Category Archives: Afghanistan

More on defeat of vouchers

Here’s the AP story on what happened. As I said before, dramatic stuff. It was truly a case of Capt. Smith of the 218th Brigade to the rescue of public schools:

{BC-SOU-XGR-Legislator-Guardsman, 1st Ld-Writethru,0321}
{SC legislator, Guardsman on leave from training casts key vote}
{Eds: Will be updated.}
{AP Photos SCMC101-103}
{By SEANNA ADCOX}=
{Associated Press Writer}=
   COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) – A proposal that would help parents pay for private school tuition with public money was defeated Thursday by South Carolina lawmakers, the third consecutive year the idea has failed.
   The effort to defeat the plan was energized by a House legislator who flew home from Army National Guard training to argue against the proposal.
Captsmith   Army Capt. James Smith, on leave from Fort Riley, Kansas, told colleagues that voters decided in November they didn’t want school vouchers when they elected a Democrat to head the Education Department.
   Smith, a Democrat, is set to deploy to Afghanistan in a couple of months.
   "I’m here solely for the voucher vote," he said.
   Smith said he told his battalion commander Lt. Col. John Nagl that it was an important vote and was granted a day’s leave.
   "He said he didn’t want to stand in the way of Democracy," Smith said at the Statehouse, where he was flanked by his 11-year-old son, Thomas.
   House Minority Leader Harry Ott said he called Smith on Wednesday after Republicans proposed a plan that would allow students to transfer to private schools. The idea came as legislators debated a proposal to let parents enroll their children in any public school regardless of attendance lines.
   "I said, ‘Get home. We need your vote,"’ Ott, D-St. Matthews, said he told Smith.
   Smith told colleagues that when voters chose Education Superintendent Jim Rex – the only Democrat elected to statewide office – it showed they did not want public money going to private schools. Rex wants to give parents more choice by allowing them to send their student to any public school.
   Advocates of private school choice thought they had the votes Wednesday night, but Smith’s presence likely renewed Democrats’ efforts, said Denver Merrill, spokesman for South Carolinians for Responsible Government.
   "We’re inching along, and we’re not going anywhere," Merrill said.

The libertarian impulse doesn’t stand up all that well in the face of a
man so willing to lay his life on the line for the greater good. That’s
just a little too much moral force, I guess.

Vouchers dead, too — for now

Apparently, efforts to use our tax funds for private schooling have failed again, in a dramatic series of events this morning. I don’t have all the facts yet, but it seems that the following have happened:

A lot of big-time good news happening very quickly. More as I’m able to get to it.

The UNembargoed news

Guardharrell

Here’s the plan the Speaker unveiled today for helping our troops stranded in Mississippi. I provide it both as a Word file, for neat freaks, and in messy cut-and-paste text — for Cindi, who doesn’t believe in links:

Office of the Speaker
SOUTH CAROLINA HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                            Contact: Greg Foster
March 8, 2007                                                    (803) 734-3125
       [email protected]

Businesses to bring troops home to visit family
Speaker Harrell, S.C. Chamber and many others vow to make this possible

(Columbia, S.C.) – Today the Speaker of the House Bobby Harrell along with members of the House Republican Caucus, South Carolina Chamber of Commerce and business leaders stood together at state’s Veterans Monument to pledge their support to bring our troops home to visit their families before being deployed to Afghanistan.

Our Guardsmen have been granted a 10-day leave to visit their families before their deployment in late April, but have not been provided with any transportation home.

Speaker Harrell said, “Our troops are leaving to go overseas to fight and protect the freedom all South Carolinians enjoy.  Our state needs to come together and thank them for their service by helping them come home to see their families before they leave on their mission.”  Speaker Harrell continued, “I want to thank Rep. Mick Mulvaney for advocating this just cause, and the South Carolina Chamber and our business community for pledging their support to make this happen.”

The South Carolina Chamber of Commerce is helping to raise money among our business community to go towards the Defenders of Freedom Fund.  Speaker Harrell also opened the fund to personal donations by donating $500 to the fund.  The fund will help provide bus transportation for any soldier wishing to return home during their leave. 

“Members of the South Carolina National Guard and others who serve in the military are the heart and soul of our state.  They are here for businesses and communities when disasters strike.  And they are risking their lives to fight in the war on terror for the future of our nation. The South Carolina Chamber is asking other businesses and community organizations to join us in bringing our troops home to visit their families before their deployment overseas,” said S. Hunter Howard, Jr., president and chief executive officer of the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce.

The Chamber has been instrumental in getting organizations like the S.C. Realtors, S.C. Trucking Association, S.C. Manufacturing Alliance, S.C. Farm Bureau, S.C. Home Builders Association, Association of General Contractors and the Greenville, Spartanburg and Greer Chamber of Commerce to step up and join this cause.  We hope many other organizations and businesses around our state will also take this initiative to assist our troops.

Please make all checks payable to the Defenders of Freedom Fund c/o Bobby Harrell, 8316 Rivers Avenue   Charleston, SC 29406. 

# # #

And this time, I’m not even breaking the rules.

Pols to weigh in to help troops

More good news for the troops in Mississippi. I just got this advisory:

Office of the Speaker
SOUTH CAROLINA HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

EMBARGOED UNTIL: March 8, 2007                     
Contact: Greg Foster
March 7, 2007                           
(803) 734-3125
[email protected]

Media Advisory
Speaker Harrell, Rep. Mulvaney, S.C. Chamber of Commerce and others pledge to give S.C. Guard transportation home

(Columbia, S.C.) – Recently 1,600 S.C. National Guard troops in Camp Shelby, Mississippi were granted a 10-day leave in early April before their deployment to Afghanistan.  They were granted leave to visit their families one last time before being deployed, but were not given access to transportation.  Speaker Harrell and others will announce in a press conference their intentions to aid our troops in their efforts to come home. 

    Who:  Speaker Harrell, Rep. Mick Mulvaney, other members of the House Republican Caucus, South Carolina Chamber of Commerce and business leaders from across our  state

    When:  March 8, 2007 at 12:40

    Where:  Veterans Monument on State House Grounds.  West side of State House on Assembly Street.

    What:  Speaker Harrell and the business community pledge to help to bring our troops home to visit their family before being deployed for Afghanistan.

This follows on the good news that Rusty shared with us the other day:

Brad–I checked with the Guard and they have about 800 coming home.
Some opted not to do so having already gone through that wrenching
good-by more than a month ago. According to information I received from
HQ, for those few who might have some difficulty paying for the trip
home, "the National Guard Assn. of SC in conjuction with the 218th
Family Readiness Group has established a program to assist in the
funding of family and soldier relief programs for the 218th. This will
include assisting soldiers who have chosen to return to SC with their
travel. This program and funding will also be used to help soldiers’
families at home as needed during the deployment. The S.C. National
Guard has assisted the National Guard Assn. of S. C. with arranging
round trip charter bus transportation from Camp Shelby to S. C. at a
cost of $110 per soldier. Anyone wishing to donate funds to the
National Guard Association of S. C. Family Readiness program can send
checks payable to the ‘SCNG Family Program’ to: National Guard Assn. of
S. C.
1 National Guard Road
Stop # 36
Columbia, SC 29201
Attn: Cindy Watson (803-254-8456)

Rusty’s going to send them a check for future help. I will, too. Others who had offered earlier might want to consider channeling their generosity to this route.

Send a soldier home

We’ve got soldiers training in Mississippi who are going on leave before heading to Afghanistan, and The State has reported that some of them can’t afford to get home to South Carolina.

Some suggest that the military should pay their way. I don’t see how (although, as I said before, if that’s more normal than it sounds, I’d like to know about it).

bud says we should help them out. I agree. I’ll kick in if anybody else will. I mean, I’ll kick in anyway, but I think we need a mechanism: I certainly don’t know where to send the money.

So write in with your pledges, and I’ll contact the Guard, and see if they’ll supply us with a conduit. Don’t send money to me; my wife doesn’t even trust me with the family checkbook. We’ll give it to somebody responsible.

But first, I need to be able to say to the officer in charge: "We want to give X amount," so that it will be worth their while to bother with us.

Or maybe there’s a better way to do this. Suggestions? Pledges? Let’s get on the ball with this.

Biloxi (or thereabouts) Blues

Help me here, because I really don’t know, but is there a precedent for the military giving a brigade a free ride to wherever it goes on leave? Is that normal? Maybe there is. But if not, why would anyone expect it?

I realize that a soldier or sailor here or there might catch a ride on a transport plane on a standby basis, or back in the day, he might have been able to catch a troop train going in the right direction.

And there is a long-standing tradition that uniformed service personnel get priority treatment at airports, train stations, etc. At least, there used to be — I don’t hear much about that any more when I travel. Airlines seem more concerned about their first-class passengers.

But the military providing a free ride for a whole brigade? Where does that expectation come from? Is this a departure, or the norm?

Anyway, if it’s a widespread problem that soldiers can’t get home on leave, that would be an excellent charity for those of us in the private sector to kick in for, as the story suggests. But if the Army has the money, I’d rather see it going to bullets and body armor.

Out with the UnParty, in with ENERGY!

Nobody’s proposing a comprehensive energy plan, so I guess we’ll have to do it ourselves.

I’ve had this idea percolating lately that I wanted to develop fully before tossing it out. Maybe do a column on it first, roll it out on a Sunday with lots of fanfare. But hey, the situation calls for action, not hoopla.

So here’s the idea (we’ll refine is as we go along):

Reinvent the Unparty as the Energy Party. Not the Green Party — it’s not just about the environment — but a serious energy party. Go all the way, get real, make like we actually know there’s a war going on. Do the stuff that neither the GOP nor the Dems would ever do:

  • Jack up CAFE standards.
  • Put about a $2 per gallon tax on gasoline.
  • Spend the tax proceeds on a Manhattan project on clean, alternative energy (hydrogen, bio, wind, whatever), and on public transportation (especially light rail).
  • Reduce speed limits everywhere to no more than 55 mph. (This must be credited to Samuel Tenenbaum, who bent my ear about it yet again this morning, and apparently does the same to every presidential wannabe who calls his house looking for him or Inez).
  • ENFORCE the damn’ speed limits. If states say they can’t, give them the resources out of the gas tax money.
  • Build nuclear power plants as fast as we can (safely, of course).
  • Either ban SUVs for everyone who can’t demonstrate a life-or-death need to drive one, or tax them at 100 percent of the sales price and throw THAT into the win-the-war kitty.
  • If we go the tax route on SUVs (rather than banning), launch a huge propaganda campaign along the lines of "Loose Lips Sink Ships" (for instance, "Hummers are Osama’s Panzer Corps"). Make wasting fuel the next smoking or DUI — absolutely socially unacceptable.
  • Because it will be a few years before we can be completely free of petrol, drill the ever-lovin’ slush out of the ANWR, explore for oil off Myrtle Beach, and build refinery capacity — all for a limited time of 20 years. Put the limit in the Constitution.

You get the idea. Respect no one’s sacred cows, left or right; go all-out to win the war and, in the long run, save the Earth. Pretty soon, tyrants from Tehran to Moscow to Caracas will be tumbling down without our saying so much as "boo" to them, and global warming will slow within our lifetimes.

THEN, once we’ve done all that, we can start insisting upon some common sense on entitlements, and health care. Change the name to the Pragmatic Party then. Whatever works, whatever is practical, whatever solves our problems — no matter whose ox gets gored. Leave the ideologues in the dust, while we solve the problems.

How’s that sound? Can any of y’all get behind that?

The Friday Freakley briefing

Freakley

This is an altogether different sort of release, but I thought I’d vary up the mix. It’s very long, so I’ll just give you the link to the Web version, with this excerpt to give you an idea of the flavor:

"Progress quietly proceeds here in Afghanistan, and we see in this both counterinsurgency and in development.Reporting acts of violence continues to make news in the United States, but significant good news are often overlooked.The Taliban have not achieved any of their objectives in the last year, and by contrast the Afghan government, the international community has worked on infrastructure, getting more Afghans to work, more children into schools and expanding the government."

Those are the words of Maj. Gen. Benjamin Freakley, speaking to a Washington press briefing from Afghanistan, where he is the commander of the Combined Joint Task Force-76 and commanding general, 10th Mountain Division.

Draft column

Why doesn’t Uncle Sam want me?
Or you, for that matter

   

It was the first American army and an army of everyone, men of every size and shape and makeup, different colors, different nationalities, different ways of talking, and all degrees of physical condition. Many were missing teeth or fingers, pitted by smallpox or scarred by past wars or the all-too-common hazards of life and toil in the eighteenth century.

1776, by David McCullough

My first ambition in life was to be a United States Marine. I was 3 or 4 years old and we lived in Columbia, where my Dad — a career naval officer — was doing a brief tour at the local recruiting depot. I guess the posters made an impression.
    The aspiration never went away, even as I moved on to more achievable goals. I learned that neither the Corps nor the Army nor any other service would take me. They had this thing about people with asthma.
    I accepted it, but couldn’t help thinking, “There’s got to be some way they could use me.”
But no. As long as there was a Selective Service, there was a huge supply of young guys with no black marks on their medical histories. And in the initial decades after the draft ended, the nation’s military needs were met by volunteers.
    But not any more.
    Today, the Army and the Marine Corps need recruits. The Army has increased the maximum age to 42. Not high enough for me, but it’s a start.
    The Washington Post reported just last week that the services plan to ask new Defense Secretary Robert Gates for 30,000 more soldiers and three more Marine battalions. Unlike his predecessor, he might actually say “yes.”
    But where’s he going to get them? Here’s one place:
    The Post reported that in addition to seeking those regulars, “the Army will press hard for ‘full access’ to the 346,000-strong Army National Guard and the 196,000-strong Army Reserves by asking Gates to take the politically sensitive step of easing the Pentagon restrictions on the frequency and duration of involuntary call-ups for reservists, according to two senior Army officials.”
    The post-Vietnam military has been highly resistant to the idea of a draft. Draftees are harder to motivate, train and rely on than volunteers. A positive attitude counts for a lot under combat conditions. But what do you call “involuntary call-ups” if not a draft? Some of those people are older than I am, and some are in worse physical condition.
    Sure, they’re much less likely to complain about being called up, since they volunteered originally. I realize that they are already trained, and generally more experienced than the regulars. I understand that veterans tend to be more valuable in combat than green troops. Experience counts in everything.
    But it’s wrong to keep asking the same brave people to give and give and give until they’ve got nothing left. It’s even more wrong that the rest of us haven’t been asked to do anything.
    Sen. Joe Biden has this speech that I’ve heard three or four times now about how George W. Bush’s greatest failing as president is the opportunity he threw away in 2001. On Sept. 12, he could have asked us to change our lives so that we could be independent of the oil-producing thugs that finance terrorism. We would have done it gladly.
    But we weren’t asked to do that. We were given a free pass while our very best bled and died in our behalf. We weren’t even asked to buy war bonds. To our everlasting shame, we opted for the opposite — we got tax cuts, even as our troops went without the equipment and the reinforcements needed to do the job.
    Personally, I think we should have a draft, and not for Rep. Charles Rangel’s reasons. He seems to think that if more people were subject to a draft, we’d have no wars. I think we ought to have a draft for the simple reason that citizenship ought to cost something. We scorn illegal aliens who risk their lives crossing the desert to come here and do our menial labor, but the rest of us are citizens why — because we were born here? How is that fair?
    We ought to have a draft, but not like the one we had when I was a kid. We need a universal draft, one that will find a use for every man (I wouldn’t draft women, but we can argue about that later).
    Set aside for a moment (but not for long) our immediate, urgent need for a lot more boots on the ground. Even in peacetime, veterans make better citizens, and better leaders. The last generation of leaders had the experience of World War II in common, and we were better off for it. They understood that they were Americans first, and that it was possible to work with people who didn’t think the way they did. They knew citizenship was a precious thing, and they appreciated it as a result. How many people in the top echelons of politics — or the media, for that matter — have that kind of understanding to that degree? Far too few.
    If we’re not going to have a draft, why not let more people who actually want to serve do so, at least in some capacity? Sure, I’m 53 and I take five different drugs to keep me breathing, but fitness is relative — my pulse, blood pressure and cholesterol are all great, and I can do 30 push-ups. Try me.
    A postscript: It reads like I’m setting myself up as far braver than Bill Clinton and his ilk. I don’t mean to. If I had been healthier when I was younger, I might have been the biggest coward in Ontario. If the Army were taking 53-year-olds today, I might shut up. I have no idea. All I can do is write what I actually think, as I actually am.
    And what I think is that more of us have to get off the sidelines and do something to help fight this war, which is going to go on for a long, long time, no matter what happens in Iraq.

Meanwhile, out in the real world

Wright_smith_good_to_go72                Wright & Smith — Good to Go

While the rest of us sit around arguing about the war on terror — or worse, ignoring it altogether as we Pci_80lbs_ruck_plus_iba_lbe_m4_kevlar_an_1dive into our own navels and gripe about our taxes or such — others are fighting it. Or getting ready to.

Rep. James Smith of Columbia was a JAG officer in the National Guard with the rank of captain, but he didn’t think that was doing enough. So a couple of years back, he started agitating for a transfer to the infantry. His entreaties were rebuffed. He bucked it up to Washington before someone told him fine, you can do that — as long as you give up your commission and start over as an enlisted man.

He took the dare, underwent basic, and eventually went to officer school on the way to regaining his former rank.Sleep_weapons_cleaning72 He has spent this summer undergoing specialized, intense infantry training for officers at Fort Benning. He graduates today. His unit is scheduled to go to Afghanistan in a few months.

In celebration, he sent a few folks pictures from his training course. I’m proud to share them with you. I’m even prouder to know James. He’s what I want to be when I grow up.

Here they are:

Waitin_for_sun_to_go_down_before_mission

Waiting for the sun to go down before mission.

Our_ride_to_the_fight72Ch53_lift_off72Smith_de_la_garza72Waitin_on_pizza_at_laaf72

Instead, we get THIS insanity

I had my previous post fresh in my mind when I read about this pandering insanity. For those of you too lazy to follow links, here’s the gist:

WASHINGTON, April 25 — President Bush announced a series of short-term steps on Tuesday intended to ease the rise in energy prices, including a suspension of Bushoilgovernment purchases to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a relaxation of environmental rules for the formulation of gasoline and investigations into possible price gouging and price fixing.

This is as bad as when Al Gore got Bill Clinton to loosen up reserves to help him get elected in 2000.

I say "as bad as" because I can’t quite decide which is worse: For a president at war in the Mideast to do this, or for a guy who pretends to care about the environment and sensible energy policy to do it in peacetime. Each action has its own loathsome qualities.

Rationing? Even better

Gas1"Look!" wrote my colleague Mike Fitts in an e-mail yesterday. "– an idea even less popular than your huge gas tax hike!"

"And even better, in my book," I wrote back.

He was referring to this letter on today’s page:

After reading Mike Fitts’ excellent column, (“U.S. helping to keep
oil prices marching upward,” Friday) on the woeful consequences, both
economic and diplomatic, of rising oil prices and of the inevitable oil
shortages to come, I’d like to put another option on the table: oil
rationing, which could bring a variety of benefits.

Many lament the fact that the only ones called upon to sacrifice in
this time of war are those on the front lines (and their families).
Rationing gas would call on everyone to sacrifice, just as during World
War II, when we all had ration cards, not only for oil but for many
other of life’s necessities such as meat, clothing and tires.

Fitts tells us that demand for fuel keeps going up, despite the
steadily rising price, which means leaving it to the market to control
supply and demand isn’t working. So perhaps only the government can
bring this control.

Fitts also points out that since our country consumes 25 percent of
the world’s oil, we can’t lecture other countries on the need to
conserve. But we can lead by example.

Rationing could give us some short-term breathing space as we labor
to find alternatives for the long haul. Yes, it is a political hot
potato, but isn’t it time to at least bring it to the table for
discussion?

HARRIET KEYSERLING
Beaufort

Mike was also referring to my enthusiasm for the idea floated by such disparate voices as Charles Krauthammer, Tom Friedman and Jim Hoagland, advocating a huge increase in the federal gas tax to take the already uncomfortably high gasoline pump prices high enough to depress demand. This would in turn create an oversupply, driving down prices. But (at least in the variant I like), you’d keep the tax rate up and use it additional for such sensible things as reducing the deficit, paying for a Manhattan/Apollo-style project to find and develop viable alternatives to petroleum, and pay for other aspects of our underfunded war — you know, like, put enough troops into Iraq and Afghanistan to get the job done. And note that I call military operations "other aspects" of the war. Reducing our energy dependence and taming deficits are as important to our strategic position as our ability to project force.

Oh, yes: Krauthammer would use the revenue to cut some other tax. But he has to say that; he’s a neocon.

Former Rep. Keyserling’s idea is even better in one respect — everyone would share the pain. With a high tax, the rich would keep on driving Hummers, and the poor would have a lot of trouble getting to work. The main benefit would occur among the middle class, who would make the choice of driving less and, when they bought a car, buying a much more fuel-efficient one. With rationing, everyone would be limited in their consumption. And it would be a more overt, deliberate way of saying, "We’re all in this together, and we’re doing something about it together," rather than letting the market pressure of high prices sort things out.

But then, it wouldn’t produce the revenue. So I qualify my flippant remark to Mike: The higher tax still might be better.

Rummy column

A generals’ revolt may be ugly,
but who else has the credibility?

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
SO YOU WANT to impeach President Bush?
    Well, for the first time, I can see one way that ditching him might be helpful, and not hugely destructive, to a nation at war:
    It would put Dick Cheney in charge, and he might have what it takes to fire Donald Rumsfeld.
    Sure, they are old comrades and longtime Bush family retainers, and the family’s loyalty fetish has mutated in this generation to the point that it is valued above the good of the nation. But they are not Bushes by blood, and Mr. Cheney would as soon shoot a pal in the face as look at him.
    OK, yes, I’m being facetious — about the veep and about impeachment. But serious and likely solutions are scarce right now.
    The secretary of defense must go. He should have gone two years ago (as this editorial board said at the time). He went into Iraq with no realistic idea of how to secure the country after the inevitable collapse of the Iraqi army, and hasn’t learned a lesson yet.
    Our troops adapt constantly to their adversary’s changing tactics. But Mr. Rumsfeld is too smartRumsfeldhubris to learn anything. Just ask him; he’ll tell you. If he doesn’t say it out loud, he’ll say it with the set of his stony jaw, the swagger of his shoulders even standing still, the contempt in his aquiline eyes.
    You want to talk hubris? Robert McNamara had an inferiority complex next to this guy.
    His attitude has always alienated at least half the nation, and pretty much all of our allies. His decisions, his actions and his inactions have alienated many others, including those (like me) who believe completely in our nation’s mission in Iraq, and are sick of watching him screw it up.
    His abstract notions of the proper size and shape of the military do not yield to battlefield realities — or to anything else. Sure, he’s right about some things, such as the wisdom of leveraging our exponential advantage in technology and the expansion of Special Forces and other light, flexible elements. But if only he were one-tenth as flexible as a Navy SEAL, or an Army Ranger, or a typical Marine.
    But light and high-tech isn’t a slice of the pizza to him; it’s the whole pie. Special ops, precision-guided weapons and air superiority are critically important. But so is securing the country after the battle — sealing potentially hostile (i.e., Syrian) borders, guarding ammo dumps, placing MPs at every important crossroads and on and on (your know, all those low-tech tasks we performed so well across Europe in 1944-45).
    This administration went into office promising not to engage in any nation-building, and although that policy ostensibly changed after 9/11, “Rummy” still acts as though he aims to keep the promise. That Iraq has come as far as it has is a testament to the dedication of American troops, and the courage of ordinary Iraqis. (Ironic, isn’t it? In Iraq, civilians risk their very lives for democracy; in America, it’s only our heartbreakingly few young people who serve in uniform. The rest of us get tax cuts and whine about fuel prices that are still lower than in most of the world.)
    But isn’t this just more of the ranting from “the anti-war left” that Charles Krauthammer was decrying the other day? He appropriately highlighted the fact that anti-war types who never before trusted anyone wearing stars are suddenly greeting the dissent of six retired generals as wisdom from on high.
    Well, you got me, Charles.
    Except that I have never been “anti-war” by any conventional political application of the term. (I’m ticked that the military isn’t big enough to credibly threaten Iran or protect Darfur.)
    Except that we endorsed George Bush twice. (Although I’m still appalled that the major parties didn’t offer us a better choice.)
    Except that I embrace the outlook of real conservatives (such as Lindsey Graham and John McCain, who had to force this administration to remember how the good guys are supposed to treat prisoners).
    And so forth.
    Look, I’m not any happier than Mr. Krauthammer to see six men who have recently worn the uniform speak against civilian leadership. But in an environment in which civilian criticism is dismissed as coming from the “other side,” ex-military officers may be the only ones with the neutrality to lift us out of the partisan mire. They are credible because they have shunned politics.
    Still, speaking up has to feel to them like breaking the code. It all makes for an unseemly spectacle — their broken silence, the media rush to ask other generals what they think, and the Rumsfeld defenders’ rush to point out commanders who support the official line. Generals shouldn’t have had to do this. But we needed someone with standing to do it.
    You say you like Rummy? Well, early in this war, I enjoyed him, too. I liked his unapologetic, we’re-gonna-do-what-it-takes demeanor. I even took guilty pleasure in the “old Europe” crack, even though I could see it was strategically harmful.
    But over time, it got to where it just wasn’t cute anymore. I didn’t see pride in country; I just saw pride. He’s got to go.

Sunday’s Iraq war column

Iraq_mosque_1

Iraq: Why we’re there,
why we must stay

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
I WAS BRIEFLY taken aback when a colleague reminded me that we were coming up on the third anniversary of “the war.”
    I thought we passed the fourth one last September. Within days after 9/11, I turned a file drawer over to “War,” and started filling it with articles, maps, photos and other items relating to “Afghanistan,” “Arabs,” “Britain,” “Bush,” “Civil Liberties,” “Iraq,” “Islam,” “Mideast,” etc. In my e-mail files, there are 27 folders under “War.” “Iraq” is but one.
    Then I realized the other editor meant the Iraq campaign, dating from the 2003 invasion. I felt pretty thick. That was a huge milestone, worth addressing prominently. This war’s heaviest fighting,Antiwar2jpgpart and America’s greatest losses (since the one-day losses of 9/11), have been on that front. So last Sunday’s editorial took stock of where Iraq stands, three years on.
    Today, after seeing, hearing and reading an avalanche of commemorative rhetoric from all sides, I address it again.

Lever of change
    The war that began on 9/11/01 — that is, the long, asymmetrical war on the West that we Americans first fully recognized that day — was one we did not choose.
    Maybe that’s why we had neglected for so long to connect the dots between the USS Cole and Al-Qaida, Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden, bin Laden and our retreat from Somalia, Somalia and poverty, poverty and tyranny, oil and U.S. support for oppressive regimes, those regimes and radical Islam, Islamists and terror.
    The invasion of Iraq, as a critical element of this war, was a fight that we chose, as critics keepIraq_saddam saying — but only in a sense. Iraq was where we decided to insert the lever with which we would attempt to turn back half a century of Near East politics and policies.
    The fact that Iraq was the likeliest place to insert it was not our choice. It was Saddam Hussein’s. He invaded Kuwait, which caused us to lead a coalition to throw him out in 1991. He then violated, for 12 years, the terms established as the price of remaining in power. He shot at American aircraft. He defied the United Nations again in 2002, when he was told that his one chance to stay in power was full cooperation. (He also — although this is incidental to my point — was the one who paid bounties to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.)
    The United States — and Britain, Spain, Italy, Portugal, the Netherlands, Poland, Norway, Denmark (most of Europe, other than France and Germany) and about two dozen other countries — decided to take action.

About the WMD
    And yes, pretty much all of those nations, and the countries that refused to participate (publicly), Iraq_brit_1believed Saddam still had weapons of mass destruction. So did his own generals, who were counting on it. He did a wonderful impersonation of a man with something to hide, when all he was still hiding was the fact that they were gone.
    I never thought his WMD programs were the best reason to invade. I thought he had them, but I doubted they were an immediate threat. His behavior on the subject gave the coalition additional justification to take action, but it never really moved me. I preferred the other big one the Bush administration talked about in 2002 — regime change. That, too, was fully justified, by Saddam’s behavior over the previous 12 years.
    The idea, which has been iterated over and over by everyone from the president to Thomas Friedman, was to start a sort of reverse domino effect — to drop a big rock into the pond, and generate ripples of liberal democracy that would lap against, and erode, the status quo in Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Libya and, if we got lucky, maybe even Iran. That process has at least begun in every one of those places except Iran — and don’t give up on Iran.
    In some ways Iraq wasn’t the place one would choose to drop the rock. It was profoundly, violently Balkanized and, like the country that spawned that adjective, had been held together by force. But it was the one place where the reigning despot had provided justification to step in.

Why take action?
    Why drop a rock at all? Why disturb the status quo? Hadn’t we done all we could to prop it up for decades? Wasn’t that why the president’s Dad stood by and let Iraqi rebels he had stirred up be slaughtered (possibly the most shameful thing my country has done in my lifetime) — because creating a “power vacuum” in Baghdad wouldn’t be “prudent”?
    Absolutely. We had propped up an intolerable status quo in the Mideast for decades. Why? To keep the oil flowing. I am dumbfounded when a war protester says Iraq is about oil. The first Gulf War was about oil; this is about the opposite.
    This one is about knocking the oil barrel over to see if we can’t get something better thanIraq_girls_1 oppression, frustration, hatred and terrorism to flow out of it. It was never, ever going to be easy. It remains hard enough that fewer and fewer Americans see how we can succeed. The challenges do remain daunting, but enormous progress has been made — often in spite of the Bush administration’s decisions. We’ve had highly successful elections — the last one with broad Sunni support — and internal security is increasingly in Iraqi hands (which is why U.S. casualties have recently slowed).
    Does forming a new government not present a huge hurdle? It does, but no more so than challenges already met. We have made it this far in spite of never having enough troops to provide the proper level of security.
    However hard it is, we have no choice. We’ve knocked over the barrel, and we have to deal with it.

Many faults, one virtue
    President Bush drives me nuts. His refusal to transform our energy strategies to make us stronger iIraq_abu_ghraibn fighting this war is unconscionable. And don’t get me started on his undermining our international financial position, or his failure to fire Donald “We’ve got enough troops” Rumsfeld after Abu Ghraib.
    But this deeply flawed man has one saving grace: When those planes flew into those towers, he got it. He knew that this was no longer his father’s world. He still sees it all rather hazily, but he sees it. And he’s stubborn as a stone. He will not give in to ripples of panic spreading through the electorate, not even (I fervently hope) to save his own political party.
    When he pointed out last week that pulling back in Iraq would be up to future presidents, and future Iraqi governments, I could have hugged him if he’d been closer. It was about time that he said what I wrote the very week American boots hit Iraqi sand — that he had crossed his Rubicon and taken the rest of us, including his successors, with him.
    It still stuns me that people can even consider pulling out, or ask when we will pull out — this year, next year? What utter madness.

The long haul
    If we did that any time within the foreseeable future, our nation would lose all credibility. No country, including our worst critics, would believe in American resolve within our lifetimes. Nor would we. It would be much worse than our global fecklessness after Vietnam. When the day came (and it would come) that the world needed America to lead it in standing up to some obvious, World War-sized threat — say, a belligerent China or a nuclear-missile-launching Iran — no one would trust us not to leave them in the lurch. Nor should they.
    Just as bad, we would have no credibility with terrorists. When the United States ran from Somalia after losing 18 men right on the verge of accomplishing the mission, Osama bin Laden drew certain conclusions about our resolve in the face of violence. The result was 9/11. What might he, and his millions of imitators, conclude if we ran from this exponentially greater mission? What horrors would they be emboldened to unleash if we were foolish enough to think we had the power to decide when it’s over?
    We can’t leave, folks.
    Even if the insurgencies ended today, we couldn’t leave. Even if the Sunni and Shiite gunmen turned on the foreign jihadists and drove them out tomorrow, then made friends with each other the next day, we couldn’t leave. Even if the hardheaded politicians in Baghdad formed a Madisonian democracy next week, we’d have to stay. It would be a long, long time before an infant republic could keep from being devoured by Iran from the east, Turkey from the north and Syria from the west. Our republic had oceans to keep it safe until it was big and strong; Iraq doesn’t.
    As daunting as the situation is, there is only one way to be certain to lose: Give up. We’ve alreadyBush9 made this a lot harder than it has to be by showing doubt. Every American who says we shouldn’t be there makes the terrorists a bit bolder, and the would-be Iraqi democrats a bit more afraid to risk their lives on our assurances.
    From his tax cuts to his Medicare drug plan to his threat to veto anti-torture legislation, there’s not much that President Bush has to sell that I would want to buy. But I pray to God and to my fellow Americans that he succeeds in selling the product he was taking door-to-door last week. The alternatives are too horrible.

Let’s check the scoreboard again

Maybe you can help me with this. I’m having a reading comprehension problem or something. First, read these initial four paragraphs of a story at the top of the front page of today’s New York Times:

LOY KAREZ, Afghanistan — When Haji Lalai Mama, the 60-year-old tribal elder in these parts, gamely tried to organize a village defense force against the Taliban recently, he had to do it with a relative handful of men and just three rifles. "We were patrolling and ready," he recalled.
    But they were not ready enough. The Taliban surprised them under cover of darkness by using a side road. One villager was killed, and 10 others were wounded by a grenade. Two Taliban fighters were captured in the clash. The rest disappeared into the night.
    The men at Loy Karez were exceptional in making a stand at all. Few in southern Afghanistan are ready to stand up to the Taliban, at least not without greater support or benefits from the Afghan government.
    In fact, four years after the Taliban were ousted from power by the American military, their presence is bigger and more menacing than ever, say police and government officials, village elders, farmers and aid workers across southern Afghanistan.

OK, now, let’s review the facts as related about the incident with which the story leads:

  • An old Afghan man bravely decides to organize his village’s defenses against Taliban raiders. All he can muster is "a relative handful" of fighters with only three rifles among them.
  • The enemy achieves tactical surprise and outflanks the defenders.
  • When the shooting is over, the Taliban is not in possession of the village. They have apparently — and I say "apparently" because of the sketchiness of the details — been driven away, with one villager killed and 10 wounded. Two Taliban have been captured, and the rest "disappeared into the night."

So please explain to me, how is it that Haji Lalai Mama and his plucky band "were not ready enough?" It sounds to me like they were not only plenty ready, but flexible and tough. It sounds to me like they just plain outfought the Taliban. You pretty much have to overwhelm an enemy to capture two of them and run the rest off.

So it was a defeat because, before fleeing into the night like a scalded dog, one of the raiders managed to heave a grenade, killing one and wounding several others (or maybe the one killed was a separate incident; it’s hard to tell)? How do you figure? By what standard of post-battle assessment is that a defeat for the village? Sure, you don’t want to lose anybody, but come on.

For that assessment to be valid by a common sense standard, "But they were not ready enough" would have to be followed by an account of how the defenders were wiped out, their weapons taken, the village’s food stocks stolen or burned, most of the men killed, several of the women raped, and half the homes destroyed. Or something like that. Maybe the women wouldn’t have been raped, but stoned to death instead, these being religious fanatics and all. But you know what I mean.

If you don’t know what I mean, and you think that anecdote perfectly illustrates the overall problem of folks in southern Afghanistan not being "ready to stand up to the Taliban," please explain, so that I can understand, too. The overall problem may be just as the story indicates, but if so, that was a lousy anecdote to use to make the point.