potential candidate Clark a while back. Today, Rich Lowry points out that Senator Graham's foreign policy credibility just took a bit of a hit over the weekend.
Still, he may be the best the Dems have to offer. I mean, this is the party that recycles people like Walter Mondale... and maybe Gary Hart.
Rajan Menon argues in today's LA Times that the coming world order will be one that is absent alliances. I'm sympathetic to parts of his argument, and he is certainly correct when he suggests that NATO has become an alliance without a purpose:
The bickering in NATO is not just a tiff over Saddam Hussein. Nor, as Robert Kagan claims in his celebrated article-turned-book, does it stem from the dissonance between European pacifism and American realism. NATO is endangered because the disintegration of the Soviet Union has robbed it of a clear and common enemy and an unambiguous purpose.That could have come straight from Spykman or MacKinder, who don't seem to be much read these days unfortunately, and it's hard to dispute.
But surely Menon paints too broadly. Yes, NATO will diminish in importance as a collective security organization and will, almost certainly, die in the near future. And other such broadly conceived security alliances may also die. But surely trade alliances among like-minded democratic regimes will be a major component of the coming world order, and we are already seeing the emergence of smaller, informal alliances of free nations in the war against terror. Those are the sorts of alliances that are likely to emerge in the coming years, and to become more formal (but not necessarily large and unwieldy). That's not exactly the death of all alliances, as Menon suggests, but it surely will mean the U.S. will have to rethink some of its approach to foreign policy (as Menon rightly concludes).
I might have some respect for the so-called "human shields" in Iraq if they had decided to stick to their position, as a matter of principle, and damn the consequences.
But the Telegraph reports today that they've decided to go home, because it's just too dangerous (wars sometimes are!):
Almost all of the first British "human shields" to go to Iraq were on their way home last night after deciding that their much-heralded task was now too dangerous.Now that they've made themselves feel better and gotten lots of press, these selfish hypocrites can now go back to their very comfortable and free lives, a circumstance denied by the tyrant of Iraq to his own citizens. Nice.
Two red double-decker buses, which symbolised the hopes of anti-war activists when they arrived to a fanfare of publicity a fortnight ago, slipped quietly out of Baghdad on the long journey back to Britain.
Nine of the original 11 activists decided to pull out after being given an ultimatum by Iraqi officials to station themselves at targets likely to be bombed in a war or leave the country.
For those who are interested, here's more of a profile of these nitwits.
The Claremont Institute is now accepting applications for its Publius Fellows Program. The length of tenure has varied over the years, but essentially the program brings out a handful of students (some grad, some undergrad) interested in political philosophy and public writing for several weeks, and puts on a number of intense seminars in political philosophy and political journalism.
Yours truly was a 1996 Publius Fellow, and it was an incredible experience. I worked with some fine scholars (Harry Jaffa, Tom West, Charles Kesler, Larry Arnn, and more) and had a great time. And it's not all dry seminars -- there's plenty of consumption of martinis and other fine drinks, not to mention occasional roadtrips and outings.
I highly recommend it.
The capture of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed is one of the the most important victories yet in the war against terror, maybe more important in the war against Al Qaeda than the likely killing of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. This guy was one dangerous man, as this Fox News profile gets at (alas, the Financial Times did a great profile last weekend entitled "The CEO of Al Qaeda" but it is only available to subscribers now).
There are a couple of important points to be made. First, if the Bush Administration were the unilateralist bully that so many leftist critics make it out to be, this capture may never have taken place; there was likely some serious diplomacy behind the scenes, and it likely involved a number of world players. And this Administration pulled it off adroitly (unlike, say, the Clinton Administration when it had a chance to nail Osama bin Laden himself). Second, it illustrates that the coming war against Iraq is not a "distraction" from the war on terror; rather, it is simply another front.
The CIA and other agencies took a lot of (mostly unfair, uninformed) criticism for not "preventing" 11 September. They may have just prevented another one, and deserve a lot of credit.
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