Category Archives: Iraq

Hail Petraeus

Petraeus_mugA colleague brought my attention to this WashPost piece on our new commander in Iraq, Gen. David H.
Petraeus. What was particularly interesting about it was the way he recommended it to me: This colleague soured on the Iraq War long ago, but he said this guy actually offers him some hope for the first time in a while.

My eyebrows went up at that, so I read the piece as soon as I could. Even those of us who fully believe in the importance of our Iraq mission could use a little hope now and then.

Saddam shocker — or not?

Saddamhang

Well, I’m back and I just wrote an editorial for tomorrow’s paper about Saddam’s execution.

Which leaves me wondering — did you find that as shocking as I did? I mean, I knew they had said 30 days and all, but I’m used to what that means over here, which is, "You’ve got 30 days to file your motions" before an automatic stay. He was in the middle of another trial, after all, with more to come.

But to state the obvious, things are different over there. Over there, "30 days" means, "You see how the moon looks tonight? He ain’t gonna see it like that again."

Still, since everything about Iraq has been so complicated and so hard to pull off, it was sort of disorienting so see how easy it was to hang a guy.

Beyond my first question, I suppose I should also ask what you think of it — as if you wouldn’t tell me anyway. For me, it’s like this: I don’t believe in capital punishment. At the same time, I won’t mourn the loss of this particular subject. Note the ambivalent, bureaucratic word "subject." I want to make myself feel better by calling him a "monster," but I know he was a man. I also believe he was a man the world is better off without, but I’m not God, which is why I’m against capital punishment.

Of course, one makes allowances, and by Iraqi standards this is progress. For a man to be hanged by the numbers after due process with the world looking on — that’s Iraqi justice, and that’s a new thing. Now all we need is for there to be justice for the millions of folks outside the Green Zone, who deserve far better than their former leader.

This was a pretty small step in that direction. But it was a step. Ironically, after all the years of conflict over Saddam, it seemed like a footnote as we struggle with the issue of whether to keep trying to bring about a just and peaceful Iraq. Here we are moving into this enormous national conversation about what to do about Iraq, and out of nowhere comes this development.

We look briefly over our shoulders and say, "They hanged who? Saddam? Well, that was quick," and turn back to the larger debate. That’s fitting. In a more just world, Saddam would have amounted to no more than that.

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.

Why do you think YOU’RE here?

Iraqstudygroup2

At first, one is inclined to read this paragraph of the letter from the Iraq Study Group co-chairs and nod enthusiastically with a few "amens" thrown in, for contained within it is a sermon that our nation badly needs to heed:

What we recommend in this report demands a tremendous amount of political will and cooperation by the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government. It demands skillful implementation. It demands unity of effort by government agencies. And its success depends on the unity of the American people in a time of political polarization. Americans can and must enjoy the right of robust debate within a democracy. Yet U.S. foreign policy is doomed to failure — as is any course of action in Iraq — if it is not supported by a broad, sustained consensus. The aim of our report is to move our country toward such a consensus.

But then my less-impressionable, more-critical side kicks in, and I have to say:

Hey, if we had:

  • a tremendous amount of political will and cooperation by the executive
    and legislative branches of the U.S. government;
  • skillful
    implementation;
  • unity of effort by government agencies;
  • unity among the American people instead of
    political polarization; and
  • a broad, sustained consensus.

We wouldn’t need y’all to be making suggestions.

The reason everybody has overhyped the ISG report for the last couple of weeks, acting like its suggestions were going to be brought down from the mountain on stone tablets, is that we don’t HAVE any of those things.

If our country weren’t so polarized, and if our elected officials were working together — challenging each other at every step, but with the ultimate goal of the good of the nation ahead of all other considerations — the Iraq Study Group would never have been formed in the first place.

Iraq Study Group column

Consensus on an Iraq plan
that works will come a lot harder

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
THAT OLD GUARD sure can get things done — so long as you don’t expect too much.
    On the very day that the Iraq Study Group released its much-anticipated report, it produced results. Politicians from across the spectrum aligned themselves with a bipartisan unanimity that would do credit to the worthies on the study panel itself.
    “I appreciate the hard work and thought that the distinguished members of the Iraq Study Group put into their final report,” said Sen. John McCain, Republican presidential hopeful.
    “The Baker-Hamilton report is a first step toward a bipartisan way forward in Iraq,” wrote Sen. Joe Biden, a Democrat who would also like to occupy the White House.
    “I commend the Iraq Study Group for offering a serious contribution to the discussion of how we should move forward in Iraq,” concurred independent Sen. Joe Lieberman, who used to want to be president.
    The man who actually is the president couldn’t have agreed more. After noting that the report was “prepared by a distinguished panel of our fellow citizens,” George W. Bush promised it “will be taken very seriously by this administration.”
    No one could deny that the panel was distinguished. And bipartisan. And serious.
    But before we line up for the victory parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, note that few elected representatives were promising more with regard to the report than what Rep. Jim Clyburn promised: “We will use it for what it is intended to be — recommendations… .”
    Many expected the group’s report would provide cover for both the president and the newly Democratic Congress to… well, to do something, and the most popular “something” was to get us the heck out of there.
    But the release of the group’s report helped clarify again what we learned in the days after the election that many of our antsier citizens had hoped would settle this business: There is no way to conclude our involvement in Iraq that is both quick and satisfactory.
    The 10 elders on that panel brought some sorely needed qualities to the debate — collegiality, maturity, pragmatism and a sincere desire for what is best for our country. The nation will be well-served if everyone involved adopts those same virtues as the debate continues.
    And the job will be a lot tougher than the panel made it look. They labored in obscurity, left in relative peace for most of the panel’s existence — without the frantic, insistent pull of unavoidable constituent groups. Our elected officials won’t enjoy such luxury. But it is, after all, their job to do. It can’t be delegated.
    And approaches that will work will be harder to agree upon than the ones the panel adopted.
Take the widely reported proposal to draw down U.S. combat troops by early 2008 to the point that none are left except those “embedded with Iraqi forces.”
    According to The New York Times, the panel achieved the miracle of agreement on that point via a simple expedient: “The group’s final military recommendations were not discussed with the retired officers who serve on the group’s Military Senior Adviser Panel before publication, several of those officers said.”
    Advisers that the Times spoke to said the prediction is not based in reality. One noted that the panel’s assumption says more about “the absence of political will in Washington than the harsh realities in Iraq.”
    Not that the panel didn’t leave wiggle-room. Few have noted that the 142-page report actually says that “all combat brigades not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq” by the stated deadline. That’s a loophole big enough to drive several divisions through, if you can find the divisions.
    As for working with Iran and Syria, Sen. McCain exhibited his mastery of understatement when he said, “Our interests in Iraq diverge significantly from those of Damascus and Tehran.” Sen. Lieberman and others have rightly echoed that assessment.
    The panel leaders’ defense of the idea has been lame. James Baker said if Iran is uncooperative, “we will hold them up to public scrutiny as (a) rejectionist state.” Ooh. I can just see the mullahs trembling over that one.
    Lee Hamilton said, “We do not think it’s in the Iranian interest for the American policy to fail completely, and to lead to chaos in that country.” Really? It’s hard to imagine an outcome more likely to generate welcome opportunities for Tehran. A weakened, discredited United States and a power vacuum in the Shi’a-majority nation next door? They would see it as final proof that Allah is on their side.
    The fundamental truths about our involvement in Iraq have not changed. The security situation has worsened greatly, and with it the political environment back in the United States — the “absence of political will” described above by retired Army Chief of Staff Jack Keane.
    Well, we’re going to have to muster some to come up with something more realistic than the Baker-Hamilton approach, because here’s what hasn’t changed: As Sen. Lieberman put it, “There is no alternative to success in Iraq.” Sen. Graham said, “we have no alternative but to win.”
    And how are we going to accomplish that? I’m inclined to think Sen. McCain has it right when he says we need a lot more troops over there. You say it’s impossible to make that happen with our current defeatist attitude? You may be right.
    But note that on Wednesday, it was the conventional wisdom that the president and Congress had little choice but to embrace whatever the study group came up with. By Friday, many of its core proposals had been declared toast by the president, Prime Minister Tony Blair, and most of the folks quoted above.
    As unlikely as it sometimes seems, attitudes change. In this case, they’re going to have to.

Washington’s Iraq situation

Hadley

Is a stable, functioning democracy
still an option — in America?

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
THE IRAQ SITUATION has become so chaotic, such a tangled knot of irreconcilable competing factions and contradictory indications that it’s almost impossible even to know what’s really going on, much less determine what ought to happen next.
    The great moment of optimism following historic elections has faded. It’s bad enough to tempt even the most stalwart advocate of democracy to want to declare the capital city a lost cause and withdraw immediately.
    But we can’t, because we’re not talking about Baghdad, but about Washington.
    In that strife-torn city by the Potomac, it’s gotten hard to tell who wants to do what, much less what will or should happen next, or when. Confused? Well, that means you’re starting to get it.
    Look at just one development of the past week.
    On Wednesday — the eve of President Bush’s meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki — the lead story in The New York Times was headlined, “Bush Adviser’s Memo Cites Doubts about Iraqi Leader.”
    “His intentions seem good when he talks with Americans,” National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley wrote of Mr. Maliki, “But the reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action.”
    In other words, our boy either can’t deliver or won’t. Bad either way. But, insisted the “administration official” who gave the five-page memo to a Times reporter despite its being “classified secret,” the administration “retains confidence in the Iraqi leader.”
    The very fact that the memo was released the way it was and when it was (weeks after it was drafted) suggests just how difficult it will be to chart a new course for Iraq, even while everybody from newly elected Democrats to administration officials to friends of the president’s daddy are trying like crazy to find one.
    Read about the memo, and the following thoughts are likely to occur in quick succession:
    Oh, there goes The New York Times again, undermining the nation’s ability to act effectively in a time of war by revealing critical secrets at critical moments. No, wait — this looks like an authorized, carefully spun leak. So the administration deliberately put it out there just as the president is about to meet with this guy to tell him he’s doing a heckuva job.
    Little wonder Mr. Maliki canceled the first of his scheduled sessions with the president. He has no more confidence in our friendship than we do in his.
    Obviously, the administration doesn’t know what to do next. But it’s hardly alone. Nobody else seems to know either (except the folks in the “pull-out-now” wing, whom you can watch get increasingly furious over the coming weeks as they realize that the Democrats who won the election aren’t that irresponsible).
    The incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee doesn’t know, although he insisted to the Columbia Rotary Club last week that he’s the one guy who does know.
Joe Biden told of confidently laying down the law to Mr. Bush:
    “Mr. President… if the Lord Almighty came down in the middle of the table here in the RooseveltPhoto_112706_001
Room, and looked you in the eye and said, ‘Mr. President, every single jihadi, every single member of al Qaida has been wiped off the face of the earth,’ Mr. President, you’d still have a full-blown war. A full-blown war. In Iraq. And it’s a civil war, Mr. President. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will not be able to…” etc.
    But most of what he had to say about Iraq was stuff we already knew: The factions must find a way to work together and trust each other (or at least check each other, via a loose federal system), we won’t solve it through military force alone, and so forth.
    He wants to start drawing down U.S. troops sometime soon, but he sets no deadlines. Why? He understands the stakes too well.
    Back to the Times: A news analysis on Friday concluded that “the idea of a rapid American troop withdrawal is fast receding as a viable option” — certainly within the administration, but also among some key Democrats.
    More importantly, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group that so many who want out have pinned their hopes on apparently will avoid timetables as well. I say “apparently” because the group hasn’t released its report yet — all that authoritative prattling you’ve been hearing has been based on leaks.
    So what do we do from here? As Sen. Biden told the Rotarians, when it comes to Iraq, “We’re gonna have to choose to hang together, or we’re all going to hang separately.”
    The factions in Washington seem to find it as hard to work together as do those in Iraq — even without all that literal bad blood. To be sure, there is a common drift — among Democrats and on the study group — toward a vague plan that talks about redeployment, but sets no timetable.
    That’s hardly a firm consensus on a clear course. One thing is clear, though: As various factors — the study group’s report, the administration’s reassessment, the convening of a Democratic Congress — converge in the coming weeks, we have to come up with something that we can agree upon, and that works.
    President Bush will have to listen to people he doesn’t want to listen to, and then those people are going to have to unite behind him — as distasteful as that will be for them — as everyone works to implement a course that won’t entirely please anybody.
    Sound impossible? Perhaps so. But either those things happen, or we might as well kiss this whole risky nation-building enterprise goodbye.
    And once again, I’m not talking about Iraq. I mean this shaky republican experiment called the United States of America.

Never give up column

Flagsiraq

We can’t cut and run from
our public schools (or Iraq, either)

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
THE CRITICS SEE themselves as realists, and can’t imagine why those of us who believe we must continue to slog on refuse to see things as they are.
    The whole thing is futile, they say, and it would be madness to keep sacrificing billions of dollars, much less all those fine young people, on our stubborn hubris.
    Don’t we know that “those people” will never embrace the opportunity we’ve sacrificed so much in order to give them? Chalk it up to DNA, or simply growing up in horrific poverty and having never known any other way. Either way, we’re wasting our time.
Karenpost
    Look at the generations — the centuries — of culture and tragic history that we’re presuming to overturn.
    It would be better, they say, to begin a phased withdrawal.
    The more sensible among us over in the “never say die” camp — those of us who believe we would be sacrificing our society’s future to cut and run — agree that mistakes were made. But rather than put it in such passive, Reaganesque terms, we know whom to blame. We are appalled at the “stay the course” fanatics who dig in their heels against new tactics.
    We want new approaches — but in the pursuit of success, not surrender. The odds are long, we know. Progress is slow, and sometimes — such as in recent weeks — it doesn’t look like progress at all. We see how it could look to some as though our best efforts have led to nothing but ruined lives and wasted money.
    To keep going takes determination, resolve, and a practically Churchillian refusal to give up.
    Of course, we’re talking about public education in South Carolina. Oh, you thought this was about the war in Iraq? Fine, because it is. I see both struggles in the same terms:

It’s not optional. South Carolina has no choice but to provide the opportunity for a good education to all of its young people. We know we can do education well; just look at the public schools in our affluent suburbs. More relevantly, look at how successful Richland 2 is at educating even the disadvantaged. We must duplicate that kind of success throughout the state, particularly in the most stubborn pockets of resistance — the poor, rural areas.
    Invading Iraq was optional. We once had the choice of other ways and other places to insert the lever of change in the Mideast (our strategic objective; 9/11 taught us that our old strategy of promoting stability in the region was suicidal). But we didn’t, and now the choices are success, or handing a titanic victory to Islamist terrorists, tribalists and totalitarian thugs. Success is going to be extremely difficult to achieve at this point, but failure is unthinkable.
    The I-95 corridor is South Carolina’s Sunni Triangle. We have to figure out how to succeed there, or we fail.

If we don’t do it, no one will. No one’s going to help in Iraq; that much has been made quite clear over the last three years. Certainly not the feckless Europeans. Even the Brits are just barely hanging in there with us, thanks to the courage and vision of Tony Blair. The only other entities with a motivation to stabilize any portion of Iraq are people we would not want to see doing so — Iran’s mullahs, or the Ba’athists in both Iraq and Syria.
    Universal education can only be achieved by pooling our resources as a society and doing it, inSoldieriraq
spite of the odds and the cost. The fantasy that the private sector would create wonderful schools in communities that can’t even attract a McDonald’s is dangerously delusional. The amazing thing is that this approach is espoused by people who insist they believe in markets, when market forces are precisely why those areas have fallen so far behind. The state has to do the job — the market lacks the motive.
    The appointment of a new secretary of defense may not get the job done, but it’s a very encouraging sign. So is the election of a state superintendent of education committed to real reform.

We can win, but it’s going to take a long, long time. We’re talking about a generational (at least) struggle here, both in Iraq and S.C. public schools. Anyone who expects us to either win quickly or pull out simply doesn’t understand either the odds or the consequences of failure.

We can’t quit. South Carolina has too many problems — we are at the bottom of too many rankings — to give up on educating our people so that they can attract, get and hold good jobs.
    In this profoundly dangerous post-Cold War world, history’s most powerful and essential republic cannot be weakened by another Vietnam. After three years of horrific mistakes, President Bush has now done two things worthy of praise: He dumped Donald Rumsfeld, and he went to Vietnam (finally) and drew this distinction between the two conflicts: “We’ll succeed,” he said, “unless we quit.” Iraq isn’t Vietnam, but there’s a sure-fire way to change that fact: Give up.
    We could pull out of Vietnam in the middle of the Cold War, and the Russians still knew we had all those nukes pointed at them. So the world didn’t fall apart, even though our nation’s ability to affect world events atrophied for many years.
    Today, too many forces of chaos, from al-Qaida to totalitarians with nukes, are poised to fill any vacuum we leave behind.
    So we can’t quit — either here or over there.

Rexpost

Hanging Saddam

What do you think when you hear the news that Saddam Hussein has been sentenced to death? Do you:

  • Fear the violent reaction to come from Sunnis?
  • Volunteer to bring the rope?
  • Think hanging’s too good for him?
  • Think capital punishment is always wrong?Saddamverdict

Here’s the way things like this strike me: I believe capital punishment is wrong, but I also believe
violence can be justified under many circumstances — in the defense of innocents, for instance. Also, he certainly fits in the "if anybody deserves it…" category. Of course, he can’t hurt anybody in prison, as long as he’s held securely enough. But as long as he lives, especially with his defiant attitude, he offers hope to his ex-followers for a restoration to power and privilege (particularly with so many Americans crying for a pullout). And if he’s dead, he’s a martyr to the Ba’ath cause. But is there anyone else those thugs can rally around with the "appeal" he has to them?

In other words, I find it hard to reach a conclusion. What do y’all think?

Stan greets Johnny as he marches home

Journalists being a cynical lot, a colleague passed this on to me with this comment: "hmmm … there must be an election coming up …
and Spears’ opponent must be complaining about how he snubs the troops …"
{BC-SC—Guard Return,0248}
{Sanford, Spears, and
sheriff’s deputies to welcome SC Guard unit} home
   LEXINGTON, S.C. (AP) —
Gov. Mark Sanford, Adjutant General Stan Spears and sheriff’s deputies from
Lexington and Saluda counties plan to gather Friday to celebrate the return of
120 members of a South Carolina National Guard unit from Iraq.
   The combat
support engineers of the 122nd Engineer Company based in Saluda are scheduled to
return after spending several days demobilizing at Fort Stewart, Ga., said Col.
Pete Brooks, spokesman for the South Carolina National Guard.
   Sanford is
greeting the unit because he met with Guard members during a visit to Iraq in
June, his spokesman Joel Sawyer said.
   The last time Sanford came out to
greet a unit was in May 2003, when he took part in the South Carolina Air
National Guard’s 169th Fighter Wing return to McEntire Joint National Guard
Base, Sawyer said.
   The Saluda-based soldiers worked to clear improvised
explosive devices — one of the most dangerous jobs in the Iraqi
deployments.
   Lexington County Sheriff James Metts said his deputies and
deputies from Saluda County will provide an escort at 10 a.m. Friday for the
buses of returning soldiers.
   "We all owe a debt of gratitude to the brave
men and women who are serving our nation and defending America’s interests in
the Middle East," Metts said in a statement.
   Metts said he hoped people
will line up along U.S. 1 through downtown Lexington and U.S. 378 to the Saluda
County line to show their support for the soldiers.

Message from Baghdad

Caldwell

Sorry to have been neglecting you — busy schedule, nasty cold, living in the nonvirtual world and all that. Bloody nuisance.

Anyway, I’m going through my work e-mail from home (something I’ve just gained the ability to do), and I received this op-ed submission. I thought it would give y’all something to discuss until I post again. At the latest, that will be tomorrow’s column. It’s about the Confederate flag. A bit of a talker, that, so tune in.

Sorry about the faux British locutions; I’ve been rereading a LeCarre novel while nursing the cold. Can’t be helped, you see.

Here’s the cover note from the op-ed submission. Discuss away:

Dear Editor,
The spokesman for the Multi-National Force-Iraq, Maj. Gen.
William B. Caldwell, IV., would like to submit the below OPED for publication
in your paper.
I request response with an indication of your intent to use
this week’s piece and an indication of your interest in receiving OPEDs
in the future.

Very respectfully,
Douglas Powell
Maj, U.S. Marine Corps
Public Affairs Officer
Multi National Force-Iraq, Baghdad

Go ahead and read it. It’s OK. It says right at the top that it’s declassified.

Some quick attaboys

Leadership

Sorry to have been absent so much of the week. I’ve been tied up in marathon meetings — I’m about to go into another all-day one (administrative ones, related to the newspaper’s budget and such) — and have had to spend breaks and evenings racing to do the basic tasks involved in getting the editorial pages out.

But until I can get freed up a little, here are a couple of quick items for my dear readers to cogitate over and discuss in my absence. I’d like to offer thanks and congratulations to:

  1. Sens. Lindsey Graham, John McCain and John Warner for having won an apparent victory in favor of the American Way. Sure, they didn’t get every thing, but that’s the way compromise works. And they seem to have held their ground as to the principles that mattered most. Thanks to them, the rule of law is finally being established with regard to the treatment of prisoners, and the legislative branch is a little closer to playing its proper role in the War on Terror.
  2. Sen. Tommy Moore, for having acted with uncharacteristic boldness to make a couple of000moore_3 important points: First, that candidates for governor should not ally themselves with political
    actions intended to hurt the state’s economy. Second, that the inconsistent and ineffective NAACP boycott accomplishes nothing at all for South Carolina. I would add that it accomplishes nothing but the opposite of its stated purpose. It puts a solution on the Confederate "battle flag" farther away, not closer. And make no mistake. The only solution is to put dead relics of our most tragic past in museums or bronze monuments, not to fly them as though they were alive and had positive relevance to who we are as a people today.

Back to meetings…

May be. May not be.

Trying to get through 330 e-mails from the last few days (I’ve been having some trouble with Outlook) before starting my Sunday column, I ran across this one that came in on Saturday. Since I spontaneously responded, and I’m trying not to say anything to readers as individuals that I don’t share on the blog, I will now do so. Share, I mean. Here is the e-mail:

From: C Hugh Campbell
To: stateeditor@thestate.com
Cc: bwarthen@thestate.com
Sent: Sunday, July 16, 2006 10:59 AM
Subject: Letter to the Editor

After innumerable columns proclaiming, and straining to justify, the vital importance to the U.S. of democratizing the Middle East, Thomas Friedman has finally run out of rationalizations and is forthright enough to suggest what should have been obvious from day one: "It may be the skeptics are right: Maybe democracy can’t be implemented everywhere."  Because of Brad Warthen’s deep regard for Friedman I hope that he, too, will face up to this reality.

C. Hugh Campbell, Jr.

Here’s my response:

He’s right. It "may be." It also may be — and this is more likely —
that if the world’s most powerful nation says to itself "We’re gonna
fail! We’re gonna fail! We’re gonna fail!" about a million times, it
just might fail to accomplish that which it was perfectly capable of
accomplishing at the start.

Oh, and here’s what Mr. Friedman actually wrote:

     It may be the skeptics are right: maybe democracy, while it is the most powerful form of legitimate government, simply can’t be implemented everywhere. It certainly is never going to work in the Arab-Muslim world if the U.S. and Britain are alone in pushing it in Iraq, if Europe dithers on the fence, if the moderate Arabs cannot come together and make a fist, and if Islamist parties are allowed to sit in governments and be treated with respect — while maintaining private armies.

All the news that gives you fits

Is ‘The Times’ trying to undermine war effort?
No; it just looks like it

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
LAST WEEK our editorial board discussed the controversy surrounding The New York Times’ latest disclosure of secret U.S. intelligence operations.
    (“Controversy” may be too mild a word. “Treason” is bandied about with regularity, and hanging has been mentioned.)
    A colleague said that people who think this is about the Times being anti-Bush or anti-American don’t understand the role of the media: “There’s always been that tension.”
    No, I said. Just because it’s been there our whole careers doesn’t mean that it was always thus. And just because readers don’t like a newspaper’s attitude toward the government doesn’t mean that they don’t understand it. They just don’t like it.
    They would prefer to see the Times cover war the way it did 60 years ago. On June 7, 1944, its lead story began as follows:

    “The German Atlantic Wall has been breached.
    “Thousands of American, Canadian and British soldiers, under cover of the greatest air and sea bombardment of history, have broken through the ‘impregnable’ perimeter of Germany’s ‘European fortress’ in the first phase of the invasion and liberation of the Continent.”

    Two days earlier, it had reported that Americans had “captured Rome tonight, liberating for the first time a German-enslaved European capital….” On Dec. 9, 1941, it had related that the president had “denounced Japanese aggression in ringing tones.”
    Note all those value-loaded words. You’ll also find that Germans are “Nazis” or “the foe.” Allied nations are referred to as “us,” rather than in the third person.
    Today, terrorists are “insurgents,” and the only “ringing tones” most journalists hear are the ones they program into their mobile phones. Taking sides is seen as not only unprofessional, but unethical.
    In some ways, this is healthy. In others, it is excessive. If D-Day occurred today, we would hear that morning on television how hopeless the situation appeared on Omaha Beach. This would be repeated, sliced, diced, analyzed and reacted to for hours before we learned that a few Americans had climbed the cliff and established a tentative foothold.
    We would soon learn how completely our bombers had failed in their critical mission of cratering the German defenses, leading to hundreds of American deaths at Omaha. We’d know that intelligence had been so lame that no one had anticipated how hard it would be to attack through Norman hedgerows, and that American paratroopers had been dropped everywhere except where they were supposed to be, often without weapons or ammunition.
    All of which would be true. And demoralizing.
    So am I saying The New York Times and other media (including the defunct Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, which took pride in its critical investigations of the Iraq war) are trying to undermine our war effort?
    No. It just looks like it.
    This can put the media at odds with more traditional folks who would like to see a little buy-in on the part of the Fourth Estate when American lives are on the line.
    I don’t believe the Times editors had malicious motives. But I do think they went too far in their watchdog role when they revealed details of how we track financial transactions in the pursuit of terrorists.
    When did this big shift in journalistic attitudes occur? After Watergate. I recently saw “All the President’s Men” for the first time in three decades. When I got to the scenes in which several of The Washington Post’s editors say they think the paper is going overboard, that there’s no way the White House would be involved in such doings, I had to pause the DVD to explain to my kids how different things were then. They’ve grown up in a world in which such charges are routinely leveled, and immediately believed. The idea that the opposition will stoop to anything is the starting point of political discourse today.
    Journalists are products of their times as much now as in the past. Today, people who hold high security clearances are prone to tell tales with impunity, and then what does an editor do (especially when you know that if you don’t run it, some blog will)?
    Which is more arrogant in an editor: Telling the readers everything you know, or deciding you won’t tell them certain things? Times Executive Editor Bill Keller and Los Angeles Times Editor Dean Baquet recently co-wrote a column in which they disclosed that “each of us, in the past few years, has had the experience of withholding or delaying articles when the administration convinced us that the risk of publication outweighed the benefits.”
    Oh, yeah? Well who are you to decide that I don’t need to know something?
    Well, they’re the editors, which is probably a more satisfactory answer to me than to you. Under our Constitution, no one but an editor can decide what a newspaper prints or doesn’t print. It’s kind of like democracy — as messy as it is, I wouldn’t want to live under any other kind of system. But with such sweeping rights come a huge responsibility. The editors said they understood that:
    “We understand that honorable people may disagree with any of these choices — to publish or not to publish. But making those decisions is the responsibility that falls to editors, a corollary to the great gift of our independence. It is not a responsibility we take lightly. And it is not one we can surrender to the government.”
    I agree. In our free society, editors must make those decisions. But there is little doubt that in the country in which I have worked as a journalist, editors make very different decisions — based on very different criteria — from those made by editors in the country my parents grew up in.
    The question is, are we better off now? Sometimes I doubt it.

Hey, Andre! Where’s the governor?

Sanford_iraq
Capt. Mark Sanford, U.S. Air Force Reserve, went to war today (incognito, posing as a milde-mannered governor). But he forgot to tell the XO he was leaving the bridge. Or whatever. (I was raised in the Navy, I don’t know what the AF guys call it.)

Andre_debate72Not that I think there’s anything bad about his not telling Lt. Gov. Bauer that he was leaving the country. I mean, I think he’s required to by law and all (maybe; sort of, depends on what "unavailable" means… or something… I don’t know, you read it), but hey — a guy’s gotta use his judgment in a combat situation. That’s what leaders do.

Here’s the question, though: Do you suppose he "forgot" to tell him on purpose — so as to undermine his junior officer in front of the crew, just before he faces a crucial vote of confidence next Tuesday?

I’ve been critical of the governor in recent days, but I don’t think he would play politics with something that serious.

So here’s the second question: If he didn’t do it on purpose, did he really just forget? And how do we feel about that?

In any case, what if something had happened to the governor, and Andre didn’t know he was now in charge? OK, once again, we’re getting into the realm of that judgment thing. Best leave it be.

Still, I’m kind of peaved that the governor didn’t tell me he was going. I could have gone with him, and watched his "six" for him. Or something. Instead, I’m stuck here writing a stupid blog post, the point of which I’ve lost…

Reflections on letters

Some reflections on letters in Saturday’s paper.

First, there was the one headlined, Grand Old Party is losing its way. My thoughts on it:
A person whose identity as a Republican reaches back to 1932 is bound to feel a bit lost, for a number of reasons. It is now the majority — or perhaps I should say, the plurality, party. (There are enough of us independents to keep either from being a majority, but I suppose you could say the Republicans are the majority among partisans, certainly here in South Carolina.) That means it has had to expand its membership beyond what it once encompassed. The letter mentions Glenn McConnell (unfavorably) and Mark Sanford (favorably). The two men are very different from each other, but united in two facts: They are both very libertarian, and it’s hard to imagine either of them fitting in with, say, Dwight Eisenhower or Richard Nixon. Actually, it’s a bit hard to imagine Ike and Nixon being in the same administration. Anyway, my point is that people looking for consistency and reassurance in a party large enough to win elections are almost certain to be disappointed.

Here-and-now issues should determine vote:
This letter is related to the first, in that it illustrates the way that many Democrats are determined to keep their party the minority among partisans by rejecting certain lines of thought. Take for instance the writer’s dismissal the idea that ideals, or faith, might outweigh material considerations. Or at least, that they should not do so among practical, right-thinking individuals. But that’s not the really telling bit. What really points to the main fallacy among many (but not all) Democrats is the suggestion that right-thinking (i.e., socially concerned or liberal people) cannot choose the "moral path" of their fathers. Why on earth would concern about the direction of the country or current events be inconsistent with faith or a "belief system." Why can’t a person who is concerned  about the future still embrace the faith of his fathers? This writer seems to assume that traditional morality is utterly inconsistent with moving forward. Why so closed-minded? As long as supposed liberals think this way, they are doomed to failure.

Townsend did what he thought was right:
This writer says "Ronny Townsend worked tirelessly for the people he represented, for conservative values and for bettering public education." Exactly. A person who embraces conservative values would certainly be committed to serving and improving public education. It is a fundamental institution of our society, and one that is essential to building the kind of future that those who went before us envisioned. Anyone who would dismantle it, rather than protecting, strengthening and improving it, is a radical, leaning toward anarchy — anything but conservative.

Liberators not always what they seem:
Why would this writer believe that the idea that "there has always been a thin line between ‘invader/occupier’ and ‘liberator’ … was not considered three years ago?" It was and is to be expected that there is a delicate balance to be struck between such concepts. I certainly considered it, worried about it — still do. This is a short missive. Is the writer suggesting that those of us who favored the invasion must not have seen the inherent risks? Is he suggesting further that if anyone had seen the risks, the endeavor would not/should not have been undertaken? If so, I couldn’t disagree more. Those are merely reasons to proceed wisely — which certainly hasn’t always been done in this enterprise. I believe concern over that fact underlies this letter. But if leads the writer to conclude that it should not have been undertaken to begin with, or should be abandoned now, I have to disagree.

Feting Bernanke may be premature:
Why? So we don’t know whether he is a Greenspan or not? Why wouldn’t homefolks celebrate the fact that one of their own is the Fed Chairman. Seems sort of like a big deal in and of itself to me.

Accepting differences leads to better world:
One would be puzzled why someone would be compelled to write that "I am of the belief that God doesn’t hate." I mean, who isn’t? One would be further puzzled to read, "One day, I hope to find a community of faith that believes in love,
tolerance and acceptance. Maybe that is too much to hope for…" All true communities of faith believe in those things. They welcome sinners, and invite them to be penitent. The problem is that some do not wish to be penitent, and choose to characterize any suggestion that they should be as "hate." This is an obvious fallacy for anyone seeking a community of faith. It’s astounding how many people fail — or refuse — to see that.

Finally, Tests give teachers too little to go on:
OK, if you’re going to insist on standards being taught, why would you let teachers know what questions will be on the test that will measure whether they are teaching the standards. If you let them know the test, they would be able to — as many claim they already do — "teach to the test." It’s not about you improving test scores. It’s about teaching the standards. If test scores do improve, we’ll know how successfully you’re doing that. The letter presents one real reason for concern, when it suggests that students have seen "subject matter on tests that was not included in the standards." If so, something should be done about it. Of course, if the standard were not taught properly, the student would find the measuring test unfamiliar. So it’s difficult to tell from this missive where the fault lies.

A monster is dead

We awake to astounding news out of Iraq — astounding not so much because it’s surprising we would be able to get al-Zarqawi, but because we are so accustomed to something other than good news.

Of course, there is something in us (or there should be something in us) that says, hold on — a man’sZarqawi death is good news? What kind of world do we live in?

Well, we live in a world in which a man who kills innocents as a main aim, as a matter of policy, as a way of sowing despair, can get a following of creatures like him. This guy got his jollies cutting off people’s heads for the videos, which he distributed as widely as he could.

He won’t be doing that any more. That’s great news.

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.

Antiwar folks! Please answer this question

In response to my Friday column, Doug goes off on an odd tangent (as I’ve noticed a lot of antiwar people do) and suggests I’m asking him to "ignore" all sorts of mean, nasty, ugly things that he sees as having happened on the run-up to war, and since then.

What?!?!? I’m not asking anybody to ignore a damn’ thing. I have even specifically brought up some of the things you mention. I insist that everyone be fully cognizant of all the facts, including all the screwups of Bush and company. How much clearer can I make that? Where we seem to jump to separate planets is when I insist that everyone also recognize the two most salient facts: There are good reasons to be in Iraq (whether the president understands them or not), and even if you disagree with that, there is no alternative now but to persevere in that endeavor.

What is it about the English language that I can have so much trouble communicating those thoughts to people?

No, scratch that. Answer this question instead. It is critically important, and maybe if you approach it thoughtfully, we can at least get on the same subject, even if we’re not on the same page:

Whatever you think of what has happened so far, what do you want to see happen NOW?

As you answer, remember that Bush, no matter what anyone says or does, will be president until January 2009. It would also be helpful if you address in your answer this related question: Whatever course we take, do you think the nation will get through it as divided and angry at itself as it now is?

Postscript: A couple of other things, just to Doug… first, this was George Bush’s war — right up until the point the first soldier’s boot hit Iraqi soil in 2003. After that, as I’ve also made clear, it’s belonged to us. And it WILL belong to us long after Mr. Bush is gone from the scene. (That fact is at the crux of what I’ve been trying to communicate.) Second: I don’t even understand why you would ask me whether I would support Mrs. Clinton in the same situation (it must be one of those questions only a partisan mind could concoct). Of course I would, in exactly the way I "support" Mr. Bush: There’s not much at all that he’s done on other issues that I would defend, but I know that my country needs to be united for us to succeed in Iraq. Actually, I might support her on more issues than I do Mr. Bush — it would be hard for anyone to screw up as many things as he has done. A side note, though: You don’t actually think she has any chance of being elected, do you? I certainly hope not. If the two main political parties once again offer us a choice (meaning: no choice) between two polarizing, extremely partisan figures, we all might as well move to another continent, because our national goose will be thoroughly cooked.