Category Archives: The World

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.

Joe Biden at Rotary

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South Carolina, Joe Biden really, really wants you to help him get to the White House. I’ll write about this more later in the week, but for now I’ll refer you to this video clip I shot with my PDA (meaning it’s even lower quality than MOST of my videos) at the Columbia Rotary Club.

The clip begins right after he left the rostrum and waded into the crowd to answer a one-word question: "Immigration?" Note the passion, the waving arms, the populist posturing, the peripatetic delivery. Joe Biden has always loved to talk, but this Elmer Gantryesque performance went far beyond his routine style.

Most of his speech was about Iraq, by the way. And it went over well. This Rotary Club never goes past its 2 p.m. ending time, but he had the audience still sitting politely listening — some of them truly rapt — past 2:30.

It was quite a performance. You may think politicians act like this all the time, because of stuff you see on TV and in the movies. But I have never, in real life, seen a national candidate get this intense seeking S.C. votes two years before the election.

Never give up column

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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, in Soldieriraq
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

Robert Gates column

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The return of the professional

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
“AMID TAWDRINESS, he stands for honor, duty and decency,” another author once wrote of John le Carre’s fictional hero George Smiley.
George was the master Cold Warrior brought back in from retirement to save British intelligence from the liars, self-dealers, ideologues, social climbers and traitors who had turned it inside out. He did so quietly, humbly and competently. Then he went his way, with little gratitude from the system.
With Robert Gates’ nomination to replace Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, old George seems Gates3
to have come back in from the cold yet again, although in different form.
Mr. Gates is a Smileyesque professional. He was the only Director of Central Intelligence ever to have come up through the ranks. He had spent two decades in the Agency, from 1969 through 1989, with a several-year hiatus at the National Security Council. He received the National Security Medal, the Presidential Citizens Medal, the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal (twice) and the Distinguished Intelligence Medal (three times).
I trust professionals, particularly those who have devoted themselves to national service. Not in every case, of course — there are idiots and scoundrels in every walk of life — but if all other things are equal, give me the pro from Dover over someone’s golf buddy every time.
Perhaps that’s why I sometimes lower my standards from the le Carre level to enjoy a Tom Clancy novel. Jack Ryan moves in a world peopled by competent, heroically dedicated public servants. Most wear uniforms — soldiers, sailors, Marines, cops — but others are costumed in the conservative suits of the FBI, CIA or Secret Service. The ones you have to watch out for are the politicians; they always have agendas that have little to do with protecting the country or the rule of law.
Rumsfeld
This has a ring of truth to me. I grew up in the Navy and have spent my adult life dealing with a broad variety of people from cops to lawyers to FBI agents to politicians to private business types. I know a lot of fine politicos and private-sector executives, but as a percentage, I’ll more quickly trust the honor of public-service professionals.
Of course, they often don’t trust me — at least not at first — and I don’t blame them. The press spends too much time with publicans and sinners, and absorbs too many of their values. As a group, for instance, we tend to love it when a special prosecutor is appointed. That means fireworks, and fireworks are news.
Call me a heretic, but I’ve always wondered why we don’t just let the professional investigators do their jobs. Do we really think the FBI — not the political appointees at the top, but the career agents who do the work — can’t investigate corruption? Sure, a politician can try to get such a civil servant fired or transferred to garbage detail, but such overt efforts to subvert the system tend to get noticed, a la Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre.”
Mr. Gates has had his own run-ins with politicians and special counsel. He withdrew from consideration to become Ronald Reagan’s CIA director in 1987 because he had been senior enough for the Iran-Contra affair to have cast its shadow over him. He was under formal investigation in that connection when he was nominated again under George H.W. Bush. No one ever pinned any wrongdoing on him, and he was confirmed by the Senate.
This time, the Democrats who are likely to line the gauntlet he must again run to confirmation Gates2
were generally supportive of his nomination. Of course, look at the act he’d be following. Mr. Gates is described as a soft-spoken, yet tough-minded, “pragmatist and realist,” an antithesis to the civilian ideologues who have been running the war.
In Thursday’s news reports, the Gates nomination was treated as another sign of “the ascendancy of the team that served the president’s father.” There’s truth — and reassurance, for pragmatists — in that. He has for the past several months served as one of the “Wise Men” reviewing and critiquing the conduct of the Iraq War, along with former Secretary of State James Baker. That makes him particularly, if not uniquely, well prepared to run the war more successfully.
Of course, he’s not a Defense professional. But the Pentagon might be an exception to my general preference. In that particular case, the real professionals — the uniformed leaders, the warriors —spend their careers trying to stay out of the Pentagon. I worry about the ones who do otherwise. Beyond that, it’s probably best that Defense not be headed by a general or admiral, to preserve the principle of civilian oversight. But it would be nice if they had a boss who would listen to them.
Given those conditions, who would be better than a pragmatic national security professional who possesses mastery of the entire spectrum of intelligence gathering and analysis, and has been studying in depth what has gone wrong in Iraq? He just needs to help the president pick a direction. The generals and admirals will know how to get the job done from that point.
They’re professionals, too.

Rummy

Heads up, Lindsey!

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Andrew Sullivan reports some disturbing news — particularly if you happen to be Lindsey Graham:

Next week, I’m informed via troubled White House sources, will see the full
unveiling of Karl Rove’s fall election strategy. He’s intending to line up 9/11
families to accuse McCain, Warner and Graham of delaying justice for the
perpetrators of that atrocity, because they want to uphold the ancient judicial
traditions of the U.S. military and abide by the Constitution. He will use the
families as an argument for legalizing torture, setting up kangaroo courts for
military prisoners, and giving war crime impunity for his own aides and cronies.
This is his "Hail Mary" move for November; it’s brutally exploitative of 9/11;
it’s pure partisanship; and it’s designed to enable an untrammeled executive.
Decent Republicans, Independents and Democrats must do all they can to expose
and resist this latest descent into political thuggery. If you need proof that
this administration’s first priority is not a humane and effective
counter-terror strategy, but a brutal, exploitative path to retaining power at
any price, you just got it.

Unity column

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When will we unite
to win this fight?

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
WHEN OUR board discussed what to say upon the fifth anniversary of the devastating terror attacks on American soil, I had to be talked into taking the approach we did: Examining what we have done and failed to do in response, right here at home.
For me, the domestic situation is more depressing than conditions in Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s a matter of expectations.
When we sent our troops into Afghanistan and Iraq, I knew we were beginning a long and costly endeavor that, even with solid support among the U.S. electorate, would take longer than the time we’ve given it so far. While much that has happened over there has dismayed and even horrified me, little has surprised me.
But the reaction over here has been a bitter disappointment, made more painful because I had hoped so ardently for something so much better.
In late October 2001, I wrote:
“On Sept. 11, amid all the horror, I started seeing and hearing things that gave me a new hope. I felt like the American spirit was maybe, just maybe, awakening from a long and fitful slumber. I knew that defeating this new evil that faced our country would be an all-consuming task that would leave us little energy for the petty bickering that had come to dominate public life. And I believed we would most certainly defeat it. We would rise to the occasion, and in the end we — and the world as a whole — would be better.”
I haven’t had the opportunity to go to Iraq, and I don’t know how well I could assess the overall situation if I did — a battle looks different to each individual in it. I don’t trust the accounts of the Cassandras and Pollyannas who would have us either despair or pretend everything is all right. The voices I seek are those that speak of what we need to do to achieve success, starting from where we are right now.
Such voices are all too rare, although sometimes they pipe up in unexpected places. I was pleased last week to see veteran scribe Joe Galloway, who up to now has done little but carp and criticize over the war effort, use his contacts among military leaders to pull together advice on how to win. The same day I read that, I read a column by Newt Gingrich — the very embodiment of pointless partisan infighting — that honestly analyzed grave mistakes made by leaders of his own party, and prescribed stern remedies.
The best part of that piece was this quote from Abraham Lincoln: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present… . As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.”
We must indeed think in new ways, but we don’t. And no one among us is blameless.
Most congressional Republicans give little more than lip service to winning the war. They devote themselves to tax cuts, while at the same time spending at levels previously unimagined. They, along with the president, have not acted as though they acknowledge the crucial connection between the war on terror and our insanely self-destructive energy habits. The president himself has left little hope for leadership — the kind all can follow — until his replacement takes office in 2009.
The Democrats, rather than acting like a principled opposition and proposing the kinds of sacrifices that would be necessary to free us from foreign oil despots, have chosen instead to demagogue over gasoline prices (which obviously aren’t yet high enough to persuade us to conserve). In the first months and years after 9/11, they seemed stunned into having no ideas to present whatsoever. Now they seem energized by what they tout as our failures in battle, almost as if they welcome such outcomes.
But you have to understand: The priority for Democrats as a party is not winning the war — it’s winning control of Congress in November.
The priority of Republicans in general isn’t winning the war, either: It’s stopping the Democrats.
I wouldn’t give two cents to affect the outcome of that pointless struggle either way. If I could, I’d get rid of most of them and start over, stocking the Congress with people whose priority is asserting and defending the values and interests we hold in common.
The sin of the rest of us is letting the parties get away with it, while our best and bravest spill their blood on behalf of a people who have done too little to demonstrate that we deserve it.
Five years ago, for a brief time, we were better than we are today. When will we “disenthrall ourselves,” and this time for good?

Towers7

Meanwhile, out in the real world

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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_1 dive 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_fight72 Ch53_lift_off72 Smith_de_la_garza72 Waitin_on_pizza_at_laaf72

What’s all this then about immigration?

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It’s not what you think; this was shot in New Jersey.

Greatest threat to U.S.
is immigration? Since when?

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor

WITH CONGRESS on break, U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett has been meeting with his 3rd District constituents. So what’s on their minds?
“Immigration” comes in first.
Second, he says, is “immigration.” Third is immigration. It’s also fourth.
And he supposed that “the war” maybe came in fifth. I’m sure our troops over there will appreciate making the Top Ten.
He admitted that he was being “a little facetious.” The war is “a cloud” casting its shadow over everything political. But there are no clouds on the stark immigration landscape. There, you’ll find nothing but a blinding, hot interrogation lamp surrounded by shadows. If you give the wrong answer, there are a lot of GOP voters out there ready to cast you into the everlasting darkness.
“Wrong,” of course, can vary, depending on whether you’re a lobbyist for the big business types who have been the GOP’s bread and butter for generations, or one of the salt-of-the-earth folk who crowded into the Big Tent in recent decades and created the vaunted GOP majority.
The main question I have on the subject is one that neither Rep. Barrett nor anyone else has answered to my satisfaction:
How did this issue become such a big deal all of a sudden? What changed? We’ve had Mexican tiendas in our neighborhoods, even in South Carolina, for much of the past decade. For even longer, it’s been hard to communicate on a construction site without a working knowledge of Spanish. Our last two presidents could hardly put together a Cabinet for all the illegals their nominees had employed as nannies.
Over the last 10 or 20 years, there’s been a huge influx. But what changed in the past 12 or 15 Sombrero months? As near as I can tell, looking at the real world out there, nothing. But in the unreal world of politics, it’s as though, sometime during the summer of 2005 or so, a huge portion of the electorate suddenly woke up from a Rip Van Winkle catnap and said: “Whoa! Why are all these people speaking Spanish?”
There were always a few who considered illegal immigration Issue One. On the left, you had union types concerned about cheap labor depressing wages and working conditions. On the right, you had culture warriors furious at hearing anything other than English spoken in the U.S. of A.
On both sides, drifting amid the high-sounding words about fairness and the rule of law, there was a disturbing whiff of 19th century Know-Nothingism.
I had one or two people who e-mailed me about it regularly, always furious at us for taking the “wrong” position on the issue — even though, until it moved to the front burner back in the spring, we didn’t have a position on it.
Nor did Mr. Barrett consider it a priority, until late 2004. At least, none of the thousands of news outlets whose archives are available on Lexis-Nexis report his having a burning concern.
During the past year, his name and the word “immigration” showed up 53 times. In the previous year, only 20 times. In all previous years, 40 times. Back when he was first running for Congress in 2002, he was talking about keeping out terrorists, mainly from such places as Iran and Iraq. In fact, opponent Jim Klauber blasted him for paying too much attention to countries “where terrorists come from,” while ignoring “the greatest problem in the 3rd Congressional District” — which, to him, was illegal immigration from Mexico.
But now, and for the last couple of years, Mr. Barrett has stood foursquare behind the House’s “enforcement first” approach. He demonstrated his deep concern most recently by visiting the border personally, just before coming home to see constituents. So when he got an earful, he was prepared.
But I wasn’t, probably because I don’t watch TV and therefore haven’t had it explained to me by Bill O’Reilly. I still find myself wondering: Where did all these angry people come from? The ones who weren’t even talking about this issue a year ago, but now promise to toss Lindsey Graham out of the Senate for actually recognizing that this issue is really complicated.
How can anyone see this issue in black-and-white terms? Hey, I want to see the laws enforced, too. But I know that a nation that can’t find one guy in the mountains of Afghanistan isn’t going to round up 10 to 20 million people walking the streets of the freest, least-controlled nation in the world.
Yes, it’s theoretically possible to round up most of them. The Nazis probably could have achieved a success rate of 80 or 90 percent. And it’s probably possible to build a 2,000-mile fence that would be more-or-less impassable. China did it.
But at what cost? I’m not even talking moral or spiritual cost, in the sense of “what kind of nation would that make us?” I’ll let somebody else preach that sermon. I’m talking hard cash.
Look at the national debt. Look at our inadequate presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. Check out the rising power of nations such as Iran, Russia and Venezuela, whom we are making impervious to international pressure with our insatiable thirst for petrol. Note that we don’t have the military assets to make Iran take us seriously when we suggest it should stop working on nukes for terrorists, or else. Or else what?
Let’s talk priorities, folks, not fantasies. The “invasion” that endangers this country isn’t a bunch of people looking to (gasp) sweep our Wal-Marts to feed their families. It’s Londoners getting on a flight at Heathrow with bogus tubes of Prell in their carry-ons.
Illegal immigration is a serious problem, when it gets to where you have 12 million aliens you can’t account for. Having our labor market, wages and working conditions distorted by a huge supply of cheap, illegal labor is also a serious problem. So is the fact that our neighbors suffer such crushing poverty that they will risk their lives coming here just to have their labor exploited.
But not one of these things is the most urgent problem facing this country. Not a year ago, and not now.

Proimmigrant

Soros, Will: Georges of a feather

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Folks who think in simplistic terms such as "liberal" and "conservative" would probably be surprised to see George Soros and George Will essentially the same ideas on the same day.

I would not. Nor would Norman Podhoretz, to whose comments I referred over the weekend. It’s quite natural that a true conservative would take the John Kerry approach to dealing with terrorism. As I’ve said
since we went in in March 2003 (and as The New Republic said at about the same time), what we are engaged in in Iraq is a classically liberal enterprise.

Nor is it surprising that Mr. Soros would embrace the conservative position of treating acts of terrorism as separate, distinct crimes rather than as parts of a larger struggle called the "war on terror." Putative liberals have approached the world this way ever since Vietnam.

Anyway, read the pieces and enjoy the irony.

Tim has pointed out that he was unable to read the WSJ pieces. Sorry; I thought that since I was getting them through OpinionJournal they would be accessible, but I see now that they were not among the free material.

To at least give you the gist of the Soros piece and explain why it reminded me of Will, here is an excerpt:

(T)he war on terror emphasizes military action while most territorial
conflicts require political solutions. And, as the British have shown,
al Qaeda is best dealt with by good intelligence. The war on terror
increases the terrorist threat and makes the task of the intelligence
agencies more difficult. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are
still at large; we need to focus on finding them, and preventing
attacks like the one foiled in England.

Podhoretz on foreign policy

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There was a very interesting piece based on an interview with Norman Podhoretz on the WSJ’s editorial page today.

It was particularly interesting — and disturbing — for me because he is considered a sort of seminal neoconservative. "Disturbing" because I agreed with almost everything he said. When you hate agreeing across the board with any ideological label the way I do, this sort of thing can make you very uncomfortable.

I take comfort from the fact that the piece was confined to neocon thinking on foreign policy. That there is an overlap in that area should probably not be disturbing or surprising. I’ve said many times that my view of America’s role in the world is pretty much that of pre-Vietnam liberals, and it should be expected that my views would jibe with the neocons in this area because they were pre-Vietnam liberals — at least, the old ones like Podhoretz were.

Of course, nowadays "neocon" is most often defined more or less entirely in terms of a certain stance on foreign policy, and indeed it largely grew out of its fathers’ dispute with liberalism in that area during the ’60s. I still don’t like the label, though, because I first heard of it in connection with Reaganomics, and I disagreed with that stuff most vehemently. That’s the trouble with all modern political labels. I agree strongly with the "conservatives" on abortion and I agree strongly with "liberals" on public education. So I guess it’s OK to agree strongly with the "neocons" on muscular interventionism. Or so I tell myself.

Anyway, back to this piece. I said I agree with almost all of it. My blood sort of runs cold when he seems to be advocating torture. But then I wonder: Am I being hypocritical about this? While I embrace the McCain-Graham approach of pulling us away from the use of coercion on prisoners, I wonder if I take that position just to make myself feel righteous.

Guilty be told, on a certain level I hope that the Brits are doing what they can to extract information from the bomb plotters they’ve arrested so that they might quickly capture the ones they haven’t arrested, before they manage to carry out some plan B. I ask myself, which is worse — a would-be mass murderer getting slapped around a little, or a 747 with 400-plus people on it blowing up? And I think I know the answer.

But ultimately, I think McCain and company are right — if we’re going to win this war that Mr. Podhoretz calls World War IV, we have to tie our own hands to a great extent. Otherwise, it’s sort of hard to be champions of the liberal democracy we hope to foster in hostile soil. So on that point, I think the Podhoretz approach is not only chilling, but strategically wrong.

The coming war with Iran, etc.

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Since Sunday, I’ve been meaning to call your attention to this piece that was in the NYT‘s Week in Review section. OK, all the folks on the right wing of the blog community can now spend 10 seconds doing the customary hyperventilating about what an unreliable, biased source the Times is … 3, 2, 1. Time’s up. Let’s get on with the topic now.

If you can’t get access, here’s the essence:

United States officials worry that they’re not prepared, either, for Hezbollah’s style of warfare — a kind that pits finders against hiders and favors the hiders.
Certain that other terrorists are learning from Hezbollah’s successes, the United States is studying the conflict closely for lessons to apply to its own wars. Military planners suggest that the Pentagon take a page out of Hezbollah’s book about small-unit, agile operations as it battles insurgents and cells in Iraq and Afghanistan and plans for countering more cells and their state sponsors across the Middle East and in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America.
The United States and Israel have each fought conventional armies of nation-states and shadowy terror organizations. But Hezbollah, with the sophistication of a national army (it almost sank an Israeli warship with a cruise missile) and the lethal invisibility of a guerrilla army, is a hybrid. Old labels, and old planning, do not apply. Certainly its style of 21st-century combat is known — on paper. The style even has its own labels, including network warfare, or net war, and fourth-generation warfare, although many in the military don’t care for such titles. But the battlefields of south Lebanon prove that it is here, and sooner than expected. And the American national security establishment is struggling to adapt.

Two things come to mind as I read this piece and others:

We’re going to be at war with Iran sooner or later — sooner, if we act in the best interests of our own country and civilization as a whole. We can wait until the dark cloud out of Mordor assumes mushroom shape and consumes a few of our cities, courtesy of Hezbollah Delivery Service, or sooner. Our standard modus operandi has been to act later. You may say that Iraq represents a departure from that wait-until-they-hit-us-first mode, but rhetoric aside, it really doesn’t. Basically, we acted after 12 years of dithering. The cause may not have been proximate, but there was a cause.
Most hand-wringing pieces (and this one is no exception) about how helpless the United States, or a regional superpower such as Israel, is against skilled practitioners of asymmetric warfare ignore a salient fact: That we tie our own hands, and the bad guys rely upon us to do that.

An elaboration on that last: There are many, many examples of the way people who would destroy us use the very decency that they assume us to have against us. One is particularly vivid. It’s from Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down — on page 46 of the Penguin paperback version, not in the original newspaper series:

… They both ran for better cover.
They found it behind a burned-out car. Peering out from underneath toward the north now, Nelson saw a Somali with a gun lying prone on the street beneath two kneeling women. The shooter had the barrel of his weapon between the women’s legs, and there were four children actually sitting on him. He was completely shielded in noncombatants, taking full cynical advantage of the Americans’ decency.
"Check this out, John," he told Waddell, who scooted over for a look.
"What do you want to do?" Waddell asked.
"I can’t get to that guy through those people."
So Nelson threw a flashbang, and the group fled so fast the man left his gun in the dirt.

What do you do about someone who is evil enough, craven enough, hateful enough to do something like that? I’ve come to the conclusion — and it’s a difficult one for me — that the only solution is to kill him — and every one of his fellows. I don’t even like the way that sounds. I gain no satisfaction from saying it. But think about it. Few people consider World War II to have been an unjust war from the Allied perspective. But the average Wehrmacht soldier was much less deserving of death than the individual who will so directly and literally use noncombatants as a shield. And yet WE killed thousands — actually, hundreds of thousands — of civilians to get at them.

We’re too enlightened, and too technologically advanced, to resort to carpet bombing today. We flatter ourselves that we can put a smart bomb into a certain window of a certain building, and this constrains us — if we can be so discriminating and particular in our targeting, then we must be. Well, no bomb is that smart.

I accept the morality of that logic, and the logic of such an ethic. But really, what do we do in such a situation as those we face today?

I’ll tell you what we do: We lose. People hold up Vietnam as an example of the futility of using American force to shape the world. Such people don’t understand military realities. The truth is that our ability to achieve military aims is limited mainly by the limits we place upon ourselves.

We "lost" the Vietnam conflict because we chose to. No, this is not a tirade against those politicians in Washington tying the hands of the military. We were simply not prepared as a nation to go on the offensive against the North Vietnamese — I mean, "on the offensive" in a strategic sense. Why didn’t we just take Hanoi the way we did Baghdad, or the way we did Berlin or Tokyo before? Because we never tried to. We went in to defend, not attack. You can’t win a defensive war.

By March 2003, there had been a change in the American attitude, caused by Sept. 11. We were ready to go on the offensive. So we did — in a concerted, yet restrained, way. Yes, there were many civilian deaths. But the firebombing of Dresden it was not. We still try to kill the enemy without killing noncombatants to the extent that is practical. And it often is not practical. For instance, how many more people would al-Zarqawi have killed if we had not killed him with a bomb that also killed innocents?

So what do we do, if we are to remain the kind of "good guys" we want to be? Seldom are we able to resolve such situations by tossing a flashbang. I firmly believe it is profoundly wrong to harm noncombatants, particularly women and children. So what do we do about enemies who hide among them, whether in southern Lebanon, Baghdad, Tikrit or Mogadishu? We’d better figure it out soon, because our problem isn’t the likes of Hezbollah. It’s the states that support and egg it on.

Iran will be a much tougher problem for us than Iraq — diplomatically, politically, morally and militarily. And we still haven’t figured out how to deal with Iraq.

I don’t know the answer. I’m just trying to clarify the question. Do we wait while Iran a) develops nukes and b) gets ever-more-effective at what it’s been doing for several decades — sponsoring terrorism across the greater Mideast?

Or do we go ahead and act? And if so, how, and where? And, given the way we have overextended the military that Rumsfeld has insisted doesn’t need to expand, with what?

Thoughts?

The Lebanon debate

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At one point during the civility discussion from Sunday, Paul DeMarco suggested that:

… if you posed some of your introductory columns as an either/or (i.e
should smoking be allowed or banned in public places) and allowed us to
vote (preferably in a way that the vote tallies were by name as in a
legislature) then we could get a better sense of the mood of the blog
as a whole rather than only that of the loudest contributors.

There’s something to that, although what interests me more than the idea of a "vote" per se is the debate that precedes the vote. That is what distinquishes the deliberative, republican approach from pure, government-by-plebiscite democracy. And that’s what I want to encourage here. A vote, by definition, is either-or, and therefore encourages simplistic, yes-or-no "answers" that usually lack the nuances necessary to address the complexities of real problems in the real world.

Real solutions — the kind that unite a community rather than dividing it — result from consensus, whether it is arrived at by a formal process or not.

So, just as an exercise, let’s try an issue. I see that in my absence my colleagues ran a sort of brief point–counterpoint on the fighting in Lebanon. The exchange was between very young people, and therefore engaged the subject along the lines of the sort of yes/no dichotomy that we’ve trained the present generation to embrace as the only approach.

Let’s see if we can take it to another level. For my part, I gladly defend Israel’s right — nay, duty — to protect itself and its citizens from forces that seek no practical end beyond killing Jews. At the same time, I recognize the moral as well as practical problems presented in trying to destroy an enemy who not only has no compunctions about hiding among noncombatants, but who gains what victories it can from the broadcast images of dead women and children.

What say you? What is the solution? Is there one?

Or should I start with something easier?

Why Iran and Syria are pals

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How does a real-life axis of evil work? Slate examined that on Wednesday. The Wall Street Journal came back on it today. Here is probably the most ominous thing — no, excuse me, one of the most immediately ominous things; I can think of a lot worse — about the Syria/Iran alliance:

…Syria’s long-term backing of the Lebanese Islamist group Hezbollah is translating into greater popular support for Mr. Assad, who since Israel’s recent attacks began has cast himself as a wartime leader immune to internal criticism. That Israel is a sworn enemy of Syria is an opinion so widely held here that it is difficult for the country’s opposition to attack Mr. Assad.

And just when I had the boy written off as not nearly the thug his Daddy was. Still, he is an ugly little cuss, ain’t he? That’s him below, meeting with a Russian envoy. (A familiar scene, eh, Tovarich?)

Assad2

May be. May not be.

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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.

I’ll have a White Russian, please

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And you think we’ve got conservatives over here?

This is the 88th anniversary of the assassination/execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family by the Bolsheviks. I’ve always thought it was one of history’s most horrible moments — smaller in scale than France’s Reign of Terror, perhaps, but hardly less barbaric.

It’s a good thing to dwell on whenever we begin to forget how lucky we are as Americans. This event was, on a moral level, roughly equivalent to the crime Truman Capote chronicled in In Cold Blood. Only in Kansas, that was committed by a couple of deviant drifters. In Russia, it was just a way to change governments. We’ve been doing that without bloodshed over here ever since the election of 1800. We should thank God for that every day.

Back to the topic at hand — it was horrible, but it did happen quite a while back. Nevertheless, these Czarist2 guys in Moscow are apparently as ticked about it as if it had happened this morning. We have some of that in this country as well, but if you saw a bunch of guys who looked like this in the streets of Columbia, you’d assume they were bikers demonstrating against a proposed helmet law.

What these folks want, though, is to restore the monarchy. As we watch Russia rise again in economic and geopolitical influence, it is of relevant interest to consider all the things that can bubble back up after several generations of repression.

Check the ascetic pallor. Emaciated limbs. Hollow cheeks. Deep, fanatic eyes. You get the impression that these very guys have been sitting in a garret somewhere writing feverish manifestos for the past nine decades?

They’re really barking up the wrong tree. Don’t they know that Russia already has a czar? His name is Vladimir.

Puting8

What are you gonna do?

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Seriously. If you’re Israel, what ARE you going to do? What should you do?

You try playing nice with the terrorists on both sides of you. You pull out of southern Lebanon. You pull out of Gaza. What does this cause the wackos to think? Why, they say that they forced you out. They say that obviously, terrorism is the way to go. So they keep doing it.

So you get fed up and you go into Gaza with overwhelming force. And before you’re done there, Hezbollah hits you in the north, and you go back into Lebanon with overwhelming force. At this point, the wackos conclude what? Well, it’s rather soon to tell, but I sort of doubt they’re going to think the way reasonable people do and say, "Hey, this terrorist thing isn’t working for us; maybe we’d better stop."

The point for them isn’t so much that it works or doesn’t work. It’s what they do. They’re especially into killing Jews, maybe even more than killing Americans. And for Lebanese and Palestinian wackos, it’s so much trouble to trek all the way to Iraq to kill Americans when the Jews are so handy.

The point for them is that they don’t want to get along with Israel. They want Israel to be gone.

So if you’re Israel, and you have this perfectly natural desire to continue existing, what are you going to do?

Whatever you do, many more will die.

Mideast_dead

What happened to Bombay?

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Many of y’all can no doubt answer this; I just probably haven’t asked the right people yet, so I’m still in the dark. (And yes, I’ve seen some explanations; I just don’t find them satisfactory.)

What happened to Bombay? Where did it go? Yeah, I know they call it Mumbai now (at least, sometimes), but why?

And how did Peking become Beijing? I mean, those are really different. Or Mao Tse-Tung become whatever they call him now?

I’m probably working on a wrong assumption here, but were the names we used to call these places and people supposed to be phonetic representations of the originals? So did they start pronouncing it differently, or did one dialect achieve hegemony over another and become the official version? Are there Indians who still say "Bombay" or Chinese who will always say "Peking," only they have lost some sort of battle among cultures?

Were the Western imperialists just that incompetent at rendering what they heard when they rolled into these places? Or was it the British insistence upon setting themselves apart from the natives by mispronouncing all foreign words?

Or are people who run these countries just messing with us?

And why do we write Sadr if it’s pronounced "Sodder?" Or is it actually pronounced in some way that the Western tongue can’t get around?

I have many stupid questions. Here’s hoping someone out there has some smart answers.

Propaganda as gibberish

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What I was looking for when I ran across the old link discussed in my previous post was the lead story from the NYT’s Week In Review section.

It was all about how scary the North Korean missile tests are, seeing as how:

Perhaps everyone can learn from failure, even the North Koreans.
Their missile, the Taepodong 2, took flight briefly last week, and seems to be in no shape to send an atom bomb whizzing halfway around the globe toward the United States. Experts judge that many years of testing beyond that inaugural flight on Tuesday will probably be needed before the North would entrust the new missile with anything as costly and precious as a nuclear warhead.
"It would take five or six tests of their final design before they’d be confident it could go someplace," said Harold M. Agnew, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory, which designed most of the nation’s nuclear arms.

Kim_jong_il So, it will be "several years" before the Dear Doofus is likely to boost some warheads our way. That’s good.

At the same time, that assumption seems based on the belief that North Korea will act rationally, not throwing away the first nuke they manage to produce. That’s weak assurance.

I gain more comfort from the caption on this propaganda poster, which the Times assures us reads, "First sound of gunfire from big power."

Really? Even allowing for idiomatic and stylistic differences between cultures, or poor translation, that is amazingly awkward and uninspiring. And, well, stupid.

How am I supposed to take seriously a threat from someone who can’t write any better than that?

They ought to require essay contests or something before letting bad guys into the Axis of Evil.

A Decent Respect

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Everybody can quote from the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. You don’t often hear the first part cited.

That helps make it fresh each time I read it. This time, I was struck by the last words of the intro:

… a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

As you know, there is no greater supporter of our nation’s involvement in Iraq than I. But I’ve also been bitterly disappointed by mistakes the Bush administration makes, and continues to make, in prosecuting the war.

I do believe that ultimately, the United States and the "coalition of the willing" should go ahead and do what needs to be done, with or without the blessings of the likes of France and Germany. But I believe also that the administration could have done more to show "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" than it has done. That’s one reason why I think Donald Rumsfeld should have been dumped a long time ago.

Too many of the president’s supporters say "to hell with the rest of the world." They shouldn’t. Yes, we must do what we must do. But we doom ourselves to ultimate failure, and loss of the leadership position that makes us effective, if we don’t show some of the humility in the face of our fellow men that came naturally to those brave souls who signed the Declaration.

They weren’t asking anybody’s permission. But they did want to be understood, and explained themselves eloquently.

We could do with a lot more such eloquence today. The two photos, both taken today, show the options. We’re much better off, and much better able to fulfill our mission in the world, if we are seen the way we are in the photo at top — a statue of Jefferson being unveiled in Paris. The picture below shows a protest in Denmark over Guantanamo. Anything we do to encourage the latter view of us if harmful to the United States, and to the rest of the world — which, whether it wants to or not, depends upon us and the choices we make.

Denmark

A monster is dead

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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’s Zarqawi 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.

bradwarthen.com

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